Hermaeus Mora | The Elder Scrolls Podcast #30

[Music] what is up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to fudge muppet this is the elder scrolls podcast i'm scott here with michael andrew as always and today we are discussing the daedric prince of knowledge hermeasmora the big tentacle mass himself which if you guys would like to start us off well he is the daedric prince of knowledge the keeper of secrets and he's kind of that daedra that just knows everything and you will go insane though if you try and discover all the forbidden knowledge that he keeps in his endless libraries of books and tomes and tentacles and and disgust really also known as the prince of fate and lord of secrets and that's the master of the tides of fate and gardner of men and he's also got a lot of different interpretations in other cultures which we'll be getting into like the woodland man and her memoria and things like that we could try and like uh start on his sort of origin and one of his titles is called like an er daedra and you know a shorter version of that would be urdra which gets referenced to a few other i think um nocturnal and uh namira gets it i think even azura gets it but basically er meaning like uh it's it's beginning like primal like before the beginning is and i can't remember the exact definition but it's super super like at the start of the universe so the implication there is that they were they're some of the oldest beings like some of these daedra um but then there is also the ideas that um hermes mora he's isn't he made from the leftover one of the poetic things leftover pieces of of creation yeah so it's technically technically not canon but the imperial census the kirkbride source says uh james mora claims he is one of the oldest princes born of thrown away ideas used during the creation of mortality in the mundus i mean if you look at how himayas mora describes himself it's very the riddle unsolvable the door unopened or the unopenable the book unreadable the question unanswerable so it kind of sounds like he really enjoys the whole like my mysterious kind of angle of things well one thing we've got to also um establish too is that hermeas mora even though he's a like a being of like you know heaps of knowledge it's not necessarily infinite like he's not omnipotent he's not all seeing because there are examples throughout the games of where there's knowledge that he doesn't have access to like you know the skull secrets like he he wasn't privy to them so he's kind of got like this um obsession with trying to to gain knowledge really he's trying to get his hands on everything constantly and it's kind of like the people who it's what gives him relationship it's kind of like the people who serve him kind of embody that as well except because they're obviously not a daedra they can go insane i mean you never know i'm sure someone could make an argument for why hermes moore is insane if they wanted to but um yeah it's that kind of like endless thirst for knowledge that drives him to collect more and more of it but also his followers or even just people who just are self-seeking and kind of will go to his realm in search of things you know it's that constant hunger for more and more and that's what will drive some of the most powerful wizards insane because a lot of the most powerful people are those who just constantly seek knowledge and power but that and that's the thing if he just had infinite knowledge he wouldn't need to interact with mortals at all he wouldn't have really care about followers if he had them and he wouldn't bother to have you know a champion like merak or eventually the the last dragonborn like he would actually benefit from from racking their brain and figuring out all that these characters know you know so it kind of gives him a dynamic relationship with mortals because he's yeah wants to expand his knowledge he doesn't just already have it yeah and he's definitely into making you prove yourself before he contacts any mortal i mean if you look at um oblivion you had to do every single daedric prince quest before you could get summoned actually to his shrine you would wake up to this mage telling you to come to hermaeus morris shrine which i really like the look of i really like him in skyrim as well the whole aesthetic of the tentacles and the eyes and things like that but i also like the kind of like big mass of like crustacean crab claws and blobs and then like tentacles as well and like i think that's all really cool he's gross he's he's like what the only daedric prince that doesn't appear as male female or like some beautiful thing like uh like a dragon or you know yeah i'd say so he's the only like hyper vague looking i'm a blob yeah and before the dlc was added he was just that kind of purple abyss with a voice coming out of it remembering september sickness is outpost yeah i did that quest way too many times little fun fact for those long time viewers of the channel when we were making the first skyrim builds i would like to like level them up i would have to play on xbox 360 like all the way up until that quest so i could get the ogre infinium to like level up like there were no console commands back then to just test things so you had to like literally test things manually with i mean there were if you had it on pc but i didn't have it on pc so i would have to test things on a console some nuts so you were cheating using that ogma infinium glitch rather than doing it all legit to test every single build things absolutely man you want to test builds before you play him anyway you kind of gotta like see yeah it can go that way you don't wanna invest 50 hours and be like this is crap which is what happened when you know we were first playing and i know scott i've said this before you restarted a billion builds um because you weren't happy with one little thing so just to get it all right back to hermes one of my i do like um this and we can tie it in with the uh the nordic myths but in the i think it's a varieties of faith he's more it's got a little thing about hermes more and they said he's also called the demon of knowledge he is vaguely related to the cult origins of the morag tong forrester's guild if only by association with his brother sister mafala and i actually quite like his um connection to mephala and so on and i was talking about it in the complexities of mafaala video and i was talking about how both funnily enough both of them kind of um embody secrets in a way like mephala more so kind of the creation of secrets um you know through the webs and plotting and betrayal and you know lies and stuff like that um and then hermaeus mora sort of obsession with uncovering and getting all the secrets so as like a sibling sort of relationship miphal is creating all of these and then hermes moore is trying to uncover everything and hoard all of these all of the secrets and truth it's it's an interesting thing about his relationship with um with fate and prophecy because you