Board Thread:Skyrim/@comment-12599067-20130928060857/@comment-24589685-20140225191318

This talk about "who got there first" is silly. If that were THE defining factor in who has rights to a given land, then all men should just vacate the f--- out of Skyrim and leave it to the Falmer and Animiculti.

Point is...

a) "Skyrim belongs to the Nords!" is, at least, a highly debateable proposition, with several valid opposing viewpoints.

and

b) One way or the other, the Forsworn ARE a displaced indigenous people, and I tend to have a LOT of sympathy for displaced peoples, refugees, diaspora, etc. What else are the Forsworn SUPPOSED to do except try to take back their homes? They can't just emigrate off to High Rock or something. Madanach and Hrolfdir should have negotiated a peace, and Ulfric should have just accepted the fact that the empire were actually ALLOWING Talos worship as long as it was kept relatively quiet for the time being (and hell, considering Heimskr, sometimes allows it despite being the OPPOSITE of quiet)... because it was an intractable, impossible situation for both sides to get everything they wanted. The Nords can't except the Reachmen to just roll over and die, or disappear, or whatever, and the Reachmen couldn't expect the Nords to just allow them control of Markarth... a treaty was the only possible solution.

It's not entirely dissimilar from some modern conflicts... indigenous peoples in Canada deserve a WHOLE lot of compensation for all the hell and genocide and racism and segregation and poverty and displacement that colonization imposed (and continues to impose) on them, but after hundreds of years of settlement, non-indigenous Canadians can't just vacate the nation, and that would likely make things worse. Palestinians don't deserve to have their homes annexed and bulldozed to make way for new Israeli stripmalls and military institutions, while they get sent off to increasingly crowded refugee camps or forced to sell everything they own to try and score a ticket and visa to UK, France, USA or Canada or something (where they'll then be stuck in a far inferior career to the one they had, and be resented by the more racist or xenophobic locals for allegedly "polluting" THEIR culture or "taking" "their" jobs), but after 60 years it's impossible to simply dissolve the state of Israel, especially given American military interests in the region, the increasing fervency and zealotry and theocracy of several extremist Islamic states in near proximity (some of whom wouldn't hesitate to then just take the region for themselves if it were left without the American / NATO / European military support), and with all the violence certain Palestinian groups have perpetrated, and the intensity with which Zionist propaganda is taught (fun fact: the zionist movement was actually started by a SECULAR jew who insisted it wasn't important WHERE the Jewish state actually was), there's now too much hard feelings for that to ever result in anything but the birth of ANOTHER set of violently angry radicals who feel deeply wronged by history.

Intractable situations where nobody, and everybody, is in the right AND in the wrong.

THAT'S what REAL wars are born of. Not "Sauron / Mehrunes Dagon / Molag Bal / The Lich King / Alduin / Darth Vader / Zombie Hitler and their forces of PURE EVIL are trying to plunge the world into eternal darkness!"

High Fantasy needs the latter sort of thing, of course. But I genuinely appreciate TES for always including the complicated, messy sort of conflicts like Stormcloaks vs. Legion, Forsworn vs. The Reach, Mer vs. Men, etc. that much more closely echo what real life conflicts and wars are like.