No, he wasn't arguing semantics. Yours was a null point and he was demonstrating why.

The article Cosmology? With the transparent moons?

I never actually realized whether there was a bug or not; maybe my computer graphics were just that sloppy xD
But for the article itself, i'd call it part of the "expanded universe" if anything. Non-canon if I'm feeling blunt.

It's not bad, and it's certainly interesting.

As with any piece of lore that conflicts with representation in a videogame, it's ambiguous. The Moons since Morrowind have been reproductions of real-world heavenly bodies and act accordingly.


We get so riled up about things being called non-canon because canon is an utter bloody hatchet job when you apply it to TES.

There is enormous cross-fertilization between lore in the game and lore out of it. You need Cosmology to explain a lot of clearly canon things, and removing Cosmology from the equation will cause some important concepts to be orphaned. Also, once you've read it, you can't un-read it, and there's nothing to replace it with. Look at the map of the universe posted earlier in the thread. It's from Cosmology. You can't just pretend like it's the first time you've come across that conception of the universe.

I was going to edit that note earlier, and also mention that debacle from a bunch of threads ago. Decided not to

What I was going to add?
That being in-game or not doesn't matter, concerning Cosmology and any other dev post. The ideas are there, they smooth out things. More flesh, more consistency. TES makes more sense bc the makers take their time to hammer any odd nail.

I always call the lore a metagame, what with all the "patches" the devs bring,
what with all the players trying to explore any imbalance and plothole that seems to appear.
Sticking only to information provided-hardcopied-officially-signed-in-sealed-envelope-game is very ...
what's the word i'm looking for?
Bad.
Whatever you said, I agree with it. I've run out of any eloquence :<

So yea, I take a lot of posts to heart. And with salt. Cosmology? I love it.
Jungle-Talos-Gondor Cyrodiil? People use it like a riposte

---------
On an odd note, just to nitpick (am i jerk?)
I can't pretend like it's the first time I've come across that conception of the universe
i'm confused

My post wasn't really directed at yours, to be honest.

For people like me, the in-game map of the universe earlier in the thread is proof that we were right to take the Cosmology seriously, because of the parallels.

But there are plenty of [NUMINIT] who would treat the map in Skyrim as completely new information, and deny any mutual reinforcement between two pieces of information coming from the same minds.

They have. It came up "gods exist." You can come across tons and tons of guys doing experiments verifying this in-game, and there's far more in the background, and implied by the background. A guy made a small-scale test to try to verify his hypothesis about the disappearance of the dwarves. I watched it happen, and the results seem to verify the consensus we've reached here. We've also been on a space station (Battlespire) and banished Mehrunes Dagon twice. Daedra summoning has totally been broken down into an exact science, and is repeatable by anyone.

Now, I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but what if... What if space in the TES universe is similar to ours? :disguise:

Seriously though, I'm still wondering if it could be similar. Not saying anything silly like the gods don't exist and there aren't holes to Aetherius there, as there's obviously evidence for both of that. What I'm thinking is, maybe there's both holes and stars, and Oblivion and Aetherius are both their own separate planes existing on different levels than Nirn (much like any heaven or hell would be in the real world). Couldn't it simply be that those space travellers went into the portals, which are much closer than the stars, and then extrapolated the stars further away were also portals to Aetherius?

The planets can still be gods/god planes too, causing the distortion, and maybe at night there are also bits of Oblivion showing through in the night sky, but these could all just be passive portals.

Isn't that needlessly complicated? I'm not sure I even understand it.

Magic comes from Aetherius. This is known because we have been there. Magic comes from the stars, which is also known because the Ayleids developed scientific methods of harvesting it. It can't be ordinary solar radiation, and it would be just bizarre if there were balls of gas identical to the stars that were just there.


That's not in doubt. Nirn is orbited by planets. That they are the corpses of the Eight is academic to the average person.


The Oblivion visible in the night sky looks like distant galaxies in the real world. So there's room for a universe there.

I don't know that I'd call it needlessly complicated, though it is a bit more complex. What I'm saying is that the nearby points in space around Nirn are all holes to Aetherius, it's just the far-out stuff that's stars as we know them. What I'm thinking is that the gods of the TES universe could be more like 'local' gods, or maybe they're the only gods and Nirn was made where it was simply by choice and that's why they're all around there.


I wasn't calling the planets into doubt, just trying to establish them in my explanation. I wasn't 100% on what they are, but I still think they fit in fine as corpses. I think the main thing I'm confused about is how Oblivion is in the sky and not it's own plane; if both Oblivion and Nirn are in the same space, how can a Daedric Prince be banned from Nirn? Couldn't they, instead of making portals as such, just build their own spaceship and fly over?

The key difference of the cosmology of the Elder Scrolls versus the cosmology of real life is this:

On Earth, people's beliefs of how our universe is structured has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of it. Our beliefs regarding the universe are a construct of what we can observe.

Nirn takes the amalgamations of the various wild beliefs from the ancient past that people had, and then adds a presupposition to them, that turns the whole thing upside-down. What if those beliefs--what if beliefs in general--actually had a reality warping effect? What if the beliefs of not just the gods and greater powers but the collective beliefs of the inhabitants of Nirn shaped the cosmos, rather than the cosmos shaping their beliefs?

On Nirn, belief-is-power.

Belief is only as powerful as the body of the god it's shaping is dead.

Believing that Sheogorath is a nice, dapper gentlemen who really only wants to give you scones will not make it so (aside from the fact he may very well take it up as a hobby, just to mess with people). Believing that the stars are all balls of gas will not make it so. Believing that there might be a portion of the Dragon God that actually likes humans and wants their Empire to last CAN make it so, but only after a buttload of work, a few Dragon Breaks, and 1008 non-linear years of hellish chaos/Magna Ge party-time.

I still have no idea where people are getting the idea that, as somebody put it, TES is exactly the same thing as Mage: The Ascension.

Because fact eludes us in a fantasy world... I'll er with the fantastic explanations.