AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Yeah but there's a lot of creation myths in the lore, and a lot contradict themselves. Sithis is the void, that's the only real stable thing there. Everything else is really interpretation.

A lot like real life, actually.

Most (if not all) creation myths are versions of the same story though, with creation being born from two opposing elements/forces. Sithis is never referred to directly as the Void in these myths either, it's only in-game characters that refer to him as such. Rereading the Monomyth I came across the following relevant passage though:

Now while the ultimate creation is always influenced by both Anu and Padomay (or whatever they're called in the respective myths), it is often Anu that takes the first step and creates something, sometimes referred to as Aurbis, that Padomay then tries to destroy or influence, thus introducing change in Aurbis (that would otherwise be completely static). Well then, if one where to see creation as Anu's realm, then naturally if Padomay is the opposing force his realm would be the Void. This would be explain why Sithis is referred to as the Void, he either houses in it or it is his realm. Over time the concepts might have become so intertwined that they became the same (not only does this happen in the history of irl mythology, in the Elder Scrolls setting this is referred to as "mantling" and an actual thing that happens).

Interestingly, I stumbled across yet another contradiction reading the Monomyth though

Here Mundus is referred to as the house of Sithis, quite strange considering Mundus is everything but the Void! Of course, this is from the Altmeri creation myth, so it might be an attempt to discredit the mortal planes and man by aligning them with Sithis, since they view Sithis as evil. It could also be the other way around of course, the Altmer despise man and want to escape the mortal plane because of this creation myth.

Source

TL;DR Disregard the Brotherhood, Astrid sucks cocks.

I wanna start off by mentioning that if I sound a little bitchy here, it's because I spent all fucking morning the other day typing out my response originally (I was doing other things at the time), and before I could post, my Android phone's browser did one of its brilliant, random, unprovoked crashes, leaving me to start at square one. Naturally, I'm a little sour in doing it over again. Apologies in advance if/when I seem unnecessarily aggressive. Also, if anybody might be made upset by any of this? Don't take me seriously, I am admittedly a moron and I'm mostly carrying on because I find this funny.

Okay, okay, there are a lot of good points y'all brought up, and I am a bit harsh on it overall, but I think you guys overlooked the gist of what I was saying. Granted, everyone but Astrid had no real hand in the absolute shitstorm that proceeds your joining the Brotherhood. Don't get me wrong, I see the beauty of the DB's plot. It's practically Shakespeare:

A warrior of legend called the Dragonborn, whose destiny is to defeat a dragon old as time and creation, becomes entangled with the fate of an assassins guild known as the Dark Brotherhood, what's notoriety is far-known and has existed for centuries. Through a farce and test of capacity, the Dragonborn is recruited by this group and is told by its leader, Astrid, that their numbers have been in steep decline originating from the death of their Listener. Without this emissary to convey the messages spoken by the guild's long-dead founder known as the Night Mother, they have no efficient means of carrying out blood contracts and thusly have lost power. The wars of recent times have torn the Brotherhood asunder in their darkest of times and left them with only one sanctuary, populated by a scarce handful of siblings with Astrid at the helm.

As options drop off and the tactics needed to survive become increasingly desperate, Astrid begins to lead the Brotherhood astray of the traditions and commandments established by the Night Mother long ago which ensured the guild's preservation and longevity. When Astrid learns that the Night Mother has chosen the Dragonborn to recreate the mark what gave them their reputation as death incarnate, the assassination of the Emperor of Tamriel, Astrid fears losing control of the Brotherhood and betrays the Dragonborn; a great cataclysm brings everything to a head when Astrid's attempt to garner support from the Emperor's personal guard detail by warning them of the Dragonborn, the result which ends in the plot fulfilled regardless and Astrid's sanctuary beseiged and set ablaze. A great irony transpires towards the end when the Dragonborn returns to the still-burning Sanctuary to find Astrid burned and immobile, pleading forgiveness for the terror she has wrought upon the Brotherhood, and the Dragonborn frees her from her mortal coil either out of vengeance or mercy using her own dagger.

