Redguards, Sword-Singers of Yokuda | The Elder Scrolls Podcast #68

[Music] what is up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to fudge muppet i'm scott this is the elder scrolls podcast and i'm here with michael and drew as always and today we have the long-awaited episode on the red guard so which one of you guys would like to introduce us well the red guards similar to the nords but also quite different are known as kind of the warrior race among the playable races on tamriel they have a very long history involving being a warrior and mastering the sword and they are naturally gifted when it comes to strength and endurance and which we don't really see in skyrim to the same degree but i think it's really cool they're also considered quite a a hardy people um in the sense of having more endurance you know more hp and they also have this uh resist poison and resist disease in previous games of 75 percent in skyrim uh they got rid of that or they they nerfed it massively i believe it was just resist poison 50 in skyrim i think so yeah but yeah they missed the 75 on both but it's meant to represent that the red guards are very tough they're very like athletic like basically the description is the most naturally talented warriors too which you can you sort of like the way i interpret it it's just naturally they're pretty physically gifted and the you know the time it takes to get a warrior from a to b to like experience from a rookie to experience would be quicker compared to most what is i mean what is interesting just quickly and this isn't law at all this is just my own food for thought but it is funny to contemplate whether or not they're so gifted at being warriors because of all the warrior waves that escaped from yakuta to hammerfell so if you actually think about like you know the genetic pool of the best fighters and best warriors who then all left yokuda in these warrior waves and set up shop um which is a nice way of putting in yeah well yokuda had very low birth rates i think one of the sources said and the fact that they were constantly at war like several hundred years of war before um before the empire was kind of unified and then it immediately fell back into chaos so you're going to end up with a small group of people surviving this and then with the sinking of the continent you know they bring over their best warriors and yeah that it's kind of grown foreign their best teachings as well which is a big thing to consider the red guards they're not just naturally gifted they don't just rely upon that they're also extremely disciplined when it comes to learning uh martial warfare and different techniques obviously there's the book of circles if if anything they take a lot of inspiration from um japanese stuff and kind of like samurai things and um i think it's almost is it musashi's book of five reasons yes book of five rings yeah it's almost like uh the miyamoto um yeah yeah yeah um but that's almost like a direct import um i actually i did a video a while back on like uh inspirations for um for the different things in um for different pieces of elder scrolls lore and so on and you look at the sword singers and the whole situation in yokuda and it's like it's like absolutely just a almost like just taking japanese history and putting it there you have like even so apparently in in japanese the word can say i don't know if that's the pronunciation properly or whatever the but k-e-n-s-e-i means sword saint and and and say the yokudan word means saints of the sword and so on and these were actual names and apparently i think uh musashi was actually given that um name as well but also if people want to look into it or they could also check out the video but there's this whole um there's a period called the sengoku period in japan where you know you have the emperor as a head of state but basically the shogun had the real um power in that period and this similar kind of thing happened with the rise of mansell sens knit in yokuda we could probably actually it might be easier also just to before we get too far ahead of ourselves with like comparisons but like let's actually talk about red guards and like their origin and so on so red guards is the name is a phonetic corruption of regatta which means warrior wave which was basically in i think it's the 808 or something like that of the first era so they're like the last race really out of the 10 playable races to sort of be on tamriel and they uh basically come to hermaphel wipe out all the needy beast folk people goblins orcs all kinds of people that inhabited these lands um and they established and made way for the nobility that were coming over but the reason they initially left is because there was this like great sinking um of yokuda which was their homeland that um underwent other periods of war and stuff like that but an interesting thing about that too is like yokuda obviously like any big sinking continent island like there's um correlation to like our mythic stories about um atlantis and so on but also even the whole idea that there's the aurical tower on atlantis there was in um on yokuda in it on atlantis there is this um that was said to be as described by plato i think in the cretius or something um that there was this big black uh big idol as an idol or column or something of made of aura calcum um devoted to the in the temple of poseidon or so on but you can kind of see like oh that's one of the origak tower and so on as well and another interesting thing actually about the name red guards is um apparently red guard myth holds that it was kind of a name taken in honor of their kind of final battle um basically like that they're the guard covered in red blood or something along those lines um it says red guard myth considers it a legacy of the war of the singers seven battles that happened before the continent was destroyed um obviously they were all outnumbered by the army of emperor hera um and then uh they used the hamel and anvil so hammer and anvil strategy which apparently kills 300 000 people or something so in the eyes of the citizens their guardians were red with blood and then they went off and became the red guards but um i wouldn't be surprised if it was just the regard of corruption but there's just a little story to look into for anyone who's curious well um also just quick i might actually just verbatim just read this because it actually sums up the history and the comparison pretty well for um the akuda so this is a previous thing but it says originally yokuda this was my writing from ages ago but originally yakuta was united under a single emperor but this eventually changed and while emperors remained as figureheads their powers were vastly