The Doomed Race of Orcs & Their Daedric Prince: Malacath | The Elder Scrolls Podcast #9

[Music] what is up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to fudge muppet my name is scott and i'm here with michael andrew and today we are discussing the orcs and also malacath and everything about them but uh since if you actually checked out our previous podcast when we did favorite race orcs is drew's favorite race so i'm gonna let him take the reins and start us off and what are orcs drew the orcs or the awesomer are the pariah folk they're the outcasts basically no one likes them they have to carve their own way they're big they're strong they're extremely ugly and pretty much the only way they can be accepted anywhere is if they're really good at stuff and luckily they're really good at killing things and they're really good at making armor it's not easy being green as i said in that early podcast they're pretty much shrek yeah um yeah they're basically uh they rl's which we'll get to as well they've been mistakenly associated with goblins but understandably so um and they have a lot of north asian influences though by skyrim's time they sort of made orkish armor sort of a little bit like urakai lord of the rings kind of vibe stuff but uh yeah and they they also age the same as men and there's a neat little story behind that where the nords ever said in their mythology to have lived as long as the elves did but then this uh god called orky who was like another sort of version of malacath he came about and he said um he fooled them into a bargain that bound them to the count of winters so but then shaw came in and saved them and threw a bunch of this this like age stuff onto the nearby orcs which aged which reduce them to the age of like human ages like they only live in human years yeah and i guess they're naturally they're naturally uh said to be violent i mean you can see that through their berserker rage power and also through the fact that throughout history they're always fighting amongst each other or themselves they like raiding to you know get resources and stuff over farming even though they've done everything but like primarily they tended to like raiding a lot and they're kind of cornered into it too you know because they don't really they don't have a place of their own and when they do it tends to go wrong so you know farming isn't really the best if you don't really have a lot of land too yeah i actually like speaking of farming i do like um this idea of them having these big like woolly centipede things yeah the big herb they're called something yeah it's like uh equitari or something it's something like that um hold on let me find it's one of the coolest sounding it's a the people were dependent on a rare shaggy giant centipede herd beast that can only survive at high altitudes that's a really cool creature yeah i know they they call them i wonder i want to find the exact name because they in the elder scrolls online in the orsinium dlc oh like ekatera e c h a t e r e um they're not so um centipede looking though in that one i think but it was the well that's the herd beast they're dependent on yeah i mean we can use our brain as well to just think of the most awesome woolly centipedes we can i mean they still do look kind of cool like what they were going for but like there's no like 100 legs there's just like six legs but they're like these bony spine sort of looking things so shall we talk a little bit about orc society yeah sure sure so i guess the orcs definitely have a very might is right mindset um they have a chieftain a chieftain system where the chieftain is at the top and he's the biggest and strongest and to be the chieftain you have to kill the chieftain the chieftain is polygamous with a bunch of wives that he's you know married to it's not like they just go and shag everyone it's they are his wives right and then the wives have um he has kids with them and then those kids train amongst each other hoping to become strong enough to kill the chieftain and become the chieftain the daughters are also often traded with other tribes and can end up as wives there and then there's also an interesting system with which uh a forge is it a forged wife yes the second wife is the forge wife i'm pretty sure and the first is the i can't remember if there is an actual special name i think it's just the first wife but i just they because i they said that multiple of the wives take on different roles but the second one specifically is responsible the ford wife is responsible for teaching all of the smithing techniques and stuff like that yeah and there's also the wise woman yeah isn't that that's the mother of the chieftain right yes correct yeah it's weird they kind of have a very like a tight-knit family unit in these strongholds yet at the same time it's very much about individual strength you know so it's like they're they're very close-knit but they also like yeah i'm going to kill you it's bizarre it's a you know it's kind of like their history i guess manifest that way i guess they kind of view it differently like to to them like it is they they view it as the success of the individual is for the success of the clan like if you have a strong if a chief one of the chief's sons kills the current chieftain that's a better thing for the family unit because he's obviously stronger it keeps them fresh and it keeps that family unit going in a strong way and he's going to create you know a new generation of orcs that are strong and willing so it's kind of like in a way that sort of individualistic sort of ambition kind of keeps the tribe strong and i imagine for the rest of the the brothers and sons and so on that aren't you know aren't going to even try and take over the chieftain because they know they're not for it they would have a much more i guess like communal sort of role and our ambition and stuff you know what i mean and i mean a lot of them will end up leaving as well and become you know the kind of city orcs who go off to do other things because they want to fall in love or live a different lifestyle which i mean we'll talk about the curse of the orcs as outcasts more as we dive deeper into the podcast but it is interesting that they're doomed if they do doomed if they don't because if they stay with the orcs they're an outcast to the rest of civilization and if they go into the cities they're an outcast to their true like home i do like i mean if you commit a crime inside a stronghold it's like you've got good reason to want to get out of there because i you know you either have to pay in material value or if they're not interested in that you have to uh as they say pay with your blood and uh that can be pretty uh pretty nasty paying the blood price yeah the blood price as well is is it's weird because there's apparently some kind of rules about it but then they go or as much satisfied as much satisfies the victim so i imagine if the victim was subjectively just overly displeased at what the crime was they would spill a whole lot more of the uh offender's blood than they need just all of it which yeah which really deters crime in general so i guess it's a good system in that way i do um i i do like we're talking about city orcs and stuff i do like in um it's in the law more so you don't see as much game representation um but how orcs were actually prized among um the imperial legion when the imperial legion spanning has these like big heavily armored shock troops and also you know valuable smiths and making the armor and stuff that's one thing um i guess we could talk about a little bit is there smithing and how i think skyrim did a horrendous job at representing the orc smithing because