I can tell you right now, if you dislike lore, The Elder Scrolls is probably not for you.
...Okay, here's the deal. The developers of Skyrim wanted to make a world that felt like it had a very deep sense of history, and more than that, of history that has been fought over and magically warped and misrepresented and lost and found and misheard and badly translated and lied about. There are several metric fucktons of reading involved in building a vague timeline of Tamriel's past, and that's if you believe the sources, which are almost never one hundred percent reliable. You might find a crisply written, concise and clear report on why Talos Septim, the Ninth Divine, was not truly a mortal ascended to godhood - commission the High Elves, who have a vested interest in Talos' divinity being questioned and probably also have racially-motivated dislike for a man who became a god (because humans are inherently inferior to them). You might also find the badly-spelled, semi-coherent rambling of a man saying that Akatosh (the Dragon God of Time) and Alduin (the World Eater, harbinger of the endtimes, and also a dragon; sometimes seen as an aspect of Akatosh) cannot possibly be the same entity because his dad told him and he heard one day in a tavern and so on, and that could actually be very close to the truth. Personally, I LOVE IT ALL LIKE BURNING. But it's heavy stuff. Often it's not even relevant, the way history books about the Middle Ages aren't entirely applicable in modern times. There is fiction-within-the-fiction. Stories written to be stories in-universe. (Many of them are short stories with twist endings that I found very clever.) But! Unlike Dragon Age, it is not vital.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-12-22 02:05 pm (UTC)...Okay, here's the deal. The developers of Skyrim wanted to make a world that felt like it had a very deep sense of history, and more than that, of history that has been fought over and magically warped and misrepresented and lost and found and misheard and badly translated and lied about. There are several metric fucktons of reading involved in building a vague timeline of Tamriel's past, and that's if you believe the sources, which are almost never one hundred percent reliable. You might find a crisply written, concise and clear report on why Talos Septim, the Ninth Divine, was not truly a mortal ascended to godhood - commission the High Elves, who have a vested interest in Talos' divinity being questioned and probably also have racially-motivated dislike for a man who became a god (because humans are inherently inferior to them). You might also find the badly-spelled, semi-coherent rambling of a man saying that Akatosh (the Dragon God of Time) and Alduin (the World Eater, harbinger of the endtimes, and also a dragon; sometimes seen as an aspect of Akatosh) cannot possibly be the same entity because his dad told him and he heard one day in a tavern and so on, and that could actually be very close to the truth. Personally, I LOVE IT ALL LIKE BURNING. But it's heavy stuff. Often it's not even relevant, the way history books about the Middle Ages aren't entirely applicable in modern times. There is fiction-within-the-fiction. Stories written to be stories in-universe. (Many of them are short stories with twist endings that I found very clever.) But! Unlike Dragon Age, it is not vital.
ARGH LENGTH LIMIT