know if he's just hoarding knowledge you could you could look at it like or why would he want to get involved he's just you know he just wants to hoard the knowledge of the things that are going on he's not going to actively get involved with it but if you imagine that he's kind of like looking into the future or you know coming up with prophecies he can kind of influence events himself and you know i kind of had the idea with um with the last dragonborn is that there's the potential that he kind of had some involvement with the dragonborn prophecy so that he could kind of like um help make a character who would move along would learn a load of stuff and then would eventually topple his chat his current champion who's getting a bit too big for his boots and then fill that role and just give him so much knowledge in this same video i had to talk about i was trying to like because with all of the sort of discussion of fate and prophecy and all that kind of stuff you have to kind of like delve into sort of determinism versus free will and that kind of thing and that in elder scrolls by nature of the elder scrolls you know changing and stuff i think it already gives into the idea that it's it's sort of like prophecy and and and you know that kind of thing is is set at the moment but it's willing to change and like there's words uh about hermes mora is constantly scrying the tides of fate and you know the words tides of fate like tides you know come in go out they flow they kind of change and if you're having to constantly scry like it's not like just a more linear process of oh i've uncovered the entire like chain of determinism instead it's sort of like you're constantly having to adjust and reprogram as you get more sort of information and you change your like model of the future so that's sort of like a you know it's kind of like when when you think of determinism and then it kind of like debunks psychics because or like imagine a book of the future but as you read it it changes because then if you know what's going to happen you would try to change it like it kind of just like doesn't it doesn't compute properly yeah and i guess it's interesting because we talk about the kind of the the immortal beings it's kind of they they operate somewhat outside of time but um hermes moore you know what we've scrying the tides of fate you know things that are yet to come um there's connections drawn between him and akatosh like in in the same imperial census you get um something that says imperial manonauts have verified that his influence on fate and time is real and unfeigned implications of which tie this prince directly with akatosh chief of the nine divines um so you know it's interesting that he's almost like inscriying the tides of fate he's kind of like trying to unravel the mysteries of akatosh and like figure things out before they happen and get you know he's got a tentacle in every um real i don't think of a bad one that had a metaphor there but yeah you know he's involved in just about everything it is interesting as well if you think about his black book artifacts that some of those are actually from the future so if there's knowledge from the future it kind of implies that he already you know i mean again he doesn't know everything but he does know what's going to happen in the future to an extent but then if he for example was like oh i need to get this knowledge from the skull in the present wouldn't he already have that in the future you know so yeah i know that yeah so you have to wrap your head around that whole idea of like a set but constantly changing timeline almost like a i this isn't exactly it but you know that whole elastic band analogy kind of like you're like going along it and like you can stretch it out and change things but like it'll snap back to like its path and stuff it's not perfect but yeah because it's kind of like it's kind of weird to actually think like the kind of whole idea of of i guess prophecy or foretelling and fate kind of doesn't really stack up with as much as they've that whole idea if that if the gods experiencing past present and future all at once like it kind of doesn't do you why do they have to guess why aren't they like the psijic order going you will succeed this will happen i know because i'm living in all of it at the same time like yeah because there's because clear example and that's why i think the daedra are far more like um fallible than they think than we think because like you know there's just too many examples of like you know mafaala has all of this like she's you know uh all of these interconnected webs and stuff and all this but she's still got a ring stolen from her by regin the ring of khajiiti or or you know azura gets tricked by a dwemer with um what's in the box kind of thing and then it gets even more complicated when you think of daedra tricking each other like shea gorath's different challenges and stuff like that theory could be that they're overwhelmed like if you think about past present future if you are constantly trying to process all of this stuff all at once there's a like a broader range of stimulus there that you're constantly like this it would be easier perhaps to like slip and miss something you don't have the cpu to handle it all and yeah they haven't listened to the power of now enough they're not very present yeah they're like they're daydreaming and then something gets stolen um and i mean you could imagine them almost being confused when you know that they've got this you know infinite experience of what existing is like and then this mortal realm comes into being that has all of these rules and laws that have been set in place that just don't operate the same way as your world you know it's like looking under the bottom of the ocean and seeing that everything you know life forms exist in completely different ways and you almost can't understand how it works um and i mean like with hermes mora you know if he's born of the leftover ideas of creation you can imagine that it's very mortal centric so that even though he exists in the past present and future it somehow when it comes to models it doesn't work that way and it's like you know it's a blind spot it's infinitely more complicated if the idea is like you know with calpers and so on if there's like of creation it's like which creation like the last one like is like you know the conventional idea but if there's all of the cycles beforehand and are they existing in all of those or does that kind of like break the idea of past present future fits to one cycle or is it across all cycles simultaneously seemingly is that oblivion isn't isn't oblivion isn't like oh i don't know it's kind of look it's work it's kind of lack like this is like we've talked about this before but as with all elder scrolls it's just a result of a you know hundreds of different people all contributing so you have to kind of massage things to get the cohesive vision of what it's supposed to be so you're going to find