Skyrim Civil War Part 3: THE GLORY OF THE THALMOR!

SKYRIM CIVIL WAR-PART 3

THE GLORY OF THE THALMOR!

(Here, we talk about the principal villains of the Skyrim Civil War questline, the Elven faction known as the Thalmor. I think it's a safe bet that both sides of the Skyrim Civil War want to pound them into powder, so it came time for me to talk about them and why the Empire seems to be the best option to fight them.)

Today we will talk about-
“YOU HAVE THE HONOR OF ADDRESSING A MEMBER OF THE THALMOR. BASK IN IT!”

Yes, yes, the Thalmor are tough custo-
“FOOLISH HUMAN! YOUR TIME IS AT AN END!”

Okay, can you not interru-
“BEHOLD THE FUTURE! BEHOLD THE THALMOR!”

Oh, for the love of-
“DON’T YOU SEE!? ELVEN SUPREMACY IS THE ONLY TRUTH!”

There’s just something about an antagonistic force that’s so cocky, so sure of their dominance, so sure of their own supremacy, that you can’t help but grow a certain respect for their style. It’s just like the forces of Sauron, or the Galactic Empire. Sure, they’re evil as all hell, and they oppress multiple species, but there’s just something about their style that wins them fans even though they’re arrogant, evil bastards who rule through the sword. And today’s topic is no different: today we talk about those golden-armored, magic-wielding, pointy-eared, bullies of Elder Scrolls V, the Thalmor!

For those of you who are uninitiated, the Thalmor are the primary ruling body of the Third Aldmeri Dominion, the main High Elven government in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. And for many Stormcloak and Imperial fans, the Thalmor represent the true threat in the Civil War questline. Their main beliefs center around “Elven supremacy” and the superiority of Mer over Man. Their main claim to fame is supposedly helping end the Oblivion Crisis, even though that was ended by a combination of the dragon god Akatosh and Emperor Martin Septim fighting the Daedric Prince Mehrunes Dagon. The Thalmor, starting off from humble beginnings as a cabal of wizards, rose to power by claiming to have ended the Oblivion Crisis, and with the Elven forces devastated after the war against the Daedric forces, these groups of wizards had an easy time overthrowing the legitimate kings and queens of the Summerset Isles and making themselves the new rulers of the Altmer people.

Prior to Elder Scrolls V, the Aldmeri Dominion, under the Thalmor, waged a long and brutal war against the Empire of Tamriel, taking many provinces from the Empire and forcing the Empire to sign a disadvantageous peace treaty known as the White-Gold Concordat, which banned the worship of Talos. That in turn, caused Ulfric Stormcloak, the Jarl of Windhelm and a former Imperial Legionnaire, to defect from the Empire, and declare war against the Empire and its allies in Skyrim. During the war against the Thalmor, they captured and tortured Ulfric, fooling him into believing that the information they gained from him helped them in the war, and then they allowed him to escape back into Skyrim, where he caused trouble against the Empire, as they knew he would, when they ordered for the ban of Talos in the White-Gold Concordat that ended the war with the Empire. During the Skyrim Civil War, the Thalmor are technically allied with the Empire, however, they do not help the Empire in putting down these renegade Talos-worshippers. Instead, they sit from the sidelines and enjoy watching these rebels clobber their former Imperial adversaries, weakening them, and hopefully, making them easy pickings for the next war.

This wasn’t necessarily the first time the Thalmor were mentioned in the Elder Scrolls lore. Prior to Elder Scrolls V, we have a small mention of the Thalmor in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, where they were nothing more but a group of wizards, openly mocked by Altmer society, and the worst they did was command boycotts of Imperial goods. In Elder Scrolls Online, which takes place long before Elder Scrolls V, however, they had a very different mission statement compared to the one they had in Skyrim. In ESO, they were the governing body for the First Aldmeri Dominion, but they were under the command of an Altmer queen named Ayrenn Arana Aldmeri, a queen who openly mocked the belief on Elven supremacy, who fought against a group of Elven Supremacists calling themselves the “Veiled Heritance.” In ESO, the Thalmor not only consisted of Altmer diplomats, but also Wood Elf Tree Thanes and Khajit chieftains, and they had no message of Altmer supremacy, since they considered the Bosmer wood elves and the Khajits as their equals. However, in Skyrim, the Thalmor are primarily composed of Altmer wizards and military leaders, who obviously don’t think of the Khajits and the Bosmer as their equals. It seems that the Veiled Heritance won in the end, and in Elder Scrolls V, the Thalmor carry the message of Altmer superiority almost as if it was their gospel. This, of course, rankles many Imperial and Stormcloak players, who see them as a nuisance at best, and the true evil at worst.

