I'm just an ordinary man.

But is not that THE Point?

Was losing my ability to think when I tried writing this but what I was saying is that the past is haunting Skyrim in every way possible. Alduin is back and denying the world a future, untended graves are filled with the dead walking, the Nord have lost their own religion and are killing each other over a god imposed on them by the Empire... even the dragonborn is the last, killing deathless beings and stealing their memory, speaking to dead gods and seeking and beating Alduin in the afterlife with the help of the dead... the country is ravaged by war and in ruins... Winterhold is lost... the Nord are fearful of magic when it was once integral to them... death too. So much of Skyrim is about the death of people, cultures, gods and ideals. Twisting the memory of them to fuel the rampant obsession with death. Everything the Nord do not know is an enemy, but everything they know is lost or warped to make more enemies. A paranoid people

M. Caius-antivirus 1) don’t know your pronouns 2) I keep thinking of your soldier/poet/king thingie and like. 🤔 can’t quite word it but do you think Martin found apotheosis as Just Martin or as Martin Septim? I know the intended reading is the second one because Todd Coward said divine right of kings, but the more I think about it, the more I find it romantic/rewarding that he was ultimately Just Martin. What do you think? :o

I neglected to mention, I don't necessarily buy that the intended reading was simply Divine Right of Kings Good, Empire Good. It's not what I got out of it, at the very least. Martin has a crisis of faith specifically regarding the god that granted the right of Kings, says that waiting for a divine to intervene and guide you isn't how you fight off evil, (supposedly this is framed as correct, since that conviction is what leads us to victory at Bruma, subsequently being how we even get the amulet back) (the complicated part here is that while this, in part, denounces the idea of a god-chosen Emperor, he also fulfills that idea in the same act) and like, he ended the covenant, the third era and the septim dynasty, and that's what saved Tamriel, so. YMMV? In the end, a divine did intervene, but only because of the Amulet being shattered, so blindly clinging to that symbol of rule would've ended far worse... the invocation of the avatar is also weirdly ambiguous regarding why things actually happened. I've said this as a joke before, you could 100% read it as divine retribution instead. It's also not like Akatosh is a beacon of morality or sense.