they went for this sort of like crude sort of really ugly kind of you know lord of the rings kind of just shards of metal kind of vibe whereas it does look really cool though yeah but i think i think oblivions and morrowind's orcish armor it's it's just it looks like it's a master craftsman's armor it's beautiful it's ornate but i kind of also like the idea that they're these ugly sort of elves but they're actually these master craftsmen that make these beautiful suits of armor and stuff and it's you know it's even in their sort of orcish motifs but um i think it's a much more interesting sort of way of viewing the orc instead of just relegating them to like everything's barbaric and crude i think you know i like contrast so i just think it's a cool i can i can agree with that with the explanation i think if i didn't have the explanation and you just showed me both armors i'd probably go with the skyrim one yeah i i i yeah i i even put that orcish helmet on in oblivion yeah it's also a case of just oblivion's art style can be yeah but if you look at morrowind morrowind's orchestra is like my favorite incarnation and i think it looks sick and their helmet yeah yeah pretty much to be fair in oblivion all of the helmets for like that aren't it fully enclosed kind of look pretty poor or like the glass yeah yeah it's just uneven no fair enough but anyway i guess in terms of orcs society they're they're all taught to like you know fight and be strong you know everyone everyone is and and the females especially do have a focus on the smithing aspect of things yeah you know which which is interesting because if you look at a lot of the tribes throughout i don't know different histories and stuff they often be like okay males go out and hunt females can also help but mainly you know food gathering food preparation tasks like that right isn't it interesting that the orcs are so hardcore that they're kind of little prep tasks it's like blacksmithing yeah i like it that's pretty intense they're very very strong yeah there's interesting um too that their orcs so as we know them most of the time we see them in you know tribes in skyrim and high rock and orcinium and we'll get to all that but they've also been known throughout hammerfell um and specifically there's a group called the iron orcs there and then in valenwood a group which they just call them the wood orcs which are but what's interesting is they're they kind of view strength and endurance as just as important as mobility and flexibility and stuff because of their what they're living in and it's just i i actually quite like the wood orcs being this interesting sort of little isolated group of lightly armored orcs in valenwood and they've been able to flourish because the bosma are often you know because the green packs they can't sort of you know um screw over the land for resources and ingredients and stuff like that um the wood orcs can though so they actually use a lot of industry that like so like mining and stuff like that and various sort of harvesting and then they can sell it to the boswell and the bosnia can buy it because then they don't you know harm the compromise the green pact so um and then also by being in valenward the wood orcs have got this nice little isolated like you know protection you know they've got all of the giant forests and stuff where they can hide away and chill and i mean along with other beasts like creatures like imgur and centaurs and stuff that flourish in valenwood but i just i thought sorry you go i don't i don't think i was just i was you go okay okay i was going to say while we're talking about um orc culture and things like that and the kind of dynamics of their societies and whatnot i think even though we usually keep all the questions to the end i think it could actually be interesting to discuss now the idea that people have of kind of like the inbreeding between orcs from like uh evolutionary perspective because a lot of people have this thought straight away that okay they become strong enough to kill their dad the chieftain who now has all of these wives and then people assume that they you know take on these wives as their own and then wouldn't that be bad for the orcs but it doesn't necessarily have to work that way yeah i think it's kind of misinterpreted in that way like the way i understood it is chief kills his dad and then presumably those i don't know what happens to those wives they either might get killed or they might go off somewhere else or maybe they just exist as widows or whatever but the it kind of falls in line with the orcish sort of ideology of preserving like you know genetic strength really by having the youngest strongest chieftain who's come over and killed his dad but then he wants to find new young wives to breed with and to to um to create a stronger generation like it doesn't really make sense that they'd go for killing um for you know taking his father's wives i mean aside from his mum obviously i feel like that's even extra but like um you know and they would all be like 40 or whatever or older at that point and you and you know how orcs feel about age like your old orcs go out to die and they don't they think it's almost like a shameful thing to be this you know because then you haven't been pushing life hard enough and you know yeah i can really see the kind of like jump on the burning pyre type mentality with or absolutely or at least just hang around and help with smithing and whatnot but i mean they they trade daughters between the clans for this purpose yeah you know so i think they would just get new ones another interesting thing is if we consider that the wise woman is the mother of the chieftain that would mean if it stays that way all the time no exceptions that when the chieftain is killed that their mom would become the new wise woman i don't know what would happen to the old wise woman like you said they could be killed or whatever might not even be like a killed thing they might even take was like oh well my time's over and do the same as the other old orcs do the male ones and then go out into the wild and fight a beast until they die like i don't they could like because they are they they're cool because the women are combative too and like often warriors and stuff so i don't see absolutely so yeah but i mean to their argument the only other thing you could say is so assuming um it doesn't go down you know the genetic pool doesn't get too fuddled in the stronghold itself um there are still limited um i guess strongholds or like groups of people like there's just smaller populations of orcs um in general and then especially if you throw in the fact that they're like potentially warring or they're maybe there's divides in between like these ones are trinimac or malacath though the whole trinimac worshiping sort of stuff usually kind of ties in with orsinium or some of the larger sort of tribes but we'll get to that later but i i don't i think it's a bit the whole inbreeding notions a little bit like a bit of a misinterpretation or overplay like yeah because i think the sheer numbers pretty much means that the gene pool's gonna inherently be a lot smaller than every other race but you know i mean look at the royals in the real world for centuries and centuries it's like you kind of you know it's like there's they're probably distant cousins and whatnot but most of the time you can avoid any really dodgy looking they have some like cool like habsburg orcs like with [ __ ] and stuff a huge underbite yeah anyway is that shall we move on to uh the next kind of area of discussion yeah sure anything else to say about orc society for now i mean we can always touch on more as we go through