Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24.119.198.177-20130930002431/@comment-4915037-20191222154049

OP, the correct answer is: did you play that expansion for Oblivion? Do you want that to have happened? It can certainly be read that way.

Do you want to interpret the vague statements in Skyrim when you meet Sheogorath to mean that happened? They can certainly be read that way.

However, while works such as Oblivion, Skyrim or Shivering Isles each exist as a self-contained story as well as part of a series—it's not hard to imagine someone plunking down in front of someone else's Oblivion save-game and playing, to the extent it's possible, only Shivering Isles content, getting quite a bit out of that story all by itself and using context clues to build a mental image of the rest of the Hero of Kvatch's life—the writers were careful to craft parts of the scripts referring to other games to allow for such readings but without requiring those parts to be read that way.

Sheogorath is a clear opportunity to do this in a script, because his lines can be full of "wacky" non-sequiturs. I haven't found that sort of "wackiness" genuinely amusing in a script in any medium since I was about twelve years old or so, but it's certainly an effective vehicle for ambiguous references to other games.