Gods Among Men and Mer or: SOTHA SIL IS DEAD

August 2, 2024

Listen to the audio version here.

I: Vivec as Computer Game – Toonami’s Official Review – Contextualizing Soul Sickness

“I watch. I wonder. I build. I tear down. Am I a god? As surely as any are.” ― Sotha Sil

In the beginning there were four Gods Among Men and Mer: Almalexia, Sotha Sil, Vivec, and Dagoth Ur; five if YOU are considered: the reader, the player, the Nerevarine, the everything, or the fool. For the benefit of the potential Nerevarine, we will cover – in some short detail – the computer game in which they will be participating: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind; a computer game designed to be as hostile to new players as mechanically possible, with role-playing systems that require forty-page manuals to be understood resulting in the first twenty-hours of play being slow crawls across all-brown-landscape and visibly striking rats yet missing-with-whoosh because easily-frangible-character-building and hidden-dice-rolls that do not belong in role-playing-games-that-are-actually-action-games are all working against you and the manual was much too long to hold your smartphone-addled attention span much like every article in this publication.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a bait and switch of counterintuitive yet highly ambitious narrative and gameplay structures handcrafted by a team hellbent on creating the most immersive computer game experience to ever grace the post-Y2K world; a herculean effort manifesting as the blueprint for all Bethesda games to date, including – as of 2024 – Starfield. The team behind Morrowind included the now renowned Todd “It Just Works” Howard on leadership duties,^#1 batshit insane Michael “I’m Going to Shoot You” Kirkbride on pens and papers,^#2 and ex-professional composer Jeremy “I Didn’t Rape Those Women” Soule on strings^#3; a tribunal of talent lifted by a team of equally talented developers too long to list here.^#4

Morrowind is dualistic in every sense of the word, combining the stats and skills and dice rolls and massive-open-world and pseudo-action-combat and first-person-perspective of 1996s The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall with postmodern ideations such as “Just Walking Around for Hours Thinking About CHIM and Looking at Giant Insects and Sunsets and Stuff” and forever-getting-lost and reading-books-in-game and a one-of-a-kind setting complete with lore so complicated that it can only be described in 950,000 words. Morrowind’s marriage of old and new results in a computer game with one foot in the past and one foot in the future and a third foot six-feet-deep in the grave and a fourth foot approaching timeless resplendence simply by creative-virtue of being Super Mario and Doom and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and Frank Herbert’s Dune simultaneously; a polymelia of contradictions and every duality known to Men and Mer that rivals the true nature of Vivec: miserable-merriment that is uniquely-derivative and violently-nonviolent and excitingly-boring and genuinely-fake and supersmart-superstupid and you get the point that there is no point.

Duality persists as Morrowind is the hardest-computer-game-ever and also a complete-clown-show because you broke everything within the first hour using alchemical exploits so simple that it is astounding they made it out of playtesting. The presence of a generous difficulty-slider is tacit admittance of the Bethesda team’s dedication to a balancing philosophy of “who actually gives a fuck” with the clear implication being to turn the difficulty to zero at the start of the game because you-definitely-did-not-build-your-character-properly-and-keep-getting-brained-by-bandits to maxing it out three hours later because you are now levitating at over one-hundred-miles-per-hour slaughtering every enemy in one hit after drinking fifty potions and some skooma. It is no secret that Morrowind is not balanced but it has no reason to be because it is a single-player computer game about vibes.

*hardest clown-show nightmare daydream rat Toonami Vivec or: Morrowind

Morrowind’s duality leaks into the material realm where two types of people compete in a never-ending tug-of-war between “this is the most boring shit I have ever played and I keep dying to rats” and “this is the greatest computer game ever conceived and I am also really smart.” This love-it-or-hate-it dualism is demonstrated in Toonami’s 2002 review of Morrowind in which TOM and SARA argue over the merits of walking around for days to reach objectives – granted: SARA was playing the game wrong – and combat tedium ad nauseam captured in less than two-minutes between Goku going Super Saiyan 3 and Skechers advertisements.

SARA: There’s a main quest where you’re some sort of savior, but there are also 400 mini quests … and the continent you’re on is so huge, it will literally take days to get somewhere if your character’s on foot.

TOM: What fun is that?