we'll talk about orc society as in orsinium society a bit later won't we to something to consider and just throw out there as well is um this is just about the iron orcs specifically but we're originally a peaceful shamanistic society of primitive stone worshippers which is just it's just a little bit of a different religion compared to um the malacath stuff like and as we're about to get into the creation and so on but um but this is all happening in the merethic era but it's just interesting that there were orcs that weren't directly following malacath at least or like i mean it could be both kinds of worship but it's not mentioned at least and it's sort of kind of the phrasing they were originally a peaceful shamanistic society of stone worshipers as opposed to like what they are concurrently and i feel like there's naturally a lot of confusion when it comes down to goblins versus orcs because you know like to the other races they do look kind of similar and i think it actually plays a role in in bowiefie turning them into the orcs you know is the the fact that um goblins actually existed in somerset before that even happened so you know like there's a there's a chance that people are mistaking goblin cultures with orc cultures and then orc cultures taking things from goblin cultures and things like that as well yeah absolutely well i guess you could just get into straight into the i know it's your favorite creation story of the races so i'll let you take the reins and explain how the orcs come to be well like you know there is another there is theories that this isn't true but i think most of the evidence points to this being the true story even if it's a bit too literal-minded as malacath calls it but the idea is that bowiefy trinimac you know was is a an enormous god to the uh to the ultima he's you know the the paragon he's the champion of auriel and people follow him and berefia didn't really like this so bowifia came along and supposedly devoured trinimac and spoke through his own voice to trinimax people telling them all about trinimac's lies and then you know just to really add insult to injury decided to defecate trinimac right there in front of the crowd and then malacath was born and some people decided okay yeah i don't love trina max so much now that he's you know he's covered in bowed his insides whereas others supposedly went along to the to the dung and smeared it over themselves and they transformed with their god into awkward scat you know that's the long and short of it yeah i mean there's there's all kinds of theories on how it all happened like if you listen to the orcs there's this idea that um trinimac was tricked and that uh mafala came and like kind of stabbed trinimac in the back and then boethiah kind of like finished the job and then there's this part about trinimac being so shamed he like ripped out the ashamed part of his soul or something becoming malacath i think the idea that um mafala was involved fits all of their characters you know the the idea that it's a deception you know trinimac is extremely powerful bulifia is powerful as well but the idea that trinimac would just be you know bested one-on-one whereas my father coming in and then being involved in a secret plot to to take down trinimac and the backstab it just fits perfectly well to throw in some just extra context there the whole uh reason behind boethiah and mephala fighting trinimac is is supposedly because as the veloth and the kyma were were leaving to go to resday and trinimac and his followers did not like that like you can't abandon elven culture so they came in to intercede and then that's when boethiah and rafala you know fought back with um cloak and dagger yeah ironically orcs are some of the elves who were really trying to keep um elvish culture together you know because they were you know they were continuing to follow trinimac and didn't like dissidents to the extent they became potentially the most dissident of the elvish races yeah i mean me even i'm not even particularly decided because it's interesting on the on the trinimac malacath dynamic and whether like trinimac is truly dead and then malacath is is is the entity that resulted or whether there is this sort of weird kind of split kind of thing that goes there there was actually a question from um uh someone cyber warlock was like i'm surprised no one has ever asked this do you think malacath could ever be turned back into trinimac just like how sheol gorath was turned back into gigalag he says edit i believe this is possible if someone fills malacath's position as prince maybe a really powerful and devoted orc could become the new pal balor cath so essentially what he's kind of asking is like could someone mantle malacath and then trinimac be free i i'm not sure it works exactly the same because jiggle ag was the original shagrath was a curse of him but i guess it's kind of similar but it's look i i'll say this to any anyone with theories out there it's the elder scrolls universe so yeah it could happen like i mean literally the the story is so strange and wacky already there's nothing that i can see that would stop new law being written to make that happen i don't think it will happen um but it's like yeah it it i feel like i feel like it's not really in malacath sort of like interest in his like theme he's the thing of outcast he's like kind of more like a fallen from glory rather than return to glory kind of thing yeah i don't think it fits that well either especially if you look at him as like a kind of almost revenge oriented yeah prince you know if he's like this seething like i don't think that he really would want to change back but i i wondered that as well you know did trinimac die and then of course there's the idea which i absolutely love this kind of myth makes reality concept or like the more worship you get the more power you get but if everyone just started worship worshipping trinimac would trinimac just kind of come to be well it's the same as i talked about this in the vivec video but there's this kind of like but there's kind of like the go the way the gold realm kind of works it's like this sort of separate existence there's almost like in in the case of vivec around alexa or so on there's all evidence to sort of support the idea that there is this there is this god vivec and then there's this living sort of god vivec like the mortal corporeal form kind of thing in a similar sort of um way in in this god realm like the idea of of of like a permanent death isn't necessarily true because they're not it's not they're not living like we are they're more ideas it's because it takes it very literally to be like in in the mortal realm like death like you know here's a person and they die and they fall over and die whereas in the realm of gods gods don't really die unless you erase the idea of them like even that sort of mortal do you know what i mean and trinimac did become way less popular afterwards but there are people that try and like you know recognize him and worship him still um and that becomes part of the conflict in various major things the major thing for me is that we've we've jiggerlag and shayagoraf that they're so fundamentally opposed that that's kind of the whole purpose of the curse is that you know shagarf is the opposite of what gigaleg represents whereas i really see trinimac and malacath to be one and the same even though it's a corruption of trinimac but it's also an evolution of him like trinimac is all about strength honor and unity and you can absolutely apply all of those things to malacath as well he's very much about unity even though now it's with his specific in-group and it's all about strength and