You do know that the Shivering Isles was a plane of Oblivion, right?

Nah, you probably wouldn't.

True, but ignoring Oblivions mechanics and focusing on the lore from the other games there is a constant suggestion that a soul gem captures the soul of a being rather then it's energy.

A soul can be defined as some sort of connection between something nebulous and the body. When the body is destroyed, there is nothing to keep the soul in place and it returns to where it came from. For a Daedra it means they are remade in Oblivion, a mortal is reborn in Mundus.

So when a soul is trapped, it can be said that the body is replaced with a Soulgem. When the soul is then used for enchantments the item becomes it's new body( as in Feyfolken). Necromancy would pull back parts of the soul that belonged to the bones and force them to animate their old bodies (hence intelligent creatures make better servants).

The nebulous object attached to the other end of the chain can be described as the alligned-AE from the loveleter. Albides didn't clarify but this can be something like a Daedric Prince, the Dreamsleeve or Paradise.

It is possible to change your alligned AE. Battlespire had a few game-over choices where you could join the Daedric side and become a Daedra and Mankars followers were reborn in Paradise. When becoming a god, you become your own AE, Vivec had his provisional house, Mankar had Paradise. I also assume the Daedric princes have their own AE.

It's also possible to follow a dying soul to his afterlife. For example in the Trial of Vivec he hitches a ride the soul of a Khajiit (try to see the image!) into Moonshadow to hit Azura where it hurts. So perhaps one of the alternatives to entering Paradise would have been to capture a follower of Mankar Camoran and ritually execute him.

Okay, Oblivion is technically hell. The Elder Scrolls version of heaven is known as Aetherius.

as an example... *SPOILER................................... when you free the undead blades after they help you get Tiber's armor, they mention "their souls finally being able to reach Aetherius" or something like that.

um, have you read the thread?

Ya... but I'm just restating.

....Noooooooooo. Oblivion ain't hell. You can only make that assertion on a BASIC, BASIC perspective. Aetherius ain't a superficial Paradise. (All) people dont' go ther when they die, just as all people don't go to Oblivion when they die.

Oblivion is a dark extreme, Aetherius is a light extreme, Nirn is the middle earth, in-between both. You can point at the heaven and hell in there if you are really determined to be annoying.

I'll just leave it at that, then.

You could equate Oblivion to Hell in that it's all "evil", and of course (some planes) have physical semblance to the Christian depiction of hell.

But as hell in a functional afterlife sense? No.

There is no Heaven or Hell, only Mu.

Lemuria could kick Mu's ass!

I meant the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) Mu.

An old quote eaten by the forums:

Way to shatter my dreams.

Only if your a blind Imperial. Go and play Morrowind, heck alot of worthship in that courtyard.

Didn't play Shivering Isles. Though I did know. All I said was, the plane of Oblivion in the game (not the expansion) had striking similarities to the classical vision of Judeo-Christian hell, in response to someone saying the devs did all they could do to seperate the real-world religions from the in-game religions. If Dagon's oblivion didn't remind you of the popularised Hell, you must either not know what religion is, or have never played the game.

Being Catholic, I do quite well. And playing the game, the whole game of Oblivion is riddled with hackneyed concepts even outside the planes. So, yeah...wrong buddy.

You only see one plane of Oblivion in the vanilla Oblivion. That plane happened to be home to a god of destruction whose splendid pyrotechnics looked like what medieval writers thought Hell looked like.
The Jewish version of Hell was pretty much a cold sleep where the soul is incapable of doing anything. So no Judeo-Christian Hell, just medieval Catholic.

We don't want to recognize the "popularized" concepts of TES, becuase the last time we all did that... we got Oblivion. Phew... Samsara going here or what?

So, being Catholic and having played the game, you still can't see the aesthetic link between Oblivion and Hell?

And here I thought it was generally recognised that they portrayed Oblivion as the ES Hell in this game to allow players to make easy decision regarding good and evil, or maybe it's just the Mehrunes Dagon's plane just looks like this.


Well, I was only focused on this plane of Oblivion, since it's the only one I've seen and the major one from the game.

WELL! I guess you know better than me, so we'll go with that.

Namu Bethesda butsu, namu Bethesda butsu, namu Bethesda butsu!

Maybe in the next game, the devs'll get their act together and start addressing some of these issues that keep getting brought up.



For the last freaking time, Mehrunes Dagon is not and does not represent evil of any sort. Evil is a concept that doesn't fully apply to the TES universe. His sphere is destruction, so his realm will reflect a world of constant destruction.

Not like any real descision could have been made anyway...

Issa Yojimbo & Ahkmed del Ramesh

You are arguing "looks like" and "is like" against each other. They are two different things. Oblivion isn't a copy of Cartoon Hell but TESIV certainly makes it look like it is.

Either way Albides explained the nuances between Oblivion and Hell, twice so I'm not gonna do that again.

It would seem there is no one gathering places, since unlike our reality, there reality is full of conflicting but existing deities. So it would seem your ways of living determine where you go, based on who you follow. Also from the Dark Brother Hood quests in Oblivion it would seem those killed for Sithis end up in his grasp in his void. So perhaps not all souls are reused (however it is proven to happen as you play as a recycled soul of Nerevar in Morrowind)

Sithis doesn't "exist" in the same sense Boethiah or Mephala exists; also been stated many times on this forum that their "Sithis" is a bootleg Shor. I don't even want to speculate on where they'd go though.

If all souls are recycled through this dreamsleave then does the world of TES have a population limit? how are new souls made...?

How is life made?