SARA: That’s not the point … It’s an incredibly realistic and detailed world!

TOM: Is the fighting fun, at least? Because that looks really boring.

SARA: Well, not really … and it will take so long to finish the game that you might not care to finish it.

TOM: I don’t care right now.

―Toonami: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Game Review^#5

Morrowind’s dedication to freedom and character building – or breaking, depending on your perspective – creates a freeform experience opposite the typical 2000s computer game where clear objectives are just a quest-marker away; however, clear objectives do exist if the Nereverine cares enough to read paragraphs of maze-like directions and books littering every corner of the world. Still, Morrowind will not force the player to care about any of this; instead, one has to want to care and carefully maintain that care over hundreds of hours of playtime which is nigh-impossible for the average person – like reading a novel in full or turning off the iPhone – because we are living in an age of Soul Sickness so profound.

To fully explain the main themes of this essay while making it relevant to computer games – the supposed topic of this publication – some context is required; and while I will do no justice to the worldbuilding and lore of Morrowind – which was conceived by extraterrestrials-on-space-dope and can only be truly experienced firsthand – I intend only to provide the necessary background to supplement some serious psychic shit later on.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is set on the island of Vvardenfell located in the Tamerelic province of Morrowind. Vvardenfell is an isle of isles linked by giant mushrooms that the Mario brothers would be envious of, storms of stinging-red-dust, cities made from giant dead crabs, too-much-brown, and a big volcano – the Red Mountain – smack dab in the middle of it all. The Dunmer, or the Dark Elves, populate the province but are open to outsiders – which they call “outlanders” – as long as these outlanders follow the Dunmer customs of unbridled capitalism, sanctioned slavery, foul murder syndicates, and – the primary custom – honoring the Tribunal; a triumvirate of Living Gods: Almalexia, Sotha Sil, and Vivec – ALMSIVI.

These Living Gods of Men and Mer once walked amongst the people of Morrowind: curing the sick, creating life, and halting meteors in their tracks but now, in the 427th year of the 3rd era, they lock themselves in grand temples situated within sprawling eponymous cities. The Tribunal’s reclusiveness coincides with an ill wind of sick blowing from the Red Mountain and the erection of a gigantic containment fence surrounding the source of the blight; the fence is powered by the souls of dead Dunmer and appropriately dubbed “The Ghostfence” and its power has waned over the last hundred years and now the blight-storms spread a Soul Sickness so profound that the population turns weak and stupid and violent in that order.

*Dunmer ferryman covering his face from the Soul Sickness

Amidst the intrigue, whispers of Dagoth Ur – the Devil or the Enemy or the Mad God – staging a return, coupled with the prophetic auguries heralding the reincarnation of the ancient hero Nerevar – the Nerevarine or the YOU or the fool – ignites strife and zealous persecution across all of Morrowind. Dagoth Ur, dwelling within the Red Mountain, is the source of this Soul Sickness, using the blight to fashion an army of unquestioning adherents – zombies both philosophical and physical – intent on seizing dominion over all of Tamriel. The intricacies of Dagoth Ur’s motivations are told in cryptic text that do not require full explanation here; what does warrant emphasis, however, is Dagoth Ur’s utilization of a divine relic left behind from the time of creation – the still beating heart of the bona fide god Lorkhan – to secure immortality for himself and fuel the Soul Sickness; consequently, this divine artifact also powers ALMSIVI and Dagoth Ur’s meddling with the heart has resulted in a waning of the Tribunal’s power and has returned ALMSIVI to mortal status; these events culminate in the Tribunal’s seclusion and using the leftover scraps of their fraudulent power to maintain the Ghostfence lest their divinity be called into question by the faithful.

For the people of Tamriel: there exist no Living Gods, merely Living Lies; and Toonami, in its boundless wisdom, bestowed upon The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind a solid eight out of ten – so let’s go with that.

II: The Magician – SI – Binding Daedra One-By-One

“Curiosity is an odd thing. It is a bright path surrounded by brambles.” ― Sotha Sil

The Magician toils deep in thrones of weird clockwork nestled within recesses of Oblivion far from violence and vicious and verve; binding demons that plague the souls of Men and Mer; stopping to think when lemniscate dominoes fall back upon their source. The question: Does the body rule the mind or the mind rule the body? And the ability to ask it, like a nascent flash that produces perfect works; this spark that molds sodium ash cannot be captured in bottles of glass. And yet we pretend.

