Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-4092092-20130801070333/@comment-29845234-20170531183737

To my mind, it all hangs on whether the event that transforms the followers of Trinimac into orcs also changed their species. Either we assume:

1) The consumption of Trinimac fundamentally altered his followers, to the extent that they are no longer mer.

or

2) The sources calling orcs beastfolk are wrong in some way.

These sources are Before the Ages of Man, PGE1 and the ESO interviews.

BtAoM claims that the Orcs were on Tamriel before the Velothi exodus. This is wrong because various sources state that the orcs were transformed when Trinimac tried to stop the Velothi leaving, so they couldn't predate the arrival of other mer on Tamriel. They could therefore be wrong about other things to do with the orcs.

PGE1 was written under an Emperor who had VERY strong opinons that the orcs were terrible and were going to be wiped out. I think what CarloV3r was getting at with the annotations point was that the PGE isn't accurate in all things, because we can clearly see dissenting opinions from the Aldmeri Dominion in the text we have. I don't think that an Imperial text written under Tiber would have called the orcs mer even if the Imperial Geographic Society knew about their actual origins, simply because Tiber disliked them intensely.

The in-character ESO interview is questionable because of the speaker's dismissive attitude to pretty much everything he doesn't like.

The ESO developer comment does rather knock all this down if you're prepared to accept developer interviews and comments as gospel truth. However, if you don't, then there are plenty of reasons to think that orcs are mer, because the sources labelling them beastfolk have several problems with them.