The mages guild steward in Balmora is sending you to execute gang hits on competition and personal vendettas on past colleagues. The steward in Ald-Ruhn is paying you to steal from the guild and shake down less respected stewards (read: racialized). There's two argonians in the whole guild, and one is stuck in a Telvanni dominated backwater with limited resources and no backing for his genuinely admirable research. The guildmaster is an idiot who was promoted out of Cyrodiil out of convenience to get him out of his superior's hair.

The fighters guild is similarly fucked up, because Eydis Fire-Eye and Sjoring Hard-Heart are in the pocket of the Camonna Tong and are having you do extortions, racketeering, and straight up gang hits on thieves guild members or their associates, random civilian business owners, and great house agents. The former guildmaster is acting as a double agent against the corrupt current guildmaster to help you usurp his authority once you prove you're honorable enough not to do extra-judicial murder for the man.

And like this is obviously The Point to some degree, the imperial guilds are corrupt and incompetent because they're disconnected from the heart of the empire and are left too much to their own devices in a nation that is fraught with conflicting political forces with heavy amounts of money being traded between large numbers of hands. But this isn't like, a direct line of dialogue that someone just says to you. If this were a weaker written game someone would just lay out the Moral Of The Story. To some extent it makes the whole of the game stronger that you're shown the corruption and inefficiency and allowed to conclude personally that oh shit the empire is really not a stabilizing force in this region and a lot of what it imports is graft and vice while purporting to bring peace and culture and democracy wait sorry this is Cyrodiil not the United States.

Even the main quest, which is nominally quite magical and loaded with theology and myth, while still being a grand and epic Quest in the way nearly nothing else in Morrowind is, is itself about politics and intrigue. In the end, the affairs of the devil and the god kings and even the incarnate saviour of the dunmer are the story of tawdry political machinations writ large, made epic only by their scale. Even with all the esotericism and opaque theologies and competing mythohistories, and theres a lot of that, no one makes it out of the muck of the real. Everyone in morrowind, even the grandest villain, are People with opinions and motivations. No one is purely sympathetic nor purely unsympathetic, there are very few Good Guys you can join and very few purely evil villains to smite.

The elder scrolls approach to these guys from the beginning though has been that their cultures are just really different from the other cultures around them.

Like you can hang out in orc strongholds in Skyrim and spend the whole game around dark elves in Morrowind and they’re just regular people that have kind of extreme cultural norms. Dark elves are kind of rude to you when they first meet you but like in the way certain cultures are rude to outsiders at first until they get to know them. Orcs are rough around the edges but they’re smart and have a proud culture and if you can hold your own in a fight they’ll respect you.

And you see these people can blend pretty well into other societies. They join faiths their ancestors didn’t practice, they have jobs that people of their race wouldn’t stereotypically have, they have opinions about what other people assume about them, they have their own wrong assumptions about other cultures.

“Dark Elves are the dark-skinned, red-eyed Elven peoples of Morrowind. The ‘dark’ part may come from their dark grey skin, but it also fits their gloomy dispositions. Folks call them ‘Dark Elf’ in the West, but they call themselves the ‘Dunmer.'”   — Dialogue from Morrowind

There’s more diversity in skin tone than people think.

I’m just gonna start at the beginning and go through the games to show what I mean. This is both an artist resource and evidence that it’s perfectly fine to create Dunmer characters with skin tones other than “grey.”

Here’s the Dunmer from Arena:

You couldn’t choose any other skin tone, so the color palette of midtone, shadow, and highlight looks like this:

Daggerfall’s Dunmer:

Still no option to change skin color so our palette is still really simple:

Battlespire’s Dunmer:

(Thank the gods the male Dunmer is wearing pants.)

Still only one skin tone, but the male Dunmer seems to have slightly lighter skin than the female Dunmer, so here’s our palettes:

Redguard’s Dunmer:

It’s a terrible picture, but it’s the only one I could find. Here’s his palette:

Morrowind’s Dunmer:

There’s still no option to change skin color, but it looks like the male Dunmer has slightly darker skin than the female Dunmer. Here’s the palettes:

I couldn’t find any good pictures of Dunmer from Shadowkey, but here’s the female and male Dunmer profile pictures:

Their skin tone is close enough to have the same color palette:

Now we’re at Oblivion, which is where things get nuts. Oblivion was the first TES game which allowed you to choose your own skin tone. Unfortunately, the slider system was so messed up, that you could eventually get any skin tone with any race. I once accidentally made my Redguard character bright, fire-truck red. Somehow. Skin tones are literally infinite.

