this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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The sad thing about Oblivion is that there are in-game books in Morrowind and previous games that describe the empire as being in the middle of a bamboo jungle. The vibe comes off as the Roman Empire in South East Asia.
Instead we got generic high fantasy with the occasional guy wearing Roman armor.
Eh, Bethesda flip-flop on that kind of stuff all the time. IIRC in Arena, the Imperial City was just in generic temperate woodland, then it was retconned in some in-game books to a jungle, then retconned again in Oblivion back to generic woodland. Same thing with the armor of imperial soldiers. Generic fantasy plate in early games, Roman in Morrowind, generic fantasy plate in Oblivion again, Roman again in Skyrim... They just can't make up their minds.
I will say this, though: It's okay to retcon old lore, but only in order to make it more unique and interesting. Retconning stuff to make it more generic and bland is a high crime.
This isn't completely fair, Bethesda addressed the issue in universe and there are multiple authors arguing about this and why that is. It plays very well with the rest of the lore which is all about conflicting accounts and variety of interpretation.
If I recall correctly the three in-universe theories are (1) it's an error and there never was a jungle (2) there was a jungle but Talos CHIMed it away (3) there was a jungle when the high elves (Ayleids) lived there, but when the humans took over the white-gold tower changed the landscape to suit them.
Unfortunately, /r/teslore has no fediverse equivalent that I know of so I wouldn't know where to have this kind of discussion.
Well, this isn't so much about how much sense it makes, but rather that they had a cool idea and then ignored it. They could have used their freedom of interpretation to build a really interesting setting and instead, they kind of just built Italy.