The Elder Scrolls Novels/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Subjective tropes in The Elder Scrolls Novels


  • Base Breaker: Annaïg, a struggling heroine wannabe who tragically struggles against the shattering of her romantic delusions, or a meaningless empty shell designed solely to show us Umbriel while Glim, Attrebus, Sul and Colin all get real work done.
    • And on a series-wide level, the destruction of Morrowind. Considering that it was destroyed years ago with a keystroke from Kirkbride in Morrowind the game...
  • Complete Monster: Vuhon. Like with Dagoth Ur in Morrowind, you can see how he became it, and even empathize with it, but that doesn't change the fact that he is willing to murder the entire population of the Imperial City and Lilmoth simply because he is too selfish to go with the viable alternatives Attrebus brings forward.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome - Sul shows up out of nowhere and single-handedly kills Attrebus's captors with magic.
    • When Sul chews out Attrebus for being so wangsty, and stemming from that:
    • When Attrebus finally Mans Up and says something that sounds suspiciously like a certain Bad-assed hero from another series in the start of his approach towards being a real hero.
  • Fetish Fuel - Toel does some ensorcellment to make Annaïg and Slyr unconcious. The two of them wake up some time later naked in a steamhouse. Bow-chicka-bow-wow.
    • Further, the residents of Umbriel are all really aquatic worms in a land-bound human form who can have sex without fear of pregnancy.
    • Fhena, the Genki Girl Cloudcuckoolander Glim meets on the Fringe Gyre wonders if she and Glim could even physically do the deed.
  • Hate Dumb - People get mighty angry about Keyes destroying Morrowind, claiming wrongfully that he gave the Dunmer the Idiot Ball and just made half the stuff up with no regard to pre-existing lore. They fail to take into account that the decision to destroy Morrowind had been made as early as the year 2000 and that he has exactly zero conflicting points with the lore established in the games.
  • I Knew It! - Yup, Lord Vivec is gone and the Ministry of Truth crashes into Vivec City at a thousands of miles per hour velocity.
  • Misblamed: People think that Keyes destroyed Vvardenfell in this book. In fact, it was Michael Kirkbride, who had been with the series since the nineties, who made the decision and heavily foreshadowed it in Morrowind.
  • Ruined FOREVER: The destruction of Morrowind caused this to be shouted.
  • Wangst - Subverted. Attebus starts to, but Sul injects some cold hard reason into the situation to set him straight by quite reasonably telling him that there are more important (and far more painful) things than his realizing he isn't as badass as he think he is, and that dwelling on it when the world is in danger is both selfish and stupid.