Have You Heard of the High Elves? | The Elder Scrolls Podcast #42

[Music] what is up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to fudge mop this is the elder scrolls podcast i'm scott here with michael andrew as always and today we are talking all about the self-titled cultured people the ultima the high elves have you heard of the high elves i the boys from somerset isle you know they're they claim to be the closest descendants of the original aldmer basically meaning they're the closest descendants of the gods and uh we're gonna see if they've got a leg to stand on when it comes to that i mean in terms of their superiority they kind of do have a leg to stand on in terms of just raw biology at least like if you're gonna pick a race to be in the elder scrolls universe you can't go too wrong picking a race that can live for hundreds of years with you know magical prowess um and and and actually even as well and if you even uh jump onto things too like just the advantage that gives you like there's it said that like you know artists are high off artists are the best because they've like had a thousand years to refine their craft and like stuff like that the other thing too though and i don't know how much this stacks up with current canon or like gameplay mechanics versus whatnot but in like morrowind for example they also had um it's 75 resistance to common disease for example because they're just that much better you know what i mean they also did have weakness to magical weakness to fire frost and shock as well speaking i really want to bring that back like the high elves to me seem a lot more interesting when they have like weaknesses basically to all magic more so fire and just base magicka than to shock and frost um and then obviously they can resist disease though and have way more just base magicka to use like the apprentice um apprentice stone right yeah yeah like for those of you guys who don't know we are very pro racial diversity and giving each race really distinct abilities that really make it stand out so you know when argonian feels like playing in our going in which you know it's playing it doesn't just feel like playing a breton with scales yeah it's funny because in daggerfall they had like uh their special advantage it was called was an immunity to paralysis which which is kind of interesting and i know it then it just got watered down afterwards in in oblivion and skyrim um although oblivion was still pretty pretty solid yeah yeah yeah uh i was just gonna say like oblivion still had some some uh some cool effects like they had um disease resistance enhanced magikarp weakness to magicka yeah well um we'll bring it back to the ultima themselves first and i think like with most cultures you can kind of look at the origins of their like religion or faith and see how that bleeds into their culture and then how that sort of formulates who they are today but it seems that the old ma way back in the day their traditional story would have it that that you know aldmeris was lost and then they found the somerset isles and so the ultimate on the somerset isles but at first they seemed to uh worship sort of ancestor worship like everyone sort of did but there was this sort of early somewhat of a schism between um between certain groups and factions of ultima ultima uh or aldemar it's kind of especially with an to australian but we've got old mo with a d and ultima with a t the t being the highest yes and um basically though what happened was there was sort of it started become a popular idea to start only revering the you know the socially better or more deserving ancestors and this has ended ended up formulating what they revere as the aedra and you get sort of like you know that's why there's financer and xoxies and auriel like these are these great ancestors that are revered but no longer just your dad who was a farmer or whatnot which is kind of a little bit different to sort of like the uh old ways the psijic order have which is some complex system of ancestor worship and then you also have like later the velothi who really really like their sort of family ancestor worship it's not just about like all the greatest the aedra and then obviously you throw in the dangerous stuff too and the velocity left and went to resdayne but um you can sort of see how that kind of um stratification of society into certain castes and there's like these ancestors are worthy and these ancestors are not how it's sort of of worship um sort of formulates their modern day sort of caste system where they have really strong social you know class divides and between nobility and it's like the essential distinction between elven and human in that when when they're talking about ancestor worship it's not very different from the way humans would just say worshipping the gods because you know to a high elf worshiping your ancestors as you're talking about with the aedra it's just worshiping the gods you know but but as far as they're concerned they're trying to maintain whatever makes them as close to these ancestor gods as possible as opposed to looking at them as something distinct from themselves they're just an earlier more powerful version of themselves yeah well that's like that like that's a general heuristically you can kind of say that you know men generally generally believe they're created by gods whereas elves believe they're descended from gods so and and the ultimate very strong it is a bit funny though isn't it that they just pick the most powerful ones and then they go these are our ancestors but then kind of brush away all their other ancestors who would be less powerful and less interesting but you know just the same their ancestors so it's like curating a pantheon of your your favorite kind of characters or entities and then saying oh that's our pantheon and all of them are my ancestors and not bringing up the other