conflict and and you know what to be honest it's easier to sort of just like poof every idea that's that's undesirable when it's so metaphysical because you can be like oh this just how it works in this or you know what i mean yeah it's it's easy not to think too hard and try and make everything make black and white sense but there is something really interesting too i i don't know i just like um his other name as the woodland man in um nordic stuff and then also that he's you know like being associated by through rafala being associated with the morag tong which is the forester's guild just like that but i just do like that there is this sort of like i wonder if there's more symbolism you can kind of pull out there but from the whole woods dynamic forest kind of thing that's sort of associated like an elder wood kind of vibe like because the bosma worship her memorial too and i'm pretty sure they also call him the woodland man um it's just that they don't see that as the daedric entity hermes mora they're like no it's different yeah whereas in the um nordic tales it's kind of like no he is the daedric entity yeah yeah he's um and you know there's these various tricks where he tried to um he tries to steal knowledge and stuff it's him being their hair isn't it um oh that story yeah yeah that's right his ears really long yeah about trying to trick um isgramor into becoming an elf um so that could it so he could be a superior hunter but then shaw comes in and kills the hare and reveals it to be you know the woodland man and says that you shouldn't uh listen to hermione s'more and you nearly got tricked you're full um i actually one of my favorite takes on him and this is a lot of the khajiit pantheon is him as hamora as he's it's one of the more like favorable looks of him just being as as the person like this you know submarine library that he sort of maintains for azura and stuff and it's kind of like i like that it seems more like a because azura obviously the khajiit pantheon is looked upon more favorably and is like a central figure i sort of like that you just don't really see hermios mora he's either he's either fringe or downright like sort of evil in most pantheons when i read about it all i can hear is he lives in a library under the sea i think it's such a um yeah i just think that's a really cool but then that all changed with like the the whole riddle tha thing yeah and then he just became more evil i don't like that why do that why just make it all contemporary well it's the same yeah i mean i know why it's more like a rhetorical question but it's like i just wish they didn't do that yeah it would be way more interesting for the kind of kidgety pantheon to stay as it was in ancient times throughout i mean they even basically did that in skyrim right like you go there they're not all talking about the nordic pantheon in the way that you'd expect yeah although that one doesn't have as much of a like hard explanation does it no it's just sort of like you people cope and god they got over the last 200 years kind of thing but um yeah something i really do um i wasn't going to say i was going to talk about uh i literally lost what i was going to talk about i was going to it's moving the conversation forward it's something that we were going to like i wish i had more knowledge all of the knowledge he came in with his tentacles yeah um it's gone oh i was just going to tell you well yeah one of drew one of your favorite uh pieces his involvement with um the augma infinium and how ogma is um named after the wife of xarxis and that xoxy's used uh knowledge given to him by hermes mora to make the ogma infinium um and then that's obviously one of his prized artifacts oh yes and like all his book artifacts you'll go crazy if you read it or you probably will my take on going crazy with the whole hermes more thing anyway is that almost everyone will because if you look at like maury and zenus and his story and how he kind of lost himself in apocrypha like he's a powerful wizard he's not just a random joe schmoe you know so if he's gonna go insane pretty much everyone is gonna go insane unless it's linked directly to like a crazy ambitious trait and some less ambitious person could just go in there and be like i don't really care and leave well i feel like when it comes to apocrypha you know it's a it is a physical manifestation that you know is tangible to interact with if you're in the if you're in his realm but at the end of the day it's kind of just you know it is an expansion of his of hermes more as being it's it's just the the raw secrets that even if you pick it up as a book you know you're not going to be able to read about it in a mortal language and comprehend it with your mortal brain it's gonna be like no this stuff wasn't part of creation this is all forbidden knowledge that that was kept separate from us and it's gonna just like just doesn't mesh with the way your mind works and just kind of drives you into i mean it's all very disorganized as well i think you'd go insane just trying to locate the kind of books the knowledge you wanted let alone start reading things right i think there's like a bit of a like a kind of a core theme in elder scrolls anyway about in like insanity and basically your ability to hand handle contradiction like i think what like because a lot of people you could go like um oh if you're super intelligent you'll be able to handle it but with super intelligence can come a lot of like neuroticism and you can be like oh it doesn't fit into this box it's contradictory it doesn't make sense whereas in in some ways having a lower iq can help you there because you just accept it for what it is and there is that theme like you know the whole thing around kim or or chims or whatever it's been uh because uh lehman tuttle the law master said chim now for all the scrolls online so do you know what we used to say chim when we were when we first heard of it and started just been watching fudge muppet and then we he's watching old fudge muffin videos and and he's cool but then we got told to say kim like ages ago and then we started saying kim all the time now when i first heard that it came out it does sound better to me now but when i first heard i'm like kim like that's that's someone's name but because i think it's kind of like like you know how you go like a um uh a chimera kind of like a c-h-i-m-e-r-e oh yeah all right it's like well yeah i like but kind well i mean kind of like even kaim sounds better than jim well like even if it was chime like chime chime yeah yeah what about chimo but we said kai or the kaima yeah yeah i mean yeah but yeah anyway the um oh yeah so the whole idea there is that you'll you you've got to hold to to really achieve that you've got to hold two sort of contradictions ones which one which is that you know you're nothing you're part of something else it's a rather nihilistic point of view and then also one that like you know like uh you mean something you're you you're an