Only the Dragonborn, the Night Mother's preserved corpse, and two other members of the Dark Brotherhood survive the seige, traveling to the northern edge of Skyrim to restore an abandoned Sanctuary on the Sea of Ghosts' frozen shores. It is now that the Dragonborn can choose to continue carrying out the Night Mother's orders and slay many anonymous victims across the land, or walk away and leave the Dark Brotherhood to their fate of dying in partial obscurity with the Empire still combing the lands for them. In the end, it provides perspective on the much larger events surrounding the Dragonborn: the savior of Mundane is not necessarily a hero before their time, and can in fact be a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer. The fate of all Tamriel, alive and dead, lies in the hands of a man/woman who can look back on their past and truthfully claim to have upheld the Dark Brotherhood's traditions by putting to death the patriarch of an entire continent for no good reason beyond a hefty sum of cheddar and the discovery of who among assassins they can trust.

It's poetry of the Elder Scroll verse, and would make a fantastic novel that I would buy and read! Yet again, the beauty is taken from the overall perspective. It's not quite as beautiful looking at it first-hand without the disregard we use because we get to do something. Now let's turn it about and look at it from Astrid's point of view!

Astrid, Queenbitch of the Dark Brotherhood's last remnants, finally manages to catch wind of a child who's been performing the Black Sacrament for days in earshot of everybody in the whole town. The child, who wants to have some granny do-wrong running the orphanage where he once lived assassinated, is somehow intercepted by some random douchebag (who honestly has MUCH more important shit to be doing; take note of the dragon flying visibly just on the northwest periphery of town) and is forced to accept that you, a total stranger with no creed to stealth, reputation, or blood contracts does a better job than her without explicitly looking for the job. In all fairness, when all is said and done (aka a 90-year-old hag being punched to death in front of orphaned children), you're rewarded by the boy with a platter of no particular historical value or decorative acoutrament, disconcertingly called the "family heirloom."

She also figures that you, the same totally-unpredictable and clearly-dangerous stranger, is the perfect addition for her little cult! Like any crazy knife whore, Astrid's response to being shown up by the first greedy fuck to wander into the kid's house? Kidnap you (who is obviously a much more experienced killer with balls of steel and a hatred for old ladies) in your sleep, and take you to the cabin where many eons in the future, Annie Wilkes would throw a shit-fit over the death of a fictional character within a fictional work (twice over). You're then told by the totally unprotected Astrid to guess which one of the other three hostages she's captured is under contract, then kill them. Obviously all three are wanted dead by somebody because there's no wrong answer to who's the lucky victim! Quick quiz: if she took longer to find a little boy trying to summon her than the random douchebag who wasn't even looking, where in the hell did she find these three additional marks? Either she kidnapped three fuckers at RANDOM, or totally broke the story and managed to scrounge up a trio of wanted-dead assholes before you could wake up from your nap. What the actual fuck?

Once you kill one/two/everybody, Astrid invites you to join the Racist Gathering- I mean, Dark Brotherhood (not known for its originality, I see) because you're good at killing old ladies in front of kids and random fuckwits who are bound and blindfolded with no means of defending themselves or even identifying you; clearly, you are the ultimatum of death what cannot be stopped. Derp. Should you stupidly accept this invitation, you're introduced to a motley crew of spirited misfits who all contribute at least one unique talent AND personality to the team! Ha-ha, hilarity ensu- just kidding, they're the bunch of pompous, intolerable, cock-in-mouth retards you'd expect to be following Astrid around. Is it any surprise that their "home" and/or base of operations is a bleak, cold, unwelcoming hole in the ground complete with pet spider the size of a Great Dane and a talking door which doesn't like fat chicks? As soon as you find the one person who IS tolerable (and luckily the one who provides you with Brotherhood side quests), you'll do everything in your power to stay out of the so-called sanctuary because it's depressing and supremely uninteresting. Oh sure, there's a room you can sleep in and use to stash your junk, but anybody with a few braincells firing off automatically knows: this place is not going to last. Why move in?

