Most people try not to do that, but a lot of the lore is meant to be interpreted on your own, so when sharing it it sounds very...metaphysical. Also a few devs have Accounts and just ty to mess with people with confusing posts.

Well ain't that a stinker. As if I'm not already confused enough.

its frequented almost entirely by people who really know their thing, some of whom dont post here anymore. besides being a place to get answers to more difficult questions. its also a good place to see how lore is made or decided upon. its also a lot less moderated, so we have some nice debates and heated discussions (not to everyones taste i suppose, but i enjoy the easy going atmosphere). basically, i'd say that its a more mature(less hand holding), intellectually driven forum.

and yes, we do speak english


not quite. when devs post its usually to reveal information about lore, or to drive a discussion about possible lore. yes, the posts look confusing at first. grab a dictionary and do a couple TIL searches, and pretty soon they start to make sense. it depends more on critical reading than it does on fact recollection.

I still don't get what jackfrost meant when he said this: "They[Psijics] embroider large, family trees on special order, and they want to keep their Old Ways (code for knitting technique) secret, hence the very mysterious island... What's not enticing about that?"

I can't tell if it's enticing or not because I can't understand what he's saying. Do you guys?

Aldmer were the proto-Elf. They fractured philosophically and racially and became all of the different elves you see today. Generally speaking, all elves philosophically want to go back to when they were like the Et'ada. The dwarves took it a step further (or debatably tried) by doing their "Numidium BS." Most importantly for our benefit here, the Altmer (note the letter difference) want to essentially become Aldmer again. Because if they were Aldmer, then they would much more easily be able to go backwards (or at least that's how I understand their viewpoint here). So, among others, through holding on to tradition, careful and measured breeding, and philosophically being like Aldmer, the High Elves can theoretically return to that state. The Psijics, for our purposes, practice these old ways of acting so that they eventually become indistinguishable from Aldmer.

You can ignore the embroidery and knitting. For the most part, it was a light-hearted metaphor that condenses what I said above into a few words.

Of course though, the chimer/dunmer broke away from that line of thinking with their exodus, and the lessons from the Tribunal, namely Vivec.

Not sure what the heck is up with the bosmer though, but I get the feeling from the aldmeri myth, that in the eyes of the altmer they're tainted because they took mannish wives.

Not sure what the heck is up with the bosmer though, but I get the feeling from the aldmeri myth, that in the eyes of the altmer they're tainted because they took mannish wives.

In my opnion it's a twofold problem, and the 'mannish wives' aspect is more pretext than substance

- first the're the bosmer way of life. Tribes of cannibal hunters aren't exactly something you're proud to be related to. Think of that hilbilly cousin you'd rather not having coming in town asking about you.
- there's also a philosophical angle. Yffre seems to be heavily involved with Mundus, and by following his way, the bosmers have trapped themselves amongst the degeneration form the Divine that's Nirn. And enjoy it. Which is about the opposite of altmer beliefs and worldview. From their obsession with Towers an their reality-molding effect, it seems the aldmers and their altmers sucesssors want to reshape the world to fit themselves, were the bosmers seems to have chosen to shape themselves to fit the world.

No wonder the altmers find the bosmer 'tainted'...

Thanks for that.

But why? Why do High Elves want to go back to being the first aldmer? That's like me wanting to go back to the state of being an Australopithecus afarensis. Or I guess even further to when humans weren't even bodies, but fish in the sea, or multi-celled organisms.

Okay, High Elves want to transcend to when they were the first mer on the planet. The reason you're giving is because it would be much easier for them to go "backwards". That I don't get. Go backwards? In what, time? This still isn't making sense. I see no reason why they'd want to give up four thousand years of advancement through the ages to go back to being what they were right after the Merethic Era (although they were sophisticated right from the start, according to PGE).
Why would I want to go back to the caveman days? I'd die within a few weeks from not being able to find a McDonalds or either get eaten and I'd go insane from not having my computer. lol

You're getting it wrong : what the altmers are aiming for is not going back to something like cro-magnon or worse. In elven myths and culture, they're not evolved into their current condition but rather devolved from their former condition of immortal, divine beings when Lorkhan created Nirn and trapped their ancestors there. That divine, immortal condition is what they're aiming for by getting back, on the notion that 'our ancestors were better than us, we want to become like them'. They don't want to get back to the time they had to learn from scratch how to live on Nirn, but rather before Nirn was created in the first place.

Wether that opinion is right or wrong can't be told for sure. Most men (as opposed to elves) myth think they're wrong and that the way to 'something better' is forward.

Vivec also agrees with men about which way to sway too. Heck, he even outright says they have been wrong since the beginning.

As for Tes96, I'm going to attempt to use a real world mythology from ancient times to try and explain a bit of what's going on in the merish mind. In ancient Greece, they believed everything was at first chaos, then from chaos was born the sky and earth. From the union of the sky and earth came the titans. From the titans came the gods. And from the gods, the heros. From the heros, normal humans. It's highly abridged, but as you can see, for each new generation, they became a gradient lower. From being everything, to two halves of everything, to being being an individual thing, to being a sphere of influence of each thing, to the mortal children of the spheres of influence, to unimportant nobodies. To the elves, they see themselves as the 'normal humans.' What they're trying to do is go from 'normal human' to 'titan.' The dwemer tried to accomplish this by becoming the Numidium.

In TES, it's like the Godhead-->Anu/Padomay-->Anueil/Sithis-->Et'Ada=Aedra/Daedra/Magna Ge-->mortals. The elves want to move from mortals to Et'Ada, when there was no Nirn, Lorkhan didn't 'trick' the aedra to sacrifice their power, etc, etc.

ignore

This just gets worse and worse. Now I have to go learn what the Towers are to understand the Psijics. And the Towers are so "not-clear" to understand. Everything related to them is practically metaphysical and I'm a literal thinker. So imagine how difficult it is for me to grasp their meaning and concept.

And to HellMouth: What would they do once they were "titans" or spirits like the et"ada? I recall somewhere saying that the daedra envied the mortals for emotions and experiences they could have that the et'ada could not. Yeah, sure it'd be nice to not age or be prone to disease and all that crap, but why become a "titan"? Explain what you would do once you became a "titan". Reminds me of when Peter Griffin became president of the tobacco company and said 'Well I'd better get busy' and so he starts sharpening pencils. lol Really, what are you gonna do once you're a "titan" or whatever the TES equivalent is?

The elves (namely altmer) don't want to be the 'unimportant humans', they want to be powerful the 'titans', like they believed themselves to be in ages past. I only used Greek Mythology as an anology.

So, a very simplified version would be like this (Greek Myth):
Titan --> unimportant human
What they're attempting to do is
unimportant human --> titan

in the TES setting, things went like this:
Et'Ada --> mortal
What they're attempting to do is
mortal --> Et'Ada

Part of their desire to go backwards is a "grass is greener on the other side of the street" thing, and part of it is some deep-seated racial hatred for Lorkhan creating the world.

And in order to understand the high-level (broad concepts) goal of the Psijic Order/Elfendom, you do not need to understand the Towers. If you want to talk about how they accomplished the goal, then yes, you do.