individual regardless of the truth it's kind of almost to be honest like if you can look you can regardless of religion and stuff if you if you look down a lot of uh philosophical sort of routes it's very easy with modern science and stuff to fall into a nihilistic kind of sense of things and go oh there's no meaning to life and in a way you could you know you could argue that any meaning to life within that framework is sort of like contradictory to what you kind of know you want to mean like you don't know yeah everything that's what i was going to get it's like discovering that you know the stars what they actually are you know like what is beyond the cosmos and all that like once you see that you kind of have to find ways to reconcile all of your beliefs and it's not easy to do yeah so i imagine that people in apocrypha are doing so the person the person though that can simultaneously kind of hold both beliefs because obviously someone who believes life has meaning will get more out of life but then they also get a more like you know esoteric or whatever understanding of of the of the the darkest reality of the world but if you can kind of have both you get the benefits of both i mean it's kind of cheap it's kind of ego based as well you can think about it from that angle of like removing yourself from the equation of being like um you know kind of like i don't exist it's kind of like this like you know not kind of nihilistic but nihilistic has this connotation of like bad and scary and stuff but kind of just like imagine a more chill nihilism but then having enough ego to be like no i am real i exist you know what i mean like i have an identity i'm me but also i'm not yeah i'm here but i'm not here and you believe both of those extremely strongly and then well overall i feel like on a higher level like just by the people who achieve uh kim is so few by the same sort of mentality there would be i think it's to a lesser degree but there will still be fewer people that that are successfully able to reconcile all of the crazy knowledge in these books if i just chime in or tune in um we talked about this i think ages ago when we started the elder scrolls podcast we talked about the dwemer and and you can imagine these very like um and like not that they don't believe in the gods but they don't care about the gods they're all about their knowledge they're very like um very rational everything they wouldn't be able to handle like the truth so they kind of just would zero some because they'd be like i can't have two contradict like contradictory beliefs i'm out of here like yeah go on couldn't handle it couldn't just let go and be like it is how it is or yeah that's why so it's like i feel like and most people's default state anyway is to they like you know the fear of the unknown people feel uncomfortable not knowing something so even they would prefer to know something that is even not strictly true but it's comforting to go like yeah that is it i know what it's about because then your brain can rest and go okay i'm chill so in with the uh the black books kind of stuff you're confronted with so much stuff that's outside of you like do you know how it's the kind of like uh i guess dunning-kruger effect when you really you know when you're on the up upcoming part you kind of realize how much you don't know like you've learned a little bit more and you're like oh my god i know nothing so imagine going into apocrypha reading these black books and then you're like you think you have a good grasp on the world and you're like okay maybe i don't know a fair bit and you see a fair bit but then you really realize oh my god i know nothing like there is do you know what i mean and yeah people it's it's said in apocrypha that you can kind of go insane from like unending revelation you know it's just uh yeah just truth bomb after truth bomb yeah they're just eating red pills like syria just yeah or black pills in the blackboard yeah yes it is a bit like that yeah but i i think to like i mean we can talk about his realm and his and his creatures and stuff which we'll get to which you've got like a nice like obviously he's got a big lovecraftian kind of theme behind him and and you know if you look at lovecraft's kind of stuff it really is that existential fear of the unknown novel something so just bigger than yourself it's the feeling of it that makes it scary is that you are nothing you're insignificant you are just you know fart in the wind you're not you know what i mean and that makes because you know you live in so your own life you're an ego you you feel like you're something and and that you're so important to everything in that so that contrary revelation just that's what creates the massive amount of fear and i guess that's the point of the black books and him and i mean look he's clearly just a lovecraft in like god insert to be honest yeah yeah when it's cool that the way the symbolism works for that is it's kind of like you know when you imagine those lovecraftian ideas it's like this great chasmic abyss you know it's the depths of darkness where you just you know you could never fathom going going that far down and that's you know it kind of ties into what the khajiit say about he's got the library under the sea you know it's kind of like their way of talking about apocrypha it's because you know all of these ideas tie into this kind of absolute dread of the truth of like how yeah how insignificant mortals and the whole mortal realm you just find out at the end of the day good for their health and they're like uh well yeah i mean you kind of just mentioned it but like you know how a lot of like there's a lot of lovecraftian like creatures from the sea and so on but like the sea overall as symbolically is like this great unknown like there you know there's kilometers and kilometers of deep sea that goes for you know ages and we just don't know anything about it let alone can we really get down there and see it all and when you do see it it's scary and weird and like you know what i mean like i mean even look at his realm it is kind of like a lot of it if you actually were to use the toggle free cam and fly out like as far as you can kind of see it is c that's big inky yeah kind of green black sea you've got those little lights that are kind of like the angle of fish yeah kind of lights in the darkness as well i didn't the one where you die if you don't travel in the light you start taking damage in the dark i remember that but but yeah so like you know on point with all the lovecraftian themes are the the lurkers and the seekers so the lurkers are your big sort of you know fish men kind of stuff needle teeth like you know they're just they're they're they're big giant you know guardian creatures but i think the real interesting ones are the the seekers they look i think they are they they look really cool and i mean their powers are cool it's even said they can talk there's a elder scrolls online text i think it's maury and zenith