SKYRIM! Narrative Part 2 (Antagonists, Protagonists, and Why Alduin is a Stupid Villain)

In the last article, I talked about Skyrim’s setup including basic plot details and what I thought about the Dovakiin’s Destiny (spoilers: I didn’t like it.) This time, I wanted to talk about the meat of the plot in some broad strokes, covering the main antagonist and the frame of the story missions, and how I really want them to work better together in order for the ending to work.

… That sounds boring.  What I mean to say is, I don’t think that Al—“the world-eating dragon”—duin is a good villain, and I didn’t really care about the climax of the game. It had no weight, because I didn’t care about the characters involved.

So. Yeah.

Let me start this diatribe by saying that I actually really like the world of Tamriel. Honestly, without joking or anything, I think that the Elder Scrolls series has one of the richest and most thorough high-fantasy worlds I’ve ever seen.

The world is so chock-full of history that you can’t walk fifty yards without tripping over the remnants of an ancient civilization. You’ve got the Dwemer, who built a huge Minoan-style civilization, and the ancient Nords who had a huge Norwegian-style civilization, and the Falmer who had a huge blood-worship-cult-style civilization.

It’s mostly a Christmas and Easter thing, though.

 It’s fantastic and awe-inspiring to see how densely packed the history of the Elder Scrolls is. Everybody has their story, and there’s a reason for everyone to hate each-other.

This is why I’m really surprised that their main storyline sucks.

Here’s a quick run-down of the main plotline after you meet the Greybeards:

You’re sent to find the horn of Jurgen Windcaller—a Nord hero and the Greybeards’ founder—in his tomb to prove that you’re a bad-ass. When you desecrate your way to his resting place, you find out that someone got to the horn first.

It’s okay though, because they left a note telling you where to find them. It turns out that the Blades—an ancient order of secret agents for the Empire—really don’t like dragons, and they’ve heard you’re the guy to come to for that. So you meet with the lady who left the note at her hideout, only to have it revealed that the Thalmor—the Evil Elf Empire—might have something to do with the dragons coming back.

Except they don’t.

After raiding the Thalmor embassy to uncover the fact that they have no idea what’s going on, you seek out a former colleague of Ms. Blade-Lady who might actually know why the dragons are coming back.

You find him, and he doesn’t really know, but he knows where you can find the information.

Just up the trail, at Exposition Peak.

You make your way to this tower where the Blades used to have their headquarters to learn that there was a war between man and dragon a long time ago. Man eventually won because they learned some secret dragon-words that nobody else knew.

After you ask the Greybeards about these secret dragon-words and they say “We don’t actually condone doing things,” they send you to talk to their High Leader who might know more.

Their leader—the only good dragon, it turns out—goes into a surprisingly sci-fi-esque story about how reality is thin at the Greybeard’s mountain because that’s where Alduin was “cast adrift on the sea of time” during the first man/dragon war. Luckily, there’s an artifact that can show you exactly what happened way back then, but it’s hidden and the good dragon doesn’t know where to find it. But he knows where you might find someone who does know where to find it.

Onwards, to the internet!

The guy you’re supposed to ask doesn’t know where it is. But he knows a guy who does. So, finally, after finding the guy that the guy who told you to find the guy tells you to find, you learn where the artifact—the Elder Scroll—is.

You find the Elder Scroll, bring it all the way back to the Greybeards’ mountain, and use it to watch three generic Nord heroes use the secret dragon-words to fail to defeat Alduin. Then one of them uses the Elder Scroll to send Alduin forward in time to now.

After learning the secret dragon-words you need to defeat Alduin, Alduin shows up and you fight until Alduin is defeated. He runs away, and you need to find where he went so you capture a dragon in the capitol building.

Jarl Balgruuf: elected on a platform of dragon-wranglin’.

Turns out, Alduin is hiding in Valhalla, eating the souls of the honored dead. You go to Valhalla—which is covered in Alduin’s Evil Fog—and find your way to the hall where dead people hang out. There, you meet up with the three generic Nord heroes and with your powers combined you defeat Alduin once and for all.

The end!

To summarize the summary, you have to ask this guy to ask this tower to ask the Greybeards to ask the dragon to ask the librarian to ask the crazy guy to ask the Elder Scroll to ask the Nord Heroes how to beat the villain.

Boss fight!

Then you have to ask the Jarl to ask the leaders of the factions in the civil war to ask the dragon where the villain went.

Boss fight!

Then you have to go to Valhalla--

Boss fight

--And team up with the three Nord heroes to defeat the villain.