honor you know that's that's kind of what uh orc tribal culture is all about so just a really angry trinimark yeah exactly yeah he's a he's a wronged trinimac but so i almost think that there would be no desire for i feel like trinimac um in a different way his sphere is still being upheld by malacath whereas that's not really the case with gigalag and shayagorov and what what's interesting there too is like we know that we know the titles of adrian daedra arbitrary but if you have aedra like trinimac hebrew they're aedra daedra dynamic like you know malacaths or daedra there's sort of an interesting dynamic there because you know gigalag and shergorath were both daedra as such like not and by aedra daedra it's our ancestors or not our ancestors but you could ah and we kind of talked about how you know what really makes a daedric prince is that you run a realm of oblivion ultimately because not our ancestor isn't necessarily always so explicitly true because if trinimac our ancestor and aedra became a not our ancestor it's almost like that the elves decry the idea that malacath is trinimac they're sort of like no you're not our ancestry anymore you're out of the club like you know yeah i i think daedric prince as most people know it kind of is just where the entity resides yeah because i mean you look at meridia being a magna gee and all this and then inhabiting a daedric realm and then malacath inhabiting a daedric realm the ash pit well supposedly that's where um boethiah banished him to um that yeah it's kind of where you reside almost yeah the distinction comes down to one decision whether to take part or not you know so it's it's they're not really that different and interestingly even because the aedra daedric dynamic those two words are like rooted in the in the elven mythology of it but you know technically like those kinds of things are um uh it's all about perspective like if you're an orc like malacath is you know kind of like your ancestors sort of like they would admit like in the same way that you know the boethiah azura and mephala are sometimes referred to as ancestor spirits to the dunmer and it's kind of like it's kind of perspective you know what i mean it's kind of perspective kind of or you know another thing i can really imagine because we don't know what forms they take on but with the whole eating and excreting story as malacath says it's you know taken too literally that could be like a really like spiritual like kind of magical thing that's not anything what we would visualize as being excreted you know what i mean like it could really be this kind of like real me i don't know how to describe it but like in my head like more colorful scene i always see eating as kind of just it's just a metaphor for corruption in some form or another so even just looking at the color of the orcs it's like green i i think of like rotten you know it's like the idea is that they're corrupted elves and i mean obviously um the elder scrolls takes a lot of inspiration from tolkien and you know the the orcs there one of the origin stories for them is them being corrupted elves turned in turned into um turned into orcs and i one other random thing as well which i really like is that you know the the concept of an orc pretty much comes back to beowulf and in beowulf they're specifically like these evil goblins that are specifically condemned by god and in a way malakaf and the orcs were condemned by a god and came into being that way which is just a you know cool random note yeah it's actually interesting how much um because tolkien obviously took huge inspirations from like a lot of the sort of um nordic sagas and stuff like that and also ancient like like anglo-saxon kind of uh mythologies and stuff um and that's but you know i by people then sort of like lifting off talking putting it into d and d and then from d and d and stuff like kind of getting all that into like you know what we have elder scrolls because elder scrolls started off as a dnd game between bethesda staff and then that gets evolved on but it's just it's actually funny how much like how like pagan our like fiction is and like how rooted like yeah it's like belief becomes reality you know because that was his whole idea i'm pretty sure tolkien said yeah i'm we're getting way off topics i'll end it here but you know his whole idea was to create an anglo-saxon mythology because it was kind of absent from england yeah you know and it pretty much has become in the form of fantasy yeah that you know that the orcs come back to that i was i was going to say as well like just to kind of quote from varieties of faith another belief with orcs um venerating trinimac and stuff like that is they believe sorry yeah they believe that when uh he was corrupted by his passage through boethiah he actually absorbed some of bowithia's strength and passed it on to his followers and this way some of the orcs see themselves as like improved elves hmm they have lots of copes yeah yeah it's convenient well i mean they are still at least in terms of like musculature and like physical imposingness they are the strongest like high elves might be taller but they're described as like live and and sort of you know skinny whereas whereas in um the orcs are nearly as tall but they're buff as yeah but then they also don't have the same magical prowess nor the lifespan or like i think if i had to like objectively write but maybe maybe their point of view and their culture and stuff i mean like conveniently their culture but their actual early lifespan like they think you know fresh ideas coming through whereas all these high elves get so entrenched in their ancient sort of they they're too incapable of getting outside of their own they're not open-minded enough they can't get outside their own dogma yeah as as drew said to me the other day the candle that burns twice as but i mean while we're on the topic of the creation we should you know probably mention the counter argument which i don't really don't really think holds any water but in the in the book before it before the ages of man it specifically refers to the orcs as being native beast folk um to tamriel and then you have toppled the pilot who surveyed tamriel when he was trying to look for old el nifey and saw i think i wrote it down specifically as he and his men rested there came a fearsome howl and hideous orcs streamed forth from the murky glenn cannibal teeth clotted with gore and to me that sounds like goblins yeah well like so in the in the script for um before elves and men i i wrote my hypothesis which was just generally that that um as we know there were goblins in the somerset isles and there's basically goblins sort of spread all throughout like they've they've been in activity yeah well yeah yeah as well and in morrowind and and all that those places so that i thought that it would be that the elves would just call them orcs as a like a cloak wheel kind of thing for all of them but um then by the time you get to the creation of the actual orcs the awesomer um they would start being called orcs almost as like a derogatory term sort of like just like the goblins back home like your orcs or whatever and then as it sort of as time goes on um it it kind of becomes it kind of blends and orcs become used and instead goblins starts being used to refer to specifically goblins for sure and if i was boethiah and i was going to corrupt you know some followers and change them and give them this kind of outcast curse i would make them look like what their their what their um base race i guess what the old ma find as outcasts and as disciples yeah i think they even enslaved yeah yeah yeah a lot of societies have they've often used