Raven biter 114 wrote: ...it was just a ton of Nords in the middle of a field whacking a dragon, not anything special.
I saw a porn like that once.
But anyway, yeah, I hope TES 6 does something really cool. I think they will.
XD, but anyways, it should to make up for the sucky one in Skyrim.
We haven't actually seen any god die anyway. You'll have to name one specifically, and even then it wouldn't convince me.
None of them have ever "died".
Sotha Sil. Almalexia.
They were gods. They died.
They were gods. They died.
After they were cut off from the Heart of Lorkhan, yes.
But when they had the heart, not one of them ever died.
Doesn't change the fact that they did. Hell, it's pretty simple: cut off the source of their godly power, and you can kill them.
They were gods. They died.
Dying is a complex thing.
You have to differentiate from their bodies dying and their whole consciousness dying.
Almalexia and Sotha Sil may very well still exist, just without their bodies, since their bodies were destroyed.
You're forgetting that the Tribunal were mortals, too.
"Gods" that were really mortals that messed with a source of divine power.
That's the only reason why they could be killed. Even then, only because they lost access to a source of power that wasn't theirs to begin with.
(Edit): The point remains that the actual gods of TES can't "die" at all. Losing corporeal bodies isn't the same as "dying" to divine beings (and even then, it's only because most of them willingly gave up their corporeal forms).
So why don't they recreate their bodies, in order to act as a conduit (assuming that gods need something like that)?
I mean, there's certainly evidence that a god doesn't necessarily bear corporeal form (Hermaeus Mora, the Ideal Masters, etc), but I think in order to directly influence events they need to be able to physically perform actions. That's why Daedric quests have you carrying out their will-- they can't influence things directly.
I would argue that an utter inability to control what happens in Nirn indicates a loss of godhood, which I would call death. Death isn't necessarily final in TES, so they can talk to people (in the same way a Dremora can: temporarily). But they can't change things.
Well, inability to change things is part of the essence of an Aedra. The Aedra can create but not change, the Daedra can change but not create. The reason that the Daedra so frequently work through mortal agents is because the Dragonfires (and later Akatosh's intervention, I think) prevent them from manifesting fully into the world. Ordinarily they would be able to.
As far as I'm concerned, a "god" is anything that people worship, from a golden idol to an all-powerful creator. Whether it has powers or not is irrelevant. In the context of TES, though, the "divines" colloquially refers to the dieties of the Imperial pantheon, and they are certainly not dead--or, at least, Akatosh is not because he uses Martin as an avatar to defeat Mehrunes Dagon and then gives the dragon soul to our Dragonborn. He may be special, being the God of Time and all.
The divines in general are unable to do anything, really, other than bestow some amount of blessing upon favored individuals. They lost their active agency in the world when Lorkhan tricked them into sacrificing power to create Mundus.