As you proceed through the missions, showing up Astrid time and time again who sits her lazy booty at the sanctuary making passive-aggressive remarks about you, it's revealed that a JESTER (oh dear god) who is already a MEMBER OF THIS MURDER CLUB, is and has been on his way to your sanctuary. You're gratefully given time to escape since word comes down via letter delivered by courier, but the fact remains that a fucking clown from the Dark Ages named Cisero, toting around a big stone coffin with some old bitch's corpse in it (which he rubs down daily in cleansing oils ALLLLL OVER and worships it like a fucking fetish) is on his way to where you have to periodically go to receive your paycheck and next mission! Akatosh be with you. As you may or may not guess, Cisero is not entirely in his right mind... strike that, he is absolutely batshit insane. You can sympathize because once you read his diaries, you figure out that apparently when you're given the job of preserving a cadaver on a daily basis, prolonged exposure to the oils you use to rinse down the body can act as a hallucinogen with a very detrimental long-term effect. Cisero used to be just like you! Then the Night Mother happened to him, and he resorted to serial killer logic to pass the time. I commend his choices.

Naturally, once Cisero figures out that Astrid's got the sanctuary locked up like her favorite emerald dildo, he begins to object that she's crazy for abandoning the traditions that were set long ago by the Night Mother when the cult was founded- the same Night Mother in the coffin, mind you. When Astrid tells him to snort lit thermite, everybody is MORTIFIED when the psychotic serial killer clown flips out and attacks people (unfortunately garnering a bodycount of zilch) before fleeing to another sanctuary that conveniently nobody uses and nobody's mentioned until now! Naturally since you're the only one capable of killing anybody with a name, they send you off to pummel the clown to death with a sack of carrots; you're given the choice to SPARE him, but clearly if you did that, you go on to give birth to Hitler's bloodline. If you didn't kill Cisero, the Holocaust is your dick and/or vagina's fault!

Once that bit of nut-wrenching business is concluded, you return to the original sanctuary to resume chatting with Mrs. Rotten tiddies. I forgot to mention that part: before Cisero lost his shit and tried to an hero everybody in arm's reach (which, again, regrettably failed to take anyone's life), Astrid had the brilliant idea of stuffing you into the Night Mother's sarcophagus so you could eavesdrop on the jester muttering incoherently to himself. What should happen while you're in there, but the dead body starts talking to you. Not only did you piss yourself, but everyone else is amazed by this- for the wrong reasons. Apparently, it's normal for the corpse to talk to a select group of people called Listeners, and the cult has been going down the drain ever since all the Listeners died off because the Night Mother was like an assassin email system to pick up on butthurt fags who want the bullies fucking their mothers killed. So the REAL surprise isn't that the dead body is TALKING, but that it's talking to YOU. I think that's what rustled off the jester because he wanted to be the next Listener, but the Night Mother probably said no because she's not into necrophilia and clowns.

So once that's established, the Night Mother starts giving you bigger blood cheddar quests that trump Astrid's oddjobs. This threatens Astrid's position of authority over the little murder cult because if everyone starts listening to the original gangster, nobody but her werewolf hubby will facebattle her pale, bony booty anymore. To prove that she's better for the Dark Brotherhood's future, Astrid sends you to kill the Emperor of Tamriel's cousin. At her wedding. In broad daylight. Surrounded by witnesses and guards. Preferably while everybody is looking at her. Since this is CLEARLY a good idea and adheres absolutely to the undercover-undetected motif of the Brotherhood (or ANY assassin with a half a frontal lobe), the mission goes about as well as expected and pisses off the people you'd imagine.