limited for 300 years the nation descended into civil wars fought between provincial lords called yokuda who lived in their great stone castles of which towns started to grow from so this is all in seton yakuta this mirrors the sengoku period in japan where the emperor was officially the head of state but his real power was fairly low by comparison to the shogun uh in this period the shogun struggled to main control over the daimyos and that is like individual local lords in japan and these basically set the stage for an age of warring states so we have yakuta and japan both with an emperor that exists mainly as a ceremonial figurehead and an island that has erupted into civil war because of local warlords the yokota in elder scrolls the diamonds in japan so um on yokuda by the year 609 of the first era a man named mansell sensed it uh cessnit sorry had fought for eight years to gain almost con total control of the yokudan empire and he was called the elden yokota similar to a shogun a military dictator year 617 he was assassinated and replaced by a commoner called randy torn randik continued the word work of mansell and he introduced new laws that made it so only sword singers may carry swords distinguishing them from the rest of the population this would be known as torn sword hunt now similar to this in japan towards the end of the sengoku period there was a lord called oda nobunaga succeeded he and he succeeded in uniting much of the japan but he too was assassinated um while he was trapped in a temple um lit on fire during oku and he committed supuku or ritual suicide close enough but oda was succeeded by uh toyotomi hideyoshi who was like randiktorn born a commoner and guess what he also did like randiktorn he institute laws which restricted the possession of swords to samurai only so the allegory is um very clear there and um then obviously there's the there's the book um comparison of the the book of circles by frana hunting and um uh the book of five rings by musashi um uh but both of those two characters too are comparisons they both had noble ancestry they watched their fathers die when they were young um you know friend hunting was undefeated for like 90 duels by the time he was 30 massage he had something like 61 as well but um it's funny because like you have all of those moroccan aesthetics and stuff the north african kind of like imagery and architecture and you know pools for bits from the middle east but like if you look at like the foundational part of their like yokuta's history and also their culture a lot of it's actually rooted in japanese stuff i just wanted to interject there and say i actually read the book of five rings it was a bit of a meme it's kind of it's kind of yeah it's kind of like the um the art of war where people like to extrapolate more than the book actually means it's like dude it's about killing people with swords yeah yeah it's not about a whole lot else and there's heaps of vague stuff in there too like oh i have this really super secret technique that kills anyone and you've got to figure it out if you want to be a good swordmaster it's like okay well kind of like yokuda one of the big reasons during this period of time japan was so isolated is because they were constantly fighting between themselves but when you had hideyoshi come along and kind of the country became unified they turned their attention on going to korea as well which in the end didn't work out but it's kind of like a parallel but almost the opposite of what happens with the red guards in that there is a potential nuclear explosion and then they invade a nearby mainland except they were successful in taking it so it kind of becomes their version and just to clarify that's like comparing the um pancrato sword technique of the she had this massive big you know and say sort of sword singing power that destroy the continent it's one of the explanations for why um it's uh and i think it's even so that it's said to be split the atom isn't it or something yeah i shouldn't really drop that bomb without us explaining it but you know there's like the parallels are really clear i mean even the big argument is that most of it kind of comes from explanations in vivec's sword meeting with cyrus which is out of law michael kirkbride text but even in in canon texts like red guards their history and their heroes you have really kind of clear um suggestions that this is what happens you know you've got emperor hera who who was obviously the essentially a dictator who fought against the sword singers and before they eventually fled and then you have this like rebel group of anti who rise up and by using a a previously unknown technique where the fallout for it would be phenomenal they use that and coincidentally yokuda is completely ruined yeah so all signs do seem to point to it well anyway after yokuda kind of sunk and they they basically headed in warrior waves to tamriel and they went to hammerfell and they basically uh in short kind of started exterminating everything in hammerfell as many races throughout elder scrolls history do there were needs in hammerfell there were orcs around the place there were even elves supposedly along the coast and you have to remember too that in yokuda um the ancient red guards or the yokudans were often fighting with a group called the left-handed elves who caused them you know a lot of strife throughout history and so kind of similar to the nords they weren't fond of elves um and so they wiped elves out when they landed in hammerfell um and even uh goblins there were big goblin groups and goblin invasions going on but essentially they um they wipe it all out and set up camp and there is sources there too um that uh the goblins of the first era in hammerfell at the time were much more uh similar to in size to orcs and so on and they were like you know big and hogo not so much the smaller goblins that you see today than that weren't there even larger ones these giant goblins it might yeah are they the ones you mean well yeah these are the large goblins and so on because there's there's um i think it's a priest saying an eso talks about and so on but this i used that um once in a previous video to explain as a potential cause as to why orcs were conflated with goblin kind early on in history because back in those days and for a lot of you know thousands of years goblins would have been um if those sources are 100 believed much more similar in stature and size you know big green and ugly kind of thing um and then therefore they could just be conflated and grouped in with the same thing whereas the goblins of today are much smaller and so on but that's where the pair like the association came about i mean