Gotta remember when saying the Thalmor would just conquer Skyrim, 1: The main Thalmor force was destroyed at the Imperial City, 2: The people of Hammerfell decided to keep fighting the Thalmor and put a stop to any advancement of the Thalmor while the Empire chickened out and signed the Concordat, and 3: If the Thalmor were overstretched fighting Hammerfell, imagine how bad it would be fighting Skyrim. A successful campaign to fight Skyrim would never work because it's too far away, they would have to go through High Rock (don't know the status of High Rock), go straight through Cyrodiil and over the Jerall(?) mountains or sail in from the North going right around Hammerfell and hoping they (a sailing culture) just let 'em. I dunno, just my 2 cents. Edit: Damn, now this is why I love TES games, so many possibilities and so much to think about.

How do you find out that
Is it in a book in game?

Which is why I refuse to participate in the civil war, (unless i'm playing evil incarnate, then I just depopulate the countryside;) they're -all- idiots.. Except Legate Rikke. She's probably the only one that both A )recognizes the thalmor threat and B ) honestly gives a damn about the people of Skyrim. Neither Tullius nor Ulfric accomplish both.

Its fascinating that so many of you believe the Empire will endure o.O

An assertion which I personally don't jive with because that just doesn't seem to be how the tone of the series is swinging. Since the end of Oblivion Tamriel has gone from bad, to worse, to completely buggered. Let's look at all the canon disasters that happen in Skyrim.


Face it folks, whatever the future of Tamriel will be, its going to be bad

It is unlikely that it will endure in its current state. The Mede dynasty looks pretty well finished for certain, but honestly, who cares about them. They're just the top of a heap of warlords that tore it up after the Elder Council fell apart, they never had any true legitimacy to begin with, and thanks to them and the war, the Empire is practically a client state of the Hegemony.

The reason things look good for the conceptual Empire though, is because there's a new dragonborn, and it seems pretty likely he/she is going to either take charge of things or at least lead the way to a new Empire with the power of Skyrim behind him/her.

So yeah, things aren't exactly pretty, but they don't look to stay that way.

Dragon Break.

While that may be true the Elder Scrolls series as a whole is still a story and thus must operate by the conventions of the medium. My point being, that with all the freedom afforded to you in the creation of your character; that same freedom hamstrings Bethesda's ability to continue your characters influence after the game.


So either Bethesda has to invalidate some of the characters choices in the game (Something they have gone pretty far in the past not to do *cough* dragon break) OR the Dragonborn will ride off into the sunset and never be seen again.

So whatever does happen, we can't count on the dragonborn to do anything but sit on his ass after the game's storyline ends.

Except using the Voice IS part of the Old Ways. If anything it provides Ulfric with more legitimacy.

That's not really how it works. And the Empire wasn't a Thalmor lackey until they lost their power and became one.
Only if we ignore the metaphysical consequences of outlawing Talos worship, if we do account for them it's the empire that's ignorantly playing it out or they wouldn't have banned Talos in the first place.
If you ignore the non-racist Stormcloaks, the fact that the Dunmer themselves are at least as bad, that the so-called ghetto is only a ghetto because they call it one as it doesn't really look like one, that there has just been a major war that was essentially racial in nature,...
the original Reach conflict was thousands of years ago. That's like a bunch of Scots claiming Pictish indepedence.

except the Empire isn't Rome (not that RL Rome was actually all that good), and the Stormcloaks are only the KKK if you focus on one thing and ignore all the rest.



From a lore perspective, I think any option could work. Maybe the Dragonborn is Argonian and helps set up the Reign of the Black Marsh. Or whatever. Should be interesting which ever way they go.

You never heard of The Dragonbreak?! The Underking has been laid to rest, Mannimarco supposedly ascended to godhood. All the possibly outcomes supposedly happened at once.

...Well ok, this isn't what you were talking about in your initial post. But you have to realize that your character has total freedom in every TES game, and that's never "hamstrung" their ability to continue the story. You can tell they definitely weren't very comfortable with the prospect of invalidating player decisions when Daggerfall was released, hence the "Warp in the West" which masked the player's choices by making the whole business suddenly sort itself out because herpderp. But by Skyrim's release there was no attempt at all to retcon player choice, the player did go through the main quest, and Martin did turn into Akatosh and saved everyone from Mehrunes Dagon. You can spend your whole Oblivion game frolicking among the flowers or jumping up and down on tables, and Bethesda doesn't care. You have choice, but there is going to be what "canonically" happened when the next game rolls around, you can be sure. And likewise the character you played will continue to play a role in the story that you didn't choose, like the Nerevarine running off to Akavir. That does seem a bit like riding off into the sunset, but I'm willing to bet something will come of it eventually.

My understanding has been that Talos managed to unite many mythic and magic elements together at the center of a real, prosaic Empire. Most fundamentally, Talos is the soul of the Empire. What the Thalmor failed to accomplish through direct conquest of the Imperial City, they expect to accomplish through the civil war in Skyrim: if the Stormcloaks win, the Empire will be too weak to survive, and Talos will be cut off from his material basis; if the Empire wins, it will destroy its mythical basis. They amount to the same thing: the loss of the link between Talos and Empire that holds together the mortal world. Which side wins is irrelevant.

However, as noted, the Dragonborn seems to be a mythic echo of Talos. And this suggests a different outcome: the Dragonborn leads one side or the other to victory, then uses that as a basis to march to the Imperial City and proclaim a new Empire and a new dynasty. In that case, which side wins in Skyrim is irrelevant.

In the previous episodes of the Elder Scrolls, we have seen the decline of the Empire in the Third Era. But this is the Fourth Era, so perhaps the tide has turned.

The Warp in the West is the "Official" History of the events that occurred in Daggerfall. Given the existence of a "Time Wound" atop the Throat of the World, I think we can probably look forward to something like that to handle the messy details.

I would think that they'd start with 500 years later. That way what you did will matter about as much as thehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of_Wormsand the Reformation. Big at the time, but it's not like the direct outcome is still with us.