Boss fight.

This story sucks. It sucks because it can be summarized by saying “I asked a few people how to kill a dragon, then I went and did it.”

Before I get down to asking “What Would I Do,” I want to ask “Why didn’t I like this ending?” I mean, it featured some pretty rad set-pieces, and it culminated with the protagonist battling a dragon in Valhalla. That seems pretty solid, right?

The problem is, even though there were some excellent set-pieces, there was no real conflict. I didn’t care about the protagonists or the antagonists. The story was ‘You & Some People vs. The Fantasy Equivalent of an Earthquake’ which is about as compelling as Pierce Brosnan & Survivors vs. Dante’s Peak.

Yes, I'm calling to report a mountain.

Personally, I didn’t care about Alduin because he was a villain with the same level of motivation as a falling rock. It made the last sequence of the game dull, because you’re basically just reacting to a thing happening.

Let’s meta- this question up a notch: What makes a good villain?

Did someone say douchebag?

A good villain, in my opinion, is someone who uses their means to try to hurt you. Not just someone who hurts you—a falling rock can hurt you—but someone who wants to hurt you. Their desire to fuck your shit up is more important than their ability.

I’m pretty sure someone said douchebag.

Alduin can fuck shit up. He’s a world eating dragon; if there’s one thing he’s got, it’s the ability to ruin your day. But his rage is directed at everything in general, and nothing specifically. He’s happening, and you have to stop him happening.

So, if not Alduin, who in the Elder Scrolls games is enough of a douchebag to warrant villain-status?

Are my stupidly large ears burning?

That’s right. The fucking elves.

I’m not just saying that because I’m a fantasy-racist (even though I’m totally a fantasy-racist.) Remember earlier, when the Ms. Blade-Lady told you to infiltrate the Thalmor embassy to see if they were responsible for the dragons? She asked you to do that because that’s totally something the Thalmor would do.

Seriously. We learn through the course of the game that the Thalmor—of the ‘Altmeri Dominion’—started a war with the Empire by cutting off the heads of all the Blades within their territory and sending them to the emperor. The war fucked both parties up but the Thalmor came out on top, and as a result of the peace 

treaty they were given oversight on basically every level of government the Empire had.

The Thalmor are big-enough douchebags to actually be the cause of the civil war subplot. Just to rub their victory in everybody’s faces, the Thalmor dictated that the worship of Talos—the founder of the Empire, the first Dragonborn, and one of the most important Nords ever—be completely forbidden. This would be like if China beat America in a war, then said “Yeah, we never really liked that Jesus guy, so…”

Also, no more McDonalds.

I mean, this is the worst thing you can do to a conquered country. Apparently out of pure spite, the Thalmor spit in the face of an entire nation’s cultural heritage while also symbolically making Skyrim their bitch.

This is a good conflict. Here we’ve got a foreign nation exerting its excessively snooty power over the plucky underdogs, when all the underdogs want to do is get right with God.

If this story was any more American I’d barf an eagle.

The Thalmor fit the villain bill perfectly. It’s not just that they have the capacity to do you harm, it’s that they dislike you. To them, you’re the antagonist—they have a reason to want to fight you other than “SMASH PUNY HUMANS!” In other words, the conflict with the Thalmor is “us vs. another us” rather than “us vs. a wall.”

So that covers my issue with the villain. The Thalmor are a better villain than Alduin, so What I Would Do is have them do more than ‘not know what’s going on.’

But that only addresses one part of the plot that I didn’t find satisfying. What about the three nameless 

heroes that I teamed up with in Valhalla to beat Alduin? Why did they make me dislike the ending?

Don’t ask me, I’m just a crab with a monocle.

To answer my own obnoxiously rhetorical question, they made me dislike the ending because I really didn’t give a shit about them. They weren’t people, they were just mooks. Recurring plot-devices. In the sequence that should have been the apex of the game, I found myself facing off against a blank wall in the company of 

cardboard cutouts.

I should say that—contrary to basically everything I’ve been saying—I’m okay with facing off against Alduin at the end of the story. In a game about dragons, it’s only appropriate that the last thing you do is fight the Baddest of All Dragons Ever. He’s just a flying Macguffin*, after all. For his part, all he has to do is hang out at the end of the game until you get there to beat him.

But if you’re going to face him with heroes, make the heroes a big deal.

More than that, make the heroes the biggest deal. It’s them you’re fighting for, after all—you’re in Valhalla at the end of the game to beat Alduin so the Honored Dead can rest without the fear of being eaten.  If nothing else, we should at least know who it is we’re fighting for.