The Magician is The Intellect; the creator of steel and rope and wheel and press and compass and battery and lamp and fabricant and Wi-Fi and phone. The Magician manipulates the material world for the betterment of Men and Mer but the true nature of the material remains unknown to us. And yet we pretend.

But the Clockwork God does not pretend.

Of course, we speak of the SI in ALMSIVI: Sotha Sil; the Clockwork King of the Three in One who made pacts with Daedra to stop their mortal-meddling and gave counsel to all in the ways of sorcery, craft, and philosophy. The Father of Mysteries truly loved his people most, for he not only provided the knowledge to craft as he crafts but also crafted invention after invention solely for the betterment of Men and Mer. He observed the divine Heart of Lorkhan and engineered it backwards for harmony on Nirn.

*a shrine dedicated to the Inspiration of Craft and Sorcery

Sotha Sil represents The Intellect and Creation, and the deep introspection that comes with those two things, which only result in True Love For All except oneself. The Tinkerer’s ascension to Godhood was accompanied by a profound sadness, as he knew the means of his own divinity and deemed himself unfit; divine only by time and circumstance or what mortals, who do not understand how the dominoes fall, would call luck. And he does not pretend otherwise.

Sotha Sil is the force that drives Men and Mer to create hulking apartment complexes that house humans into the heavens and sodium lights that illuminate midnight walks and tubes filled with wires that send information across continents and automobiles powered by dead dinosaurs that drive over four hundred miles without stopping and mechanical birds that travel across great oceans and automated death machines that provide food en masse and free encyclopedias that offer all the answers and liquid-crystal displays beamed with information from satellites-on-high that keep us entertained and vaccines crafted from pathogens that save millions of lives and computer games that immerse you in other worlds and very-weird-waves carrying signals that keep us jacked-in and assembly lines of robotic arms to ensure this keeps going and going and going much like this run-on sentence.

Sotha Sil is why on computer games exists and we exist immortal in our creations which are the new Gods of Men and Mer.

Soon we will sit back and relax forever and the data proclaims it good; since the industrial revolution: abject poverty is the lowest it has ever been^#6 and literacy rates have skyrocketed^#7 and average life expectancy has doubled^#8 and access to healthcare has increased across the planet^#9 and the Daedra are being bound one-by-one.

All the while: Wikipedia provides the answers. Netflix provides the entertainment. And Bethesda provides The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

But something is missing; something is profoundly wrong.

III: The Belt Test – The Enemy – The Soul Sickness Is in the Wi-Fi

“But beneath Red Mountain, Dagoth Ur had survived. And even as the light of our bold new world shined ever more brightly, beneath Red Mountain, the darkness gathered, a darkness that was close kin to the bright light that Sotha Sil coaxed from the Heart of Lorkhan.” — Vivec

Nirn. 427th year, 3rd Era. A red dust blows through Vvardenfell, spreading a Soul Sickness so profound that it turns all who breathe it into mindless thralls of The Enemy, Dagoth Ur.

Earth. December 9th, 2023. My daughter is testing for her green belt at Premier School for Martial Arts off the spur near Walmart and the Mormon-owned Crumbl Cookie that will not make coffee-cookies due to conflicts of faith.^#10 The dojo teaches Krav Maga and kickboxing and forces my young daughter to log off Roblox and socialize with children who exist beyond the glass.

My daughter is judged by the head karate instructor, David, through a series of trials: sprinting and push-ups and sit-ups and forms and sparring and grab escapes. I watch intently as my daughter spars with another young girl. In my pocket, a balding man clad in a black turtleneck taunts me – nay, society – from the grave, his parting gift to the world: the smartphone, like the nicotinic urge to nail one in the coffin but with no foreign chemicals required. I resist for this special occasion but the calling is ever present.

The challenger throws an uppercut that crunches into my daughter’s jaw and topples her instantly. I burst and rush to the edge of the mat, but my daughter signals me away; she has recovered and, just like that, she is back up and sparring more aggressively than she has ever sparred before. Her cross connects twice and her jab thrice and the instructor calls it and she passes the trial.