kind of writing about overhearing them talk to like a i never quite got the visual but is it like a urn that has like a kind of brain in it they talk about these urns that have like these i haven't read that red like i'll just like pull it up pull it up so just beyond my concealing tower of tomes was one of those endless holes lined with numberless urns holes that i have assidiously avoided ever since i learned that each earn houses in a broth of i think it's noise some fluid noises a living concept organ so a living concept organ is that like a live brain brain yeah exercised from its corpus yeah like a brain taken from its body i do not like those urns from the entrance to this hall of urns came the all too familiar squelching sound of a seeker's footfalls but then it stopped and in its place i heard for the first time the sticky sound of a speaking seeker and then there's some like kind of dialogue stuff which isn't like particularly unique pretty sure that's the seeker lispt pretty sure concept organ is act is used again in reference to a brain um before with um marook or something is talking about some of his prop revelation stuff i i that's something that's really beautiful in like all in that's why i like a lot of elder scrolls law books and so on um and if you look at ancient sometimes like in real life mythological stuff ancient words you can kind of get a better image by using a simpler thing like concept organ is more like beautiful but like you know obviously it's simpler to say brain and concept organs seems more like just mashing two other words together to get the same thing but it just works do you know what i mean yeah ever did the shade of elesh speak to him serrated words that rasped his concept organ and brought him to wisdom through affliction yeah unless they were both talking about a different kind like a some concept organ that wasn't his brain or something i was thinking that as well but i mean merrick's male you know but men's concept organ might be a bit different i mean look let's replace it though you can say i never did the shade of alesh speak to him serrated words that rasped his brain and brought him to wisdom through affliction it's not as cool it doesn't hit the same doesn't hit the concept organ doesn't it it's different it's funny how like a lot of words like if you go back with the language that language like gets stacks on top of like basically things that take on new meaning so so you know like you could go like atmora literally mean you know i think it's like elder wood or something like that but like they would be because it was originally uh it would be kind of uh like us saying elder wood and then someone to someone else like someone of another language or someone would hear our word for it it's really basic like they were just saying oh yeah the elder would but they will understand it as like oh this unique sounding word and then they like there's examples in england and so on and and other countries around the world where if you actually like decode all the language of of a place it's called like river river river or river on river because it's it's an ancient word for river built on top of it now because you know foreigners come and and they go oh we're going to conquer this place what's it called this and then they use their word for river with it and you know what i mean like well it's like i'm over you know oversimplifying it but it's the funny thing about english and kind of a lot of germanic languages is they can be very simple and straightforward like you know there are a million words i could think of off the top of my head that you know like hairbrush or toothbrush something like that where she's like we just cram a word like two words that mean literal things together like dumb yeah like hairbrush really isn't too different from concept organ you know what i mean like yeah just yeah hair and you brushed it it's a dessert weren't you saying scott to me once the kind of translation of bat is kind of like leather wings oh so what i was saying i used it in the point for languages in in one of the videos we made before is that it's like uh it's like in in like irish it's like a gaelic word and that's what they use for bat but if you li if you just phonetically like just get it down it's so not phonetically if you just directly translate it it just says leather wing that's all it means leather wing but they understand it as a bat what i was saying is in language is for example in another culture to say dunmer or something they could leather wing could instead of mean a bat it could mean a cliff racer which is a very different thing and understanding how like you know that you know the just differences in language and how things evolve and understanding and so on but kind of like how there's different dragons as well in all different cultures and like it can be a lizard or it can be a actual mythical beast or it can have wings or it can be more like a snake or yeah but a lot of translations can make it kind of sound like it's the same thing but they meant other things yeah it's just funny that like when you strip away all of like the complexity of it at the mo like a lot of communication is like really basic it's kind of just like when i say it's not like it's just like you know words being mashed together that then forms a complex word but if you strip them all down they're still basic things that can get more vague so what i'm trying to say is like you're there how like the leather wing is it does have a variety of interpretations and so on but culturally like contextually they understand it to be a bat it means bat you know but yeah there's cool stuff maybe look where buffalo wing came from well i thought buffalo's had wings no like i'm just thinking like leather like cow and i'm thinking of buffaloes and wings i always found that weird that they're called that i honestly had never think about it ever is it probably not a source from a mess is it not a source or something from a place called buffalo oh like would that be used did you look this up is this a trivia fact that you know i didn't know he's going to take 200 iq points for anyone in the comments saying that this is a um this is like a big tangent it's not because this is about books and language and knowledge in general so any trivia fits perfectly within the realm of hermaeus yeah okay just real quick for the answer rumor has it this is just the top of google search i didn't put much effort into it rumor has it an eating establishment good name for a restaurant there you go eating establishment called anchor bar in buffalo invented them or rather their owner after being accidentally shipped wings instead of other chicken parts anyway yeah place called buffalo yeah sometimes those kinds of like foods it's usually like a a place or something but see when hermaeus maura like harvests our brains this is all he's gonna get he's gonna be very jokes on him yeah um but yeah i guess we could talk a bit about his artifacts