ones it's just like okay um and there's sort of a obsession with um like kind of maintaining like you're just saying through the the purity of like the closest basically maintaining the closeness to the gods or their ancestors in terms of both like cult like their sort of superior culture they're trying to maintain their culture but also in bloodlines which has led to uh eugenic practices and stuff where they're very specific about like not you know crossbreeding with lower castes and stuff like that to sort of maintain the purity of kings descended from gods and so it's also it's like their willingness to to follow a god depends on that god's opinions on oriel's idea that um that they would they were trapped in this mortal realm so any god who kind of goes against that is then becomes kind of shunned by the high elves so um i think uh stendar is a good example of that right he's the uh the apologist to men so long as i'm not mixing up my gods but anyone who's um kind of pro the human ideas of you know that this is our we are mortals we're not something more grand than this we are thankful for our lives as opposed to being angry about this trap that oriole talks about then those gods are enemies as far as they're concerned which is why sure you know lorkhan is the ultimate enemy because he created this trap yeah this this may feel a little bit off topic but it is funny to think just how important genetics would be to them in the sense of the raw advantage that it gives them like because we can assume that some would have an even bigger natural affinity for magic than others right and as we know magic can help you live a really long time so if you kind of breed with the right person your child may live 500 years versus 250 years right and if you keep having the those with the highest magical prowess come together then you will just end up having the most powerful families as well because you live for longer so you have more time to grow wealth and practice different things and become more intelligent man they would have a massive divide of inequality if you think about it it's like pretty op because it's not just based on nothing and i'm not saying they pick their partners based purely on um magical prowess but you can see how that would play an impact somewhere yeah well that that's um a really interesting thing because most people would assume you know you go like oh being a high off that'd be mad because you're all of the personal things but if you are all of the biological factors but if you were a high elf in somerset isles it's like yeah it might be all right if you're a king or whatnot or a higher nobility but like anyone else in the social strata like you you can't like it it seems as though it's really hard to move up and down between the different classes and because you're very restricted and you're just the society is very like hands-on like okay you're born like this okay this is what you've got to do in life kind of thing except for the sort of you know privileged few so you can kind of imagine it would be quite appealing to many high elves who are say i'm a lowly merchant or or just like you know a farmer or something to actually get out of there and flee to say the empire even with more cosmopolitan ideals but you know say a lowly high elf to just you know a village of people in um you know leo near leon or something would respect them as like well they might be you know racist or something but like if not might respect their magical prowess or look up to them it's kind of like um it's all based on relativity i guess it kind of reminds me of like nowadays where people from um countries with stronger currencies can move to a country that has a weaker one like let's say someone from the us moving to thailand and suddenly with what would be an average income in their country uh they're like a king in terms of what they can buy what they can afford it's not like it's kind of like that if you think about it you would move somewhere safe in the summerset i was you're a very average mage and then suddenly oh you're a good mage here and you've been living for longer than everyone else so people see you as really wise and but that's not to say all high elves live a really long time i mean obviously we know that's not the case just based on the dialogue you would you would encounter more high elves referencing like different time periods um if it was super super common to live for you know six or seven hundred years it's weird because elves kind of are like the best way to describe there's some eso things that are kind of like oh you know average going two to three hundred years and all that kind of stuff but with elves as a general rule it seems to be kind of like magically an influence or sometimes it's just variability like sometimes you find a high off at 200 and they look like they're about 90 for a human or something you see another alpha 200 and they're like young you know they're like in their 20s you know what i mean it's um it seems kind of variable but um i guess we can also sort of start talking about obviously we kind of get the gist of of what a high elf is and we've talked about the thalmor and stuff before which is like a very radicalized version of their like core principles anyway of you know elven superiority and um descendants from god's yadda yadda but um somerset uh somerset isles and the ultima have actually you know at times they've gone and plenty of exodus so you've got the aylids and so on which sort of came from there as well and you've got the velocity that came from there but um the ultimary language sort of ended up being one of the sort of defining i guess bases for the modern tamrielic language um as well and i can't remember i'll have i'll have to find it whether it was riemann or not but there was a point where all legal documents and stuff were done in the sort of uh ultimary language and