So, one aspect of High-King Torygg i find hilarious, is that we are told time and again that he was a boy king, that he was extrmely young when he took the throne, and if you dod the math, he ruled about a year before he died.
And then we meet him in sovengarde, and because Skyrim literarily does not have a model for anything but "literal child", and "fully grown man" we are instead presented with a man who at best looks like he's in his late twenties, when he's supposed to be a young man, barely into his majority, probably 16 when he took the throne, and 17 when he died.
Basically, this visual misstep completely changes the players understanding of Torygg, as rather than coming across similiar to robb Stark, he instead seems more similar to Eddard Stark.
An older man, who's nature is forged and established, when in reality Torygg was a young man who had just lost his father, gotten married, and was seriously torn between staying loyal to the Empire, or declaring independence in order to undo the white-gold concordat's destructive effect on the people of skyrim.
It makes Sybille's comments that Torygg might seriously have just gone and declared Independence if Ulfric put him up to it, in a completely different light.
Istold, Torygg's father was high King of skyrim at the end of the great war, and he went along with the treaty and ensured that in regards to the surrender to the Thalmor, to quote Balgruuf, "Was I given a chance to object to the terms of the treaty? No. The Jarls weren't asked. We were told. And we had to like it."
Istold was a pragmatist, who put everything he may or may not have believed in to the side to enaure the empire didnt crumble from skyrim(the only real source of troops left in the empire at the end of the war) up and leaving at thw end of the war.
That is his father's legacy. He kept Skyrim together and underneath the Empire, and grit his teeth while accepting the de-facto Thalmor occupation and police state of Skyrim.
It would be a hard thing to do, for a son to take his father's throne, and then effectively make all that pointless, to make the sacrifice his father made for the empire meaningless.
And yet he considers doing just that.
He considers the idea of just telling the empire to take a hike, and end the Thalmor prescence in skyrim, to accept that the empire was a dead and crumbling institution(which it is) and that skyrim would be free, independent and that he would have to fight a real war of independence in which he would be the leader, the rallying cry that the nords who had suffered near on 3 decades of religious and culturual extermination, brutal taxes that left the entire region beggared to pay for the recovery of cyrodiil, and just the old idealists who wanted a proud and independent skyrim of old, would flock to.
And at the end, when he was denied the chance to choose Skyrim's future, one way or another, he choose to fearlessly face Ulfric in combat, his honor unstained, the reality that Torygg was meant to be a young man, completely reshapes the entire confrontation.
Rather than an honorable, older man, he is instead a teenager with his whole life ahead of him, being challenged out of the blue, to a life and death duel, and yet sticking true to the cultural ideals that his office as Skyrim's Monarch demanded of him, even when it would certainly lead to his death.
It also adds to the venom the people of Solitude has for Ulfric, and in turn to Roggvir who let Ulfric escape.
For most of Skyrim, the question of wheter or not they considers the duel regicide, or a legal challenge that was accepted can be looked upon from afar, and the technicalities of the legal argument can be debated from a position of second hand.
For the people of Solitude, they just lost their king, then their young prince rose up and took the throne, and despite what ulfric assesses, Torygg seems to have done his duty to keep law and order in solitude, with his headsman bitterly noting that criminal scum like the argonian who starts the shipwreck quest would not have set foot in the city if Torygg was still alive.
He was legally recognized as king by the moot, gets married, and then, one year into his reign, the prince that a lot of them had grown up with and at least be well familiar with, if not known personally, was murdered in a dubiously legal duel.
A young man, barely into his adulthood, who had his entire life ahead of him, only started his reign, had just gotten married and was settling into his rule, which by all accounts was relatively prosperous if nothing else.
Murdered, using the sacred power of the voice, by a man who himself had given Torygg his support and blessing to become High King at the moot.
No wonder almost the entire city hated Roggvir with a passion for letting ulfric escape after that oh so kingly work of just murdering their teenage king with divine power.