This is even WORSE in hindsight, because the real reason the Brotherhood's ranks are short is because the wartime battles have lead to the unearthing of other sanctuaries and the slaughter of countless, innocent hitmen, which isn't great for the success rate of recruiting seasons. So why NOT aggravate the leaders of those armies which have been predominantly active fighting a whole new war IN SKYRIM? No, Astrid, we did not reinforce the whole "we're-still-here-don't-fuck-with-us" reputation. We just rustled off the bluebloods holding all the cheddar and all the determined bounty hunters/soldiers it'd take to knock over our hole in the ground a hundred times over, and NOW it's guaranteed they'll be combing the land looking for us! Even if you survive that bullshit, the Night Mother one-ups the show and says you should kill the actual Emperor next, like you haven't rustled off the known world enough! It's actually a much better plan, presumably because it doesn't involve killing your high-value target with the badass bodyguards in the most grandiose and spectacular fashion imaginable while everybody's watching. It goes off without a hitch! That was a lie.

While you were setting up your mission to whack Big Boss with the random contractor, who is actually legitimately wanting the Emperor dead and has no desire to backstab or fuck with you in any way (holy shit, is that rare), ASTRID is busily sabotaging your entire mission because having everyone not listen to her 100% is clearly a bigger problem that the assured survival of the cult PERIOD. Following the murder of the royal guard captain's son, Astrid sells your booty down the river so that the Night Mother doesn't succeed and take away her power. To whom does she snitch about your plan? THE VERY PEOPLE WHO WOULD EXTERMINATE THE BROTHERHOOD ON SIGHT. She gets it in her head that if she suddenly turns you in, the Royal Guard of the Emperor will just forget that the assassination wasn't orchestrated by you, but everybody behind you... not that he forgot that you killed his son and the Emperor's chef, either.

So once things go tits-up, you can be sure that escaping the castle after the Emperor's double chokes on your filet o' cyanide is not the end of it! No, Astrid's glorious plan backfired when the royal guard simply interrogated/tortured/followed her envoy for the tip-off and came upon their "impregnable hideout" with a few firecrackers and a couple of persistent mooks. You arrive on the scene after they've broken in and have to fight your way through to find your surviving associates while the place is burning to the ground. Yeah, the royal bodyguards were wise to send the regular grunts in to flush out the assassins after setting the place on fire! Because being in enclosed spaces filled with heat, smoke, and probably a large stash of alchemical agents, explosive storehouses, and bottled contact poisons is a brilliant idea, especially when your buddies are the ones who lit up! What is this, Jackass 0.1? "Hi, I'm Random Court Guard, and this is Incendiary Sanctuary Raid!"

You manage to get far enough to find Astrid, who has HILARIOUSLY burned half to death (I'm serious, bitch looks like post-mantle Chucky from Child's Play minus the dismemberment) and is stupidly willing to face the music. While you're preparing to piss on her crispy epidermis to torture her nerves until they break, Astrid offers up the truth that she was a greedy stooge who ratted to the wrong informant and got fucked for her trouble. What a twist! She begs you to put her out of her misery with the clan's trademark dagger, so you cut off her nose and run a train on her skull like the bitch deserves before hitching a ride out of the building with the Night Mother. Anyone ever find it suspicious that you keep winding up like that, laying up against a dessicated corpse that talks to you and only you? I'm starting to wonder if the DB storyline is some kind of allegory for you inadvertantly going insane much in the same way Cisero apparently did, regardless of your disposition on the circumstances... discuss.