i'd be curious to know how successful the warrior waves would have been when we know they obviously succeeded against the goblins but it was a seriously close fight at some points in time especially when you you didn't have that many red guards coming over compared to the the groups that would have been living there but the iraqi needs were fairly prosperous in was it the kraglorn region um yeah and we normally see needs as being very much kind of they end up being the pushovers of usually the elven group that comes along but the druckinis were really prosperous but it just so happened at the time when the when the warrior ways came over there was a lot of strife internally in the doraki needs society because there was like uh what's his name i think i've got it here somewhere via muriel the betrayer slew the council of need it kings conveniently just as they're dealing with this yokudan onslaught so you know perhaps if the iraqi were more prosperous at that moment in time maybe we'd have a completely different hammer fell maybe maybe perhaps and i mean you could also say too it's like if the uh if the dwemer didn't disappear like a hundred years beforehand or something it could have been a different story as well yeah because hammerfell is covered in dwemer ruins which the red guards could i guess benefit from um so the idea that hammerfell would be fairly boring kind of desert not much going on that's definitely not the case there's many cultures and plus they'll be adding more i'm sure but there are many cultures that would have been prospering there they just so happened to have mostly left at this point it's fine speaking of the goblins i just found the ghost of uh flint tooth warchief you meet and he really does look like a like a goblin but kind of like you were saying scott more like an orc in the sense that he has this um more humanoid a player character appearance but the face is just a little bit more shriveled with a like a pointy nose kind of like one of the presets you can actually pick in skyrim for orcs if you wanted to try and make a goblin like put the weight down real low and make the facial features pointier yeah um well to contextualize to a little bit more so we can sort of start talking about culture more and so on uh following along with that history so the regatta come they wipe out everything there and they basically carve out this sort of isolationist place basically they have new yokuta action and it happens so happen that there's deserts and stuff which they're quite familiar with from cuda and so on so they've come over they've carved out themselves this land and the royal class um come across as well then uh nato tambu um and basically what happens is you know a little bit of time goes by but you do get this sort of um fundamental division in red guard society between the crowns and the forebears and the easiest way to understand this is that the crowns are basically the closest things to yakuda culture and religion just imported straight in and the forebears is kind of like yokuda light it's like they get influenced by a lot of the um other empires and stuff and especially during the second empire of riemann um when uh they got conquered um by raymond and so on um the forebears were sort of they're generally you're more like cosmopolitan happy to work with other people and so on and you do see this we'll talk when we're talking about the pantheons religion we'll probably talk more about the crowns because that's more relevant stuff because the forebears is that just but just with you know some yokuda namings and flavors and some of the parts that um are left over but it's it's functionally so you know you'll have like morwar and mara but there's a difference between like the yokudans the crowns don't necessarily see them as the same kind of entity whereas the forebear is sort of a little bit more you know same with like tuwaka and rk there's like actual fighting over the connection people really don't like it especially yeah what's quite interesting actually is that um what's confusing to be honest um is that in the third era there was this group that came called the plutonics um and they were trying to basically find a middle ground between the forebears and the crowns um but what i don't understand is it said that they kind of you know they were kind of for the progressive and cosmopolitan ideas that the forebears had while retaining the kind of strong respect for their past that they had which makes me just think are the forebears really yokuda light or have they fallen so much further than that um depending on your perspective of fallen or changed so much that the lutonics really are like an in-between if you know what i mean because if they were really just like oh we we still respect the yokudan way we're just a little bit different um i wouldn't see the need or for someone to create such a movement i feel like the idea is as time goes by the divide would only grow i mean if you just think about it logically because inherently progressive kind of um ideals they lean to change and so the longer you have in a passage of time the more change will occur so i'm sure when the division happened perhaps it wasn't as large as it is by the third era oh yeah yeah and it would be interesting it just makes sense yeah it'd be interesting to see if we get an elder scroll six set in hammerfell or in high rock and hammerfell just how different the two groups have actually become over time it's like two there's that there's that um the other thing that's sort of probably there's probably more like practical reasons too that helped cause a further cultural divide but the big thing is the forebears are more willing to work with foreign powers and sort of join in with tamriel society broader whereas the crowns have been more resistant more isolationist that they don't want like obviously they do like trade and and so on but they're just a bit more like we really want to you know live in our bubble of it's very much a geographical thing as well you can you can see why things do end up like this because you know sentinel being the kind of crown's headquarters generally it's like you know it's it's out there as far away from as far away from the mainland as you can get across the iliac bay from the bretons who they've kind of had a long history of warfare with whereas if you're kind of generally more inland where there's borders to to high rock and skyrim and cyrodiil and you know um valenwood it's all there sorry not valenwood but you know close enough um you can see why there'd be much more of a mishmash of kind of cultural beliefs yeah absolutely because it because that's that's the thing too i've mentioned it in other