them as cannon fodder and and things like that um so i i think definitely bowie could have looked at goblins and been like yeah i'm going to make you look like a half elf half goblet the other note there is is that there's evidence um in in in the games and so on about the goblins of the first era and then probably the marethic era before that were much larger than the ones you have today so that also back then when you have those first era goblins they might be like similar size to like the awesomer at that time so calling them all orcs even makes more sense but perhaps as they got smaller the goblins i'm talking about they became referred to as goblins and for sure and with their teeth clotted with gore they they will eat any meat whereas there's no evidence the orcs would ever do that so it's like it's it's pretty clear that it can just be a you know a large group of goblins and they were big like hunting got killed by a giant goblin but what's interesting too is is that and a lot of people make this connection and that's sort of why they kind of imply a common genetic route is they all um worship malacath in some forms like all mulak or morlock or or the blue god or whatever they've all idealized this sort of same entity and you know malacath himself is like you know patriot of ogres and goblins and and all goblin can as well as obviously orcs but i have a feeling that and i guess this is a nice segue into orsinium and so on but i have a feel like the the cultural unity of them might actually be an orcidium thing because so orcidium when you have the regatta come in all of the yokudans they come into hammerfell they're basically just massacring everything and making their new home there are plenty of orcs out in hammerfell um and as you can imagine like orcs kind might have been spread from valenwood where they currently are all up through hammerfell up through and probably little bits of cereal all up into high rock but as the regatta came across masculine isolates the valenwood orcs but then you've got a lot of orcs that have nowhere to go so they end up fleeing north um and that's kind of where um toro groegron brings together all of these um basically orc and goblin kind refugees and brings them into orsinium which is this one city and then that's where you could have started having them all kind of unified in kind of cultural and religious beliefs around malacath or whatever oh absolutely i mean the thing is like they you can you can see why people associate with them like uh orcs with them they have so much in common they're green they used to be bigger like you said they have pointed ears they worship malacath they are like they all have the same patron god basically they're all outcasts and i know lots of things do but in addition to all of this clan based system might is right kind of mentality a war chief or chieftain who runs the joint yeah and then like a wise woman they have shamans who are kind of like the religious and spiritual leaders but whatever their religions were in the past may not like you were saying have been anything to do with malacath this could have been a religious following that was developed through association with the orcs yeah absolutely um yeah i i i see where people come from with all of the um the orc similarity and i i think if you're being really honest that orcs perhaps in daggerfall and arena they were just yeah they were just like a standard sort of enemy type like goblins until they like oh let's actually make them something interesting and so on for morrowind there's that skyrim quest as well discerning the trans mundane right where you have to collect the blood of all the elven races and and the orcs are among the elven races in that quest as well which yeah that's kind of like a case closed uh yeah but like like i was saying it doesn't have to be a fact that like are they an elf or are they a goblin it's like yeah they're an elf but boethiah could like i was kind of saying this before off camera you could make a a man and then i don't know say you're a god so you're bulithia you can do anything i'm gonna mix man with i don't know a spider and it's like is he a man or is he a spider it's like he's a man still but he has all these spider-like features and that's so they were they were elves but then you can throw goblin features on them because you know that these outcast things it doesn't mean that they've got goblin king blood they might but it doesn't necessarily mean that you know what i mean and that's specifically what daedric princes do because they can't you know necessarily they can't necessarily like azura does it but like actually create but a lot of the times what they'll do is just take something that's already existing and transform it um you know like you've got molag bao creating the daedric titans from a dragon for example you know they they take some they take things that already exist and mash them together or create something else from it but they're just like artists as you told me yesterday yeah well that synthetic imagination well that power is pretty broad in like literally anything that exists in reality they can do it so like an artist or something that it's the idea that there's no such thing as an original idea but i guess the difference would be in actual creation like the aedra would be an original idea like conceptualizing time from literally the void nothing like those kind of things so but so the daedra's powers of creation in that regard are pretty as unlimited as you can tangibly kind of understand really yeah for sure but i mean you've got to be pretty unimaginative to create the orcs based on how similar they look to goblins yeah well i mean all azura did was look it's like he's a grey volcano with red eyes let's just give that color scheme to the elves you know it's like a spore creation menu they just clicked on the volcano and then clicked on the the race yeah but um yeah so i i guess we can start moving on to we sort of touched on orcidium so we know the first or sinium um and as we know there's multiple incarnations but does anyone want to take over on on orcinium here so we know it's established and why it was established yeah well i guess it is it's it's something the orcs have needed for such a long time it's just a location you know that they exist but they're just their parish ever since their creation they've been outcasts so the idea that taurug had to um to bring people together is it in a way you know we'll get on to it but it's like it's funny because it's almost doomed to fail because for them to remain the prior folk it always just needs to be torn down at some point which does just continue to happen to them but for sure and i guess that's a topic that will get blended in as we speak about orcinium this kind of why the orcs always lose kind of topic but i mean you you look at what happened with the first orcinium i believe they were raiding the biose river yeah and i mean if you're situated between two we'll call them superpowers at least compared to all the orcs and and their civilization they were trying to build if you keep raiding and you annoy high rock and hammerfell they team up against the common enemy you're gonna have a bad time and then you had the siege of orsinium which you've got to give the orcs credit for i believe it lasted 30 years yeah and you even had like the yokutan order of diagonal and garden shinji involved in that as well so it's not like you're just fighting like chumps you're fighting like the best of the best warriors and then you know obviously as bred bretons and red guards do is they turn on each other too so yeah doesn't help yeah yeah that's it because the gate and shinji had a