Obscure texts/c0da series

[Pilaf The Defiler]

Disclaimer: This and other Obscure Text threads are not trying to claim that Obscure Texts are "canon", but I think this fits better in Lore than in fan fiction if only because it's a thought provoking "what if" that would actually make the TES world less generic, so I'm putting it here. It might be moved, but I tried. Haters can hate.

QUEEN AYRENN, DOMINION QUEEN
[OLD MARY INTERREGNUM]



I'm merely a herald of Weird Tamriel. Don't shoot the messenger. Embrace Love to avoid the Landfall.

[VirtualWeasel]

My god, this sounds like Salvador Dali's wet dream.

[Marelo]

This is significantly further in the future than I expected it would be.

[Minor Edits]

When you try too hard to be cryptic, it devolves into nonsense. Some nonsense is fine, but nine pages of nonsense tests my patience.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

I never really understood the assessment that MK's work was "nonsense". I understand what about 80% of those terms means, and if you have any questions I can either tell you or find out from the source or the artists.

Anyway, to new entries.

et'Ada, Eight Aedra, Eat the Dreamer

and
WG-T-ONE
"Artless Signal"


As you can see, these are supposed to showcase the artistic talents of dedicates TES lore fans as much as the obscure texts themselves. That was MK's intention. I've been told fan favorites like Remanada and Seven Fights are getting this treatment soon.

edit: I've decided the entire series can go here, and if someone doesn't think it belongs in Lore it can be moved elsewhere. Please re-name this thread "Obscure Text Art Project/c0da Project"

[Avron the S'wit]

(You can rename any thread you begin by editing the first post in the thread, Pilaf, so feel free to rename it.)

Obscure text is a funny area, but it is certainly lore. I see no reason to remove it from this subforum. This is a wonderful, exceptional find, Pilaf, and I am enjoying reviewing this with several others. Exceptional stuff.

I did notice the art of several TES fans (such as Lady Nerevar) and am pleased to see these as well. Fabulous! I soak this all up very happily! More, more!

[VirtualWeasel]

It's not that I have a problem with lore like this, it just seems to me that MK is trying too hard to be cryptic; I think that being cryptic is something that comes naturally when you write something so monumentally important, but it just seems as if it's not doing itself justice.

And, I dunno, this lore and whatnot may be unique and well-made, but I think he's just taking it a step too far.

[Minor Edits]

I never really understood the assessment that MK's work was "nonsense". I understand what about 80% of those terms means, and if you have any questions I can either tell you or find out from the source or the artists.

Sorry, that was too harsh. I don't consider all of MK's work nonsense; much of it is very engaging. As for this particular sample, it's not all nonsense, but the difference between terms with no meaning and terms with no reasonably decipherable meaning seems pretty miniscule in this context.

You're no fool, Pilaf. If you can't decipher 20% of the terms after what I'm sure has been a extensive analysis, they might as well be devoid of meaning. I don't know about you, but eventually, I find it kind of obnoxious when I perceive one in five of the terms in a sentence to be gibberish. My interest in even trying to assign meaning to the terms diminishes as their volume increases, both because of the effort it would take to translate them all and because it becomes more and more likely that some of them will have no real meaning at all. Anyways, good writing shouldn't require consulting the author for understanding.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

I'm sure the words and terms I don't fully grasp [or can't get the meaning of from people at TIL] actually mean something to Michael, but he or the current devs at Bethesda (who do still collaborate with him on some aspects of the lore) haven't chosen to reveal what these terms mean. Or he just uses words that sound really cool to him. I've never had a ton of trouble understanding the overall meaning of passages in his stories.

For instance, he uses the term "Varliance" a lot in his texts. It's never been explicitly defined, but if you use context clues and translations from Elvish scripts that devs and fans alike have provided over the years you can decipher its meaning as roughly being "of or pertaining to star light", which is significant in more than one Nirni culture. The cool thing about a word like that is that it could have a double meaning - in the Khajiit tongue "var" means "what will be will be." As fate and stars are often intertwined, this is appropriate.

edit:

An excellent piece depicting the Republic of Hahd.

[GodsBePraised]

Thanks for this. I don't know where to find anything these days.

[Marelo]

While I very much enjoy these texts, I think the more I understand about them the more I have to keep them separate from my understanding of "normal" TES lore. Weird Tamriel is a good way to put it, like an alternate canon where most things are a few steps farther along the path of the bizarre.

These concepts just don't feel as solid or relevant as the game content, you know? And maybe the games will eventually build toward Weird Tamriel in more obvious, transparent, or tangible ways, but, without that context, I gotta think of it as glimpses into some other, stranger Aurbis than the one the games inhabit.

(I don't mean this to seem like a challenge of any sort. I mostly needed a space to write/figure this out, but now it seems that I might as well post it.)

