I know that all three alliances in Elder Scrolls Online (clumsily kitbashed due to map convenience as they already are) are supposed to be “both good and bad” but by the Divines the Aldmeri Dominion is a sus ethnostate. I’ve had struggle sessions with some ESO guilds with some that claimed, I kid you not, that Ayrenn was “the only Adult In The Room” (their words that time, not mine) during the Three Banners War because… she said some snippy snarky MCU talk during the Daedric attack on the summit at Stirk instead of “childish” things the other leaders did like grieve for their dead soldiers.
When I brought up Shadowfen and asked whether Ayrenn was in on a literal genocide attempt against the Argonians or if she was just incompetent or uncaring enough to delegate to genocide-enjoying generals, what I got back was “war is hell”
and “well all three alliances did bad things to each other” 
(none of those other bad things were direct fucking race-specific genocides!).Because pirates raiding a coastal town with a letter of marque is equally as bad as murdering Argonian children before they hatch on a generational scale and poisoning their spirit-trees to try to prevent future generations.
And all of this is before later games showing the Dominion wanting to retroactively erase non-elves from existence using time fuckery.
if she was just incompetent or uncaring enough to delegate to genocide-enjoying generals
Something like half the quests involving Altmer are basically “the hitlerite elves have such enlarged racism lobes they cannot help but plot to rebel against the liberal Ayrenn and do pogroms, genocide, or attempted omnicide.” Ayrenn is a tepid liberal reformer whose hegemony relies on the willing violence of a bunch of self-defeatingly racist elven fancy lads, and any possibility of making the AD less ontologically evil died the second she decided to try to coexist with the omnicidal aristocrats as long as they agreed to let a few bosmer and khajit into their paramilitary country club, instead of purging the entire noble class and replacing them with bosmer and khajit loyalists.
That’s right, she’s basically elf Jimmy Carter: charismatic, affable, seemingly well meaning and empathic on a personal level, but entirely unwilling to wield power against entrenched blocs of ontologically evil racist monsters in the state’s ranks and supporting institutions, and still ultimately willing to collaborate with maintaining the empire’s hegemony abroad with the most grotesque violence including turning a blind eye to or rubber stamping genocide.
My hot take is that most of the community love for the AD comes entirely from Razum-dar being such a charismatic and memorable character and other factions just not having any recurring characters as memorable or enjoyable as Raz. Players like Raz and Raz worships the ground Ayrenn walks on, so some of that rubs off on the players too. I couldn’t even give you a description of the equivalent recurring secret agent quest giver for the Ebonheart Pact, and I couldn’t get into the Daggerfall Covenant storyline at all because Daggerfall is such a painfully generic and dull place that I rushed through a little of it then just got demoralized by how much all of it was bland and boring and went to do something else instead, so I don’t know if they got any decent characters at any point but I’ve never heard of any whereas everyone knows and loves Raz.
Stanning any of the ontologically evil factions and their idle dipshit monarchs is bad and dumb, but if someone’s going to do it the funny cat man secret agent has gotta tip the scales a fair bit.
The nearest Daggerfall Covenant has to recurring characters is House Ravenwatch, and they show up, like, twice outside the Rivenspire main quest.
Edit: Also Darien, who shows up again when you get to Coldharbour and appears in Summerset.
most of the community love for the AD comes entirely from Razum-dar being such a charismatic and memorable character
Yeah, he’s Khajiit CIA with all the propaganda-driven “super cool Adult In The Room that pragmatically murders enemies of the regime” vibes that entails.
The expansion packs gave us some decent characters, including some Altmer that didn’t like the Altmer nazis to the point of making their entire island disappear from them (but now cooperating with them in the present because fucking liberalism again).
Yeah, he’s Khajiit CIA with all the propaganda-driven “super cool Adult In The Room that pragmatically murders enemies of the regime” vibes that entails.
It does help that most of the people he’s killing are aristocratic elf nazis.
The expansion packs gave us some decent characters, including some Altmer that didn’t like the Altmer nazis to the point of making their entire island disappear from them (but now cooperating with them in the present because fucking liberalism again).
On that note, the Psijics kind of embody both what I love and hate about ESO’s writing: it actually gets to go to and use all the cool, weird places and things from the lore that are seemingly banned from mainline games because they step outside Todd Howard’s unseasoned mashed potato vision, which is really cool and an actually good use of the setting, but then they also tend to have really underwhelming writing and story design because it’s an MMO. Like just walking around Vvardenfell or the Morrowind mainland or Valenwood or Elsweyr is really cool, but then the actual storylines there are just kind of shit. There are flashes of good character design and some writing that actually grapples with how fucked up and weird the TES setting is supposed to be, and they definitely do this better than the mainline Bethesda studio, but overall the writing and stories are just kind of bland slop spread over really cool and nice looking places.
It also doesn’t help that the way they split their expansions up means if you just buy the latest major expansion you miss the first story beat of every arc, then get about 60% of its story, then miss the remaining ~35% or so because it’s all sliced up into dungeon stories and minor DLCs that suck and are also very short but contain the ending of their respective arc’s story.
Y’know you guys have this awful habit of making TES lore actually sound engaging and it’s been giving me “maybe I should actually give Skyrim a bit more of a fair shake” brainworms for the past year now
I am an Elder Scrolls enjoyer from way back (the very first game from the early 90s!) and the lore’s been built up for decades, hit or miss, elegant and sloppy. Todd Howard’s bumblefucking makes the lore interesting in spite of his executive decisions.
It’s funny to me that for all their massive egos, the Altmer are horrible empire builders whereas Cyrodiilics, people they look down and want to impose their rule on, are literally named imperials for a reason. They can barely keep an alliance with the Bosmer and Khajiit (who are more or less forced to be with them for protection) because their populace is largely too stuck up their own asses to pretend to give a shit about the Dominion’s own stated goals. How the fuck are they going to manage a continent-spanning empire centered on a province of Men whose entire culture is built on resisting Elvish oppression? Even just numerically speaking, it’s impossible.
The Elder Scrolls series has been pretty good at highlighting this as well playing with general tropes involving fantasy Elves; namely how unwarranted the idea that Elves having longer lifespans (by like a few centuries) and “sophisticated culture” grants superiority (see: Ayleids and Dunmer especially). ESO takes this up a notch even if it does give out mixed messaging by at some points unironically YAS KWEENing Ayrenn and giving said ESO guilds their unwarranted admiration for her. She is a massive hypocrite who still holds on to her prejudices when, after everything in the AD questline, she should know better.