Practically, the reason why the Imperials and the Stormcloaks fight each other is because they can’t decide who can stand up against the Thalmor the best. The Imperials think that a united Skyrim under the Empire is the only thing that can stand up against the Thalmor, with Ulfric’s murder of King Torygg and his uprising the Empire sabotaging the Empire’s capability to fight the Thalmor in future wars. For the Stormcloaks, they see the Empire as weak for capitulating to the White-Gold Concordat, for allowing the persecution of Talos-worshippers, so they will take the fight to the Thalmor themselves, even if they have to go through the Empire in doing it. The whole Civil War was all one big Thalmor ploy, and the fact that the Stormcloaks and the Empire are killing each other over it shows that the Thalmor plan succeeded. No matter who wins the Civil War, there will be less people to fight for the Thalmor, although, as I have mentioned before, if the Empire wins, perhaps its trade routes and wealth can be used to fix Skyrim faster. But still, that’s still wealth that could have gone elsewhere, like fixing the White-Gold Tower or sprucing up the military to fight the Aldmeri Dominion.

Unlike the Empire, which primarily relies on pragmatism and tactics, or the Stormcloaks who rely on brawn and national fervor, the Thalmor have a bit of both, with an added element-their mastery of magic. The Thalmor, during the war against the Empire, relied primarily on intelligence-gathering, the strength of their alliances with the Bosmer and the Khajit, and their mastery of magic. Like the Stormcloaks, they have very strong national fervor, just as the Stormcloaks have their “Skyrim is for Nords!” mantra, the Thalmor have “Elven Supremacy!” as their guiding light. But like the Empire, the Thalmor also use pragmatic tactics to gain victory and achieve their ends, such as when they lied to Ulfric about the information he gave them, saying that it helped them gain a great victory against the Imperials, so that when they released Ulfric into Skyrim to cause chaos, the chaos he started eventually led to the Skyrim Civil War. Unlike the Stormcloaks, they’re not single-minded nationalists in their approach to war, and unlike the Empire, they’re definitely not punch-clock villains who ignore sleights like the banning of their gods. Such an adversary will require a strong enemy for it to fall, otherwise, the Thalmor will lie, cheat, trick, and fight their way to victory. They’re like the Lannisters of Skyrim, swindling and manipulating their way to victory. The Thalmor tricking Ulfric into waging war against the Empire while the Thalmor were at peace with them was like how Tywin Lannister got the Boltons and the Freys to betray the Starks and take care of King Robb for him, so he doesn’t have to take out Robb himself. Except, unlike the Lannisters, they have magic on their side.

Like the Lannisters, the Thalmor armies go into battle in style, wearing gilded plate-mail armor that looked elegant when compared to the Stormcloaks’ chain mail or the Imperials’ steel or leather armors, and unlike many suits of plate mail, the Elven armors are lightweight, giving them the speed advantage of wearing light armor while providing more protection than chainmail or leather. The Thalmor also back that up with wizards casting spells, firing lightning bolts and fireballs, summoning elemental creatures by their side. With the Imperial battlemages being a thing of the past, and the Stormcloaks having the traditional Nordic mistrust of magic, that gives the Thalmor armies an edge. Their Elven swords and other weapons are at a higher level than the steel and iron blades that the Imperials and Stormcloaks carry, and even the common Thalmor soldiers know enough magic to create bound swords and shoot flames from their hands, or even use healing magic to heal their wounds without medicines or potions, an advantage that common Imperial and Stormcloak soldiers lack. When I play Skyrim, and I fight Thalmor soldiers, I have to actually give more than a half-hearted effort in killing them, whereareas killing Stormcloaks (or Imperials) in the Civil War questline feels like me in Dynasty Warriors killing a thousand mooks without even giving two shits about the individual enemies themselves. The Thalmor can throw enough high-level spells or summon enough elemental beasts to give my character some trouble and force her to actually care about the fight, but with the Stormcloaks? She might as well turn the other way and let the companion characters go all Lu Bu on them.

