I'm sure a book from a group of Akaviri warriors that devoted themselves to slaying dragons has no bias.

I believe Parth agrees with their assesment

As far as I know you're not the last or the only Dragonborn, you're just the guy/girl who got shafted cleaning up the mess.
So even if you die and Parth does crazy evil and tries to enslave everyone another dragonborn will be around eventually to off him.
I say spare him and leave some for the next dragonborn to absorb some of them delicious dragon souls.

And I'm sure they slew everyone -including the Dragons who actually sided with the Nords during the Dragon War. Makes me wonder how Paarthurnax managed to get away...

Who knows, maybe Talos/Tiber Septim talked with him during his time with the Greybeards, decided to leave him in peace and changed the Dragonguard's primary mission.

"did you ?"

Nope, we's buds.

One thing I don't care for is whether or not Tiber Septim didn't mind him. I mean, the whole issue of that guy's life is confusing, convoluted, and contradictory that I'm at the point where I don't care anything about him. The developers have thrown too many damn varying stories about him that it's pointless to talk about him. In some cases, he sounds noble, in others he's a backstabbing jerk.

Indeed, how player character-like

I agree that the lore is becoming convoluted on a lot of subjects.What can you do though?

Well, I suppose it's rather like trying to stitch history together IRL - in a country which for instance had no written history for much of the time since its "birth" as a nation not to mention so many wars, famines, and other disasters over thousands of years that "history" is a hash of epic proportions. In a situation like that, word-of-mouth/storytellers/bards etc. are pretty much THE history - and one has to only play the "telephone game" once to realize how easy it is to get things not just wrong, but completely backwards.

It's actually pretty compellingly "real" - the fact that no one really knows who Tiber Septim was, and what he did. I prefer that to a detailed exposition of his life personally.

I like it too, but it's just funny that this game specifically is also forcing you/me to make some judgements on Talos (especially with the Civil War stuff). Who IS Talos, that I could even judge anything about it??

I'd prefer to avoid it.

But.. then again, people (NPC Nords) don't deserve to be persecuted for their religion, no matter who Tiber Septim was. So I guess I don't really have to address the bigger issue. Just that.

Devil's advocate hat here: why do people in Skyrim not deserve to be persecuted for a religious choice? This isn't the real world. It's not a metaphor for anything we deal with on a daily basis IRL....

In Tamriel, it's perfectly logical that EVERY group will be persecuted for something by someone.

Well, I don't see anything particularly aggressive/harmful about Talos belief. Just defensive.

Now.. if they were rabidly defending the honor of Ysgramor or something, then I'd really not care. It seems like he represents nothing except badass Elf-Killing. Talos, despite all the varying stories, seemed to work with many types of people. Mages, Nords, Dunmer, Altmer, etc..

But that's your current-day self talking. Tamriel is another type of world entirely. Otherwise, we wouldn't all be out there killing, stealing, and doing Daedric quests.... And we don't KNOW what Tiber Septim really did - all we have is a bunch of books, many of which are completely contradictory and most all of which are written in the vaguest manner possible.

Unless Beth decides to write THE DEFINITIVE GAME - in which we all come to know Tiber Septim.... who he was to begin with (yeah - he was Talos of Atmora.... but WHO WAS THAT?) we'll still be stumbling around never really knowing....

And knowing Beth.... even if they DID write the Tiber Septim game, we'd still never really know.

I

I'm not even sure he was Talos of Atmora. Apparently, he's also from High Rock. He gets around.

But yeah, I see your point.

And that my friend is pretty much the bottom line. What Beth has done to a huge degree with all these games is force us to all look at our own views of things - in regard to a whole other world.... a world which isn't like THIS world ever was (oh, it's "medieval" in some aspects, but it's not really like Medieval Earth at all) but does have enough congruences with our own world and its various intricacies that we feel comfortable "living" in Tamriel.... until something drastic happens. And the one thing Beth does to absolutely MARVELOUS degree is never really push that "jerk me into RL" switch - because THAT would be the point at which some of us (maybe MANY of us) would quit playing.

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE TES. I have done since Arena.... BECAUSE the franchise does a pretty damn good job of being as much to everyone as it can, while still remaining true to itself.

TES - may it live long and prosper mightily. I hope to be playing TES X on literally my deathbed.

He agrees in so much as he says it's in a dragon's nature to dominate, hence why he says they're right to have misgivings about him. But if he was killing humans during a time when dragon hunters were trying to exterminate dragons, I really can't call that a crime since I don't know the circumstances of the situation.

I think it's likely that akaviri dragon hunters were around the same time as dragon wars. Even the tablets say men tried to revolt occassionally, only to be knocked down. I'm sure a lot of races did that.. In the case of the Akaviri, they come from the same land as dragons. Dragons are an Akaviri race, more or less. Surely the people who had the most exposure to them would have been fighting. Maybe they're not the Blades or Dragonguard, but something like it in it's infancy.