[Pilaf The Defiler]

Some of the more obscure concepts were actually mentioned in Skyrim - notably the Whiterun preacher making reference to Talos retroactively reshaping Cyrodiil's climate with his voice, and the parabolic Kalpa cycle being mentioned by Paarthurnax.

[Marelo]

Oh, I know. I'm talking mostly about the descriptions of the far future and its reach into the past. You know, the Weird stuff, as opposed to just the obscure stuff. Volleys of mathematics launched at Jills from spacetime warships is a hard thing to leap directly to from sword and sorcery fantasy. The tamer things like CHIM-augmented Thu'um from a walking divinity, or a cyclic universe, those fit in with the games much better (so far).

Basically the more futuristic these texts get, the harder I find it to see the connecting line between the setting's present and Kirkbride's vision of its future. It doesn't seem contiguous to me. Loveletter is easier for me to swallow and parse, but it's also from the 5th era, not as removed as the 9th we've been shown, and even the Loveletter has its fair share of mystery and baffling lack of context.

One interesting intersection between obscure-but-easy-to-accept and Weird Tamriel is Pelinal. It's really easy for me to believe he's a time-traveler demigod of some sort; we demigods do our own bit of time-travel in Skyrim, after all. But the robot thing? It sounds really cool, but it's hard for me to visualize without it seeming silly, since we lack the context in which that would happen and not seem out of place.

But hey, c0da is supposed to answer All the Questions in early 2014, so maybe that will be the context I'm looking for.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

Pelinal being a robot isn't super weird or out of place for me. I mean, we fight steam powered robots every single time we go into Dwemer ruins, don't we? And the gods are from outside time and space. That's some real sci fi [&@%!]. If a god can make a man out of flesh and blood, he can make one out of metal and oil. It's just a different vessel for the animus, right?

[Marelo]

It's more of an aesthetic context thing. I don't have a concrete reference for what Pelinal's being a robot means in terms of appearance or function or behavior, so I'm at a loss for where to place him on the spectrum of robots in art. (Hilariously, the image that pops into my head when I think about it is, for some reason, the Christmas robot thing from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which is also from the future and insane.)

Animunculi are easy for me to believe and understand because I've seen them move and act. I have context for what they are and why.

I guess I should clarify that I don't doubt the possibility that these things are fully part of the setting, these advanced AIs and math weapons and TalOS and so on. It's just that they're somewhat meaningless to me without a more complete, less cryptic picture of what's going on, so I might as well ignore them until I get such a clearer picture. If you went back in time and told a bunch of Roman senators that the internet is coming and emails will be sent and hackers will sometimes cause minor mayhem, it wouldn't mean anything to them, since they lack an understanding of these terms and their relation to an actual experience of the world.

I want the narrative and specifics of this vision of the Aurbis' future rather than small flashes and suppositions. I need the substantive how as well as the theoretical that. Weight! I want weight and meat to these concepts. They are thin marvels without.

I may be obsessing over this.

[GodsBePraised]

So.... the super young Dominion queen of TESO is.. Kimmune.. who is.. the Eye of Magnus.. -___-

[Marelo]

Oh, I didn't even notice that connection. You'd think someone would have noticed she was a mining vessel and not an elf?

Edit: There are possible explanations. There're all kinds of ways to rationalize it, like the Eye of Magnus being a shell left behind by a new form, or the personality escaping and taking over Ayrenn's original. But that's kind of what frustrates me. There are all these unexplored and unexplained major ideas about how things work and what things are, and while it's interesting from a standpoint of trivia and puzzles, as a narrative I find it dissatisfying, uncompelling, and, for the most part, disconnected from the experience of the games.

Gimme dem deets, Kirkbride! I want stories and worlds, not cryptic puzzles.

Now I'm just repeating myself. I'll lay off for now.

[Woodhouse]

I agree with Marelo's aesthetic comment. I think that mixing magic and technology with akatosh's "spaceship" and the story of Pelinial being a cyborg future man are awesome, but I can't really visualize it. At least not as well as I can picture Akatosh simply being summoned to Nirn or a non-cyborg blood crazy demigod.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

The problem with asking how something that's magical or divine works in a fantasy setting is that it sort of defeats the purpose. The Dwemer race were obsessed with unraveling those mysteries, true, but most of their lore is lost or untranslated. The lore of other races is more reverential or obscure when it comes to the divine.

How is Pelinal a robot? He serves a specific purpose. He's more of a living weapon than a man. Like Numidium, on a smaller scale. He's also fascinating because he's from the future, where Reman exists, but Reman wouldn't exist without Alessia uniting Cyrodiil, which she couldn't have done without Pelinal. Time travel paradox. That one's harder to figure out than him simply being a robot. When you consider the machinations of the Time Dragon it makes a little more sense.

