Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-62.255.98.169-20130504143516/@comment-24590102-20140816065236

Morality = Pragmatism.Context(Social). Here's why: Taking the needs of others into consideration and, making room for the needs of others so that others will make room for your needs is not only the totality of morality (i.e. in the sense of doing no harm) but is, additionally, the only practical, i.e. pragmatic, approach to living in the company of others. The idea that pragmatism is, in some illogical mysterious way, opposed to "morality" is an old myth invented by kings (i.e. successful highwaymen) of old seeking, via some form of priesthood, to subvert the conscience of their subjects in order to gain absolute power over the integrity of the person so that they may continue their robbery and barbarism on a yet grander scale.

I tend to think that the Dwemer had no practical need of servants and would not have wanted servants because there was nothing anyone could do for the Dwemer that the Dwemer could not do better themselves. Servants would only have proved to be a dead weight that totally counteracted everything the Dwemer had achieved through automation. Thus, it is my view that the Falmer had nothing to offer the Dwemer in the first place and I doubt that the Dwemer would have allowed the then infamous perpetrators of the Saarthal massacre into their cities given the lack of evidence that they might have allowed people of more trustworthy cultures into their cities. And don't forget that, being extinct in the practical sense, makes the Dwemer the ultimate punching bag for any culture with sins to project onto others.

I'm not seeing the evidence supporting the in-game claim that the Dwemer enslaved the Falmer. The Falmer have slave pens, Dwemer ruins do not (unless I've missed something). Everything I've looked at in the architecture of the Dwemer ruins seems to indicate a function other than keeping or using slaves. Thus, on the one hand, it makes complete sense that the Falmer, who are slavers, are projecting their misdeeds onto others to take the spotlight off their own foul deeds. Moreover, based on the ruins I've seen, it appears that the Falmer attacked the Dwemer just like they attacked the Nedes in Saarthal and then proceeded to invent the typical historical revisions of the conquerer once the Dwemer were no longer around to contest their claims. The Falmer have lived in Dwemer ruins they inherited from the disappearance of the Dwemer for thousands of years without building a single thing (bar the temporary encampments they erect). This suggests that the architectural style they claim as their own (in that hidden valley) was meagrely something they inherited from yet another absent culture - this time one whose existence is unknown to anyone but, perhaps, the Falmer who originally moved in and took up residence.

The ingame written claims concerning the Falmer originate with Uthrax who's only argument is "Now I know the truth about the Falmer"...? I can say that too.

''I've been to Whiterun, I've seen Avenici Himself, and I knw the truth about the Avenicis. They are a family of dragons and are going to sprout wings, spout flame, and saute all of Nirn with sweet mustard quenched in orange and chilli. Muahahahaaa!" ''

This is exactly the same argument as Uthrax's but contextualised to a different agenda with a stray banana peel thrown in for good measure. The same claim repeated by a couple of surviving Snow Elves hidden away in a high valley, like Uthrax's claim, smells like hearsay blindly propagated from a people who are trying to play the victim in a land where they are still every bit as predatory as they were on the Night of Tears. And, yes, of all the Falmer, there are only two I would credit with any form of blindness. :^)

But coming back to the question of the OP, the differences between the Falmer and the Snow Elves arise from two general causes. The first set of differences are due to immediate response to environment and include things like posture, cleanliness, sharpness of dress, etc. The second set of differences seem to arise from thousands of years living underground and includes things like altered eyes with abundantly evident night-vision, etc. There are physiological differences although it is probably not known if these differences amount to outright speciation (i.e. that the differences are so great that a Falmer and a Snow Elf could not produce fertile issue). Yes, organisms evolve forward and backward according to the changes in the environment dictating their niche, but I would argue that it is not entirely impossible for an organism to evolve back to a previous species any more than it is impossible to win the lottery 777 consecutive times -  just highly improbable due to the complexity of environments, the one-way nature of many environmental processes (e.g. erosion) and the unlikelihood that the same niche can ever be naturally duplicated along a symmetrically reverse path.

Also, while there may be differences between Nirn and Planet Earth, The Elder Scrolls does not belong to the absurd genre. Things have to make some kind of sense or it just doesn't work - so it's ok to expect things in The Elder Scrolls to make sense in a fundamental way. For example, we don't have to understand what allows a dragon to breath fire, but we do need basic things like gravity, laws of motion, period misconception, and the correctly overwhelming proportion of academics talking through their a.... donkeys in the name of "theory" - which is why theory is still primarily defined as "supposition" if you look it up in a dictionary.

The idea, for example, that the Falmer were completely transformed by their ancestor's consumption of certain foods (i.e. over and above how the digestive tract would adapt to these foods) is an example of a misconception which one would expect to find in widespread acceptance in the period corresponding to The Elder Scrolls. The Elder Scrolls would not make sense as a medievalist fantasy, if the people presented lacked such misconceptions and, instead, possessed knowledge to the same level of accuracy we have achieved in the present day. This is not beyond Bethsoft. In fact, if you keep your eye's open you'll see that this level of attention to detail is pretty typical of their material. In fact, the Bible of the Deep Ones is a typical example of something someone at Bethsoft plucked out of high academia and fit very well into their creation. Ideosyncratic patchwork languages evolve out of contact with people speaking multiple dialects and, in extreme cases, people speaking multiple languages. In his novel, the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco included a character who spoke in an ideosyncratic patchwork language - but this is not something you hear much about in English-speaking circles. So when it turned up in Oblivion, it was quite the pleasant surprise for me. This is just to say that Bethsoft really do pay a lot of attention to detail in some of the most unexpected ways and that the problems of information reliability in the real world are not an unexpected element of the genre.