Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-2165692-20140425203121/@comment-24590102-20140826164416

Kadilkhajiit wrote: You can also use execution hood without it impeding your vision even though It's a checkbox which could have been more easily left unchecked in the event that the captives really were intended to be blind. Also you keep acting like if they're blind they shouldn't be able to those things but you forget they're not at a disadvantage because,and really pay attention to this,they are not human and have had thousands of years to adapt and overcome they're disability.They have a different type of blindness because they're a differnt creature,they're not even mer anymore having devolved into white souled creatures.

They may have a different way of locating things,or maybe since they've live longer than humans they're just better trained,after all even without hundreds of years of training blind humans can hit moving targets.People can be pretty amazing with training.(scroll down to #3.)

Plus you're taking this way to seriously the 'mystical blind man' is a common trope in popular culture.This is just an entire race of that.

P.S. The snow elves weren't tricky.They were at peace,then saw the nords out numbered them and decided to attack. Blind people are just like you or me - without eyesight we all need aids or some form of vision replacement to be able to hit a target. That bionic eye setup that Miekka has could probably allow him to hit clay targets with the right tweak and the correct technique. Alternatively if a noise-maker or whistle were engineered into the clays it would do the trick too. And you don't have to be blind to learn to use your ears. The big issue with audio-visualisation is that nearby background noise almost invariably drowns out soft sounds coming from further away. Also, terrain plays havoc with echolocation due to ghosting. When inside a building, for example, sounds originating outside often mislocate the source along the direction of strongest echo because the strongest echo coming through a window is louder than the source after passing through brick, air-gap and plaster. I think @202.156.139.1 points out some important facts about sensory propagation and the inverse-square law...even if entirely different words  :^)

I really like your mystical blind man point. It is very much a popular element of fiction - and with that longer lifespan I think it makes it an important consideration. I have the sneaky suspicion that Bethsoft may have given it an all new left-handed spin... :^)

P.S. the Snow Elves and Nedes were allies; "great" allies if the quote is any indication. That made the Snow Elves betrayers and very tricksy in the deal as well. In our world, if I recall correctly, Placanica tells the story of a certain migrating people (who shall not be named here) who came to certain towns and villages under pretence of the white flag and claiming to seek refuge. They would make great friends with the townspeople and their men would mark the men capable of bearing arms as well as marking any men at arms. On a signal or at a given time, each would murder their mark and the surviving townspeople would be evicted from their homes and taken as slaves or, worse, chained to the land as serfs. This went on with many towns falling to this stratagem until a child escaped capture and warned the people of a certain town (also not to be named here). The people of that town were ready for the white flag ruse and, although the town in question has been sacked and burned many times over, its people have never once been conquered in 3000 years - truly, a people unbent and unbroken. The aggressors and their descendants, to this day, play the victim and vilify the people of the town in question. I can see strong parallels between this epic, inspiring piece of history and Bethsoft's story of the Dwemer and the Falmer. In particular, the way that Falmer vilify the Dwemer after their very own betrayal of the Nedes at Saarthal makes me wonder if someone at Bethsoft is familiar with Placanica's account of history. I guess that's why I'm so seriously "don't believe everything [anything] you hear" and all gung-ho about the most innocent looking Snow Elves being the most wicked malefactors of all. For all this, I could be wrong but the story seems less ricketty to me when the Snow Elves are assmumed to continue in the tricksy ways that were first noticed on that Night of Tears.

Also, it's worth looking more closely at the timeline. Uthrax's account places the Falmer in Blackreach in the late Merethic Era hundreds of years before Harold's campaign against the Snow Elves of Lake Honrich (1e139) and before the Dwemer first arrived there and "discovered" the place and its obvious aetherium lodes some time after 1e221. Those aetherium lodes are not exactly something the Dwemer could have missed for decades or even years. A discrepency like this is not exactly subtle but it does signal that one of the characters in the tale is playing fast and loose with the facts. In a work of literature, this kind of character-generated aporia would signal that one of the characters has erred or is engaged in propagating a deception and the situation would require an examination of setting to solve the mystery. This is highly relevant because, just like film, video games are meagrely a new and more immersive medium for literature - which is why the same rules of analysis apply. Having said this, in the mystery genre, the setting is nearly always contrasted against the lore with the protagonist almost universally using elements of the setting to see through lore-generated misdirection.