Lore discussion Options

[monkeyemoness]

Loremaster Lawrence Schick is moving to Ireland and thus leaving the ESO Team

Gonna miss him tbh, and whoever replaces him has some big shoes to fill. Or else.



EDIT: Oh, his successor wrote a good chunk of the Clockwork City! Okay, I'm not worried at all.

This post has been edited by monkeyemoness: Feb 7 2019, 05:54 AM

[RaderOfTheLostArk]

Oh, yes. Michael Kirkbride. One of my..."favorite" topics. I have mixed feelings about him, at best. Mostly negative.

We love you Michael Kirkbride

I don't!

To deny that he made some amazing contributions to TES lore and set it apart from every cookie-cutter fantasy setting out there (or at the very least, uplifted it from its DnD homebrew origins), would be very stupid. He also stuck adamantly to the "open source" aspect of TES lore, as Schick did too, which I also appreciate and love.

But on the other hand his writing eventually became more deranged and nonsensical, his woman characters come in only two settings, those being "Mom" or "Whore", or both at once (his take on Almalexia), he has a creepy fixation on "intersex=divine", he LOVES to use sexual violence in his writing, and his interactions with the fandom can easily be described as abusive and monstrous (but this isn't the place for that discussion).

A while back he decided to bow out of the TES fandom, to everyone's benefit. Zenimax/Bethesda, to their credit, DO incorporate some of his better work done outside of their, hm, supervision, so at least there's that. (C0DA was actually referenced in Morrowind and the Clockwork City, actually)

I more or less agree. There is denying the positive contributions he has made to the lore, which wouldn't be the same without him. But some of his esoteric work is just...too out there. I'm decidedly not a fan of a lot of it, and it feels more like him just being his usual self-aggrandizing self. And he really can't take criticism of it, but a lot of times the legion of MK bootlickers just attack people for him.

Although come to think of it, you're right, he DOES write about sexual stuff--particularly sexual violence--a lot. That's really creepy.

Also = can't even talk about TES without thinking of Ted Peterson.

Another thing that bothers me about the MK worship--and this time more so his overzealous fans. They act like MK is the only person who has ever contributed anything worthwhile to the series and nobody else's writing matters or it sucks. That pisses me off. Not only is it wrong and obnoxious, but it is a slap in the face to those who have made significant contributions. What about Ted Peterson, like you said? Marilyn Wasserman, the namesake of Mara? Julian LeFay, albeit really early on? Todd Howard, whatever his faults may be? Ken Rolston?

I wrote several paragraphs documenting a lot of his, uh, questionable behavior but thought it was best to not bring that in here lol.

That's disgusting. The dude really needs to get over himself. And the fans just make it far worse when they excuse his behavior. The way he'll come on, spout cryptic [censored], and act like some sort of grand loremaster is so pretentious to me. And then his fans so willingly take after him even with how abusive he can be.

I wasn’t too big on Kirkbride’s work. While the metaphysical intricacies were interest at least, there was some strange content in his writing. While I personally don’t shy away from heavier content, I don’t “worship” it the least or dwell too much on the sexual violent stuff. I honestly found the whole Azura/spear/throat/explosion quite absurd. Insanely absurd! There was also mention of Vivec and Molag Bal and some odd stuff happening between them. Could be metaphorical but some lore experts actually believe it “happened” in lore.

Kirkbride is a strange one.

I also don't think some of his more esoteric stuff even fits with TES. Some of it goes way too sci-fi for me. Which is great...in other franchises. Nothing against sci-fi (in fact, I often quite enjoy it), but just don't put in TES. One of the many things I love about TES is it isn't cookie-cutter fantasy, but you don't need to throw in insanely nonsensical fantasy stuff or sci-fi to keep it that way.


Everytime I think about this topic, I don't know who pisses me off more: Kirkbride or his legion of crazy fans. End rant.