Board Thread:Online Discussion/@comment-70.112.240.21-20140206142245/@comment-70.112.240.21-20140211070952

Zippertrain85 wrote: Back then people had an eye for an eye mentality, since they tried to wipe out the Nords, they tried to wipe out the Falmer right back. It might not be right, but that's how they did it.

If you look into any of the reasons and theories behind why the Snow Elves originally razed Saarthal, none point to them having an extermination plan for the Nords, they never had ideas to wipe the whole race out. As stated in a few messages above, I'm not in any way condoning what they did to the city, it was horrid, but they did it to:

1. Find and take the ancient power the Nords had discovered deep in the earth beneath the city for themselves

2. Keep a much faster-populating race (Man as opposed to Mer) from spreading unchecked and eventually having the sheer numbers to overwhelm them as a whole (which is very logical thinking, especially for back then considering that land was still being claimed, settled and taken by force to whoever could control it)

The grand difference between this event and the Nords' retalliation that I call upon is the fact that they knowingly made it a mission to eradicate any and every single being of that race and traces of their history AFTER the war was over, and won in their favor on top of that. What the Snow Elves did was a very dark thing, but what the Nords' did was a nationwide mass extermination. It's pretty accurate in comparison to the real-life event in WWII regarding the Nazis' killing of Jews in that it was a completely unneccessary thing to do, seeing as the Nords had already won the war, and broken the Snow Elves' spirit there was no way there could be another uprising, it was solely for the sake of revenge, and while you'd think an entire war should've been enough to quench their bloodlust, it seems the Nords were sadly just too cold to stop there.

On one side you have a group that destroyed a city to gain ancient power and ensure the opposing race didn't become too big of a force to be able to fight against (and as I've stated many times now, that doesn't justify the Snow Elves in doing so, those were just their motives behind doing it). Now on the other side, you have a group that insighted a war in retalliation to said city's destruction, then after winning the war, they proceeded to systematically hunt down and kill any living member of that race and purge their history out of pure hate, this was also AFTER the war had ended, which made it 100% unneccessary.

All in all, no side is "right" or "wrong" here, but as I said before, when you compare events and how they stack up with who did what to who, the Nords just plain and simple went way overboard with overkill.