podcasts too but it's just like and i think they should take this into account when world building places and so on but sometimes your proximity to other cultures are far closer than your own so for example like how wind helm is far closer to black light than it is steven whiterun so you know like rehard is like just over the border from anvil like yeah it is interesting to think because you you do see it um in our own history where kind of different cultures or groups will go and kind of conquer or invade another territory only to find that their own culture becomes affected by the one that they you know tried to invade a lot more than they probably expected um and you know with the forebears being the descendants of the warriors and going on and conquering more it's only natural that that happened yeah yeah um do we want to talk about uh maybe get into the religion and stuff because that obviously religion informs a lot of the cultures and stuff of each of the uh places so i feel like it's easiest to start with the yokudan sort of um belief and then you can kind of we can talk about four bells uh four bears as a footnote afterwards but um what's interesting about the red guards um generally uh we've talked about this plenty times before but there's the sort of anewic and paramedic sort of system of belief like you know generally you know it's it that reflects their view of the lorcanic entity whatever name that might go by and also like creation and mortality is kind of a whole it's generally whether you see you know everything um mortality and creation as a trick or some sort of like you know great and bountiful thing and they see it as a trick which is quite interesting because they're i suppose you know you consider them a race of men despite them not coming from atmora they came from yakuda yeah and they have the kind of elvish kind of uh flavor yeah the annuic flavor when it comes to their belief and their origin almost almost an extra level as well because you essentially have their equivalent to auriel creating law khan personally and then that that law khan that which is called sep ends up being the kind of troublemaker but you know i guess you can take that all the way to the top with our new having padami as it's like created reflection it's over well well let's start with you've got um so the anupadame kind of dichotomy is generally how people understand all of the elder scrolls mythology and so on uh as a general rule in the red garden mythology they kind of see this as as one um being called satakal and sometimes then there's in the text and so on they will go like satac which is kind of like anu and um which is basically his hungry stomach and so on and that basically makes this snake eat itself over and over and over and there's all these spirits that exist um in this but they don't want to every time he eats himself and sheds a new they all die until you have rupture or also called tulpapa who discovers a way of the um walkabout which is a kind of like described as a moving sideways or something strange angles to like yeah escape the cycle and then you end up in a place eventually created which is the far shores yeah well so they and then rupture basically so there's this whole concept of like the the sole trade or something and basically being able to survive these different calpers essentially um and each time satikal eats himself and then begins anew but rupture is surviving and he set the stars and stuff to teach other spirits how to do the same thing but eventually he built out of the the detritus of old world skins he created sep but sepp had the uh was kind of it was innately kind of corrupted because of the uh hunger of the of the satikal's stomach so he then um try he tricked a bunch of other spirits into sort of creating this other world it's like oh this walkabout thing this sort of sorry system of uh moving it's it's too hard let's do this instead but it was a big trick instead to create mundus essentially more so he goes and gathers up a bunch of old skins of like dead worlds and puts them into a big skin ball basically and says let's let's live here which can kind of be you can see parallels between that and calling mundus a daedric realm you know if you have the idea that um daedra lords create their realms and they often mimic um mundus which you know a more pandemic depending on your view you might consider that to be the pure place and then realms of oblivion are copies of that but if the idea is that mundus is just a load of old dead skins put together it's just kind of like a a copy of like the glory of our new um and and and a furious i think then you can see how they have such a negative view yeah for sure um i was gonna say i think it's good to kind of uh conclude it by actually reading from the monomyth um which is basically says so he tricked the spirits told them that they could reach the new world by making one out of the old these spirits loved this way of thinking as it was easier no more jumping from place to place many spirits joined in believing this was good thinking tall papa just shook his head pretty soon the spirits on the skin ball started to die because they were very far from the real world of sadaqah and they found that it was too far to jump into the far shores now so basically they end up saying please take us back to papa says no you have to learn a new way to follow the stars to the far shores now and that is essentially how they become trapped but sepp apparently needed more punishment and so tall papa squashed this snake with a big stick and the hunger fell out of sep's dead mouth and was the only thing left of the second serpent the cool thing there too is that idea that adam anthony and the adam anton yeah like the final like stick i just really i love when you have different cultural like ideas about it i don't know it's just really cool the fact that the hunger remains in this story is very much like how the heart of law khan remains despite law khan himself being killed you know that continues to exist um and i mean i've said this before and um you you can kind of see a potential connection but with rupt girl tall papa kind of finding a way to stride sideways almost to get out of the line of fire when the world eats itself again is kind of like how the the high elves have finaster who teaches them to live longer by shortening their stride you can see how that's like similar to the way the gods become eternal become you know they don't get recycled by interesting different ways interesting motif too because you even have like the the six walking ways of ascendancy and so on this sort of idea of steps and movement and so on as i mean it's literally called the walkabout