jewel with blood tusk yeah over um what what was it just overall sinium's fate and then the king of high rock just had them all yeah because animal killed and invaded hammerfell i don't know how to pronounce his name you can say i said joyle joyla or we actually used the french to english translation before the podcast and it was like um oh my gosh i actually figured anyway i think it was it could have just been a drama you know we know he's like but whatever king joyle i think he was juan joao or something anyway that king was making a play um for some hammerfell territory i'm pretty sure and that's where mckellar leckie the ansar warrior um stops them but regardless so the siege of orcinium is successful ultimately um but it wouldn't be recreated for another while until you get king kurog so this is all fits in with the this is in the second era so it's actually quite a bit later um and you have that's this is the orsinium dlc for eso basically is set in the orcidium that's been recently created that king kurog basically made a deal with king emmerich to fight king rancer of shawn helm which is another high rock sort of city state um and if king kurog came in and helped then he'd be part of the daggerfall covenant and be allowed to have orcinium and have it as this sort of secure um territory but what's interesting is this is when you start getting into the idea of there's multiple cults there's the malacath cults and the trinimac cults of orcs and you have these this divide and and they often talk about um ideas of how malacath is holding the orcs back like and and in a real literal sense like you can think about it that that he is by like you know be these tribes don't like you know the sort of the sort of outcast kind of themes and so on kind of keeps them as these outcasts and so on whereas orcinium would be like a higher society like the grandeur of the orcs and then it's sort of um intertwined with trinimac a bit more so you know what i mean exactly like going back to what we said talking about the creation trinimac didn't like the dissidents he wanted to keep people united and that's kind of exactly what orsinium stands for you could so you can see why they'd neglect malacath and prop up trinimac even though they're very much the same entity you know it's the different aspects of them yeah yeah and i think the other thing that the orcs kind of did wrong which doomed them to failure like when all the different old ma migrated to different places you know some went to cyrodiil there's the aylids you know they went to resdayne became the kymer and then the dark elves and so on and so forth the orcs went everywhere so they split everywhere and then as you do when you split into different groups over a really long time you develop a bunch of different cultures which they kind of have the overarching themes of the chieftains and stuff like that but in terms of things like worship and like as we're talking about with trinimac versus malacath you get a lot of different ideas so when you bring them all together things aren't always exactly kumbaya absolutely but uh king kurog's orsinium too like that's kind of exactly what you're just talking about that's why it falls apart is because he was trying to wrestle some kind of control through a bit of a little conspiracy and you know setting up this person to attack this person and this cult and so on but basically once the um once this plot this all unfolds in the obsidian dlc plot but uh basically king kuro gets outed for trying to manipulate things behind the scenes and trying to sort of to in fairness he's trying to unify the thing but unify obsidian but he's doing it through you know devious means but you know arguably that's how you get there and like that's how a lot of empires and get to that position and so on but ultimately it falls apart you get another king come in and then i don't actually know if it's confirmed exactly how the second one falls apart it's just it just fell apart at some point it's also worth mentioning that the first orsinium and the second orsinium are separate geographically they're like in different places um so the sec so that second orcinium was a freshly built um place um then you get to the third era and you have nova orcinium which just i'm assuming just means new orcidium or something right but um yeah that that i'm assuming was on the same spot i think that's on the same spot as the second orsinium in the rothga rothgaryan mountains i mean that's led by gortwag gronagram who was a bit of a different orc he's quite um you know politically savvy but also if memory serves me right is a um trinimac worshipper and once again brings that those ideas of trinimac to the forefront of um the orcish culture yeah and the land for nova orcinium was also won again in a duel uh brett and noble yeah yeah and he he's involved nicely in the daggerfall plot and so on but by the end of the whole warp in the west thing i'm pretty sure he has a secure kingdom of orcinium using the new medium at some point yes yes which definitely helps yeah so you get all into the into that uh nuts craziness but but then sadly it gets it gets destroyed again yeah so in the early fourth era during the following the oblivion crisis but what's interesting is now this is a the third location for um orsinium and that's in between uh hammerfell and skyrim and the dragontail mountains so uh we can talk about potential es6 stuff in a second but so just remember there's been four incarnations of ocedium one was in in high rock one was in high rock two but in the rothgaryan mountains novorossinium the third incarnation was in the same spot as the second then you have the fourth in between skyrim and hammerfell so potentially and there were questions i'll probably find them to uh shout them out but basically about the idea that will we see um orsinium potentially in an elder scroll six and if it's hammerfell then it's all hammerfell and high rock it's absolutely ripe for it like and i think that would be really cool to bring in some political diversity as well like it would just be awesome to have a whole city full of orcs in a mainline elder scrolls game you know yeah i mean look as as todd said as well when he's like talking about being ambitious and stuff like that and like you know that kind of concept of like uh what games you're going to make before you die type thing it's like come on i can just see a big orsinium ambitious thing being in there it just adds another player which everyone wants into the kind of like political scene and especially if they're gonna double down i mean i really hope so on like role playing and choice and stuff like that it'd be really cool if you could kind of decide the fate of orsinium or ally them with with different factions and and things yeah absolutely like taking part in a siege of orsinium would be pretty epic like if that's one of the ways you could side or something as long as it doesn't take 30 years no or maybe it's ongoing maybe it starts by the time yeah that's maybe there's this ongoing siege and you can either break it or make it you know turns out it's the pvp zone multiplayer that is uh awful i guess um but yeah so that's our point like one thing i guess we should talk about at the end because then we'll also i'll just go through some of these individual questions as well but uh the larger philosophical thematic themes of the orcs why they always lose why they are you know the prior folk and are there any like final points you guys have got on that or culturally they're always they're always going to lose it's like it's it's at the very core of of who they are you know it's it's partially because of how staunchly individualistic