Another thing is, Arngier has an intense anger at the idea of Blades. He calls them akaviri barbarians or something.. despite Delphine and Esbern not even being Akaviri per se. He somehow knows more about them than the typical "protectors of the emperor" gig they had in Oblivion. There's probably dragon related history he's leaving out (or to be expounded on later).

Hi there!

Really?
Somehow I felt undully pressured to Kill Parthurnax, in the sense I got the feeling the MQ would not advance or advance into a less interesting branch had I not killed him. How strangely easy tit was o kill him and Alduin, in what can only be described as the most anticlimatic moments in the MQ thus far.

I see no valid reason to kill him, to be honest. He repented and his contrition is good enough for me.

Just my 2 cents, anyway.

Hell no,him and Odahviing are my partners,The Blades can go rot in the Void for all I care.

I didn't kill him because the Blades were kinda jerks to me after everything I did. They told that I "HAD" to kill him and they would not accept me until I did. So I walked.

Okay, so let's extend this metaphor.

Stalin was a bad man, a tyrant, a mass-murderer. However, he also was instrumental in defeating Hitler, once the alliance between the two had been broken. Let's say, for the sake of this metaphor, Hitler and Stalin also genetically modified themselves to be super human killing machines.

So let's say it's now the year 2012, and super-Hitler is back, and is resurrecting dead nazi super-soldiers. You travel to the top of a mountain where an order of monks guide you towards their leader, who they say can help you, and at the top of the mountain you find super-Stalin sitting there. He promises to help you find a weapon that can finally kill super-Hitler, and does. However, after you find this weapon, a group of nazi-hunters you've also been working with comes and tells you about all of Stalin's crimes, how he had participated in mass-murder on par with Hitler himself, and ask you (the only person who can kill super-soldiers without them coming back to life) to kill him.

Do you do it?

Now consider that once you've finally beaten super-Hitler, super-Stalin intends to take command of all the resurrected super-soldiers. NOW do you think it's a good idea to kill him? Consider that super-Stalin and his super-soldiers will live forever, while you, the only person capable of killing them, will die of old age, and once you are gone nothing can stop them. Now do you see why the nazi-hunters want you to take care of him so bad?

Yet at the same time, the Prime Minister of the UK is trying to secede from the EU because the EU President signed a treaty with the recently succeeded French banning the worship of Jesus while allowing French soldiers into Britain to enforce the ban. The same guys who think leaving Stalin alive with an army of super-soldiers is a great idea think that this Prime Minister is a racist power hungry maniac who should be shot. MAKES PERFECT SENSE.

all i see is a dragon that helps me and gives me the ultimate anti-dragon shout which easily allows me to kill him.

and... on the other side i see delphine.. annoying me all the time and acts like my boss, even though i do all the work she would never be able to do.

i would kill parth if this means i'm allowed to kill her. would be worth it. but why kill someone useful and let this annoying granny annoy me forever

The Blades had their eyes on Paarthurnax for centuries, but he was under the protection of the Greybeards and the Tamrielic Emperors. Also, the old Grandmasters of the order, didn't want a direct confrontation with the Greybeards upon the subject and there was always the prophecy of Alduin's return.

With Alduin been sent back to Akatosh for "rehabilitation", Paarthurnax is no longer needed. The Blades have no obligation to answer to any emperor, since he signed the White-Gold Concordat which disbanded their order -among other things- and gave the Thalmor the impunity to hunt them down in their own land. The Greybeards won't raise a finger to actively defend their mentor so, there's no better time to take him out.

And the best part: the Greybeards won't be in position to blame the Blades for Paarthunax's death. In the end, all they did was to tell the Dragonborn to kill him. This doesn't mean he absolutely had to do it. Did he?

I'll never understand this Delphine hatred. So what if she's bossy? She and Esbern were the only mortals with the means and motivation to stop the end of the world. If she wasn't telling the Dragonborn what to do, he/she would be running around confused or worse, sitting up at high Hrothgar waiting for the world to end. Is it really unreasonable to assume that Delphine's knowledge and skills make her better fit at running the show than the Dragonborn?

Me either. She's got an attitude and paranoid levels that will probably develop into something worse, but she's not exactly villain-like either. I can think of many other characters that genuinely antagonistic. Njada Stonearm. Maven Black Briar. Delphine even apologizes for her mistrust and all that. "Old habits.. y'know." If she was a realistic character, she'd be even worse. She's basically a shellshocked war veteran. One of my friend's dads was like that. He was mean and tormented. And ended up killing himself eventually.. but not without causing more drama than Delphine ever does.