then they were changed um into cyrodiilic by i forget who it was i can't remember if it was a septum empire or riemann but regardless it's it's kind of like you can kind of imagine it like the latin of our real world in the way that it was very important for all religious documents and legal documents for a long long time because of the roman empire and so on they just sort of got in early um yeah i mean it's one thing that's you know that i there's a risk of making everything more confusing by bringing this point up but when we when we talk about the the kind of the differences between the old mary dominion and the empire um when we consider that a lot of history is recorded by the empire and you know after this point it's recorded in cyrodiilic it it asks the question like how much of um somerset and high off culture and society is as crazy as an ex crazy and extreme as we see it and how much is potentially played up by the empire wanting to kind of like distinguish themselves as the cosmopolitan ones as opposed to the like you know there's the the idea that they they only keep one out of ten children if they're racially pure enough and it's like well then other people argue that that's just absolutely not the case but that i think that's in one of the pocket guides it says they do that so it becomes a bit interesting because i like the idea that somerset is as alien as it it's described because it just makes them much more interesting but you gotta wonder like it a lot of the times it is from the perspective of the culture who writes the history which from our perspective in pretty much any time you play the games it's very empire focused and a lot of yeah scholarly work comes from an imperial perspective yeah absolutely especially since the the ultimate themselves are you know quite isolationist like all throughout history they've generally kept somerset aisles for high elves and by them you know to themselves um and so you can imagine they're very much the same with their sort of knowledge and documents and so on they're not exactly like flooding that out to to the empire so it's why the empire like um you know becomes the the dominant uh scholarly you know stuff that you know the the books and stuff i suppose i suppose it could be just a story about one group of high elves then applied to all of them in the pocket guide you know but like it sounds like something the nobility would do but like a lower class might not that's the thing like some of these emissaries especially in like the first pocket guide they they go in like they they already really dislike the high elves before they even go and visit um eleanor and um i think that's one area where the high elves have kind of been screwed out of some really really interesting law is that when you know using the dunmer and morrowind as an example before was shown in eso you know in eso it's an interesting place but it's not you know it's not crazy alien and interesting the way we actually see it but that's because morrowind had a fully fledged game and a fully-fledged culture and all of this stuff fleshed out whereas the heils didn't get that before their portrayal in in eso you know which is one thing that kind of makes the much more basic you know the elves that you see in most fantasy um worlds as opposed to the kind of you know we bring it up a lot because it's really interesting to imagine they're like the city of eleanor made from glass and insect wings with like hypnotic swirling ramparts and impossibly tall towers and all of that it's like to imagine a game that actually explores that would make the high elves as interesting potentially as the dunmer yeah we've never really got that yeah i it's funny like in terms of gameplay it would be one of those really hard just because of you know how they're all like isolationists and they don't like other races but there's even this cool like little um excerpt it's actually from the eso interactive map of tamriel but it says um like this is just about some of the obscene like not obscene but crazy kind of customs and stuff they have but like as a guest you will not be required to memorize uh memorize every detail of proper behavior at a higher elven dinner table and surely you won't be judged too harshly for minor misunderstandings however the more you know the better your impression you make yada yada but this is what you have to do so you refill the glass of your of the diner to your left when it is low and never refill your own glass never rest utensils on the edge of any vessel do not eat more than the most percent prestigious attendee at any function allow the head of your table to lead the discussion never watch another while they chew using the wrong utensil is considered barbaric if you do not do not know which to use watch other guests and follow their example but you can see like just that little bite size thing of just how like rigid and formal like it seems very controlling on every single element of conduct throughout the day whether you're just eating or whether you're probably it's like probably even applies to other things like reading or how crossing the road stack boxes yeah it kind of it sounds really sucky to be honest like there's not it seems like freedom is not a thing that's highly prized there and they have a very like um it almost makes you think a little bit like sort of ancient india and stuff in terms of like the higher like the caste system in the way but like you've got to your your life is destined before you're sort of even born and so on you know what i mean like your place in society yeah because i guess you know if the vast majority of high elves are not part of this extremely high caste who are like you know in the image of the gods you can imagine that a lot of the you could say the vast majority of high elves maybe wouldn't buy into this idea that we need to be perfectly pure and just like