too yeah exactly process yeah so um but yeah and then so the and we end up with the yokudan gods that we have so so if you were to go to like the the varieties of faith in tamriel breaks it up um as the the eight of the crowns and you have satikal which is the kind of god of everything the big the big snake the aura boris essentially and then you have rupture the big chief deity and also called tall papa right and we you know you know what he does um he's also you know time god kind of stuff comparatives you can compare to akatosh or auriel what not um there is tuwaka which is the tricky god the god of souls um and i love this i don't know why i just really like this tuwaka before the creation of the world was the god of nobody really cares when tall papa undertook the creation of the walk about tuaka found a purpose he became the caretaker of the far shores and helped god's find the way that afterlife just kind of like took on the role that no one else wanted and really found himself in it because i i'm writing on the the gods series like different videos on on like different cultures gods and stuff now and an interesting like sort of uh pickup is that generally um men only like rk as an entity really only appears in um the in the mythologies of men and so on whereas they don't really have them in the elven mythologies and then rk um rk also being called the mortals god and so on and it's basically like the have worshipping a god that venerates somewhat the cycle of life and death it's kind of antithetical to the kind of desire for immortality that the elves have which is strange that the bosmer actually do have rk in their um in their pantheon but there's a whole bosnian video that will explain that um go into more detail on that but it is just interesting that that the rk the tawak or whatever is considered i would say the bosma almost in their own unique way as elves have a connection to the land which is obviously mundus then most elves would you know if you ask to hire off where they feel connected they feel connected to a furious they want to return to their immortality immortality to their godhood whereas the bosma may not necessarily want that i'm writing the possible video now so i won't do well it's too hard but there are some interesting things that makes me think i'm like are the bosmer even like anuic or do we just assume because they've imported a lot of somerset influence or something but like if you were to read the ifree story and their you know reverence for creation and so on like they might say like oh lorcan tricked everything and that's how we all got here but they s they got pissed about it you know they they're pretty happy with creation free is essential to the fact that mundus even exists at all and you know and he's not perfectly pure either he's depending on the culture he's he's been corrupted by namira things like that you know so it's it's definitely not black and white yeah by any means but you know like with gods like rk or tuwaka as we're talking about if you only have gods if you don't have a mortal realm if you don't have mortality they do they have no purpose you know what purpose is the cycle of life and death when everyone is eternal so that's why they kind of come along later yeah and um next we have zett god of farms which uh people compare to xenothor or something like that it's not necessarily explicit but um he's a god of agriculture interesting which when you i'll go on i was gonna to say zed actually has a daughter um called zeki or it's spelt with cues so it could be zakwee uh the madonna of tears what a goddess and daughter of zest um and apparently that kind of um left hugh's bane or has forsaken it and she takes pity on them and um kind of helps them the lady in the cistern statue no one knows what that is so it's actually listed under a possib as a possible statue of zeki um but also a possible statue of lucky so mysteries well you can you can see why that and zeki would be important to a culture that has historically never really had very arable land it's like uh you can't really grow crops that well um if you you're gonna have a goddess of rain for sure and there's another agriculture just another little tattoo to tie on there but um he it said that zett renounced his father tall papa um after the world was created and that's why tulpa makes it so hard to grow food so it explains like part of the arid land and that's why he made it apparently hard for hughes bane uh to grow food as well and then the daughter decides to go against her kind of creator and take pity on them yeah we ne and then next you have morwa the teat god which is also compared to mara but yokudan fertility goddess fundamental deity in the yucatan pantheon and favorite of tall papa's wives she's still worshipped in areas of hammerfell including makai always betrayed as forearms so she can grab more husbands there's also statues of her depend um depicted with um uh beehive and like honeybees and mother and that's another comparison what i feel like i've brought this up a billion times but that needed that thing it's just an interesting um fat mother b goddess could be very much stronger emphasis on procreation giving birth with more than ma like mara is obviously the mother but the the the emphasis on having arms and like in statues she's holding a child with one arm she's got a full stomach um where she's you know she's heavily pregnant in the statue and then you know all of this stuff it's like yeah it's all about breeding yeah she's um less submissive and breeding yes she's actually she doesn't look submissive she's lustier than mara but um less so than de bella according to a source yeah uh which makes because i guess wouldn't be so much about the you know nine months waiting to have a kid it's more about just the love making yeah see because yeah because mara is is you know they consider a universal goddess she's pretty much in every single pantheon it's i find it really interesting that de bella really is like a nordic origin thing like it's not found in um you know elven pantheons and stuff like that it really is a thing of man and i guess to be honest if you look at the bella even a lot of her stuff is of you know of beauty and you know even comparing the sort of lustful sort of like pleasures of the flesh and stuff like that it's all a very like you know things that you enjoy within creation and the beauty of creation maybe if let's decriminalize the bella but maybe if the elves had the bella in their aedric pantheon they wouldn't have fallen to the temptations of the danger in the first place they'd have some something to kind of placate them maybe they shouldn't be so chaste and they'll have some post-night