So he's outlawed in Skyrim though I'm sure there are 'speakeasy' temples that still worship him.
He's one of my favourite gods on the game for how he helped build the Empire and is basically Jesus with a sword.
But the elves aren't a fan of him.
Thoughts on Talos or Tiber Septim?

He is a hero if you like mortal life.
He is a villain if you think what was before mortal life was better than mortal life.

He's the Vivec of the Empire. I'm sure he made his backroom deals, stabbed and poisoned his share of decent guys, and likely got jiggy with more than one person he shouldn't have. So, he's definitely a little of both.



Philosophically, from an in-universe standpoint, though? I'd rather root for him than against him.

Why do the Mer hate him so much?

Well, on the surface, it's because he's a man that became part of an essentially merish pantheon.

But I, personally, think it's because Talos is Shezzar 2.0, and Shezzar was no friend to the elves.

I read that Talos is the ghost of some spirit that returns to defeat Alduin to prevent the end of the world on a cycle. Is that true?

*cough*

Yes Talos was a very unfortunate mistake.

All hail the 8 divine....as it should be.

According to the game lore, Talos is what keeps Nirn existing. As someone said, whether Talos is good or bad depends on whether you like the fact that Nirn exists or not.

The Thalmor are religious extremists who took over the Summerset Isles in a bloody coup who literally want to destroy the world because they hate physical reality.

While this sounds quite insane (and probably is), you need to keep in mind the Gnostic underpinnings of this sort of belief, which is ever-present in the game lore of TES:

In Gnostic belief, only the perfect, the eternal, the divine is good. All physical reality is a corruption of the perfect divine. Life and mortality are evil. The world in Gnostic lore was not created by the True God, but by something called the Demiurge, a jealous sub-deity that tried to mimic the True God by creating on its own, but created mortals by mistake because the Demiurge wasn't as good as the True God. All forms of physical being are inherently corruption upon the true divine spark that resides within each being. Any sort of physical pleasure or diversion, then, is corrupting, and we should live purely for the purpose of purifying our souls to be reunited with the divine when we can finally escape our mortality.

In the Thalmor belief, Lorkhan was pure evil for creating the world and "corrupting" them by letting them become living creatures. They want to destroy the world so that they can go back to being nothing but pure ephemeral souls. To do this, they have to destroy Talos, who holds the world together.

Everyone started liking Talos just because the Elves banned liking him. It's like Hipsters. In TES.

To be honest, I didn't really know all that much about what Talos actually did until I was forced to ask the question about why the Thalmor would want to destroy him. Some things you just don't appreciate until it's about to be taken away... like the continued existence of your planet.

It's not just being contrarian to want to continue living.

The Thalmor is all for living. Forever.

Actually, they are quite against living. At least, anything like life as we would perceive it.

In a manner of speaking, they want to do to all of existence what the dwemer did to themselves - remove themselves entirely from time. Without change, there is nothing like life. There is no learning, no growth, no development.

And that's the point, they see any form of growth as "corruption of their divine spark". They see individuality as a corruption of the One True Original Being, and as such, it's time to Borg you all into being Assimilated. Thought and feeling are corruption, we must be unified and unchanging and unfeeling.

They're not for going back to the pre-pre-existence stage, as far as I know. They're for going back to the first brush of anu and padomay. They're moving up a few subgradients, not all of the subgradients. They're leaving a world made out of the corpses of their ancestors.

Actually, yes, that's the whole point - they are trying to undo being created and having individuality, because that is seen by them as a corruption of their divine origin point. Their belief is that any existence or sentience at all is profanity of their divine essence, and that they are trying to return to their being before Sithis ever "corrupted" Anuriel by coming into contact. That's exactly why Anuriel is their highest deity-like-thing, and Sithis is the wellspring of all evil to their philosophy.

Bottom line: They don't want to exist, much less be sentient, because existence itself is corruption of their pre-existence.

He is a hero depending on how you value experience.

He helped engender a finite life of physical possiblity.

A villain because he has helped inhibit an infinite experience of all possibilities.

I'm drunk, and would like to be a Mer.

Some real people genuinely want to borg it up (minus the weird cubes and omnicidal wars). The end of life as we know it is just the beginning of new life.

Well that's boring.

There is no evidence of that.

No evidence of what? He had an affair with Barenziah and made her have an abortion to secure his line of succession and used the soul of his buddy to power the Numidium. He's done his fair share of shady things.

Talos sold the Bretons into forced slavery, summarily executed his prisoners, and demoralized the Nords to the point where they joined his army as the lowest of troops. The man is bad news for Mer, but also bad news for men.

Bad news for his adversaries maybe, man and mer, but overall he is the glue that holds the world together. So overall, he's good news for everyone who enjoys living under a centralized, generally freethinking continental goverment that enforces law and order.

You're basically saying, then, that he's good for freethinkers, as long as those freethinkers think like him, right?

Exactly!

Aside from his mythic properties that literally keep the world from being destroyed by those like the Thalmor.

Pshh... thinking it's bad that the world be destroyed. It's your imperial dogmatism that refuses freethinkers like the Thalmor from positing that the destruction of the world is good. Since when has the world been any good, anyways? What's there to like about the present kalpa?