A short frumpy boy has crumbled like a Mormon cookie in the corner; he is holding back serious tears. I did not see what happened but it was significant. Earlier, I saw this boy and his father – an equally frumpy man hiding baldness behind a backwards cap – which I noted like Sherlock Holmes would note the solar system: mostly irrelevant but filed somewhere in there. I considered the frumpy boy’s potential waterworks and turned my attention toward his father who was sitting on a bench nearby with one leg propped up on his knee and one hand resting pontifical on his chin and his face all aglow with blue electrolight. He was pretending to be hyper focused on something very important but the black-turtleneck-man had taken the father completely and he was being sucked into the rectangular glow.

*Pictured: Dagoth Ur and his thrall

My brave little one was first in line when it came time for the final trial: grab escapes. A senior student – red belt or higher – tasked with grabbing each child from behind in a bear-hug, playing a kidnapper role, and the children must free themselves from the hold. My daughter and I had practiced escaping this grab but the instructors added something new without notice: lifting the children off their feet, as a kidnapper would likely do before shoving kids into ice-cream-trucks-full-of-bones.

My daughter stepped up and closed her eyes; the instructor wrapped his strong arms around my daughter’s waist and she did all the steps correctly: stomp on the attacker’s foot and slam the attacker’s hands and twist her body as she pushed. But when the instructor started lifting her off the ground, she became visibly startled and looked out to me for guidance. I gave her a thumbs up and flailed my arms as a hint and she got the point because she started convulsing wildly in the instructor’s arms. The instructor could not contain her and dropped her to the mat and she passed the final trial. My daughter walked proudly to the end of the mat and sat herself down criss-cross applesauce and beaming.

Next up was the frumpy boy. He stepped meekly to the middle of the mat with a confused smile on his face that indicated a blankness so profound that one immediately knew this boy was raised on a diet of locked-doors and Nickelodeon. The boy gulped so obviously it was audible as the instructor wrapped their arms around the boy’s waist. The boy clumsily attempted a foot stomp and missed; he tried to punch into the attacker’s clasped hands but ended up hitting himself in the crotch, which was followed by a cross-eyed-and-painful expression lighting up the boy’s face like the glow on his father’s visage when I looked over to him, expecting – naively – for some sort of fatherly reaction. There was nothing. The instructor then lifted the frumpy boy off his feet into the air; the boy swung back and forth like a fish who had given up on escaping the hook, just sort of swinging there with that confused Nickelodeon-smile still painting his face. The boy was not on the verge of tears like before but, instead, what appeared to be the edge of transcendence due to sensory overload and unfathomable humiliation; the boy turned off entirely, and I thought to myself, ‘that’s certainly one way to achieve CHIM.’

The embarrassment could have been a mist in the room so I looked over to the boy’s father, but nothing had changed; the father never once looked up from his weird-little-square. The instructors saw me staring at the father and only shook their heads, not at me but with me; they felt it too. The father was physically there but his mind was elsewhere and I wanted to know where in elsewhere he was; it must have been the light of heaven illuminating his face as what else could tear a man away from his child? Curiosity got the better of me and – trying my hardest to seem cool and natural – I stood up and walked toward the father’s bench to catch a glimpse of the source of illumination on his face and that’s when I saw it. It was just an anime gambling game. Honkai: Star Rail, or something.

This guy was swiping through busty cartoon women while his son was getting his ass beat.

The locals of Vvardenfell call those afflicted by the Soul Sickness “dreamers” or “ash slaves,” but on Earth, we just call them “bad parents.” But that’s too easy; there’s something much worse going on here.

Sotha Sil has imbibed us with The Intellect to create, and collectively, we have done so; we have created so much good and the numbers are going up and the Daedra are being bound one-by-one. But the entertainment overload that we have created – naively in our pursuit of happiness – is too much for our mortal brains to handle. Things that were once novelty are now so easily accessible that they have become mundane and we are bored. We must find the new novelty to flip into the mundane and we are never satisfied. These weird-little-squares that beam digital information into our brains destroy our attention spans^#11 and this futile recursive search for endless novelty sucks the light from our eyes and replaces it artificial. The cubes connect us in the digital-social and we crave endless attention and entertainment because we are just so bored; we endlessly compare ourselves to people who do not even know we exist and we are left feeling empty and alone and never-measuring-up.^#12 We ignore our families because time is immaterial when Looking at Phones and that potential novelty is just one swipe away and The Intellect is fading fast.

