Okay, so we've got three factions, and within these factions three primary races. Maybe I'm trying too hard to find a connection, but these setups are just begging for rebel-king-witness relationships. Do you think we'll be seeing that on some level, in ways the developers intend?

I hope not. The concept is being abused.

The imagery might be there but I don't think it will extend beyond that. Anytime there is a group of three, people are eager to point it out.

No. Enantiomorph is more than just a King-Rebel-Observer relationship. The King has to be overthrown by the Rebel, with the Observer striking the killing blow. The most important part is that it has to create something. Besides, this isn't the kind of thing three factions could pull off. One faction would have to be ruling, the other trying to overthrow them, and the Observer would have to kill the ruling faction. It doesn't work on that broad a scale.

To be fair, all of it is done by fans. I'm hesitant to call any of the "Enantiomorphs" in Skyrim legitimate and/or deliberate. Even LDB-Miraak-Mora, which makes the most sense in the larger scheme of things, is suspicious.

Indeed its getting rather old now.

I'm inclined to think that a lot of the examples that people might bring up (Paarthunax, Alduin, LDB. Herma, Miraak, LDB. Sheogorath, Jyg, CoC. et cetera...) are merely the result of how quests and stories tend to be constructed in TES. With the player, the quest giver, and the antagonist. If the concept is being abused, I'd suggest that it is the fans that abuse it.

Of course, you get examples which don't involve a player character but you can see what I'm getting at, I hope.

Which is pretty well true, since the Enantiomorph is, to begin with, riffing on how quests in video games are constructed.

The three-faction situation is directly related to their PvP designs. As far as I know, the players are being kept out of the politics and dealings of the alliances they choose not to join; therefore, having an Enantiomorphic event requiring all three factions would be very hard to pull off. Again, that's a guess on my part, but it seems logical to me.

Also, yes, as others have pointed out, there has been a huge increase in interest in the Enantiomorph lately, and a lot of it does not appear to be legitimate. I agree with Toesock that at least some of it is deliberate on the devs' part: They've discovered that we, the fans, get really, really excited when three people try to kill each other at once. Whether or not they have any lore ideas revolving around these "pseudo-Enantiomorphs," on the other hand, is another question, and hopefully the answer is "no." I also agree, however, that once the fans found some of these Enantiomorphs that appear to be more deliberate, they started seeing them everywhere--which, as far as I'm concerned, is probably a mistake, as it encourages the devs to throw another boatload into the next game.

And since Moon Matrix is absolutely right, if the devs aren't responsible for this mess, they'll have to be pretty damn inventive in order to avoid it in future, if they choose to do so.

That is called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or the Illusion of False Frequency.

Yeah, the three headed ouroboros at least indicates that the TESO devs have a solid idea of Lore symbology, even if they don't totally get the meaning behind it. The latest release of the Imperial Edition with Tharn's updated Pocket Guide to the Empire further emphasizes that they get the importance of the Lore to the series. There's just a lot of attempted reassuring that they know what they're doing in that regard across the board.

You'd think with our desire to read Loreishness and metaphysics into everything devs do, that they'd be more successful in that regard.

You cannot please the unpleaseable.

I would gasp in disbelief about the "new" PGE, except that I remember reading about that somewhere else. Thankfully, it's not actually titled "Pocket Guide to the Empire," and while I'm sure it's a homage to the previous games' PGEs, the devs at least aren't going to pretend that it's meant to be part of the same series that was specifically begun for the sake of Septim propaganda.

Nonetheless, the fact that Tiber published his Guide specifically because he wanted to mark the end of the Interregnum and the beginning of a new era means that his PGE was meant to be special. Therefore, seeing an older version suddenly pop up in the lore is troublesome simply because it seems to devalue the PGE that we already know. I don't know if that's a legitimate complaint, because I suppose there's nothing preventing previous rulers from pulling the same stunt, but I just feel like the importance of Tiber's rise to power was well-represented by his use of a new propaganda tool. I don't think I'm making my real worries very clear here (because they're mostly a jumble in my own head), and they're probably not that awfully important in the long run anyway, but something about this seems off.

Regardless, as I said, it could be worse. There are a lot of other problems I have with TESO, so this one thing (which is only a problem from a certain point of view, I admit) is not a huge disruption to me.

This is honestly just plain dumb. Do you really think that Tiber was the first to have the idea to publish a book about Tamriel? That's like saying that the publication of Pliny's Historia undermines the Encyclopedia Britanica. A game that covers all of Tamriel (to an extent), and takes place in a time period not previously explored, is the perfect occasion to release another guide to Tamriel. Frankly, between that and how many times fans have asked for it, I would have been surprised had they not included one.

You can complain about the content of it later when it is made available online, but saying "how dare they try and give us a whole book of new lore gosh darn it" goes against the whole point of this forum.

You have absolutely no proof of this. Can you cite to me how you know devs are just abusing the lore concepts? I get that you don't like Skyrim, but there is little evidence to go around acting like the devs only half understand their own lore and are just misusing concepts to hook fans.

It is true that plenty of the "enantiomorphs" out there are false, but that doesn't mean they all are. That's as group-thinky as the crowd that sees Enantiomorphs everywhere.

Agreed.

How about until further notice, the only enantiomorphs are the actual... enantiomorphs. Lorkhan/Magnus/Aka, Wulfharth/Hjalti/Arctus, and if I remember right, Nerevar/Alandro Sul/Someone else, Vehk I think, I forget. The whole Sul as Witness thing is really hazy in memory at this point.

Also really liked the Ulfric Stormcrown/DB/Tullius thing, just their names seem convincing, but I'd be willing to surrender that one in the interests of false enantiomorph unilateral disarmament.

Bingo.

Please note, I said myself that I wasn't sure exactly why I didn't like the idea, and was willing to accept that it wasn't as bad as my gut feeling seemed to indicate. Is there a reason that you felt the need to take this one sentence, ignore the rest of my post (including the very next sentence, which begins, "I don't know if that's a legitimate complaint"), and try to bash me over the head with it? A simple "I don't agree, and here's why" would have sufficed.

I'm not sure which part of my post you're referring to. Is it the bit where I said that the devs have deliberately started to throw things at us in threes to see us jump up and down like kids, the part where I said that fans have started to see them everywhere regardless of their legitimacy after seeing the first few, or the part where I agreed that the entire idea is based off of standard quest design principles? For the record, the first two are my opinions, and I apologize for not being more careful with my wording. The last one is a pet theory of mine, but the point of my post was to say that the devs will find it difficult in future to avoid providing quests that look like Enantiomorphs to fans simply because, whether or not I'm right to say that Enantiomorphs are lampshade hangings of standard quest design, the fact remains that the two are very similar, and thus devs will have to find a new form of quest design entirely if they want to completely prevent fans from seeing Enantiomorphs.