our ancestors because they're just like you know they get the they get the short end of the stick for not being considered as close to their ancestors which can be arbitrary really yeah you know it can be decided by who's in charge i guess it all kind of drives home the point of just how xenophobic and snobbish they can seem to the other races of tamriel because you can imagine just how snobbish they would be to their own kind based on a caste system so if they think that you know if the highest of the high elves think that some of the lower class are nothing or like you know worthless to them what are they going to think of an argonian or khajiit when they travel to other provinces there is no way that i could imagine being confident in forming a pact like the old mirror dominion with the high elves let alone the thalmor um knowing that they look down on their own kind as well it's interesting um to actually know another thing about their spread um is how you have the house durani or or what no the dureniel's basically and they went to high rock and they basically ended up enslaving the bretons and informing sort of like they sort of create this caste system again but it's interesting how if you think about it at its root breton's cast culture and like you know stratified classes and all that is heavily um influenced by the durani elves bringing that from somerset isles and and that over as well i also just want to clarify real quick i mentioned before like ultimate language being the basis it's kind of it isn't in part two but also remember um the ultimate language when it goes it becomes sort of uh transforms into a ayla dune and cyrodiil and the aylids were there because the aylids played a big role in the ones that allied with alicia um they sort of helped the men kind of you know create their new little empire basically um until like you know like 100 or something years later the elves started getting kicked out of power and having their lands taken from them but yeah well so there's a lot of influence in the model and seriously talking about the durani the durani is kind of like the perfect small scale example of how high elven culture can really come back to bite you in the ass because they create this culture where they're at the very top of the chain and the the bretons that they you know they can use as concubines and they're only allowed to marry each other they're not allowed to marry you you know they're essentially property um and then when you're so selective about who you can breed with and then you're you're an expanding culture at the same time and you just end up becoming completely outnumbered by everyone who's not this high race like you to the point where you just dwindle away and you can't control your lands and the the race you essentially created of of man myrrh will just end up naturally not through conquest just taking all your land and you just end up with the few pure people left on a tiny little island in the middle of the iliac bay so it's like you know it's it's not always the best strategy i mean you can see why they try and ally with the bosma who have of the most populous race of elves um and the kijitas will help bolster the numbers as well yeah you can imagine i'll go so i was gonna say it is interesting just quickly i found um the hierarchy so it says at the top of the wise okay teachers and priests followed by artists princes warriors landowners merchants and workers blow workers were the beasts such as the enslaved goblins who the old man used to perform the jobs beneath the dignity of the very least of them so it is interesting that um education but also art seems to rank quite highly like above yeah merchants and other things yeah i kind of see that for them art and architecture are like really closely entwined because you know it's like when you know when we talked about the description of eleanor um it sounds like not everything about their their architecture at least as it's described is entirely practical it's almost like a display to the gods of how great they are and how you know reaching towards the heavens even though there's probably not much need to create everything from glass and you know things like that it's it's like it's an artistic endeavor just as much as it is um practical interesting thing to point out they're two about that caste system too with enslaved beasts at the bottom but often when people think slavery they think of um dunma but slavery really is an elven practice like in the way that you you know the ultimate did it and they did it with the goblins and so on you've got then they go to cyrodiil and then they enslave the humans there then they go off the res dane and then they enslave the um argonians down south like even the dwarves in slaves the snow elves kind of creating the farmer yeah exactly elves are you know they really it's a common theme of them sort of that we're superior and we can enslave these other people like it's a very uh it's an early elven ideal i would say yeah there's no doubt the old mary dominion you know on the surface level can seem like this this packed this diverse pact of khajiit bosma and high elves but you know you mentioned the goblins before i am i imagine beneath the surface especially in the falmor they're they're looking at their bosma and khajiit allies as they're basically our goblins who are going to be working on the mainland for us and that's why a lot of the times you know where other alliances can be formed fairly naturally they resort to kind of tricking the other they're tricking the khajiit especially into aligning with them as if they're they're great saviors like on the the void nights supposedly bringing back the moons um yeah yeah i get i always get i mean i always got the vibe with the two there's two pieces of information when you you know you hear about how there's the the cullings and stuff in valenwood