some more if you wanted to yeah i mean the black books are really cool like they're i remember you really arguing against drew for whether the black books or the mysteriums arksies was the better tome to be on a top 10 daedric artifacts list because the black books have some really poetic stuff in them i guess um well i think i i even said the organ infinium perhaps like i found it more interesting than the black books but it's the collection i think of the black books that um the interesting cool because they all have slightly different things in them like i said before they're from different time periods even the future and i like the concept that they're actually more powerful than the ogre infinium if you were to read multiple of them if you could handle it i feel like the og marine phenium is kind of the baby book for mortals because it was made by a baby it was made by xarxis but you know there was sort of more hero god kind of level like less less uh do you know what i mean it's very elven god if you i mean like a bit more um modern along the chain versus hermes more direct from the source of the most like ancient stuff we'd say it's taking one you know prominent historian and taking the encyclopedia you know of the of of his people um of xi's people and then putting it into this book so it's obviously yeah and it's got a nice creation story too like the whole like augma um thing got a scary aesthetic i only i only recently saw the actual real life inspiration for that book definitely be careful if you go look at this but yeah there's lots of cool stuff um about i i just like that those lines about the black books about um future actually should just pull them up uh uh hold on i wanna i'm just gonna pull out my script from from before where we were talking about because there's the stuff where it alludes to um kim and stuff as well oh it was just something like stars because while you're getting that i think the the most interesting thing about the ogre infiniium beyond the reasons xi's made it is the the aesthetic of it the idea that it's got you know a patchwork of all the the mortal races sewn together in a very creepy way versus just black i found the book it's in the book waking dreams it goes the eyes once bleached by falling stars of utmost revelation will forever see the faint insight drawn by the overwhelming question as only the true inquiry shapes the edge of thought the rest is vulgar fiction attempts to impose order on the consensus mantlings of an uncaring godhead first and then it goes to continue but like once the eyes wants to bleach by the falling stars of utmost revel revelation sounds like the middle dawn period where there's the only consistent thing that was going on during the middle dawn dragon break was the eight falling stars and then also like you know talking about the i like the uh dread feeling there of like you know the rest is vulgar fiction attempts to impose order on the consensus mantlings of an uncaring godhead but just sort of how insignificant even these you know mantling different stories and gods and heroes and stuff it's just all it doesn't matter to this uncaring godhead and i just really like that that's an example of something you know you'd read you know the characters in a lovecraft fiction would read or come upon or something like that and be filled with x's is there an explanation for how we get that translation how we get it what it yeah like how who who is saying that this is what the black ops when you open the black literally it just says it in the language it's i know i'm just saying it's kind of unusual because unless you're i guess the idea is hermes mora has chosen to write it down for you in whatever language the rate you know the person reading it is reading it in or if someone has tried to decipher it no it's someone being your character you do you know what i mean i'm trying to see it from a lot i think it's just straight on to the page in a way that i think like it's probably more gameplay function to give it to you like you can always imagine that it's a bit more of like a mind transfer kind of thing but you can imagine infinite languages in his infinite realm of all of these different pages and stuff like you know you could easily it's like an instruction manual that's why you can only open like one or two pages of each book because the next two pages will be in a different language and you just keep going but i mean all the books aren't law friendly in the elder scrolls in the sense it'll be a book and it's like three pages like if you want to account for like languages and stuff like everything in like heaps of things in morrowind or in skyrim or so everywhere should have their own individual languages and you know imperial versions and different in the same way that there is you know in a real world that there are a variety of of different i guess maybe that's kind of like one way you could see a difference between the black books and say the mysteriums arcses is that if you open the mysterium's mysteriums you see daedric script because you could say it was quite literally written by dagon as a daedra lord whereas perhaps with the black books they they're books but it's more just reaching into your mind and transmitting even imagine rather than actually giving you you can even imagine it like poetically as like raw knowledge and then that your brain like only understanding language like it filters to what you understand you know what i mean i guess that's what yeah that's auto translate you know yeah maybe it kind of gives you the full knowledge of the one sentence like you you know how you could read a sentence that's really basic like um being present is really good for your brain that's a really boring sentence or being present is good but imagine you read that but you actually get the full understanding so that you actually grasp that in the one sentence like anyone can read that but that doesn't mean you can like live it and comprehend it in its like entirety so imagine more of a situation where you can just read a sentence and then for example imagine reading like um i don't know to be in shape eat healthy and have a good diet but then that gives you like a full understanding of all nutrition and like everything involved with that so you read these few sentences but then there's also the mind transfer which kind of like is what hits hard yeah you know what i'm saying i know what you're saying it could be any could be i'm just spitballing no yeah no i mean it's all it's all valid regardless it's just you know that's what it says because it you know you have to read it in game whether it's a that or an translate app or if it's directly beamed into your brain that that's the knowledge but there are some interesting ones there's something about isgramor as well in another one of them and i just like i like a bit more so and i also think that the og marine finium in its like purpose is a bit more it kind of seems like a device to imbue power if you know