So there you have it, Astrid's master plan to take over Skyrim and restore glory to the Dark Brotherhood: recruit granny killers, murder innocent people, completely disregard the commandments that have kept her "family" safe for generations, piss off more than one serial killer (one of them being a clown that LIVES IN HER HOUSE), then expose the queer doing all the work who's obviously going to survive while the guy she told burns her friends and shits on her couch, JUST because she wanted to be in charge instead of the pet talking dead chick who clearly knows better than her! And what do you get out of it? cheddar, weapons, threads, skills, experience, a Forever Horse conjured from the depths of Satan's anus and forged in pure metal awesomeness, and a series of ironic occurrences bordering on weeping hilarity that you would find NOWHERE else. Dumb as hell, but it's definitely worth the ride!

So, after all that being said, do you guys see where I'm coming from? I really have to ask myself if YOU'RE crazy, or if ASTRID is crazy, or if EVERYONE is losing their minds and it's just melting together because of the magic. There is no fucking way Astrid saw any of this coming, and there's no way any of it made any sense to her as it played out! Looking at the plot from her point of view is like a deconstruction of the sequence with every possible choice being made WRONG. Everything that seems to go okay is either vanilla, supreme cosmic coincidence, or outright divine intervention spurting from Akatosh's DICK. I mean, what the fuck?! Am I the only one who noticed Astrid's schitzophrenic tendencies, how she swayed from one side of a decision to the other with no foresight geared towards consequences or repercussions? She's like a five-year-old with even worse judgment of character! I was perversely pleased with her end of the conclusion.

I spend too much time overthinking shit that doesn't need even half this much analysis. *sigh* ...in case anybody's wondering, I've always wanted to write jokes and scripts for Spoony... I don't think I'd be very good at it since I'm not that savvy to any particular genre or generation, but if anybody here's got any pull with his crew, I could really use a recommendation. I need something to do with my life and writing for critics seems to be a viable option right now. Not like I've got shit else to do with my time...

No no no no you're definitely not crazy. Pretty much every faction in skyrim has the same sense of loyalty as a black widow. Very few organizations in that game don't end with you being betrayed by SOMEONE (the companions being one, which is fitting...)

The blades, I found, exibit a special kind of douchiness in that they acually demand YOU carry out the betrayal in their story line. I promptly told whatshername to stick it up her booty and did my own thing. I visit every now and then just to make a mess of their tableware.

.... wait, the... The Companions? I don't remember that part, they were the first faction storyline I did with my fighter Orc character. I remember turning into a werewolf and later taking it back, but I don't remember betrayal.

That's what I mean, the Cmpanions are one of the only factions where there ISN'T some kind of backstabbery. It's actually closer to a brotherhood than the goddamn Dark Brotherhood. It's conflict between a good faction, and a bad faction, where someone from the good faction isn't either a spy from the bad faction, or just a dick.

When you wrote your previous giant post, I only posted what I did about Astrid because I thought you were looking for clarification about the story/what happened or something. But you have the gist of it, and so I was wrong on that.

If your complaint is that Astrid is wishywashy and goes back and forth in her decision-making process (which in turn leads to her stupid decisions, which I actually think are spectacular in the "epic fail" category), then you're right. I still hold that it was intentional, though. I think the game was trying to show that even Astrid is conflicted with the idea of betraying you as horribly as she did. She loves her family, and by extension, she loves the DB, and possibly even you (at least at first, before all the stuff you go on about happens).

I think the point is that even Astrid has trouble reconciling her feelings about the situation. On the one hand, promoting the DB is giving her family power/wealth/respect. On the other hand, she starts to realize that restoring the DB's power means losing some of her own. She wants the DB to gain power, and she also wants to keep it, and it's not until later that she starts to realize that they are mutually exclusive. But even so, she takes steps that promote both goals, right up until the end when she realizes that only one of those goals can actually maintain her family. Then she redeems herself (or just has one more failure, if you like to see it that way) and chooses to support the goal that will maintain her family without her.

Even though the DB questline is my least favorite in terms of gameplay (I like being a saint when I play), I still think it had the best story other than the Main Quest. It wasn't until I really looked at what was going on that I felt that way, though. My initial reaction was like yours.

Good, then we're all on the same page.