But it’s not just about the armaments, weapons, and magic that an army can field, it’s also about the tactics. And the Stormcloaks haven’t necessarily impressed me on that front, either. They’re led by a guy who got captured twice, who almost LOST to the weakened, dying version of the Empire that they claim is too weak to fight the Aldmeri Dominion. Just as the oh-so-invincible Dragonborn can get captured by the weakened, down-on-their-luck version of the Dark Brotherhood, so was the mighty Ulfric captured, not only by the Aldmeri Dominion, but also by the same corrupt and dying Empire that he claims is too weak to fight the Thalmor. If he can’t even defeat them in a fair fight, how in the hell is he going to fight the Thalmor, who not only pounded the Empire into a disadvantageous truce the last time around, but also captured and tortured the living daylights out of him?

Compared to that, the Thalmor were masters of tactics and strategy. They managed to discredit and eliminate their rivals in the Summerset Isles so they could establish their dominion. They conned the rest of the elves into believing that they defeated the Daedra who invaded the Summerset Isles during the Oblivion Crisis. They persuaded the Khajit into joining their ranks by claiming to have fixed the problem with their moons disappearing. They found every member of the elite warrior guild known as “The Blades” in their territories, killed them, and sent their heads to their Emperor as a “gift”. They managed to fight the Empire to a standstill and get an advantageous treaty out of it, even though they were fighting a united Skyrim along with the rest of the Empire. Their torture and manipulation of Ulfric Stormcloak led to the Skyrim Civil War, where the homeland of their hated enemy, Talos Stormcrown got torn in half, in a battle between Nords, which would obviously weaken humanity and the Empire no matter who won.

The way the Thalmor forces fight the player is also a marked difference between them and the Stormcloaks. The Stormcloaks charge at their enemies, hoping that numbers and brawn will win the day. The Thalmor lie in wait outside of caves, waiting for the player to come out, before ambushing them after they most likely spent the time in the caves or dungeons clearing out whole platoons of bad guys. During the assaults against Stormcloak forces, I never felt like I needed to try, I just buff myself up and then went to town with them. But with the Thalmor, even ambushing their embassy manages to be a real fight, even though their embassy in Skyrim have ten times less the number of soldiers that the Stormcloak forts have. The first time they ambushed me with a hit squad, they managed to kill one of my companions. The second time, they lost because I was decked out in high-level Daedric gear. With the Stormcloaks, they’re only a threat when they come at the player with large numbers. Without that, they’re practically easy to kill.

So not only are the Thalmor more well-armed and armored compared to the Stormcloaks and the Empire, they also had superior tactics, too. They proved that throughout the Great War that preceded the game, and they show themselves to be better fighters than both the Imperials and the Stormcloaks. Hence why I insisted in previous entries that the Empire was the superior choice: the Stormcloaks have nothing that the Empire itself already offers, and the Empire has more resources and better tacticians like General Tullius. It takes one trickster to fight another, to even the playing field. Charging at them with blind patriotism as your guide is EXACTLY what the Thalmor want their enemies to do.