My solution for figuring out canon Oblivion skin tones was to look at all the Dunmer NPCs and figure out their skin tones. I used every NPC for which I could find a good screenshot, which ended up being almost every single Dunmer NPC. Their individual palettes are in the bottom right corner of their pictures.

As you can see, the range of skin tones is extensive. Very few of them could be described as simply “grey.” Just to illustrate my point, I took the mid-tone for each NPC and sorted them all by hue. Here’s the results:

That’s basically a desaturated rainbow. @cliff–racer has a headcanon I really like which explains the sudden wide variety of Dunmer skin tones in Cyrodiil as the result of mixed races. Cyrodiil would be the place with the greatest opportunity for mixed race children, so it makes sense.

Moving on to Skyrim:

Skyrim has five skin tones, but they’re all very similar. Here’s the mid-tones in order by lightness:

After the wide variety available in Oblivion, Skyrim’s selection is kind of disappointing. Even if they didn’t want to give us purple and green and blue Dunmer, at the very least they could have gone darker. I always end up choosing the fourth or fifth option simply because all the other ones look whitewashed.

Elder Scrolls Online was kind enough to provide its own color palette:

Here’s what they look like on my buddy Tel here:

The top row seems to have a slightly tan undertone, and the bottom row has a slightly blue-green undertone.

The depiction of Dunmer skin color in The Elder Scrolls: Legends is nearly as varied as it is in Oblivion. There’s many pictures where skin color is just a flat grey, or where the art is so stylized, or the lighting is so intense that skin color isn’t discernible, but here’s a selection of closeups of Dunmer cards in which skin color is more easily seen:

And here’s some I wasn’t even sure were originally drawn to be Dunmer even though it says “Dark Elf” on the card:

Here’s the mid-tones for the Legends Dunmer sorted by hue:

Just look at that desaturated rainbow!

The changing of the color of the Dunmer’s skin is a major piece of cultural lore. It’s part of what changed them, as a people, from the Chimer into the Dunmer. Azura cursed them to have grey skin and red eyes after Almsivi broke their promise to Nerevar and used Kagrenac’s tools to become living gods. Almsivi reframed the transformation to become a point of pride, and their skin color became a religious symbol.

“Velothi, your skin has become the pregnant darkness. My brooding has brought this on. Remember that Boethiah asked you to become the color of bruise. How else to show yourselves people of the exodus into the vital: pain?” — Vivec speaking in the 36 Lessons of Vivec, Sermon 32

“The color of bruise” is a significant phrase, because bruises aren’t just grey. Bruises are purple and blue and brown and green. Make your Dunmer colorful! It’s part of their cultural heritage! 

The dead spoke to her as Almalexia walked through the dimly lit tunnels. Their whispers were so entangled with each other that to pick out what each spirit is saying is something only the most experienced of priests and priestesses have achieved – and they would spend hours – if not days – in the depths of Necrom, listening to the dead’s endless muttering. And if they were lucky, they might decipher the words of only one spirit. And it will always be of the ones that shout loudest.

Almalexia entered the burial chamber she sought, the creaky wooden door swinging shut behind her. She travelled down a narrow and unlit passage, using a summoned ball of light to guide her way. The walls looked wet, and felt icy whenever one of Almalexia’s bare arms brushed passed the cold stone. As she entered the chamber itself, the cold became oppressing. Her breath fogged in front of her, and she shuddered. Above her, outside of the catacombs, the evening was humid – an opposite to the frigid tomb. It was known for tombs and burial chambers to be cold, but this had a sense of foreboding to it.

At twilight, a number of councillors, merchants and guards had been summoned deep beneath Kogoruhn, into one of its many halls. They were given no explanation as to why, just that it was important and vital that they came.

It was a spacious hall, lit by mage-lights which drifted idly above. They only lit the entrance of the hall, the rest of it was shrouded in darkness.

They entered the hall one by one. Some recognised each other as they came in, and a sense of dread began to hang in the air. They remained silent, not daring to talk. There were guards in and outside of the hall, watching them all closely. As more people came in, the greater that dread grew.