Good vs Evil, does it exist in the Elder Scrolls? : Othor Games

» Wed Apr 17, 2013 5:27 am

Does the dichotomy of Good and Evil exist in the series?

Taken from another thread to be moved here:

Good and evil are subjective terms. From his point of view, heroes are very evil

Aye, an antagonist is not always necessarily evil. As the term suggests they simply have an agenda that is contrary to the protagonist (ie: you) and you inherently are supposed to dislike them for that. Their morality might also be contrary to yours which you assign them the term "evil" when in fact they may feel they are right and good and you are the evil one, as much as that might seem insane to you.

I'm not going to boil this down to philosophical subjective terms. In the Elder Scrolls setting, he is evil, heroes are good. In addition, what's to say he doesn't consider and know himself to be evil but revel in the fact that he is, and as such, still see heroes as good?

In Elder Scrolls terms, there is no good or evil. It's all relative. There are creators and destroyers, but neither are good or evil. TES is never that black and white.

That being said ZOS seem to be presenting it in a more good vs evil sense which I'm not really happy about.

» Wed Apr 17, 2013 1:45 am

I don't think so. Just different shades of grey IMO.

The thing thats always appealed to me in the TES series is that nothing is really ever black and white. You can save the world but can do so while being a murderous psychopath, or do so with apathy and just wander the world at your leisure. Characters you encounter have their own motivations and views on the world and hardly ever fall into some nice neat category of good or evil some feel the need to place things in.

» Wed Apr 17, 2013 9:28 am

no there isnt ... ppl think high elves are evil and nords are good ... i mean cmon even nords did bad things in the past

probably all if the 9 races did
so yeah only perspectives no good or evil

» Tue Apr 16, 2013 7:23 pm

It's like in the real world.

Typically, you have a handful of unambiguously evil (and good) people, the rest are just shades of grey.

Potema was unambiguously evil as far as we can tell, for instance. As far as we can tell, Alessia was unambiguously good (considering her slave revolt and actually allowing some of the newly-fragmented Ayleid city-states to join her Empire.)

Good and Evil does exist, just as it does in the real world, but rarely is one displayed without some of the characteristics of the other.

» Tue Apr 16, 2013 11:45 pm

The core conflict, the central dichotomy of TES lore is not Good vs Evil, it's Change vs Stasis, with no moral qualities applied to either. There are some individuals who are going to seem unambiguously good or evil when viewed through a modern moral lense, yes, but that's not the central issue at hand here. There's no evil dragon kidnapping the fair maiden, nor any rescuing knight. There's a long, long history of philosophical conflict over an open-ended question posed by the deaths of the Aedra at Convention. Is it better to transcend or regress from the Mundus and mortal death?

It's worth noting that the heroic ideal within the TES mythos is the silver-tongued traitor, rather than any moral paragon. All the greatest heroes were liars, or murderers, bastards and betrayers, from the start to the end without exception. Pelinal killed Ayleid and Nede indiscriminately when his madness overtook him - Tiber slit Emperor Zero's throat and then betrayed his closest friends, and in doing so became the most important deity in the mythos. Vehk betrayed the closest friend he'd ever had and stole godhood with a lie, then rewrote history as it served him.

The Heroes aren't the good guys in TES. They're just the ones who win.

» Wed Apr 17, 2013 9:07 am

I totally agree with Solitha Nev.

Good and evil are not concepts in TES. Everything is morally ambiguous the way it is in real life (IMO.) There is an argument to be made for both sides.

» Wed Apr 17, 2013 12:03 am

One addendum to my post: Arguably the greatest Hero really WAS a pretty awesome person overall, as someone pointed out somewhere in the Lore forum. Alessia, even in a schizophrenic universe that deifies [AYEM]holery and being a [SEHT]head, managed to be pretty much the perfect hero.

Well, I mean, she took a literal winged bull as consort, but *cough* other than that. And that's pretty much totally par the course for mythic heroes that far back in history anyway, IRL.

» Wed Apr 17, 2013 5:54 am

I don't know....

We don't know enough about Alessia to judge her morality. I mean, aside from taking a bull as a consort, she also accepted the aid of an extremely violent genocidal mad-man.