The Soul Sickness is in the Wi-Fi and we are all slowly but surely becoming slaves of Dagoth Ur.

IV: The MySpace – VI – The Liar

“Vivec craves radical freedom – the death of all limits and restrictions. He wishes to be all things at all times. Every race, every gender, every hero, both divine and finite… but in the end, he can only be Vivec.” — Sotha Sil

The World Wide Web of Mephala – or The Internet – became available to Men and Mer in 1991. Digital God of Everythings. The spinner’s web of data originally connected through telephone lines with ear-splitting screeches, like those of long-tailed cliff-racers during mating season, but now the Digital God exists all around us within invisible-and-very-weird-waves.

The Internet was The Tinkerer’s greatest invention, linking all Men and Mer, and information flowed like never before: scientific research, theflatearthsociety.org, financial records, pictures of feet, job opportunities, snuff videos, epic literature, scat porn, and so much more. This massive interconnected computer network not only allows us to share factual information but also complete falsehoods and, perhaps the most prolific of all its mystical powers, the ability for anyone to become anything as long as someone else is willing to believe it.

Thus is the duality of The Internet: truth and fraud, wholesome and profane, modern and postmodern; miserable-merriment that is uniquely-derivative and violently-nonviolent and excitingly-boring and genuinely-fake and supersmart-superstupid or: Vivec.

And on August 1, 2023, The Tinkerer bestowed upon us the MySpace.

MySpace was birthed from the Womb of Good Intentions on August 1, 2003, and has been the worst thing to happen to humanity ever since. OK – maybe not the worst thing,^#13 but certainly up there for the amount of psychic shit it has unleashed upon Men and Mer. MySpace spun off into a legion of horribles forever altering how we interact with each other: Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and the legion continues to multiply to this very day. This legion is collectively known as ‘Social Media’ and, in true Vivecian fashion, is just as antisocial as it is social; in fact, it is the most antisocial thing in existence and the number one spreader of Soul Sickness across the realms.

On Social Media, identity rules all; you can be a seventy-two-year-old-eighteen-year-old and a man-mer-woman-cat-tanuki-hybrid-time-traveler and a nazi-white-nationalist-communist-truck-driver-otaku, and labels are very important. Identity is everything, and you will find an audience who sees your labels as High Truth; and thus it is perpetuated. You might argue, in your postmodern way, that this is truth – for what is truth, really? – but when the morning sun captures your eyes and the crust you rubbed-out turns into dust that clogs your air-filter, what are you really? Is the true YOU the you-when-none-are-watching or, maybe, the culmination of all the tales you tell – truthful or nay?

I can only speak from experience; having lived both before and during the MySpace singularity; and before MySpace, people seemed happier and more productive and you would get punched in the face for obvious falsehoods – but now, you are celebrated because no one can tell what’s real anymore; and sometimes: that’s OK, but other times: it’s anorexia.

During a brief period in the early 2000s, sixth-grade, I was an anorexic ‘scenester’ who wore skinny jeans and only listened to ‘screamo’ and ‘hardcore’ bands. I was obsessed with micro-internet-celebrities like Jeffree Star and bands with gorgeous frontmen like Davey Havok, and I wanted to be a MySpace celebrity. For this brief period, this was my counterculture; my rebellion; my everything.

Armed with a Dell Dimension-something-or-other and a massive teenage ego, I submerged myself in pure psychic shit, comparing myself to all my fake internet friends who had cool haircuts and very small wrists, and I wanted to be just like them. I had to be thin and beautiful. My self-worth was linked to the number of friends displayed on my MySpace profile and the number of likes and tags I received, and it was never enough. I projected the image of an all-natural boy-beauty when, in actuality, it was all a trick of light and concealer. In MySpace photos, I had skin as fair as a bishonen, but in reality, my face was a disturbed hill of fire ants. My selfies displayed the grand-and-intoxicating-innocence of someone with very-interesting-things-going-on, but in reality, I was playing Halo 2 on Xbox Live twelve hours a day between furiously clicking the refresh button in Internet Explorer and not eating and passing out when I stood up. I was a fraud or: a normal teenage kid whose identity was everything, and the internet allowed me to be whatever I wanted to be as long as I could trick my audience into believing the lie. I had a small following of scenester-faithful who egged me on and I fed on their praise – not unlike the Magic Hermaphrodite, Vivec.