The Stormcloak players seem to have this expectation of the Thalmor, that they’re just bumbling idiots and pointy-eared nuisances that they can easily dispatch. But the Thalmor forces that the player dispatches are nothing more but small patrols and at most two small garrisons, one in Northwatch Keep, the other in the Thalmor Embassy. Outside of mods, those are the only Thalmor forces the player faces, and of course, when they do mod the game to face more Thalmor, what’s to say they didn’t mod their character to be far stronger than the average Dragonborn, let alone the average Stormcloak or Imperial? They think that waging war on the Thalmor is easy; all they need to do is to get rid of the Empire and declare war. If it was that easy, the Emperor would have just torn the White-Gold Concordat in half and sent General Tullius over to kick the Dominion out of Hammerfell and invade the Summerset Isles, which would surely gain him Ulfric’s support and end this small dilemma of a Skyrim Civil War. And the Stormcloaks justify the fight in that they’re fresh to fight while the Empire is supposedly weak and dying. Yet, they cannot even finish off this weak and dying Empire unless an actual Deus Ex Machina, the Dragonborn, walks by and wins it for them. Just as another literal Deus Ex Machina, Alduin, saved Ulfric Stormcloak from losing his head to General Tullius.

Ah, but I can already hear the Stormcloak fans talking about how they can give the Stormcloaks better weapons and armor through magic enchantments. They can have the Mages’ College in Winterhold train Stormcloak mages. The Companions can train more fighters to replace the ones who die in the Civil War. The Thieves’ Guild and the Dark Brotherhood can counter the Thalmor intelligence ops and kill important Thalmor agents and leaders. To which I say, what makes you think that the Thalmor aren’t doing something similar? The High Mages in Alinor are some of the best in Tamriel. The High Elves are some of the most feared magicians in the world. And the Thalmor forces proved to be some of the best in both intel and combat-how else would they have been able to hunt down the Blades as if they were dogs? Would the Companions do any better? Can the Winterhold College of Mages compete with the High Mages of Alinor without the Eye of Magnus? Can the still-recovering Dark Brotherhood and Thieves’ Guild compete with Thalmor intelligence ops in terms of their resources and size? Highly unlikely, considering that the Empire had more resources than all those organizations combined, and they still somewhat lost against the Thalmor, even losing the capital city of Cyrodiil for a time. It seems more like the Stormcloak fans try to justify this all just so they can restore public Talos worship and kick out the Elves from Skyrim, even though in-game we don’t see a campaign to kick out the Thalmor from Skyrim.

Speaking of Talos worship, it was quite rare for a villain to intervene in a private matter of faith for the people. Most villains would want more territories ceded to them in peace treaties or make the other side unable to re-arm itself, and while the Thalmor got the treaty writers to give them Hammerfell, they didn’t put any limits on the Imperial Legion re-arming. Instead, they asked for a ban on Talos worship, which doesn’t give them any military advantages outside of riling up the more devout Nords, including Ulfric Stormcloak. To the people in Cyrodiil, that seems like a small thing to give up, but to the Nords, you might as well ask the Elves to stop worshiping Auri-El in the open. But aside from riling up Ulfric, whom they turned into a basket-case, and getting the Nords to distrust the Empire, there may have been another purpose to the Thalmor’s shenanigans: Talos Stormcrown became Tiber Septim, the first Emperor of the current Empire in Elder Scrolls. And Talos didn’t necessarily build that Empire out of goodwill and cookies. No, that Empire was built through blood and steel, like most Empires were, and the Elves didn’t exactly join it peacefully. They were conquered and brought into it like many others. And Elves have very long memories; they tend not to forget things that they remember from the past. Perhaps many of those Thalmor wizards were people who lived through that conquest, and they harbored bitter resentment of their people getting forcibly inducted into the Empire. Memories of Talos using the Brass God (a gargantuan Dwemer automaton) to conquer and humiliate the Second Aldmeri Dominion still rings fresh in the minds of many elves who perhaps actually lived long enough to have been a part of that conquest. If you were a High Elf, and you saw this man brutally conquer and humiliate your people, would you want him to remain among the pantheon of the Divines? Would a person whose whole kingdom was conquered by the Mongols want the Mongol leader who conquered his lands be remembered as a god amongst men? For every person who worships Talos after everything he’s done to the High Elves, the sting of his conquest of the High Elven lands gets renewed among the High Elves.