clarity better decisions perhaps there's also tava the uh bird god yokudan spirit of the air and you may be thinking why is the air so important and that basically in a way you could say traces back to the fact that they were sailors um and still are great sailors and you need you know favorable winds to uh travel in a ship and make sure everything's okay people also kind of see her well not the not the crowns but uh the forebears and others often basically relate her to kynareth yeah and what is also i if you um have a look at it there there is a uh in the elder scrolls online thieves guild um expansion there is a really cool armor that sort of riffs off like um the polish has with the big wings at the back but using that as like a tava thing is really cool really i haven't seen that i'd like to see that if you it's still um that if you just go to the tava us page itself there's a picture down the bottom i'm going to check that out that sounds really cool but um yeah and there's that but then now this is where you do you actually the comparisons kind of stop with the crowns you have onsi who is a war god called the bone shaver notable warrior god of the yukon regatta onsie taught mankind how to pull their knives into swords which i really think is i love sometimes are those like uh kind of like historical explanations for things but if you think about how if you go back to like bronze age or when humans were working with poorer materials like all the blades are shorter and so on and getting long swords was like you know when smithing became you know far more advanced it's kind of idea oh this is the god that taught them how to pull them into swords but like you could also say oh is that actually just like you know new smithing methods and new materials well i've heard somewhere that they actually have something unique about their swords that makes it different to other swords but i can't remember what it is yeah they're curved curved swords i thought we were going to dodge having to say there's no escaping it and um next we have diagonal aura calc god of the sideways blade a hoary thuggish cult of red guards that originated in yokuda during the 27 snake folk slaughter which you know people have compared to um say yes when you hear snake folk that's what you think of but diagonal was an avatar of the hunding the you you couldn't god of make way um and he was instrumental to feeding the left-handed elves and brought aura calc weapons like you know made of aura calcium to uh the yokudans which helped them win the fight but what's interesting is more interesting really there to talk about is this hunding which is sort of like a uh the yokudan spirit of perseverance over infidels and in a way it's kind of that it's like a god but it doesn't seem as personified because it's personified through the avatars there seems to be a little in maybe comparative like you could compare to the riddle far kind of in the way that it's more like a cosmic energy somewhat or even in the way that law khan is like dead and sustaining the world and his shazarines but you need the avatars to really have his conscious sort of will done if you know what i mean yeah i was going to say it's it's kind of reminiscent of the cesareans just without the connection to sep like i mean if there is a connection to set we'll have to look for it but um like the idea that the hunding comes at a time of need and it's happened if it's i mean we say it's happened we don't know for sure it's happened it's just kind of like it enters folklore as the hunting arriving when you know a hero comes along kind of like cyrus being an example and then they say friend our hunting was as well i mean yeah i'm trying name says a lot the exact quote uh during the time wars for there's um what is it friday's faith in the empire the actual other book hold on hunting there is um yeah that is interesting so it says in tamrielic history he's it's only happened three times twice in the first era during the regatta invasion and once during the tiber war in his last incarnation hunting was said to either be a sword or a crown or both and you know you people could think like oh a physical crown but it could actually be a crown as in this is interpreted to be science yes you know the physic um he's part of the crowns fighting against type septum and with the sword and um but yeah yeah and prince at who was yeah who was a crown crown prince but but it's a cool a cool concept um there's also lekki these are sort of your additional like red cults leki the daughter of tall papa um uh goddess of aberrant swordsmanship um and she's basically their sword masters were known to be skilled in the best known cuts apparently and she leki introduced the ephemeral faint basically a sword god basically a god who personifies sword for the for the ukulele we've kind of done hunting um yeah there's maluk the uh horde king also known as uh which is basically an enemy god it's basically malacath this is a god makes sense and the history and then sep we kind of covered as part of it but it's it's law khan to in the yokudan mythology yeah but um yeah that's them and if if we did like just to quickly touch on the forebears there it is essentially the eight divines like they you'll go from like akatosh they have standard and so on but they'll call xenotha zed or mara boa and they added you know they've got dybella and so on um but outside of that it's pretty it's just basically more imperial flavored you couldn't kind of mix one thing we should mention as well because it's related to spiritual matters is that the red gods um they definitely worship their ancestors quite a bit not in the same way that other races do but um you know them being buried in the right way and having toward involved which is basically like you know rk and rk's rights is very very important they want to make sure that they go to the far shores they don't want to they want to make sure necromancers don't mess with them and this has actually been i suppose somewhat of a hole in the defense of the red guards because they are distrustful similarly to nords of magic um you know to a significant extent and so much so that even a group known as the ashbar who basically exists to hunt the undead are frowned upon um because you know they're killing the honored you know the the intern the dead yeah and um people want nothing to do with them it's kind of like disgusting but they're tolerated because they're like a force of good that's needed in the world but still disrespected yeah it's it's a bit uh it's one of those weird things like i can't really imagine like imagine your village is being like attacked by a zombie and you refuse to like kill it because it came