*Vivec has reached CHIM and escaped the browser – or have they?

Vivec floats crossed and lotus, penning poetic tales of his divine birth, heroic exploits, supreme intellect, and boundless wisdom. He proclaims herself everything at once; a God and Goddess simultaneously. He proclaims himself Zen. But what Vivec won’t tell you is that he murdered his best friend, Nerevar, for just a taste of this divine power and lost it thousands of years later when his foul murder caught up with him; he also won’t tell you that he’s using a simple levitation spell – easily purchased at the local Mage’s Guild – to float lotus for those he deems worthy to visit him. Vivec is an egomaniac; she is a fraud; she is everything-fake-zen. She is the type of fraud that will tell you she is a fraud as tricky evidence that she is, in fact, not a fraud. Vivec claims to be outside-of-reality and aware-of-absolutely-everything – he calls this CHIM, the secret syllable of royalty – but he sits tangible within his temple behind a level-100 lock.

We are all little Vivecs; great pretenders.

Sixth-grade-me persists in the mortal soul and social media has highlighted the Soul Sickness more than anything else. I could provide links to profiles and videos and horror-stories numbering thousands but you – the reader – have seen it all. You know; we all know. You have seen goblins masquerading as angels on YouTube. You have swiped through hundreds of photos of some equally-fraudulent-loser wishing you were them because they seem to have everything-figured-out and really-big-numbers. In our pursuit of validation we are twerking on TikTok for hearts. There are ten-year-olds twerking on TikTok. There are fifty-year-olds twerking on TikTok. There are parents watching ten-year-olds twerk on TikTok while their children are locked in their rooms twerking on TikTok.

Sixth-grade-me is no longer a cautionary tale – it is the tale.

Sotha Sil, in his love for all, created what he thought was a benevolent tool; Dagoth Ur co-opted this tool to spread the Soul Sickness, and in our desire to be little Vivecs, we have succumbed to the Soul Sickness hardcore like MySpace in 2004.

But what is the root cause? The ALM in ALMSIVI holds the key.

V: Give Me Validation or – ALM – Will Kill You

“She believes her tales implicitly. As does everyone else. Her capacity for deception appears limitless. She sows lies like a master gardener sows seeds, and the harvest of trust and adulation is breathtaking in scope.” — Sotha Sil

She lifts her phone to the heavens, enables the front-facing camera, and sucks her cheeks in for the angles; she believes no one knows she does the-cheek-thing but has no awareness of her own transparency. She tells Alexa to play her favorite song – “Never Lose Me” by Flo Milli^#14 – as she presses the record button. She starts singing along and cafunes her own bright-red locks as if seducing herself while the weird-little-square captures her in all her sucked-cheek autosexual glory. She cannot lip sync worth a damn but has no awareness of her own failures and believes her tales implicitly. When the recording is done, she sits on the couch with her face buried in glow and fiddles with the lighting and filters to remove the blemishes from her face, adds some cool-shaky-camera-effects to the ending, and then hits publish. This ritual takes one hour, forty-eight minutes, and she does this three times a day. She is twenty-three-years-old and lives with her parents.

Her forty-thousand-plus followers instantly engage with hearts and comments abound. She has never once received a negative comment, and she is a social-media-goddess who believes her tales implicitly.

“the baddest for sure!!”

“how you can’t get over your ex when there’s females like this out there??”

“omg girl ur inspirational”

“single? cuz i hit”

“Your moms fosho invited to the cookout.”

“wish you were my sis!”

“babe that hair got me sweatin!!”

For the first time ever, her video has gone viral, and she is in heaven for a brief moment; but then something new happens: the negativity starts flowing in. The negative comments are few in number, but for every negative comment, one hundred positive comments are mentally discarded, and she is malding and breaking.