so this is all the fourth era stuff about the thalmor culling like you know dissidents and so on within within valenwood um and then also when remember when there's the khajiit assassin gets sent after you in riften or you've just come out of the sewers yet as ben and there's a khajiit assassin in a dress like from thalmor but like i can really imagine them just really treating them like tools it's like here you know i'm going to use you as a tool because you know high elf sticks out as well you know you can go like oh you know khajiit and the nord might look oh they're just a criminal khajiit kind of thing or you know whatever but they're actually a secret they do have two of the most nimble uh racers who would be the most useful for being assassins and thieves and spies and stuff and then they don't well obviously warriors are very useful but they don't really need a warrior-centric race because they have a lot of offensive capabilities in their own way with magic and other things and obviously nimble fighters are still effective fighters too in the case of the bosmer and the khajiit yeah or little conor mcgregor it's true though and especially if they're armed with bows and stuff and you know yeah when we were talking about the bosmer it's like there is a you could argue there's wasted potential there in that for the most part they keep to themselves and they they're pacifistic but they can also be very violent in terms of just how their culture is set up so if if you can indoctrinate some bosma and you know the same applies for khajiit if you can indoctrinate them into your way of thinking for the from a high health perspective you've got you know an untapped army of incredibly good warriors like archers and assassins and and all of that so it benefits them massively to to kind of like become friends with these yeah the other thing to consider as well is it kind of fills the gap that magic doesn't so if you think about pure warrior or strength or kind of tank capabilities in in a war or a battle um the thalmor do have magic and as much as they're not the biggest fans of um like necromancy and stuff you you can imagine daydream i mean we know about lord marathon and all that jazz which you know it's not not not my most favorite thing but i guess it's still canon but um you could have mages summoning things as well the um interesting thing too the other big benefit of just having valenwood and elsewhere in general is actually like some of the sort of like just territory and control and if you think about it that um the ultima are they have a they have supposedly the strongest navy they have a really powerful navy and you know a history of fighting the seals and and slowed and such and also they're an island nation so a navy is somewhat essential but in regards to the modern um like political landscape you can see kind of why they might have wanted to go for hammerfell and especially get that to lock down that southern hammerfell area as well and you know they've already got valenwood because um that gives them a good control of the um it's the abakian sea i think or a bcnc i don't know how you pronounce it but um because you've got anvil which is a major port for the empire and so on and if you can kind of like you know got valenwood to somerset blocking it here and then there's like you know if you had southern hammerfell and some so you can kind of get a really good control of those seas without you know limiting trade because i suppose like if you think about the imperials and where they are they can either trade from leon and go the long arse way all around black marsh morrowind up into skyrim into high rock or they can do the much shorter route which is just out of anvil up into high rock into the iliac bay which is a massive trade hub like if you as the ultima or the thermal really um you know if you manage to lock down hammerfell and you have vane with that you've cut off their trade like because inland trade between you know over all of the mountains over across skyrim or in through dragon star stuff it's a much rougher um slower process so um there's probably more more to their hammerfell conquest than you think because you can at first just go oh why'd they want to conquer a desert yeah that it's like there's more to marsh is something that really needs to be conquered too so it's not like they don't have a grip on the bottom right hand of the continent it's more like that doesn't really exist um until the argonians cause a problem and morrowind's been you know had a lot of chaos with red mountain and whatnot so you know they kind of have a lot of useful territory if they if they did keep hammerfell yeah tactically they have the ultimate advantage it's like you know to kind of you can compare it in a way to britain and germany in in world war ii you know it's like britain is is really hard to penetrate because it's a you know you have to cross the channel in order to attack it and then not only that but germany you know they had to operate from taken land in order to launch an assault on um i'm getting my examples mixed up but you know and they had to conquer france in order to to attack britain pretty much and you can imagine that if the if the empire wanted to push to somerset it's kind of hard to go from anvil if you've got enemies in valenwood and all so it's like you can see why short of having the numidium on your side you really can't mess with somerset it's like that's the only way to force their hand is to have a literal god working with you yeah absolutely yeah pretty powerful yeah um yeah that's also why i think like obviously we've talked about this before but failed to scroll six like hammerfell is the best setting for any sort of reignited thermal tension and and stuff like that plus like i think a setting there too in hammerfell is really cool because you'll actually be able to experience some of the