what i mean like a path of steel path of this so on so it's like here get like this big boost of power to a knowledge to certain things whereas like the black books kind of seem by design like they seem that it's just like you're reading hermaeus mora's personal library it's like they're not meant to be read by you do you know what i mean like the ogumar infinium is supposed to its tool is here have it imbue power or read it gain the knowledge whereas the black books is sort of like a bit more of a you know don't because it's hermaeus mora's like he doesn't gift the black books to people yeah you go in you read them and then you're like oh freak out or you get like a cool bonus but you know what i mean or both i guess yeah if like for that same reason it'd be interesting to know what is written in the ogre infinium you know seeing as that's the one that's supposed to be given to mortals and we know nothing about its you know what really whereas we know a lot about the content if any things which is kind of if anything the ogre infinium is just like a page of like unknown language and look and stuff isn't it isn't it just i think that might was it just a copy of the mysterious in oblivion in oblivion i'm pretty sure the augmer infinium is just a copy of of the mysterium's arcs in oblivion but in skyrim it's got this sort of different kind of like triangle kind of almost looks like a nordic kind of uh wheel sign this middle of this triangle and then there's another thing i'm pretty sure it's um made up language stuff but if anything that looks more like it's supposed to beam yeah that's more like a brain transfer one like at least to me you look at it and just kind of there's these people with tattoos yeah i'm looking at it now they've got the tattoos on their wrists and shoulders and stuff but yeah it'd be interesting to know what it says you know what some of it says oh for sure if it could it just says i love my wife ogma she is very nice i am an elf and i made her from my favorite parts of history yeah yeah but you know it'd be interesting to know what you know a kind of a god of the old ma would consider his favorite parts of history you know you could be getting into the bit where we lost al dameros you know what you know what i could actually say as much as hermaeus moore has been explored heaps it would be really cool to give him another artifact don't have any ideas yet but it would just be cool to see like okay come on let's be a bit more creative you know he's the god of this oh let's do another book like let's i'd be curious to see something else that's kind of about the acquisition of knowledge like um i don't know what but maybe like it's like kind of scrying glass or like a yeah like a seer stone or i don't know i was gonna say um yeah well he says scrying right so a crystal ball would be yeah so i think kind of thing like that or some divination kind of probably stick just to the book and i think it's the only reason i don't mind as much in this case is because there are no other david princes that really give you a book like i know mysterious has you know what i mean or there's like a few in here so there's books that exist but you know no one wants the folium disconnectum or whatever it's called here's a weird idea here's a weird idea and i'm not saying i particularly like it but i'm just going to float the idea out there okay imagine completing a daedric prince quest i mean they do it with clavicus vile but more like oh do you want this or do you want this kind of thing or if you do this you get this dude like imagine share garage saying you know to scroll six i'll give you wabba jack or the folium disc need them like i would obviously knowing that i'm playing the game that there's obviously going to be a beneficial gameplay effect from it and i'm not going to go insane i mean i would probably pick the folium disc need them just to see what it is because i know abberjack's just just going to be staff of random effect i'll throw something out there too it's like you know i think we've kind of talked about this before and like being able to join cults and stuff like imagine if you just get your stock stand and you've got your warrior guild mage guild assassinated thieves guild it's probably what's gonna happen one thing i feel like that they could do that's actionable is actually put in a series of quests for some of the daedric princes so you know just give them two or three in different areas do you know what i mean so you can kind of come to his statue and you're like yeah i'm gonna and you do these things and maybe you can get multiple relics from the same yeah you know i mean would be cool i mean why not i just my opinion with elder scrolls six is just go nuts because it's gotta last for a long a long time and there's not gonna be another elder scrolls main title for ages yeah if you can i don't care just chock full of stuff i really think like if they and i think that's a good idea anyway because people if they're worried about uh not worried about but if they want to hone in on like brand recognition people love the daedric princes like that's like you know oblivion like it's everyone's size i love going with statues and doing the believing you know the daedric quests and they love the daedric quests and skyrim like double down on it then if you want to put more effort in do and you want to like that would satisfy me and it would satisfy the daedric um the whole idea of um uh brand recognition or something like that i might make that into an older school six discussion actually it's such a simple idea i've never really heard much like oh why aren't there just multiple quests from the same daedric prince because we become your champion and never hear from you seven years ago in like when we did uh ideal elder scrolls six i think we mention it in there the idea that you would be able to like have like little mini i said yeah join a day drip cult and stuff so i guess it kind of implies it but yeah it is funny if you think about it like you are my champion and then i never call on you for service ever again yeah you know it would be cool yeah what what else is there to say about hermeasmura really um i know that there's the whole idea i find interesting that you're it's a small one but that you're tethered kind of there and you're like not you don't actually die in apocrypha like because you're there in real life still with the book yeah with the book like you can attempt the gauntlet multiple times and probably go insane from just doing that i wonder if you can be killed while you're in apocrypha though or do you reckon you would look like this ethereal ghost unable to be messed with while you're in there i'm not sure how it works when you're um if you teleport directly into there i guess because you know the black book is kind of like a tether like maybe like how maury and zenis and stuff got there it wasn't through a black book it was like teleportation but i mean more like yeah like are you invincible