“Basic white girl check”

“Somewhere a Dad is shaking his head”

“This girl be in prison in 3 years”

“pretty face but no”

“girl sucking her cheeks in like looking like an alien”

“i saw mcdonald’s was hiring”

Under the bed in the master bedroom, in the lockbox with the 1111-passcode; that’s where dad keeps the gun. Her family is out at work, and she, despite no one being home except herself, creeps slowly to the master bedroom door and places her hand on the doorknob. There is not a single tear in her eye, only the endless nagging of how she looks like an alien and how she needs to go work at McDonald’s and how she has a pretty face but no.

She believed her tales implicitly but didn’t realize that her own belief hinged on the belief of randoms online – and still doesn’t – and now she is shattered. Her validation: lost. She puts in the very-irresponsible-passcode and removes the gun from the lockbox with a trembling hand.

She props up her phone on the bookshelf, enables the front-facing camera, and does not suck her cheeks this time. She tells Alexa to play her brother’s favorite song – “You Gone Die” by Viper^#15 – as she presses the record button. She lifts her father’s handgun into the air in front of her and says, “To all you haters out there, I’m going to find you and,” then starts screaming Viper’s lyrics at the phone, “YOU GONE DIE!”

She had an inkling as to who one of the negative commenters was: an ex-boyfriend from college.

Forty-eight hours later, she is sitting in a jail cell, telling her cellmate how she was a goddess on social media. Her cellmate looks at her with an insidious twinkle in her eye and a grin on her lips. The Hater’s Prophecy Fulfilled three years early.

*Almalexia records a sick new viral TikTok

ALM, Almalexia, Ayem, Mother Morrowind, Healing Mother, and the Face-Snaked Queen of the Three in One resides secluded in her temple in Mournhold in the city of Almalexia. Long ago, when she was filled with the Heart of Lorkhan’s full power, she was compassionate and walked amongst her people, healing the sick and protecting the poor and the weak. She received endless praise and worship for her kindness; known as the “Goddess of Love” among the Dunmer, but this love was contingent upon power and praise, and she was only truly the Goddess of Loving Herself.

Upon the return of Dagoth Ur and his Soul Sickness, Almalexia’s power waned, as did all the Tribunal’s power, and Almalexia was consumed with madness, for her power to heal was gone and she feared, with all her being, of being perceived as a fraud by her faithful. She feared that her carefully crafted image of Loving Mother of All would be destroyed and her people would forsake her, and she could not live with this.

When the Nerevarine – the player, the YOU – returned to Mournhold, Almalexia saw this as the perfect opportunity to regain the faith that was wavering amongst her people – who realized that their goddess had become reclusive and no longer walked the streets healing and loving her people. Ayem used the Nerevarine, sowing lies to manipulate the Nerevarine into spreading a sandstorm across Mournhold – just so she could cause it to subside later on to regain her people’s trust. She then tasked the Nerevarine with gathering a ring of teleportation from a Lich – under the pretense that this Lich was planning an attack on the city – and then used this ring to teleport into Sotha Sil’s Clockwork City and unleash The Tinkerer’s fabricant creations upon her own city; she did this to scare her people and appear as a savior when she stopped the attack; not only would this bolster her faithful but also show that she was the one true divine of Morrowind and that her peers – Sotha Sil and Vivec – had gone mad; and to that end, she blamed the fabricant attack on Sotha Sil.

Many died in every stage of her plan, and she did not care. Almalexia lost her power and feared her subjects would stop validating her. The fear she imposed upon her people through trickery and lies, she felt, would drive them back to her; her validation would be regained. And there could be no other gods to steal this validation from her. Her vanity and obsession with identity, obscured from onlookers and stable when she had power, drove her to madness when that power was taken away and her divinity was questioned.

Almalexia’s final task for the Nerevarine was to travel to Sotha Sil’s Clockwork City and confront the Tinkerer for his supposed involvement in the fabricant attack on Mournhold. The Nerevarine does as they are told, and ALM teleports the Nerevarine to the Clockwork City. The Nerevarine fights through hundreds of fabricants and solves all of The Magician’s clockwork puzzles, and finally, they arrive in Sotha Sil’s chamber. They see Sotha Sil hooked into his Clockwork City through machinery and wires, and they walk up to him and he’s non-responsive and cold, and that’s when the Nerevarine realizes:

Sotha Sil is dead.