they can be as well and in terms of individual strength and you know like i mean talking about um kurog trying to unite orsinium um unless you can really convince everyone to kind of follow specifically old trinimac and neglect malacath it's hard to tell a war chief what to do you know he's spent his whole life he's worked his way up he's killed the war chief he's now in charge he's not taking orders from anyone you know it's so what do you think about the idea then that that it is like do you agree with the idea that malacath is actually kind of holding them back because he's propagating you know the codes of malacath are propagating these tribal stronghold ideals and if so what's his end game there and like what why why would he be against the idea of returning to like a more trinimac oriented sort of thing if they even are the same sort of entity or whatnot well i guess he would lose worship wouldn't he but imagine what what to stop now as he's known i'm sorry i'm more going if there's a split and this is like i don't know the kind of revenge seeking seething one only exists through being a revenge seeking kind of spiteful way so to stop being that would be to stop existing yeah but my thing is like like what's his um like what's his revenge who's his revenge aimed at like he's not against himself right i almost don't know if it's revenge in some ways it's like i could be being a bit cruel to him here because i love i love him as a god but he's almost like that uh that dad who lives vicariously through his son and he's like really like you you're gonna play football and you're gonna be the best it's like um you know he's he's lost basically everything except for those people who have staunchly followed him through all of this crap quite literally um and in a way he's probably blinded by the fact he doesn't want to lose them he doesn't want to lose his followers and he's you know he's a he's a father figure who can be a bit overbearing yeah no i i agree with that like i sort of he sort of just like resigned to his lot in life and he's like this is my my little domain i'm not going to give an inch but i also don't care about anything else well you know how protective he is you know like in just very briefly his dealings with shay agora from the 16 a quarter madness you know he's kind of tricked essentially into into killing one of killing an orc right i think it was his son wasn't it yeah like some demigod prince thing right yeah i mean actually to be honest i missed that part but um i feel like he would react similarly to most orcs as well i don't know i just get very potential think about his actions um you know he uh you know in oblivion he seeks to get these all these ogres released from from slavery and so on so like whoever he sort of brings under his wing as outcasts or whatnot he sort of serves their interests as well like he is that sort of protective father figure and even by you know um with the whole thing with yamas and stuff in skyrim being a chief who's a bit of a you know a fake and a liar he's kind of got the best interests of the whole stronghold in mind there to get rid of him or have him you know so he's also like it's like a strict but you know loving father that's also stern and strict you know what i mean and and he wants his uh oh you go michael i was going to say you could almost say that perhaps he's a little bit insecure about bow with you defeating him so he doesn't really care about them growing into a successful civilization he just wants the bragging rights of being like we're the strongest like we may not we not we may not be the most advanced or have the biggest territories of the biggest armies that i'm the strongest they're the strongest like we win fights i'll never lose a fight again well and imagine you know malacath dwelling in his ash pit of you know ash and choking air and it's horrible there and but then when you get to the ash and forge at the heart of it it's like it's like the perfect orcish stronghold you know so he he wants he wants orcs to want to go there he wants to you know enjoy eternity with them in his realm whereas if orcinium is really successful you know like this is a stretch but if the orcs kind of get back to trinimac worship get back to aedra worship and kind of unite and become are people almost more like the elves they were before they were transformed um the that aspect of trinimac even though earlier i said they're kind of one and the same that part of this entity kind of dies off you know that's how i see the ash pit you know it's just a perfect stronghold yeah i mean someone um uh kelly karoon um i'll just sort of paraphrase because of the big question but it was basically asking a similar thing and like would trinimac actually be the better deity to follow for the orcs but i i feel like if it's kind of all about the cultural perspective like you know they don't see the building of civilization or obsidium as greatness they perhaps you know way more individualistic but not in just their only me matters but even like the strength of smaller tribes like it's kind of like a real like the clan map yeah and the kind of thing that all that matters it's like if you know if you know if there was an orc and a and a king of some kingdom or something but if they met in the battlefield it's all about the physical prowess who's the stronger like your kingdom doesn't matter at that point i mean unless you've got thousands of soldiers behind you that are protecting you maybe but you know but like on the one to one it's kind of a bit more emphasis on the sort of individual sort of man-to-man kind of um strength versus this idea oh you have your big precious castles and all this kind of stuff but you're not actually got that real sort of survival strength i think and no wonder they were tempted into like jewels and stuff although i mean it did work for them when they dueled and won successfully to win land i mean what breton with all their civilization and armies and stuff would agree to give over land for having a jewel with one orc i know the bretons are really into like that kind of stuff too but not in the same way like your chances are not yeah necessarily good or stuck in your favor it's not something you'd probably want to take the bet on but i guess ego and and um things like that make you do things yeah and thinking of jill's grey prince remember in oblivion the best fighter it wasn't on um what was the deal of him with his vampires oh he was kind of like his father was a vampire he inherited it right yeah but he's not strange but he wasn't damaged by the sun he really i think i don't know how it worked but he just had he was just a pale orc with i think reddish eyes but red eyes are an orc trait at least of skyrim you can have red yellow or blue eyes so you know um but yes we were sort of i'm just going to shout out the people gore ila we we answered the sort of generally the potential sort of possible paths for orc friends in uh post skyrim tamriel um and yeah i think they could have a thr thriving orcidium could be a uh one that ends in the in the storyline like i feel like it could be explored in hammerfell like we said like an elder scrolls six but um i feel like orcs are kind of doomed not but they don't see it as doomed but they're going to keep on living how they've lived for the last you know 4 000 years you know plus yeah i mean look this is the whole point of a curse anyway it's not too interesting i mean breaking a curse is also cool but the idea of a curse is that you can't defeat it like you know what i mean that it keeps on kind of screwing you over yeah and it in a way be like the kaima coming back yeah yeah yeah exactly um some people just asking