while you're in there from a law perspective could anyone kill the dragonborn while he's it's like playing vr you know you play vr you're in that world but then someone walks past and touches you and you're like oh the real world exists and i can't see it at all you know i don't know why i don't actually know why you can't die in it like why you shouldn't be like why they design at that point just a just a law thing i guess yeah it's almost like your soul is you know separated from your body at that point so your body's just a shell and you're you can't really your soul can't exactly be killed if it's an apocrypha i guess you know like almost like you've been temporarily soul trapped in an apocrypha or something so what if mirak defeated you you'd just be like all right i'm gonna respawn see you soon like what's the deal there well i guess he actually speaking of souls he could probably absorb your soul because dragonborn just take all the knowledge and you know you're basically just a book at that point you know man i mean we can mention uh mirak i mean people probably know this inside out but obviously uh mirak um he uh joined up with himayas mora to get himself out of the uh well it's seemingly you don't know which order it is because like there are theories i don't know like i i think we made it there i can't remember if i'm doing it saying it right but the theory we made before about mirak is that that perhaps hermeasmura you know by scrying the tides of fate or so on could like foresee the whole dragonborn kind of thing yeah use you use that and give it to mirak but he got it kind of from the future kind of like with the akatosh sort of deal do you want to mean like had that blessing that knowledge beforehand well he knew it because it was in the future from chronology i mean hermes morris still had to really save him and like pull him out from phallok yeah the jailer and um yeah i don't know how you know and after all that time um merak was starting to get a bit you know like he wanted to turn against emmaus mora essentially so you know in having the last dragonborn eventually find his way to apocrypha hermes mora was kind of in a win-win situation where either merak would defeat this new challenger and realize oh crap you know like if i if i'm not loyal to hermes mora i'll get replaced or merak dies you know like hermes morris swoops in at the last second to finish off merak so then the last dragonborn takes his place he's going to be more subservient but also brings in a wealth of new knowledge yeah yeah last night i want to actually talk about as well as just mention is how um mira i love how mirak's stuff and the acolyte priests all have have like their masks have kind of changed like mirax is obviously like a very tentacley looking um mask and you can kind of imagine that it's been transformed maybe by its time in apocrypha or something but same as the the three acolyte masks um have that kind of like love you know what i mean a bit more of a lovecraftian kind of feeling you kind of um yeah it's just cool how they've they've they've mixed you get that mixture of the dragonborn sort of the dragon cult look i will just i will just ask you about mirack do you think that he lives for so long because of powers he got in apocrypha or because time works differently in the daydreak it's a bit of a column a column b column c is bethesda just want an enemy that's been around for thousands of years you know but i i think that's the end but i think it's that situation where it doesn't matter which explanation it is it's just like oh either or you know what i mean yeah i mean for sure i guess actually there is probably something finally we should discuss and so on but like fate of the last dragonborn because if we look at champion of cyrodiil in oblivion the the kind of canonical idea is that he goes off and mantles sure gorath and becomes shagraph and gets him out of the picture generally you want your protagonist of the previous games to be out of the picture so you can pave way for a new thing like it doesn't feel good if there's a dragonborn running around that's like so much do you know what i mean so they i think they will try and conveniently get rid of this demigod essentially by making him a champion of hermaeus mora and then he gets right down the hermaeus mora uh rabbit hole kind of thing and then he's sort of like last scene you know there'll be something like maybe there was a line oh the dragonborn was the legendary lost dragonborn he was last seen sailing to solstheim or some something like that and then then he's gone but like i guess his fate he's like you know because you can also imagine him reading the black books but perhaps going down a rabbit hole and and getting into all of the black books and then you just never hear of him again you know it'd be cool to think that he maybe just went insane yeah that would be dangerous as hell yeah true that but um yeah anything else yeah i think realistically realistically they'd just end up uh you know continuing on as references they'll just be you know in dialogue with hermes mora same way with shay gaurav as you kind of get hints at the protagonist being there or being present in some form or another and you may get hermes mora talking to the new protagonist referencing his current you know servant protagon like a sorry servant or champion or whatever you want to call it or his fate in one line that you can kind of construe however you want wouldn't that be probably wouldn't that be an absolute disrespect to the dragonborn and the law if in order to scroll six the hermia smaller quest has you defeat the dragonborn to become the new champion there is no way to do that i have to be honest like uh like they are pretty good at not stepping on your prior like game decisions and invalidating them like you know yeah morrowind they go oh nerevarine just off to akavi out of the way you know champion of cereal becomes the you know shea gorath at the end because you know the expansion so i as a general rule i don't think they would ever set a canon dragonborn or anything like that because i think it's kind of just it's it's you know antithetical to their idea of player freedom and choice be who you want to be if you then you know a couple years later tell them oh you know remember that thing before like you were canonically them which is why i'm sort of like interested to see how they'll handle um the the deal with stormcloaks first imperials yeah it will be it will be interesting all right well that was a very knowledge-filled broad podcast on emmaus mora constantly scrying the tides of fate here at fudge muppet so um i think that's about it and we will be back to nerd out with you again next time

Channel: FudgeMuppet

Views: 55,834

Keywords: skyrim, elder scrolls, elder scrolls lore, skyrim lore, elder scrolls podcast, fudgemuppet, elder scrolls lore podcast, elder scrolls 6

Id: 4c085QxLLZo

Length: 55min 23sec (3323 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021