What happened in Cyrodiil? Options

[Lady Saga]

What do you think happened to Cyrodiil 200 years into the 4th era? Is there an official explanation as to what happens? Does the Arcane university still exist? Is Cyrodiil in as much a decline as portions of Skyrim are?

I'm just wondering about all this, as I just tried to do some research and can't find anything official. I only looked at UESP, though.

[Destri Melarg]

Good lord. Thanks for bouncing this topic up, flowerboom. Sheesh, I was on fire a year ago or something!

I think I’m still on fire about it!

The lore is the single thing that I love most about this series. To me the history of Tamriel is one of the most detailed and fleshed-out backstories of any continuing series now running... in any genre or medium.

The one thing that we know, given what we have seen, is that Tamriel’s history has always been one of violent dispute and upheaval. No matter what era you look at the single constant is cataclysmic change. You have the Night of Tears and the Alessian Rebellion. You have the Battle of Red Mountain which results in the sudden disappearance of the dwarves and the spontaneous ‘ashification’ of the Chimer. You have a Thrassian plague and a Knahaten flu that decimate entire populations. Akaviri invasions occur at the same time as sieges of Orsinium. The giant Numidium destroys so much of Nirn that the survivors bend the knee to a half-breed Atmoran general. The Camoran Usurper uses armies of the undead to terrorize the entire continent. Dagoth Ur rises in the east... and an Oblivion Crisis deposits armies of daedra on the fields of Tamriel.

Mixed in with all of that you have the wars: The War of Succession, The Dragon War, The War of the First Council, The War of Righteousness, The Four-Score War, The War of the Isles, The War of the Red Diamond, The Five Year War, The Arnesian War, The War of the Blue Divide, The War of the Bend’r-mahk, The War of Betony, and on, and on, and on.

All of that does not even include the fact that, every once in a while, time itself seems to have a stroke and the Dragon breaks... and sometimes stays broken for a thousand years! What we have going on in the Fourth Era is just a logical continuation of what has come before.

This is why I say Bethesda has no respect for the lore it creates.

I couldn't agree more!

WARNING: RANT INCOMING -

That is not to say that I agree with everything done to the lore in the wake of Skyrim. My biggest problem is that the writers have taken a very significant chunk of the established history of Tamriel and changed it in order to accommodate the return of the dragons. Throughout Oblivion (and, to a lesser extent, throughout Morrowind) we are told that the Septims possess the dragon blood, which allows them to wear the Amulet of Kings, which keeps the dragonfires burning in the Temple of the One, which keeps the doors of Oblivion shut and all mortals safe from the hordes of daedra lurking beyond. We are told that the Amulet (and the blood) were gifts from Akatosh to Alessia and that, ‘so long as Alessia’s generations were true to the dragon blood, Akatosh would endeavor to seal tight the Gates of Oblivion.‘

NOWHERE in the lore does it say that Alessia then picked up a sword and proceeded to use her dragon blood to shout dragons out of the sky! Was that something that Akatosh forgot to mention when he was handing the Amulet over? Given the fact that every depiction of Akatosh we have ever been given identifies him as a dragon, one can see how a small detail like that would slip his mind. What really drives me crazy is that the only explanation we are ever given is from a guard at the Western Watch Tower:

Guard 1: I don’t remember Tiber Septim facing any dragons.

Guard 2 (in best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice): That’s because there weren’t any dragons then, idiot. They’re just appearing now for the first time in... forever.

Now I would probably accept it if they had told me that Red Mountain’s eruption and the subsequent destruction of Morrowind resulted in yet another Dragon Break, and that this Dragon Break awakened Alduin and resulted in the shifting of the role of the dragonborn from protector to slayer. That at least makes sense (insofar as the Elder Scrolls universe is concerned). They could have come up with a million reasons to explain the rise of a new dragonborn. You can't call something 'canon' and then remake it on a whim. As it stands now everything surrounding the dragonborn rings false because it doesn’t match with what came before. That isn’t a mistake, that’s just flat out lazy!