Almalexia, using the teleportation ring secured by the Nerevarine, appears behind the Nerevarine with a blade of blue flame, intending to wrap up all her loose ends. She speaks to the Nerevarine of her motivations, of her vanity, of how she used the Nerevarine to secure the ring and enter the Clockwork City to kill Sotha Sil. Afterwards, the Nerevarine and Almalexia do battle and Almalexia – in her weakened state – is slain.

Almalexia, in her vanity and endless search for validation, tricked us all; the Soul Sickness feeds on this need for validation, and as a result, we have unwittingly killed The Intellect. We are stagnating. We are twerking for hearts on TikTok.

VI: Sotha Sil is Dead – CONCLUSION – Soul Sickness Redux

“He spoke not a word when he died, not a whisper. Even in death he mocked me with his silence!” ― Almalexia

In the beginning, there were four Gods Among Men and Mer: Almalexia, Sotha Sil, Vivec, and Dagoth Ur; five if YOU are considered: the reader, the player, the Nerevarine, the everything, or the fool. And by the end of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, there are none; you have slain Almalexia in her search for validation, accidentally enabled the murder of Sotha Sil and his Intellect, cut down Dagoth Ur and his Soul Sickness, and murdered Vivec in his obsession with identity just because you wanted to; then, you saved the game one last time and turned the computer off, and with that, YOU have left the world of Nirn; the world of Distraction.

And that’s all well-and-good for the world of Nirn; the inhabitants of Tamriel will have other problems later on, and perhaps we will return one day to solve those problems; in the meantime, we have a lot of problems right here on Earth.

How can we ever hope to solve war, hunger, rights issues both human and non-human, and a slew of societal problems if identity, validation, immense obsession with the self, and phones are all we care about? These things power each other in a hamster-wheel of such high speeds that our figurative skin and muscles are being ripped off, and we are skeletons that care about nothing else than numbers-go-up on graphical interfaces made of 1s and 0s. We exist in stagnation and are on the 24th iteration of the iPhone; we think we are so smart, but we are repackaged mimicry and violence and vicious and verve.

The Internet was a psychic-atom-bomb that claimed the souls of billions, and the poison radiation left behind slowly melted its own creator. We are coasting on the death of Sotha Sil; the death of The Intellect; we don’t even know when it died; it just slowly withered away within the last thirty years while we were too busy being obsessed with ourselves to notice The Intellect crumbling like a Mormon cookie in the corner of the room.

When The Internet was created, we expected the right information to be perpetuated into the collective human consciousness, and we were dead wrong; so much so that we are trying to shoot up pizza joints because Hillary Clinton is part of a pedophilia ring that meets in their basement, but in reality, it was all a massive 4chan misinformation campaign.^#16 We are echo-chambered into extreme falsehood and our brains are dripping out of our noses.

The Intellect created the tools of its own destruction, and now we are Looking at Phones while little Timmy gets his ass beaten. We are turning weak and stupid and violent in that order.

*Almalexia in War Mask of Validation wants you to kill The Intellect

And, as I’m sure you have already concluded: this essay is peak hypocrisy. When we pull back the curtain, I am exactly the same as the people I am criticizing. I post, sometimes ten times a day, on my Mastodon social media account; my writing, favorite music, day-to-day observations, takes on computer games, and my hyper-inflated ego are all on display for the world to see, and for what: likes? Nay, validation.

Have I really grown beyond sixth-grade me? I may no longer be anorexic, but has my validation criteria simply changed – become more sophisticated? Instead of wanting to be validated as skinny and beautiful, I want to be validated as a brilliant writer full of ultra-unique thoughts and insightful opinions and wisdom overflowing.

I am always bored, always distracted, and always stupid. I played a computer game for two hundred hours when I could have been doing literally-anything-else – which would have been far more productive – all to write an essay about how society sucks while simultaneously being a major part of the problem because I am suffering from the very same Soul Sickness as everyone else.

Almalexia is calling us to kill Sotha Sil, and we have answered her call unwittingly. We pretend to be Gods online when we are just ordinary people suffering from peak Soul Sickness no different than the father at the Belt Test.

The new Gods Among Men and Mer are phone, identity, validation, and social media; and Sotha Sil is dead, and with this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. We must restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world we have created.

Good news: if you read this far, then you are much better off than most; however, the first step in restoring the weave of fate is to log off and put the phone down – but do we have the power to do so?