Greetings Gracious Apes and Novitiates,

You deserve to be commended for your spirited defense of Ald Tam Rugh. Weird Tamriel lives on thanks to your efforts.

But you also deserve reprimand for poor performance; too often do I spy the faithful resorting to vague piss-taking, trying to silence the forum-casuists with the unhelpful, unquantifiable 'Boring and Therefore Wrong' argument. We cannot win the holy war on focus group-approved cliché this way, and moreover we are made worse in its use. Indeed it has made us lazy, numb, and inarticulate as OBCyrod or the Dragon War, only able to respond, lethargically, to challenge by pointing our chubby digits sideways as MK's laurels and screech 'NO THIS IS BETTER. BECAUSE IT IS'. That's a level of discourse unbecoming Associate-Degree Holders, never mind such august company as Forum Monkeys.

But there is another way. While Interest may be subjective, Formal Aesthetics are not. Michael Bay movies may interest you more than films by Jane Campion, but you'd be hard pressed to successfully argue that they're superior qua art - compare any single from The Piano to one from Transformers. The ratio of balanced compositions to explosions is simply staggering.Now transpose to Tamriel. Next time you have occasion to argue over, let's say, the civil engineering in Alinor, distance yourself. Don't tell us about what interests you. Show us why insect-wing-membrane and reinforced poetry has greater merit as art, as an impactful, edifying experience over Rivendell redux.

It won't be easy, granted. You may end up inadvertently writing doctoral theses for the sake of snow whales.

But Weird Tamriel depends on it.

Tam! Rugh!

Altmeri Civil Engineering?
Simple really.

One breeds a sense of authenticity and uniqueness while another breeds a sense of familiarity and reinforces ideas that shouldn't be there to begin with. Like Tolkien elves being anything like TES Mer.

To go into more detail.

Insect wings and such types of architecture will stick out more and will be more memorable. They are completely off most people's radar and there are very few cultures that have such a thing going for them. Even fantasy cultures. Zero major fantasy tropes that I am aware of involve buildings made of insect wings and crystal. With the importance people place on aesthetics, it will make the culture itself feel more authentic and unique. As opposed to Rivendell Redux which sends all the wrong messages about Altmeri culture(see all the threads on X race is Y culture because of Z aesthetic for evidence of such things) and will be just another game/fantasy setting that reuses and adapts a trope that has become tired at this point and all too familiar. It is a creative-less crutch used by artists who do not or cannot come up with their own interesting architectural styles. Rivendell is great, as Rivendell.

Ahem,
Tam! Rugh!

I've been trying not to weigh in on this argument because I don't think anybody should say anything about how someone else should experience an Elder Scrolls game.

But here's my thoughts on things like Snow Whales:

When I read that story I assumed I was reading the folktale of a culture in a place where Snow Whales didn't exist any more. Or perhaps something had been mis-translated. Or perhaps they were a creature invented to explain a natural phenomenon, like Sylphs explain the Wind.

Personally, I didn't even raise an eyebrow at them. It's just a story, a tale being told in-character and, just like in real life, TES characters sometimes write fiction. Sometimes they write nationalist fiction for the purpose of manipulation. Sometimes they're re-telling a story invented by their great-great-grand uncle who was stoned to the gills on mushrooms at the time. And sometimes they're just flat-out wrong.

But let's ignore even that, for a moment. Snow Whales are not in the game (not literally, anyway). They are in one story. A story that arguably isn't even meant to be considered "canon." If one story is worth arguing over, then either we're really that bored, or the TES universe has gotten that good.

"It's boring, and therefore wrong?" That's a discussion to be had among the developers of the game, and in our own heads, and not between us. Who am I to opine about what another person should consider real or unreal in an entirely fictional game?

Except of course in the Amaranth discussion in which case I am a complete hypocrite I suppose. Hmm...

I salute you, lore-master.

I admit to check on the lore forum almost everyday, enjoying the discussions provided here, despite not having the level of knowledge to understand half of them. It is somewhat enlightening, and a bit scary*.

*I don't quite get why you all seem to be so transfixed to the weirdness, and avoiding of clichê like it's a plague of the mundane.

I agree that MK's writing, while entertaining, seems to be taken quite seriously just because it is MK. It feels like those are magic words of the "prophet" of weird Tamriel.

