Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-95.94.124.138-20130922100323/@comment-12277465-20140417210320

First of all:

No, the afterlife is not necessarily fair. The Christian afterlife is very specifically not fair. That's like the entire point, kind of. (I can explain further if necessary.)

This does not, however, mean that only Nords can get into Sovngarde. There are many reasons to believe otherwise. The supposed racism of a Nord-only policy is not one of them.

The Dragonborn is explicitly stated to be able to get into Sovngarde. True, he's a special case, but it still tends to indicate that there isn't a sort of categorical, metaphysical restriction. Also, Ysgramor is in Sovngarde, right? And guess what? Ysgramor isn't a Nord. He's an Atmoran. Races in TES -- like races in real life, really -- are extremely fluid. It would be ridiculously difficult to even figure out who was to be allowed in if it was based on biological race. So no.

Presumably, the vast majority of those who go to Sovngarde are Nords because A: it's based on their culture, so they're the ones most likely to fulfill the prerequisites and B: it is, again, based on their culture, so the Nords will want to go there, while others might not. Tullius isn't in Sovngarde if you kill him because he has no particular interest in going there. He'd rather go to whatever the Imperial afterlife even is.

Oh and about Alduin? He doesn't die at the Throat of the World because the health bar is a gameplay abstraction. It's not a one-to-one representation of an entity's life force, just like how there are more than fifty people living in Whiterun. In most cases, the health bar is more or less connected to when someone will die, so you kill them by reducing it to zero. But in other cases, the life of the entity is translated into the health bar differently, like with essential characters or Alduin at the TotW.

That said, I'm kind of unsure as to whether it's possible to kill him outside of Sovngarde or not. I originally had assumed that it wasn't, but I'm leaning toward the other option now, simply because there's not a whole lot of evidence to the contrary, and if he was invincible, why would he have fled and risked the displeasure of his underlings? For that matter, why would he even need to build up his strength? If you can't be killed, it doesn't really matter how weak you are.