The fact that the Empire pulled back its legions to protect Cyrodiil while the High Elves practically had to bunker down on their own against the Daedra is another sore point; which made it easy for the Thalmor to claim that they were the ones who solved the Oblivion Crisis in the Summerset Isles. So, think of this from the Thalmor perspective: for centuries, you’ve had to suffer this brute being worshiped as a god throughout the continent, this bastard who practically conquered your people and forced them into the Empire. But now, his line of descendants are dead. The Empire he founded is in a weakened state. And now, you have the chance to reverse the destruction and humiliation that the Second Aldmeri Dominion suffered in his hands. The current rulers of the High Elves are still Imperial puppets, but they were weakened when fighting the Daedra during the Oblivion Crisis. What do you do? Well, if you’re the Thalmor, you overthrow those weak rulers, claim responsibility for closing the Oblivion Gates, and set your country up to be strong enough to take down the weakened Empire. And unlike the Stormcloaks, who rebelled against the Empire before they were strong enough to quash it, the Thalmor and the Third Aldmeri Dominion fought the Empire openly only when they were ready, and the result was that they fought the Empire to the kind of standstill that gave them an advantageous position in the peace talks.

Compared to the Stormcloaks, who rebelled against the Empire before they were ready to fight it head-on, and who ignored better avenues for secession such as persuading King Torygg to secede from the Empire, the Thalmor Elves’ rebellion and eventual war against the Empire was wildly successful. Had the Thalmor been in the Stormcloaks’ shoes, they’d have persuaded Torygg to secede first, then once Skyrim is armed to the teeth and ready to fight, they’d attack and conquer Cyrodiil and place their own man on the throne. Instead, the Stormcloaks chose to ignore peaceful options that would get them to achieve parts of their objectives without shedding blood, and instead fought against the Empire while half the people in Skyrim still supported the Emperor. And they’re led by a man who not only got himself captured by the Thalmor, but also by that “weak, corrupt, and dying” Empire that he so often disparages. The Thalmor managed to take three kingdoms into their side and get the Empire to give up worship of its most beloved deity and give them Hammerfell in the peace treaty. The Stormcloaks, meanwhile, would have been defeated had Alduin not rescued their leader in Helgen, and would have remained in a tie against the Imperial forces in Skyrim so long as the Dragonborn refuses to join them. I know the Stormcloaks are deeply pious people, but relying on religious figures to bail themselves out of trouble makes them seem to be the inferior faction to take the Thalmor on, especially since the Thalmor proved themselves to be wildly successful rebels before they became a companion empire to the Empire that the Stormcloaks were having a hard time defeating.

Point being, the Thalmor are the kind of villains who have a lot of style and finesse to them. They may have lost Hammerfell, but that’s more because of the fact that they weren’t really focused on keeping it, and the sordid state they left that land in is more than enough to keep the Redguard population from interfering in their future plans. To fight the Thalmor, one must outdo them in what they do, and comparing the Thalmor rebellion that overthrew the rightful rulers of the Summerset Isles and wrung favorable terms from the Empire against the Stormcloak Rebellion that almost lost had it not been for Alduin is like comparing night and day. The latter rebellion against the Empire failed to take advantage of all the possible assets they could have had, failed to defeat the Empire in Skyrim, let alone win the support of all of Skyrim’s people, and had it not been for a few “divine interventions”, would have definitely lost the war. The Thalmor made a successful career out of being rebels first before they founded the Third Aldmeri Dominion and gave the Empire a severe beating, with them successfully pressing the claim that they saved the Elves from the Daedra, successfully killing the rulers of the Summerset Isles and taking control of them, and finally, founding their own empire that gave the actual Empire of Tamriel a hellish war they will not soon forget. Which is why allying with the Empire was my ideal solution for defeating them: The Dragonborn and the many groups that join them do have the potential to be a nuisance or even a threat to the Thalmor, but only if they have Imperial resources and wealth flowing into them so they can grow into a state that would make them a viable threat against the Aldmeri Dominion. It takes one strong empire to defeat another-that was the lesson the Great War between the Third Aldmeri Dominion and the Empire taught me, and that is a lesson I apply to the Skyrim Civil War.