I think the DB questline gets a lot more interesting and makes Astrid's decisions seem more like covering her booty if you actually do the OTHER DB quest after, on a different character.

Because there's two ways to take it. You can kill one of the three she asks you too...

Or you can kill Astrid.

Killing Astrid actually has her say something I thought was rather interesting, which would be "Good choice"

Upon which a whole lot could make sense. Astrid DOES say that someone in the room has to die because they have a contract on their head. The twist is, it's not the three people she got. It's her. At some point, someone, somehow, put the Black Sacrament on Astrid and she found out about it. Astrid doesn't want to die, like most sane people, and so she keeps it a secret. She finds out about this idiot who decides to go and kill another sacrament target, and figures hey this guy/gal kills people who kinda sorta deserve it also, lets see if we can recruit him/her. She sets him/her up to believe that someone in the room deserves to die because they were targeted, and purposefully puts herself in there. Seems stupid, until you realize her ruse is basically perfect, because she never lets on that she's the one who has been targeted. She doesn't want you to figure that out, she wants to see how well she can push you where she wants you to go.

Eventually she loses her grip on you because turns out you can talk with the Night Mother. This makes her panic. The Night Mother knows Astrid has to die. So she starts going against Cicero's wishes for a more classic Brotherhood in order to try and get him and the Night Mother to leave. This backfires by having Cicero flipping the fuck out. So now she has to deal with him AND you, so she figures pit you against each other and see who wins. You clearly do, and so she now has to set you up. Unfortunately, she's a fucking idiot and sets you up with the guys hunting her down.

Finally, after fucking everything up, she realizes it would be entirely better if she just dies already. She has you kill her, but she falsifies the sacrament she puts herself in (because the sacrament is preformed with parts of a human who has died, and she's still alive.) This is just her covering her booty a little more, so you never know why exactly she betrayed you. Feeds you a bullshit story about how she was worried about her family, and lets her own mark be carried out because goddamn if she doesn't deserve it by now.

o,o

@A@

*inhales* ...that is fucking brilliant... it makes sense, now! I never discovered that part of the storyline, because when I first met Astrid, I didn't really have my angry-bastarde perspective on her AND figured that since she's vital to a faction's plot, she would be immortal like the Jarls and such. Killing her never actually seemed like an option! I'm gonna have to do that..

Well-played, Bethesda! They fooled me with the Batman Gambit! I... honestly, have never seen it done so well in a video game. Bravo- wait. That means I wrote out my whole rant for no reason! Fuck... did it at least make anybody laugh?

wait, no, her betraying you to commander maro could make sense also

because if you DO kill Astrid, you get a quest to go to Maro and he tells you to go kill the rest of them because you killed their best how hard could it be for you.

Apparently, you can do this because one of his guys figured out the door password. So Astrid could have gone to him to try and make sure he doesn't attack the DB, while getting rid of you also.

Yeah, I kinda figured that part out; how else did they find and invade the sanctuary after your attempt on the Emperor's life fail? The timing is too close to be a coincidental discovery and subsequent massacre, they scripted it so that Astrid would be cornered for murder nwith the others, AND it would screw their chance at regaining any of their former glory. Two birds, one stone.

Like I said BATMAN, you've explained to me the segments of story I never discovered and thusly filled the gaps, completing the circle of genius. It's official, the DB storyline neds to be novelized in combination with the Thieves Guild plot (which is less convoluted, but more grounded and sets the foundation for a thief gone assassin).

Also, your name is now THE GODDAMN BATMAN. I will not call you that heading there, THE GODDAMN BATMAN, because you are THE. GODDAMN BATMAN. All three words, like A Pimp Named Slickback.

Morrowind concept art book, pretty cool to see.

I really like how Morrowind had a style of it's own that makes it stand out among the RPGs of the time. They did something different and it worked out well, hence my fond memories of it.

All I remember is something about a ring in a barrel.