battlefields and and see some of the damage that the great war did because skyrim wasn't really the theater for the for the great war at all it was pretty much cyrodiil and hammerfell so if you um it'd be cool do you know what i mean and some of the wounds would be fresh i mean still 25 years but you know you can do a lot of just you know some destruction takes a long time to repair and it's not like you have machines but i guess i guess it also depends on if you want to repair it as well like it depends on the priorities too obviously they have the capabilities to repair everything in like a couple of years if they want to but it's like is it feasible is it worth doing now or should they do something else yeah um i was going to say ultima are quite a straightforward race i was just thinking back to when we did our podcast on our top 10 favorite races uh based on kind of coolness for lack of better world or how much we liked their law and the altmost ended up surprisingly on the lower end of my list even though before i started i thought they would end up higher because i it's funny there's a massive distinction between races that i love the lore of and races that i love to play like for example high elf is a race that i love to play and i played as my second character in skyrim um was a high elf who had it sounds really funny but i i thought it was really cool at the time it was like full muscle um high elf wearing like the topless fur so like but then using lightning magic so you can imagine a real like you know how the force one mages have this like arcane bandit feel yeah yeah yeah it's kind of like that i think i even remember it was on the xbox 360. an interesting thing about uh just thelma to talk about too is there's so in the pocket guide to the empire third edition which is so it's written in the third era around the time of oblivion um you have uh it does say this it's like with the insularity of the somerset of the somerset decisively broken many ultima particularly the young which among the high elves is a fairly loose term began to take a more critical view of the rigid hierarchy of ultimate society and its strict cultural xenophobia while there had always been discontent on the fringes of ultimate society which was traditionally resolved by exile of the male contents for the first time a significant element of ultima began to agitate for social change um this nascent revolution of the summital has taken many forms most constructive surely is the acceptance of new cultures and races onto its shores yada yada it goes on for a bit but um it's interesting so this would have been at the time like you know end of third era early fourth era that there was kind of this more like yeah let's move away from sort of i guess superiority and rigid hierarchy and so on but that gets completely flipped on its head with the thalmor up uprising and then when the thalmor take control um and i guess that also explains the the night of uh is it green fires where they tr where you had some early dissidents trying to escape to hammerfell from this new regime starting off in somerset yeah as well but it's just interesting like you know you got to treat them as individuals like not even high elves not all high elves most certainly um do not benefit from you know the strict caste systems and of uh you might find as well i mean you see it not every high elf you meet in skyrim for example is particularly snobby i mean a lot of them are but plenty of them aren't you can imagine that it's kind of like the orcs where you have the orcs in the stronghold and then the ones that leave get called the city orcs and they're kind of frowned upon but they're not about that stronghold lifestyle right whereas the high elves who leave as well you can imagine i just want to go be a merchant in high rock and that's it and where they are their job might not be respected but you would find that a lot of the ones that stay are the ones that like it um and the ones that don't like it would leave because it's quite easy to leave it seems it's not like especially as a high elf like there's plenty of places and you have options yeah that's what i'm saying like majors especially in peak empire times with the mages guild and so on like there's you you know what i mean like i mean provided you're a mage but even so going to the imperial city and just like i feel like it is a kind of a cooler you know like i would want to probably live in the imperial city or some kind of cosmopolitan nation because you know inherently how like even the imperial city and this is how it tends to be in real life that cities are more cosmopolitan and accepting in general versus like rural areas or more like you know you'd have a better chance in in this than say broomer or coral or something like these sort of more like clovian sort of isolated groups they might have different but what if you were going to be the king or like high class in somerset isles it it sounds cool but you can look at a lot of noble families like unless you really kind of want any freedom yeah because it kind of sucks because your life is so restricted into happening to what you can say and do and who you have to marry and what you have to you know it might be far more liberating to go and go to the imperial city marry someone you love and yeah do some you know what i mean whatever you like well yeah because a lot of their their lives are built around trying to reclaim something that they really can't do you know like that this obsession with what they once were they they're going to be constantly undermined and foiled by the the reality that they're not like that anymore you know and i think like building on what you said about how you thought they were going to be a more loved race but then you kind of put them lower down the list it's that one thing about um the ultima is that it's like you've got all of these really