babble

Words: 5,556

Summary:

An in-world treatise describing the mythic afterlife of the Nords, Sovngarde, and its documented regions as they are present upon the lunar realm of Secunda, as well as presenting a unified theory of afterlives in The Elder Scrolls universe in an attempt to reconcile post-TES:IV retcons with earlier, more self-consistent writings. A collection of internal notes for Aad Semblio Impera, expanded and re-written for outside reading. Does not contain any major story spoilers.

Author's Note:

Hello all!

This is a personal little side project I've written over the past week or so. Some of you who have known me for a while might recall a couple of older asks where I've mentioned that I have Ideas™ on the topic of Sovngarde and the way it is presented in Skyrim and in the franchise as a whole. Those of you who have known me longer still know that I'm big on the lore and the nature of afterlife beliefs and such in TES has been one of the biggest pains in my hide for several years now, and much of these pains come back around to a series of (frankly inane) retcons introduced in TES IV: Oblivion.

Given that myself and a couple of friends have dedicated the past couple of years to actively exploring and elucidating on some of the more confusing subjects in this fandom, I decided that it's probably high time that I've collected all my thoughts on afterlife lore and its nuances and reconciliations in one place for ease of sharing. Then, before I knew it, I was sitting on a two thousand word worldbuilding document and had twice as much left to write. And, well, you can figure out the rest!

As a heads up: this thing is still missing one more section. Technically speaking, though, it's already finished without that part, and it is more tangentially related than the existing sections, so in order to avoid suffering any kind of burnout I decided that I'll simply tack it on at a later date when I feel like it.

Words: 5,556

Summary:

An in-world treatise describing the mythic afterlife of the Nords, Sovngarde, and its documented regions as they are present upon the lunar realm of Secunda, as well as presenting a unified theory of afterlives in The Elder Scrolls universe in an attempt to reconcile post-TES:IV retcons with earlier, more self-consistent writings. A collection of internal notes for Aad Semblio Impera, expanded and re-written for outside reading. Does not contain any major story spoilers.

Author's Note:

Hello all! This is a personal little side project I've written over the past week or so. Some of you who have known me for a while might recall a couple of older asks where I've mentioned that I have Ideas™ on the topic of Sovngarde and the way it is presented in Skyrim and in the franchise as a whole. Those of you who have known me longer still know that I'm big on the lore and the nature of afterlife beliefs and such in TES has been one of the biggest pains in my hide for several years now, and much of these pains come back around to a series of (frankly inane) retcons introduced in TES IV: Oblivion. Given that myself and a couple of friends have dedicated the past couple of years to actively exploring and elucidating on some of the more confusing subjects in this fandom, I decided that it's probably high time that I've collected all my thoughts on afterlife lore and its nuances and reconciliations in one place for ease of sharing. Then, before I knew it, I was sitting on a two thousand word document and had twice as much left to write. And, well, you can figure out the rest! As a heads up: this thing is still missing one more section. Technically speaking, though, it's already finished without that part, and it is more tangentially related than the existing sections, so in order to avoid suffering any kind of burnout I decided that I'll simply tack it on at a later date when I feel like it.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

Man with a husband? Even if every person on earth sincerely feels "love is love, some men have husbands and I love that we are diverse like that", the software will still see that the majority of people with husbands are women, and mark "person with husband is a man" as "likely wrong". This will happen to any minority, because any technology that calls the most common thing "correct" and everything else "incorrect" is, inevitably, inherently, violently anti-minority.

MUL QAH DIIV - this is was a pretty quick concept from a week ago or something, but I have all these ideas for redesigning dragon shouts among everything else in Skyrim and the one for Dragon Aspect was that you sort of project your dragon soul outside your body to aid in battle and whatnot. You can control it if you focus, since it's just another part of you. It would probably be even less ghostly looking but I didn't wanna render this properly with my focus on other drawings - but I find this a more satisfying alternative to spectral armor without letting the dragonborn literally take the shape of a dragon.

Reuploaded because cropping reduced the quality. I need good, lossless quality (I'm probably overloading my tablet with large canvases for no reason).

Because I was completely lost in the writing sauce these past few days (awesome feeling) and didn't have enough to show for it on Wednesday lmao. Tagged by the wonderful @chiqita, thank you for keeping me in the loop <3

Today on the docket: I have finally decided to bite the bullet and compile all of my funky little ideas and concepts about Sovngarde into a single doc that I could easily share and reference. Five hours later, I had a two thousand word worldbuilding document that only covered the introduction and the first region, and then I realized I am in trouble.

With that in mind, today I will be sharing the preface to this document, dragging TES IV afterlive retcons through the dirt where they belong addressing the discrepancies between afterlife in TES as it is presented in older and newer lore, and setting the baseline for the cosmology and mechanics that will be further discussed in later parts of the document.

Fragment word count: 1261 words.

With that preamble out of the way...

Foreword: On Afterlife

Despite its lack of foundation in the overwhelming majority of oral and written Tamrielic traditions, the cultural dominance of the Cyrodiilic Empire and its militant cosmopolitanism has given rise to the cosmologically baseless, yet astonishingly well-entrenched theological paradigm best described as “aetheric defaultism”. The cornerstone of this framework lies in its notion of “heaven”, which postulates that all mortal souls, regardless of their spiritual dogma or cultural context antemortem, are fundamentally and inalienably ordained to reside in the myriad realms of Aetherius, the primordial spirit plane of light and magic believed to be the birthplace of all souls.

As befits the philosophy of a polycultural hegemon, these heavenly realms are at once infinitely diverse yet palatably generic, lacking any substantial description that might otherwise encroach on the dogma of local belief systems, instead opting to incorporate select elements of provincial traditions into the broader body of Imperial theosophy, re-contextualizing all but the most divergent of beliefs as merely permutations on the same core cosmological structure, wherein Aetherius is “heaven”, Oblivion is “hell”, and all but the most unfortunate and wayward souls that fall prey to daedric corruption through personal ignorance or fundamental flaw of character are destined for eternal and blissful existence at the exalted throne of the immortal Divines.

and no, this isn’t me saying “write that messed up, disgusting thing” because while, yes, write it if it’s what you want (I myself enjoy writing dark fics, something I believe would be considered “vile” to a lot of people), this is me saying in a world of censorship and capitalism, ao3 really is a treasure.