#i get that with bonzo it was out of pure spite but this? this is a certified dommy grandmommy

[squircatlies]

"Why do people want to fuck the horrors?"

*proceeds to create lady Mowbray by mashing together Gertrude Robinson and lady Dimitrescu*

[tes-trash-blog]

Maybe this is because I read Ender’s Game and hated it, or maybe this is because I generally hate most war fiction floating around that can be summed up to “we good, they bad, they dead, we win”, maybe I just hate lazy colonization fiction in general. Either way, it’s started an itch about Ysgramor, the Return, and the circumstances surrounding the extinction of the Snow Elves.

So that’s exactly what I’m going to rant about tonight.

TW: Everything.

Part 1. The Circumstances Surrounding The Return, aka Saarthal

So, it’s established in Nordic lore that Saarthal was the first Atmoran city to be constructed. As to where the other Atmorans that braved those seas before Ysgramor’s initial arrival went, your guess is as good as mine. Tamriel was always a safety valve for malcontents and yearners, and there certainly were humans there before the Harbinger. Strangely enough, there doesn’t seem to be remains of the potential villages in Skyrim. Same as the Snow Elven cities that surely dotted the landscape. Hm.

I digress. Saarthal is, for the intents of this rant, the first real city. For reasons lorekeepers are divided on, the Elves attacked. Modern consensus is that the Atmorans discovered the Eye of Magnus, and the Elves wanted it. Elven lorekeepers argue that the attack was a result of various provocations from the city. Either way, the city was sacked, in spite of the city’s best efforts to fight back. Tragic, no matter which way you parse it. So much that Songs of the Return asserts that Ysgramor’s grief was such that he cried tears of ebony, and his son forged Wuuthrad with those tears. On a boat. Using lighting as a forge, and the seawater to cool the metal. All that, and he still managed to get that lovely detail of a caricatured Elf screaming in pain!

Three mourning people, and already their thoughts are not on how to go home and lick their wounds, but how to best kill Elves. Not a single thought to maybe arguing for peace in their homeworld, instead they braved the war torn Atmora to gather warriors.

Violence is not an answer. It is a question, and already Ysgramor’s was shouting a hearty “Yes”.

Part 2. The Return, or Fantasy Manifest Destiny

So in spite of Atmora being a war torn hellhole, Ysgrmaor and his two boys go back. He commissions boats, and finds able warriors to sail with him.

I feel like I don’t need to tell you how expensive boats are. I guess I’m trying to say is the dude had money, or enough social capital to have them commissioned. Either way, he ignored the ongoing war in his own home to wage another across the sea.

“But tes-trash-blog! These were people who have been traumatized! This is their grief talking, and grief does things to you!”

And yet. From Songs of the Return, Volume 2:

“Yngol, the elder, was the brave strategist, bringing his learnings to bear on the battlefield that his enemies would be defeated before they even know the battle had begun. Ylgar, the younger, was possessed of an unwavering spirit that drove his singular prowess to overwhelming feats in war. Together, the mind and the arm, they were capable of sowing a destruction most thorough and glorious to any foe who stood before them.”

So… Three perfectly peaceful, grief-stricken and traumatized folks, but one was strategic enough to “end a battle before it began” and the other was basically a berserker. And yet the Night of Tears was a massacre of innocent civilians. Ysgramor felled a number of Elves during the attack, but they were all innocent civilians.

A goddamn Word Wall says not to ask for peace for peace is weakness, but hey. They were innocent, peaceful people, their hands forced by “treacherous Elves”.

They apparently found battle, “though none remain to tell what those battles entailed”. How convenient. They took slaves, and cut out their tongues.

This is all under the banner of grief, of anger. It’s seems a bit too systematic to be purely emotional, and Songs of the Return even says the Companions were shrewd and sharp. They knew what they doing, but let’s assume they were purely acting out of grief. Let’s assume they only wanted vengeance. Let’s assume their only goal was revenge against those Elves for killing their kind.

Surely they stopped there.

Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

Part 3. A Homicidal Maniac Drives A Race To Extinction. What Happened Next Will (Not) Surprise You

The Elves are dead! Vengeance is complete! Surely Ysgramor, now fully vindicated and no longer hearing the screams of his dead friends, can rest.

Well.. No. As it turns out, he and the rest of the Companions didn’t stop. They went as far as Black Marsh where they killed Argonians, to Elsweyr where they met, killed, and skinned the Khajiit. They even reached Hammerfell, where they met round eared folks. But they were different, so they too found war. It almost seems like grief and trauma and what have you were flimsy excuses to drive an entire culture to extinction.

It almost seems like those Five Hundred Atmorans were a war-hungry bunch, bent on colonizing. The Songs of the Return only ever continues to echo this sentiment, with talk of “rightful claims” and “bringing the light of the proper gods to the heathen land of elves and beasts.”

It’s fantasy Manifest Destiny, plain and simple. It’s a genocide of an indigenous people, and the invasion to other lands because “we good, they bad”.

At best, this is a story of people going mad with grief and rage, and being unable to reconcile that pain. Given that the Companions are still a highly respected faction in Skyrim, one can assume they never learned their lesson.

Part 4. So Where Does This Leave Us?

KA Applegate said it best, in regards to the controversial ending to her Animorphs books:

“Here’s what doesn’t happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don’t do a lot of celebrating There’s very little chanting of ‘we’re number one’ among people who’ve personally experienced war.”

And John Kessel doubles down on that in his essay “Creating The Innocent Killer”, which I highly recommend:

“Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault. Stilson already lies defeated on the ground, yet Ender can kick him in the face until he dies, and still remain the good guy.  Ender can drive bone fragments into Bonzo’s brain and then kick his dying body in the crotch, yet the entire focus is on Ender’s suffering. […] As Elaine Radford has said, ‘We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special—especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies.’

But that’s a lie.  No one is that special; no one is that innocent.”

Substitute Orson Scott Card’s self insert Gary Stu with Ysgramor, the names of his enemies with Snow Elves. Go ahead, I’ll be right here.

Genocide is genocide, be it caused by grief or rage or land dispute or magic eyeballs.

And yet that pride over genocide, that elevation of Ysgramor is one of the Nord’s more defining traits. They’re a proud, boisterous people who frown on magic because it’s the work of “weaker races”, who honor the Companions even though they’re basically mercenaries with a genocide fetish (see: The Silver Hand, the Glenmoril Witches), who drink and get rowdy and are so goddamn proud of their axes. It’s an open carry nation that makes it abundantly clear that outsiders aren’t welcome. They are descendants of killers, as are most races in Tamriel, but they never let you forget it. Hell, the more popular skald song is “The Slaying of the Falmer Princes”. In game, you can barely walk into a tavern without hearing a bard say “Kill Ulfric!” or “Kill the Invaders!”. The latter is pretty ironic, if you think about it.

Once I heard someone somewhere say, “Well, the Elves deserved it.” I can’t remember where, it may have actually been an argument in real life, but they refused to say anymore. I assume this is what all arguments for Ysgramor and against the Elves boils down to.

So. Did the Snow Elves deserve extinction? Did the Elven civilian at modern day Fort Greenwall deserve to be cut down? Did his daughter, who wasn’t even born when the Night of Tears happened? The women and priests deserve debasement and slavery? What of those whose tongues were cut out from their mouths, those who were crushed under black quarry stone while forced to build Windhelm?

Or is “they deserved it” just an excuse, a candy pill to swallow so the offender can avoid bitter truth?