from like the local burial tomb or whatever and it could be someone you know you know touching on death yeah i don't know if it goes to that level but um yeah um red guards um you know ebbs and flows and you know for gameplay reasons in here so magic is is more prevalent but um generally red guards have supposed to be like they're not you know like you said not uh like the nords not too big on magic and um you can kind of see like because you know they are the absolute martial race you know and even their magic which actually i'm surprised we've gotten this long without talking about it but their big magic their equivalent of the the their version of the thumb almost is this is sword singing which is this idea that you can manifest a she-hai which is like a spirit sword from like your very soul again this is through a very meditative kind of introspective process how did you see the the korean genetic scrolls online with the the singing the actual like singing yeah i i i feel like i i don't know when i remember what you said xbox connect voice command thumbs are you going to be sitting there playing six singing a song at the tv it does it does make sense though because you know yeah you've got the ideas that initially like i think i think there's a quote around here somewhere that says like our people once artisans poets and scholars but the ever-evolving strife made the way of the sword inevitable the song of the blade through the air through flesh and bone its ring against armor it was an answer to our prayers so i guess the idea that it it was it wasn't necessarily people born to born and trained to be warriors that were the ones who kind of founded this magic it was the people who were devoted to the arts that ended up finding this kind of warfare through meditation so you can kind of see that there would actually be singers and artists i think it would be a lot cooler if they were gonna go with like literal singing to summon it or involved in the process if it was some kind of um unique mongolian throat singing or something instead of like singing a little spa i mean i imagine it kind of like you know how if some people are meditating and they they in tone or chant certain things kind of like mantras to make it happen that's how i imagine it anyway i always imagined it as in the sword like literally the the seeing of it in the way you know when you like whip something through the air and you're whipping so fast and all that and it's making all those wish sounds as almost like a song in like all the different but i don't know i thought like anyway it's it's it's all fine and like in the same way that like i understand why they have like a physical sort of like you know final fantasy looking kind of sword versus you know the idea that it's like like a trail of like missed or blinding light like you can't really like see it even they have all these hundreds of stances defensive and offensive and stuff and you can almost see it's like oh it's like they're chord progressions you know they know all of these routines and then they make music with their swords and it does it does match in terms of like thematically you know tonal architecture the form all of it to do with singing um and like the voice and if you idea that you know elder scrolls is a song or something like that you know it's all vibrations bro yeah it'll it'll it it all fits but um yeah but yeah so they're they're they're like the uh also another sort of uh thing i wish they didn't do in the law as much but it's like oh the sword singers are all gone now in the same way as all the cool nordic tongues are gone like all of the best stuff is in the ancient history and part of that is for gameplay it's funny it's funny as well because similarly to the nords who don't like magic but then of course the nords did have kind of magical stuff and these um for some reason i was going to say uh clever men right yeah i was about to say wise men i'm like no they're not the wise man um the ancient al-aqir had um powerful wizards as well but they were very rare yokudan war wizards um were part of armies but they were like a rare thing so it's interesting to think and like you know like we just talked about summoning a sword it sounds pretty magical um yeah but it's all about perspective i guess in the same way dark elves don't consider them communing or even bringing back their the ghost of their ancestors as necromancy like dark elves are very against necromancy um but other races look at that and go that's a necromancy so yeah it's kind of like the aedric equivalent to um daedric summoning you know the idea that they're channeling their souls into their sword they're almost in tune with the dream sleeve you know as opposed to reaching into oblivion and forging a sword from celtic creature in a bound sword they do it the anuik way i actually tweeted that not long ago saying we need some better designs for bound weapons because um they it just i find it silly that they look just like the daedric that you forge in that style in game it'd be cool even if they obviously you know it's from oblivion you can make it daedric in appearance but stylistically different to the daedric you forge would be pretty cool kind of give you the impression that you're actually getting a different daedric vestige each time that's kind of been forced into serving you yeah just something to set it apart but yeah anything else to say about the red guards well they do uh there's some miscellaneous things apparently they have a great affinity for horses and they breed horses like that you couldn't change that reminds me yeah that reminds me um people actually little fun fact the yokudans that you know the warrior wave apparently are not the first uh to arrive in hammerfell or to arrive on tamriel there's this group of horsemen in in high rock i believe who were there a bit earlier um let me find what their name is well youtube sauce bro yeah no no i'm gonna this is not a sauce trust me bro i'm gonna well gesture i was just gonna mention sorry is yours related to horses still it's not related to horses well i don't know how much of a digression this would be but i was just gonna talk about that um in terms of like mapping with the stars and the stars have been important to them and i like how like you know uh it was said that rupture set the stars for the spirits and so on but the stars of what they obviously used to um you know advance their navigating forward and that's how they got to when they've got complex star maps and that's how they got to hammerfell from yokura and so on and it's just another like they've got a lot of astrologers um and so on there too i mean we like we can also get into their fairly long history