About plotholes.

It's not that strange.

The lore in the game is vague and contradictory because it is actively being discovered and interpreted by many different races and cultures. They all have different pieces of the puzzle, and those pieces are all interpreted through their own unique points of view. Lots of what is known is either interpreted incorrectly, or made up to suit someone's agenda.

So, I wouldn't assume anything "known" about the universe and how it works is 100% correct to begin with.

This is no different than the world we live in.

  • Subjectively, history is revised to make certain people look good or bad due to current cultural norms or political agendas. There are usually multiple accounts of the same event such as Tienanmen square.
  • Objective history is only ever as accurate as current information suggests, and corrections are made over time. Such as Christopher Columbus. The most objective accounts still have at the very least an unconscious bias.
  • There are even wars over teaching proper history and science because they affect the profit potential of certain organizations.
  • We can't even a 100% accurate story of an event happening right now with multiple witnesses and or participants. X number of people will give x number of stories, all seen and experienced through x number of lenses.

That said, Bethesda is making a game, not a story. The gameplay comes first, and the lore should never get in the way of making the best game possible at the time. The fact that every game is seen through the POV of a different character (who also has a unique interpretation for every PC of every player!), and not an omnipotent narrator also helps.

When a new game starts, all the previous lore is subject to all the above caveats. If you find a book or an NPC discussion about the events of Skyrim, in the next game, it's still just conjecture based on the surviving information (was it even taken down and then copied correctly?), and the current individual, political, and cultural biases.

So no, it's not strange at all. :)

/r/teslore Thread Parent