about uh actually i'll find the person but about volundrong it was um mcgoldenblade why does malacath have voluntrong in the first place is it a dwemer artifact how did it come into his possession but um with daedric artifacts then they're kind of just like claimed a lot of the time like there are i'm pretty sure there's other examples of artifacts yeah they're not always made by the daedra themselves you know in a simple way too you can think about things like even the spear of bit of mercy um being a spear that's claimed by shel gorath um mehron's day aegon and her scene like three people that have different associations with it so it's not always it's just kind of a fluid idea but um i guess after the dwemer disappeared the war the chieftain of clan rawkins just left a hammer lying on the ground while he's gone so i mean you could ask the same thing with um perite and spellbreaker couldn't you yeah yeah listen dwemer looking shield but once again they can always create whatever style they are wanted to like they could just imitate the dwemer style or but yeah um i i don't i think it's just that deja princes daedric artifacts don't have to be created by they can be claimed by the daedric princes in the same way they can change souls as well yeah yeah but in this in in the same way they can claim souls like i'd like why couldn't they sort of claim um a uh mortal power magical artifact you know what i mean um we touched on what uh avery von frank was saying what ash pit look like and do you think we'll go there in a future elder scrolls game maybe we might go there as a small like singular mission or something if there was a big orcinium focus and it really doubled down on some some of those themes and storylines but you just have to go to that that like main area where all the orcs are like the actual pit itself's not inhabitable yeah so it's like yeah like you you mentioned that before um and magical breathing in order to get around at all yeah it's a place that's meant to be full of like i'm pretty sure just like everyone has like a thousand wives and there's constant combat and like all this kind of stuff um was two more questions from um panda bear out of like eight or something he answered but i feel like we covered most of them um who of the orcs fought with and then he sort of uh like probably everyone that exists but therefore the red guards bretons regatta um he asked dwemer and probably could have yeah um because they were around since the dwemer around um yeah they could i i'm sure they fought with everyone honestly like pretty much anyone they come into contact with if if they didn't fight with the dwemer it'd purely be because there wasn't much dwemer stuff to take from the surface yeah um yeah for sure i'd also say as well just on the concept i wanted to touch on with volandrong isn't it interesting how this hammer definitely does not look like daedric in morrowind and oblivion yeah yeah like it kind of just looks unique i don't know how to yeah to say it it kind of looks like it could be dwarven um not like the metal like it just looks like more like you can imagine a a dwemer creating it but then it seems like malacath has really corrupted it by the time of skyrim you know it's like got this pulsate like red eye and it's all like spiky and like it looks more like the mace of molag bao for example than than it did before it looks like it's designed to fit on the back of skyrim orcish armor you know yeah because they they yeah i mean a lot of these things too they'll like you know it's the each game's art style interpretation like you know just the thing about artifacts is they can just transform you don't really need to explain it yeah yeah and you know convenient different generations of armor you know you can use any material to make any different styles um i think we've just about done it covered everything unless you guys had anything else but there is one more question which i think is a nice um finishing point um from panda bear that was saying do you consider malacath the weakest daedric prince like you know all things considered him being um pariah folk because i mean personally i can't see him really i don't know if he's the weakest but any sort of big like vi for power or anything if you know what i mean because he's sort of relegated himself to this is my domain and that's all i care about the orcs the ogres goblins outcasts that kind of thing it's hard to say isn't it because being derived from trinimac almost implies a higher level of power even if you don't exert it but you know again and this isn't the answer anyone wants but power is often derived from worship as well so who's the most powerful can be contextual but i would say he's definitely if i had to not include that as one of the weaker ones like they do say though in one of the books periodite is the weakest i think that's said it is said but um yeah but for some reason in my head canon i can actually like just using the logic of all the other knowledge i can imagine periodic as having more power than malacath just not having examples in history where it's exerted so that people can go wow powerful the thing too is it's like power's kind of like it's like relative to what it's used for like the goal for like you could have like lots of power but you might be like time or some sort of like big force but you're not actively like you know how like powers like um you would have thought about and how useful it is to someone like what can you do with that power if you're if you encompass a big thing in your sphere but you can't actually really do anything with it like you know what i mean that's kind of part of the discussion because interestingly outside of just ogre's orcs and stuff like that malacath is cited in um in uh reachmen worship um for like outcast elements and stuff like that so it can't he kind of does embody outcasts outside of just orcs and just specifically like goblin can kind of folk like so really anytime there's someone that's you know going away from the status quo that he can be like an outcast sort of invoking his fear you know what i mean yeah i think rather than him necessarily being weaker it's more just the fact that all the other princes look down on him you know they just don't like him true as opposed to specifically him being separate because he's you know physically or in terms of power below them it's more just they don't like him for sure and i mean if you think about like you're kind of getting out anyway with power and what it's used for if he's using all of his power to be the outcast god and to keep the orcs as outcasts he's doing a good job isn't he yeah i mean like if that's what he wants to use his power for it's not like every daedric prince is like mehrunes dagon and they have to come stomping through the imperial city squishing guards beneath their toes you know yeah yeah he's spiteful he you know he doesn't i feel like he doesn't even want to prove himself to the other daedra a lot of the time yeah you know yeah he's just that he's the too cool for school you know kid in the class yeah i think i think that touches pretty much everything on orcs i think yeah i think so i think it does well thank you everyone for watching social media links are in the description below let us know what podcast topics you want to see next and we look forward to noting out with you all again very soon

Channel: FudgeMuppet

Views: 89,094

Keywords: skyrim, skyrim lore, elder scrolls 6, elder scrolls, elder scrolls lore, orcs, orcs lore, orsinium, orsinium lore, malacath, trinimac, malacath lore, trinimac lore

Id: e-JmzWCSN-8

Length: 64min 24sec (3864 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020