on tamriel or maybe that's more of a topic for for we're talking about hammerfell but i mean because they're constantly at war i mean like one example is like if you're wondering why the bretons and the red guards kind of have historic conflicts especially the crowns in sentinel and whatnot is it you know orcinium became a bit of a kind of a uh what's what you call it an enemy for both the bretons and the the red guards so they were able to kind of team up to deal with orcinium but at the time you had a king in daggerfall called joyal who was pretty ruthless so he you know he made an alliance with the red guards when they were fairly fresh they'd only been on the continent for around 100 years at the time and then the the king of daggerfall managed to organize a a jewel to decide the fate of orsinium between the strongest orc bail off blood tusk and gayden shinji who's a you know a legendary red guard um but instead of letting them fight it out king joyle just had them all executed slaughtered a load of red guards just turned on them and ever since there's there's probably been a bit of a lack of trust yeah well he tried to invade too and they get these then it stopped at the bench stopped by mckellar leckie and and some of the sword maidens um yeah so using their sheehai but yeah so you can see why they would have beef so to speak well speaking of uh meat are you two about are you ready to get red field on [Laughter] the sinking of the homeland happened around year 792 of the first era um the the waves to hammerfell were continuing um in 808 of the first era then there is this text from the elder scrolls online our favorite place for law called the horse folk of silverhoof and basically it's saying you know that um it sounds unbelievable but there's this lost colony of red guards on the northern coast of high rock um that are these horsemen that and they originally came from yakuta um although they have unavoidably been britainized over the centuries by contact with the needy folk who surround them um but they have they still have some like yokutan speech and things like that like they have words still however the elders of the tribe maintain detailed oral accounts of their genealogy and from the number of generations they record it is possible to date their arrival on the shores of tamriel to the early 6th century of the first era so you know in the 500s this was a period of upheaval in high rock when the durani hegemony was in its final death throes and the breton kingdoms were just establishing themselves a time when a colony of determined settlers could find a niche and establish itself before it would be driven out there you go there you go so i guess it's not like 100 confirmed but there's my source it's like one of those unreliable narrator like sounds interesting could be things i mean we do talk about because we don't know much about yokuda we talk about it as a very holistic thing like what what happens on the mainland may not necessarily affect some of the smaller islands because it's like a large archipelago with with several different cultures on these different islands and even some of them there's the idea that not all of yokuda was completely destroyed when this cataclysm happened and some some of the islands may still be intact with people on it etc etc i like to think it's even a kind of cool idea that like it did sink but like the tallest mountain tops became like islands and stuff still like so they're actually up there like yeah it's hard to say with the sinking of yokuda you've got the kind of cross between what's literal and what's you know figurative and what's a bit mythical because you obviously have the idea of um you know in the in the anuad you have huge portions of tamriel sinking into the sea you have the idea that old mara sank into the sea which it's always been my opinion that old marius never existed and the sinking of aldmeris was was representative of their culture dividing and separating and then getting them straying further from their gods um yokuda it seems like there's it's much more likely that something did physically happen there but it's all it's always going to be hard to know for sure yeah i i i just recently doing some of the religion things just to touch on aldmeris there is that like the elves because we like often that's like presented as like oh yeah that's what happened but like elves made me like far more deluded than you actually think about the reality like i no longer really treat the elven things oh that's likely what happened or anything like that because even the concept of aldmeris um like being like that like they were i'm sure would believe it to be a very physical place or something or something that exists like there's and there's just there's quite a few layers of um delusion throughout their cope their religion and stuff like even that like the idea that every single elf came from them like we still don't have a direct a to b connection to dwemer or falmer and also the bosmer claim that they were shaped by the stuff and then it's like you know then you've also got so basically what you've got is you've got this the high elves and um the merrima the the cl just fighting no we were the trial we were the true element but really like throw this there's a lot of shade thrown around everywhere and a lot of incon consistencies and stuff that you can sort of welcome to the older scrolls ladies and gentlemen super cool but um i mean we can like you know their architecture is built for the heat and they have like you know carefully planned ventilation done so that's really cool red guards and stuff like that but basically you know they've got like you know very middle eastern north african sort of very smart stuff built to survive very ornate like i i do i'm a big fan of um that kind of architecture i like everything a little bit more ornate and um well it's arguably practical but like less practical stuff i do like they have a nice combination of both like there's ornate when you need ornate and then there's very smart designs you know made on purpose to withstand um the deserts and i mean we could absolutely before we finish up just shout out that we've done an ideal elder scrolls six homophobia we basically did heaps of theoretical world building and and like sort of map making if you like this podcast at all then you will love that video yeah so do give that a check yeah all right well thank you everyone for tuning in to the elder scrolls podcast it's been michael scott and drew and we look forward to nerding out with you again very soon

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Length: 54min 41sec (3281 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021