fascinating groups that diverge from them who are really interesting because they kind of came from that whereas the ultima are just like the ones who stayed behind who refused to change at all which is is kind of what makes them you could say potentially makes them a bit more boring than the other elves but at the same time what makes them the most fat fascinating is this idea that they just have no idea of their true origins like we can't even find our old homeland it's like it's a bit tragic really as much as they paint themselves as the very best and like we've said many times like heils with some of their descriptions in the books and so on with all the beautiful crystal towers that they had the potential to be far more alien but as we've seen them in eso and and so on they are pretty close to just sort of your classic lord of the rings type elf so they kind of by default it's like i've been there done that we've seen it in d and d and every iteration of fans i feel like it was 780 years it just made me think about the orcs episode you're like they're practically shred just seems like this is love um yeah there's an ancient meme for you he's an extra you know that thing where i showed you um where there was like uh those animated videos and it's got like shrek as kind of like a shrek girl oh yeah and it's like so good riding a hot dog i just saw some meme and it was like and it was like what the oh imagine what the internet will be in 30 years and it's like shrek writing a hot dog with a witcher thing and there's like obama and all this kind of stuff it's so so spacey so absurdist but yeah yeah i can imagine as well being an ultimate too when we were talking about being like in the higher class and it being boring in the elder scrolls universe magic is real and i just can't imagine that the pull to politics and wealth would be nearly as interesting i know it's all relative and when you get there you might be like magic but i'd much rather be sleeping in some bunk bed in a mages guild you know eating basic food and nobody knows who i am but i'm learning to i don't know summon literal like demons but monsters or like you know cast spells and tone invisible that that sounds much more appealing to me it's kind of like that thing of like getting super powers would just make you not really care about some of the more mortal boring trappings yeah i think part of what makes the highest more fascinating for me is buying into these like massive conspiracy theories you know it's like um like for example my i don't really play here so but the character i created i created a high elf but i made his his skin as tan as possible because the idea is basically oh he's one of the aliens who escaped elise's rebellion and as like you know they they it said that a lot of them traveled to towards valenwood and somerset to kind of mesh in with the foul like you know the early times of the foul more and they're secretly just trying to get revenge against men so you know it's not just some expansion it's like it's like no we want revenge for something that happened thousands of years ago and it's like you know it's kind of like you almost have to to to really enjoy the high elves you kind of just give them credit for everything that came from them which is like obviously so much but you know the durani and the aliens being like fascinating examples of their expansion that didn't get too crazy following completely different cultures and gods makes me think too actually why some of the aylids it's never mentioned really but aylids some of them could have got along with the kyma and so on and have converted to the sort of a lofty way of life mm-hmm um in an exodus as well but um yeah i mean maybe something because you'd never you'd never know yeah well if they turn to daedra worship it's not going to be a big leap for them to follow the good daedra there's probably some shrines and temples too i guess those daedra inhaled cities i guess we don't have much information on the aylids but like i i still imagine that the aylids because a lot of the it seems a lot of the benefits of worshipping the daedra wasn't i love you so much it's more so all of the powers and stuff that they could achieve from them so i would say that the aylids are probably still quite like annuic in their beliefs and the way that law khan like trapped them here kind of thing so it would have been quite uh i guess that's why because of the shift even going to um uh to the dunmo world to the chimera at the time their belief about lorcan and and the purpose of mundus is very different so they're like fundamentals yeah it's like the daedra was more like their hedonism and their fun not their if these daedric princes are encouraging them to enslave and torture humans as well it's like that can totally align with the a high of an attitude despite kind of yet worshipping a daedra yeah that is true yeah um i think that's like i mean without mentioning every single little detail or little you know thing that they do do but um dude [Laughter] we're gonna get demonetised now watch out yeah but um i think that's about it do you guys have anything else to mention on the altima the city of their own beasts yes you know exactly so it's like yeah that was my thoughts entirely like sigic order gets a podcast kind of vibe and i think if we kind of jump into the gods too much you're kind of a lot of like discussing the elven gods you kind of want to bring up the nordic gods and i feel like we'll probably have some kind of dawn error episode and that'd be that'd be good we'll discuss the goings on so it just helps separate these things i like that yeah all right well thank you ladies and gentlemen for tuning in to the elder scrolls podcast we will see you next week addie host

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Id: -jJA6J-a4IQ

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021