Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-62.31.43.199-20131118141224/@comment-24590102-20140316102259

Thanks, Dovahsebrom. This is is interesting  :^)

The fact that someone could escape from AE and return to Nirn seems to confirm that AE is a "place" where others abide and can return with the right technology/magic etc. In other words this goes back to the persepective that the Dwemer sought an escape from Nirn. If the Dwemer suddenly acquired faith when, for centuries, they clearly knew better, then this kind of sudden sweeping social change on the scale of being unanimous (unless I am mistaken?) suggests that their civilisation was rocked by something major.

(You'll notice that this time it's me going out on a limb, here, so what I am saying "ain't necessarily so" either)

Bravely marching on: As to that "something major" I'm thinking of something large scale and perceived by the Dwemer as "unprecedented" - e.g. such as a strategic defeat (loss of all Skyrim cities and facilities), as opposed to tactical defeat (loss of a single battle, e.g. Red Mountain). The Falmer suddenly becoming occupiers of all Dwemer installations across Skyrim, between the end of a war (started by a brutal Falmer annexation of allied territory under the deceeption that the alliance still applied) and this sudden and seemingly unanimous Dwemer exodus, is suggestive that the so-called slave revolt of the Falmer may have not only been successful but shattered the Dwemer sense of security rooted in centuries of relative safety in their own domain. This may have lead to a perception that Nirn was no longer a safe enough world to live in and, ergo, to a urge to migrate as far away from Nirn as possible.

But, I think what I was trying to explore when I waded into all this was the idea that maybe the Falmer are not quite the victims some perceive them to be. Again, we have a mystery which is too old to be truly solveable (at least in the absence of time-travellors with all the answers) because, as time goes by, the body of evidence decays with, well, all the other bodies (something which is understood all too well in the forensic sciences - not just in archeology).

I think that Zenimax/Bethesda have gone to a lot of trouble to make their representations of Nirn as immersive as possible - i.e. extremely detailed in terms of real-world themes (as opposed to pandering to button-mashers with higher graphic resolution and "depth of combat" systems). I mean, just look at the Empire/Stormcloak civil war - it's certainly not black and white as its factions portray it - which is exactly how things go in a civil war. What we see here is very much a real world theme where information is selectively covered up by both sides whose real enemy is rolling with laughter on the sidelines. So I think that the obscurity and obfuscation of information is a very important real world theme (with respect to giving a narrative sufficient relevance to hold the attention of the audience). You'll see this in all the great modern works - e.g. Tolkien, Salvatore, Anderson, Hamilton, Crichton, etc. - even George Lucas and his special effects couldn't have succeeded without this theme.