Like the villain side of the equation, the protagonists need to want something. If they’re characters—which the heroes are probably supposed to be—they should have a desire to do something you agree with.

This is a deceptively simple problem: in a showpiece game like Skyrim, how do you make us care about something as small as people?

So, I ask myself, What Would I Do Differently?

I see what you did there!

Okay. First off, the Thalmor are the the villains. Alduin is just the plot device. It’s a similar relationship to the Sephiroth/World-Ending Meteor dynamic in Final Fantasy 7, except less stupid.

The Thalmor hate the Empire. Because they’re long-lived elves, they are disgusted by the inferior humans, and want to do everything they can to destroy them.

Elves hating you is canon. Fuck elves.

From the past, Alduin arrives once more to wreak havoc in the terrestrial realm. The Thalmor learn of Alduin’s world-eating capabilities at about the same time as the main character, but instead of seeking to defeat Alduin and save the world, they want to use Alduin to destroy humanity once and for all.

So, what if they wanted to find the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller before you did?

You show up because the Greybeards told you to seek out the horn of their founder, but instead of a note you find a Thalmor clean-up. You fight them because you’re both really surprised that the other is in this tomb, and then you ask yourself why are these ass-hats raiding the resting place of Jurgen Windcaller?

It turns out, they're raiding it because they don’t want you to succeed. They might never be able to control Alduin, but they certainly don’t want the Empire to find out that Alduin can be defeated. This fits what we know of the Thalmor, because they’re already censoring one of Skyrim’s most prominent heroes. These 

guys are all about historical revisionism; this just proves they’re proactive as well.

You go back to the Greybeards with the story of the Thalmor raiding the tomb of their founder. Maybe the Blades agent is already there, asking about a similar incident. Now we have to ask, why are the Thalmor stealing the trophies of dead heroes?

Ms. Blade-Lady doesn’t have an answer, but the Greybeards suggest that it might have something to do with Alduin’s return. They concern themselves with recovering the Horn, but Ms. Blade-Lady thinks that it might be something more important. She tells you to meet at her hideout, and tells you about the Blade/Thalmor rivalry—namely, that most of the Blades are dead because of the Thalmor—and asks you to contact one of her old comrades at his house in Riften.

You get to the Comrade’s house, only to find it being ransacked by Thalmor agents. You overhear one of them say that the guy you’re both looking for must be hiding out in the sewers, so now it’s a race to see which one of you finds him first.

Of course, since you’re the good-guy, you find him and lead him back to Ms. Blade-Lady, where you find out that the Thalmor are stealing the artifacts of the heroes that initially defeated Alduin.

So, now you have an awesome framework for the missions of the game. Instead of asking a guy for information about a guy who may know a guy, you’re trying to track down the artifacts of the Three Heroes at the same time as the Thalmor.

This gives the player a drive, a tangible goal, the possibility of failure, and a great amount of variety. You could rob the graves of heroes, but you can also maybe track down an artifact being held as a trophy of a Jarl, or being held by a Bandit Lord you have to kill. You might have to raid the Thalmor embassy for a reason other than finding out how little they know. You might have to defend the Greybeards’ Monastery against a Thalmor siege. Perhaps each artifact is connected to one of the three words of the Dragonrend Shout you need to kill Alduin, if we’re still going that route.

And, of course, each quest for one of the relics gives you some insight into the character of each of the heroes. You learn who they were and why they fought. You learn that they were people as well as bad-asses. When you see them through the Elder Scroll, you get a cool thrill because you know who they are. When you get to actually fight beside them, you feel like you’ve got to hang out with a goddamn rockstar.

So, What Would I Do Differently? I would center the story around the heroes that I want to emulate, then see how far I’ve gotten by finally getting to fight beside them. I would have an enemy that wants to keep me from being a badass, and then defeat them by becoming the hero. I want to save the world from a catastrophe by flying in the face of the people who didn’t want me to.

Also, I want to fight a dragon in Valhalla.

I guess I’ll give you that one, Bethesda.

NEXT WEEK: Some goddamn article that isn’t almost three-thousand words long. Jesus. Also, I want to look at a game that I think did things really well (Eternal Darkness!) and how the mechanics of the game helped it to tell a story.

*A Macguffin is the thing that drives the plot forward. The specifics of the object aren't central to the plot, but they can help direct it-- think the Death Star plans in Starwars IV, or the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.