A robot wouldn't have to be noticeable to the naked eye, either. They may even be made of flesh and blood, or bleed, or be able to procreate. Imagine super-advanced silicone life forms. On a whole other level from the other types of robots in this series. They're "alien". There's no telling if Pelinal was even originally from Reman's time or if that's where he was just before helping Alessia. Weird things happen when the Dragonfires are unlit. Akatosh's power is weak on Mundus then. Time and space both get really fuzzy. Just look at what the Alessian priests supposedly did. Hell, eight of them may have actually retroactively become the damn Divines - who created the world that created them. How's that for a paradox?

[CBR JGWRR]

In short, he's a terminator then.

[Marelo]

It's not the logic or possibility of these concepts that puzzles me. It's the aesthetics. We may not know exactly how the animunculi work, but we have a very good idea of what they're like (clunky movements, lots of steam, clanking, clever folding, that sort of thing). It may be that Pelinal was a robot so advanced as to be mostly indistinguishable from non-robots, which is a perfectly acceptable answer to me. But we aren't shown that in any concrete way (as opposed to, say, the robots in Blade Runner). That's the part that makes it hard to place Pelinal: The lack of specificity. The only scene in which we see him, it's his spirit, which doesn't tell us much about his physical form. Knowing the general manner in which he was a robot, and how that relates to the setting, is not the same as knowing all the mysteries of his workings, and I don't think it's too big of a thing to want from his narrative.

I'm not sure how to get this across exactly. When I want to know "how" he was a robot, it's not that I want the physical/magical principles governing his creation or anything like that. I just want to be able to picture the kind of robot he is, because "robot" is very vague. Just saying "Pelinal was a robot" is unsatisfying to me because, so far, the only robots we've seen have been Dwemer constructions, and I doubt Pelinal was one of those, so I'm left with not a lot to go on when trying to picture Pelinal.

The same thing is true of spaceships and so on. It's not established in the setting what spaceships are like in motion, or what space travel means from the perspective of someone engaging in it. So when someone tells me that Direnni Tower is a spaceship for Akatosh, it prompts me to imagine Akatosh traveling through Aurbic space in Direnni Tower without giving me any reference for what that would actually look like. That's where the disconnect comes in, that's why it feels like a meaningless bit of lore trivia instead of a real part of the setting. I still know that it's probably true, but its truth doesn't seem relevant or concrete to me without the sensory details.

I don't know or particularly care how an illusion spell works (because yeah, it's magic), but I know what it feels like to see one being cast, so it's easier to imagine and understand how it fits with the aesthetics of the rest of the setting. It's the difference between "He cast an illusion and they killed each other," and, "He projected red light from his hand, and those struck by it fell into a violent frenzy." I'm not engaging in lore criticism, but in art criticism. (So why did I post this in the lore forum? Ah, mysteries.)

[GodsBePraised]

I easily rationalize the sci-fi elements with the fact that this is still a magical and mythical universe. Pelinal is a robot and Pelinal is the dual avatar of Lorkhan and Aka. What does robot even mean in this context anyways? He has a laser for an arm.. I guess..

[Pilaf The Defiler]

It's his lobotomy arm. Nirn is a dream of the sleeping Godhead. What happens in the brain when a memory is lost forever? A neurological pathway cut? Pelinal "came into the world like a Padomaic". He seeks to erase Anu's stability and the old dream of Aldmeri Dominion. He serves the same forces Talos and Reman served, and Alessia and Ysgramor. Countless human culture heroes, really. He's a Padomaic. He embodies Shor and he seeks to weaken the Anuic forces and to tip the balance in Man's favor. He seeks to make Nirn forget the Elven Dawn.

[GodsBePraised]

It's his lobotomy arm. Nirn is a dream of the sleeping Godhead. What happens in the brain when a memory is lost forever? A neurological pathway cut? Pelinal "came into the world like a Padomaic". He seeks to erase Anu's stability and the old dream of Aldmeri Dominion. He serves the same forces Talos and Reman served, and Alessia and Ysgramor. Countless human culture heroes, really. He's a Padomaic. He embodies Shor and he seeks to weaken the Anuic forces and to tip the balance in Man's favor. He seeks to make Nirn forget the Elven Dawn.

Well done.

"and we he asked what such an affliction felt like, to which Pelinal could only answer, "Like when the dream no longer needs its dreamer."

Given new revelations that answer could be "Like when the Aurbris no longer needs Anu."

[Musicman247]

This doesn't actually seem to be established Lore (canon that everyone agrees on), so I'm going to move this to TES General.

The Lore sub-forum should probably remain a place to discuss the things found in-game rather than out-of-game references.