And, about Michael Bay, i'm not sure if this applies to the concept of qua art, because I had never heard the term before, but as explosion-laden as his work is, it has some genius-like qualities that are recognized by some experts of cinematography**. My evidence:

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/48-armageddon

**At least far superior to me.

Snow Whales are necessary because the dragons need suitable prey to hunt. All else is below them.

But everybody knows that Snow Whales simply fly very, very high in the sky.

Here we go again.

While I obviously agree that making the Altmer more like Tolkien's elves is a very bad thing, I want to touch on this notion of "authenticity and uniqueness."

Michael Kirkbride's vision of Tamriel feels authentic because it's well-thought-out, not because of the subject matter itself. A Song of Ice And Fire feels authentic too, even though its subject matter is very familiar. When that much care and thought is put into the fantasy world, it can be a one-to-one recreation of 20th century London or pink bunnymen living on a moon made out of baklava, it's going to feel authentic.

As for being more unique, it only is in the sense that Kirkbride borrows heavily from tropes that we're not used to in a western RPG. If you're familiar with http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111127165418/finalfantasy/images/3/3f/Amano_FFIX.jpg http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100706030450/finalfantasy/images/9/98/Crystal_Tower_Artwork.jpg, http://i.neoseeker.com/ca/white_knight_story_conceptart_Ejcga.jpg http://i.neoseeker.com/ca/white_knight_chronicles_conceptart_oV4ic.jpg http://i.neoseeker.com/ca/white_knight_story_conceptart_eycNk.jpg, or http://www.rpgamer.com/games/other/multi/lastremnant/art/lastremnant5.jpg http://www.rpgamer.com/games/other/multi/lastremnant/art/lastremnant4.jpg http://www.rpgamer.com/games/other/multi/lastremnant/art/lastremnant6.jpg, to name a couple relatively recent examples and one classic one, you already know what Kirkbride sees when he shuts his eyes and thinks about Tamriel.

What makes his use of these influences feel unique and interesting, though, is the context he frames them in. We're used to only seeing JRPG tropes in a land of bright colors, spiky hair, silly outfits, and pre-pubascent heroes. But he weaves them into a conventional Western fantasy environment and combines them with real-world historical cultures and just a touch of sci-fi, and the end result is something that isn't exactly like anything else in fantasy. That's the real reason why Michael Kirkbride's Tamriel is surprising and interesting, not because he's a genius or savant or something. And having grown up on JRPGs first and foremost (Morrowind was my first foray into western RPGs), it still has a deep sense of familiarity to me because I've seen a lot of it before. Which gets back to the point I've made here time and time again, that familiar isn't bad as long as the authors aren't using familiar tropes as a replacement for actually putting time and effort into crafting a believable world.

And that's the real problem with ZOE's vision of Tamriel. They're using Tolkien, Martin, and Salvadore as a crutch, so that rather than writing out, for instance, who the Altmer are, what they want, how they think, or how they live, they put them in Rivendell and allow the viewer's imagination to fill in the details ("Okay, these guys are elves, so they're probably wise, benevolent, nature-loving, powerful, and just a little bit arrogant and snooty").

Using familiar tropes is not, in itself, lazy (Again, the Ayleids are a great example of how to do this the right way). But the way that ZOE (and Bethesda, to a lesser extent) is using them is.

I personally don't care for the BATW argument because, while it provides us with some really entertaining stories, it also encourages us to completely ignore what we know in order to feed the desire for "weirdness." Weird or not, my issue is and has always been consistency. If the weirdness is consistent with what we already know, then I'm more than willing to accept it. If it isn't, though, I'll consider it a fictional fiction and leave it at that. Consistency, sadly, is not exactly objective in TES--we ignore Arena almost completely, but grit our teeth in frustration when something we learned in Morrowind is thrown to the wind, etc. Even this has become a matter of opinion between us. But (in my opinion, at least) this is a more useful measure with which to determine what we should and should not consider "real" in an already-fictional universe.

I have, in the past few weeks, made a lot of posts that browbeat, belittled, insulted, disdained and offended people who posted boring or generic explanations for things that already had good ones.

All of these were well deserved and I'm not sorry, and I still believe every cut and jibe to be true and necessary.

However, on a philosophical level I agree with you Hurdle Curdle and will endeavor to make more complete and detailed explanations of why these people are being foolish in the future. On that level I was mistaken and am sorry.