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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.

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

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.