PSA: This is a video game blog. This is about a video game and the sociopolitical structure in said game. If you are here from truthstreamedia would you can kindly get the fock out of my gaming blog right now. It has nothing to do with any real live governments and everything to do with my opinions on a plot point within a game I enjoy playing. Thank you. – Zen
#1 reason why you shouldn’t side with the Stormcloaks: Ulfric Stormcloak is a brainwashed sleeper agent for the Thalmor.
No. Seriously. It says this in the game. If you play through the main quest and go to the Thalmor Embassy, there are several dossiers you can pick up in the torture chamber, one about Ulfric. If you lost or sold those on your play throughs of Skyrim without reading them like I did at first, go create a new character and go through the quest, and read it this time. Also, pay attention to the Thalmor Embassy and the fact that it has a torture chamber. Which implies that the Thalmor are into some pretty serious party games.
Nobody likes the Thalmor. At least I’m fairly sure that nobody in the game likes the Thalmor except the Thalmor and maybe certain Khajiti groups. I’m willing to bet that nobody who has ever played Skyrim, even as an Altmer, likes the Thalmor. They’re arrogant, rude, corrupt, and cruel. And insidious. As if having a torture chamber underneath the Thalmor Embassy, where Elenwen and her minions torture men and women whose only crime was worshiping a deity they didn’t approve of wasn’t bad enough, there is ample evidence to suggest that the Thalmor were behind Ulfric’s rise to power in the first place. Point being: the dossier and Ulfric’s own comments on the death of his father, the former Jarl of Windhelm, while he was a prisoner.
The idea was for the Thalmor to covertly destabilize the Empire by inciting rebellion in Skyrim and keeping the rebellion going for as long as they could, to weaken the Empire’s resources throwing it away in a war that would in the end, a bitter victory or defeat either way. It seems to me that the Thalmor were hoping that with extremely high causalities in the Stormcloak war, the Empire would be far better pickings afterward.
Personally, I think the Thalmor offered Emperor Titus the White-Gold Concordat because they were actually far more vulnerable and had heavier losses than they wanted to admit. They were fighting a war on several different fronts, and it obviously had taken great effort to take the White-Gold Tower in the first place. By offering the Concordat, they wouldn’t have to keep an occupying force in Cyrodiil while their efforts in Hammerfell continued and were costing them a great deal of resources in the meantime. The mer races are crafty, long lived people, and tend to think and plan for the long term. If they were planning another Aldmeri Dominion that occupied the entire continent, it would have taken a lot more maneuvering than the White-Gold Concordat. In my opinion, there was absolutely no reason to offer that treaty if they already had the Empire by the balls.
If you need any more reason to rethink joining the Stormcloaks, let’s dig into Ulfric’s racism a bit. He hates anything non-Nord. Several people in game repeatedly say this in his own city, from Ambarys Rendar to Brunwulf Free-Winter. He treats the people under his protection as second-class citizens and ignores their complaints. The Argonians get the worst of the lot because they’re not even allowed inside the walls, and I would mention the Khajit except that nobody in Skyrim likes them, and that would be unfair. Any leader worth having would try to better life for all the citizens. Instead, Ulfric is far too focused on his rebellion to even pay attention.
Ulfric’s ideals behind the entire campaign, while sort of understandable, cannot be justified in the way he executed them. The Empire had to sign the treaty in order to survive to fight another day, yet he is angry about that. He continuously refers to the Empire and all the Jarls that supported the decision as milk-drinkers, inferring that they are weak. Yet, it is a wise leader who knows when to quit. If he thinks that the way to a strong Skyrim is by standing alone and standing up to the Thalmor, without the aid of their Imperial and Breton brethren, that’s damned well going to get every single Nord under his command killed. Ulfric is forgetting that ancient proverb, “divided we fall.”
The murder of High-King Torygg also sticks in my mind quite a bit as the actions of a man not honestly taken with his ideals, but one that is merely using them for his own gain and to inspire others to support him in his agenda. A boy that became King too soon, one that had held Ulfric with respect, and had not seen much of battle, slain by someone twice his age and a veteran of several wars, only to prove a point. To kill a King is not going to create a Skyrim that is strong, it only destabilized it, and then Ulfric felt free to say “Skyrim is weak.” I’m willing to bet it was fine before Ulfric came along and made it weak.
What, exactly, did Ulfric go through when he had been captured by the Thalmor and tortured during the war? Is this outburst across the whole of Skyrim just a symptom of his own guilt? Ulfric’s Dossier from the Thalmor Embassy reads that the Thalmor led him to believe that some of the information he broke and gave to them was instrumental in taking White-Gold Tower. It’s a fair thing in my mind that the answer is yes, and his intense desire to stand up to the Thalmor is because he was a broken man.
Taking these things into consideration, it’s quite reasonable to say that Ulfric was just as much a victim of the Thalmor and circumstances as Torygg was, and that’s probably true. However, in real life, someone who was abused or had some sort of previous trauma that led to his eventual negative actions is never exonerated on that justification and is still held responsible for those actions. I feel this should be the case here. Despite what may have happened to him, Ulfric would still topple the Empire for no good cause. The Nords were not being oppressed except by the Thalmor, and in fact did most of the oppressing of the other races in Skyrim, and all they had to do was hide Talos better until the day came when the Empire regained its strength. I understand the desire to worship whom you please, but that was never part of Ulfric’s agenda; it was to “free” Skyrim and in a way himself of the influence of the Aldmeri Dominion, and crown himself King. And then the Thalmor would have a king on the throne that they could manipulate.
I think it’s more fun to play the Imperial side, anyway, because then I can imagine the hell that would break lose when those veteran armies of combined former Stormcloaks and Imperial Legion march on Valenwood and the Summerset Isles.