"Every Strand" author commentary pt. 2

[allekha]

Chapter 4:
Apparently, in Telvanni, the usual tradition is to throw books at whoever did something for you and imply they're an idiot for not having read them.
I wonder how many books you get during the House Telvanni questline, because it feels like every one of their quest rewards is books.

I don't have much to say about specific lines in this one, but I think the Sheogorad region is really pretty, and I like visiting areas like that in real life.

Nerevar has spent enough time fending for himself that unlike most nobles, he does not like to travel with a retinue if he sees no need for one. He already won himself a country; why should he need to further show his wealth by dragging others along with him everywhere?
As mentioned, in the last commentary, surrounding yourself with lower-ranked people seems to have been typical for people of higher status in the old days... but I can imagine it would be annoying if you were previously a pretty normal person.

then he bows his head low, clasps his hands in front of his chest, and tucks his elbows in.
I spent some time thinking about what the Nord should do here - just bow? Ring-kissing felt a bit too modern. Eventually, I decided on this based on ancient Mesopotamian statues with a similar posture that judging by the labels, seems to indicate praying.

Nerevar nods and lifts his hand, and this man lives.
And 'the Nord' and 'the Northman' become a 'man'.

Chapter 5:
He steps inside and nearly bashes his temple on a supporting beam where the roof descends sharply to the side and the builder assumed that any residents would be a head shorter.
I like to think that Dagoth Ur is taller than Voryn Dagoth was in life, but that he was still something like typical modern Altmer height and everything is just a little too small for him. (I admit I also find it amusing when fic makes a little fun of the Altmer for being too darn tall, lol.)

then he has the blasphemous thought – Gilvoth would throttle him – that the moment is almost brotherly
Brotherly! Totally brotherly. In conclusion: brotherly. "Once we were friends and brothers" and all :)

He's used to falling asleep later than this, and in the absolute quiet of his room; he rarely sleeps well when the needs of traveling have him sharing a bed with Relmyna or one of his brothers, and so he is not surprised when he ends up staring at the ceiling and listening to the sound of Nerevar breathing
As much as I like 'oh no there is only one bed and we are having Feelings about it', I also like more platonic variations of it. (Not that this scene is entirely platonic, but still.) I recently read a little thing from a historian about how sometimes medieval rulers would sleep in the same bed the night after signing a treaty as a symbol of trust, and I feel like something like that could make for an interesting early Nerevar&/Voryn fic.

Voryn had looked at the ring uneasily, as its power was obvious to someone as skilled in enchantment as him, and he wondered, not for the first or last time, if he had made the correct choice in supporting him.
There can be something creepy about very charismatic people, and they don't have supernatural powers backing them up in real life. (Though not always, if for example they're just entertainers.) Nerevar might not have been a cult leader, but still.

the occasional cliff racer is easily chased off with some fireballs from Voryn or thrown rocks from Nerevar
Maybe not all cliff racers in the past were quite as suicidally ferocious as the ones we encounter in the game?

There being a shrine to Azura in the Sheogorad islands is inspired by her Morrowind quest taking you there.

"What, can you not see a beautiful lady in that?"
I like those constellation illustrations that impose a fancy, detailed picture on top of some stars that bear pretty much no resemblance to the illustration's shape even if you squint and try to activate the part of your brain that really loves making pictures. Some constellations do make sense, but I'm not sure how people came up with some of them!

Chapter 6:
His parents used to send all their sons down for the summer and enjoy a few weeks of quiet to themselves before joining them.
I feel like eight kids would be a handful you might be happy to fob off onto the grandparents for a few weeks, even if you're a rich noble and have a bunch of people to help with the childrearing.

staying up far too late looking through the books their father had enjoyed as a boy
A thing I did as a kid!

He finds a mushroom he's never heard of; it looks as though it's bleeding mudcrab blood, its surface dotted with strange milky blue pearls
Vaguely inspired by the blue milk mushroom (Lactarius indigo), which I found while looking for inspiration for a Telvanni retexture that I was thinking of making. I know there are a lot of brown mushrooms, but the fact that the magic House lives in brown mushrooms in a brown landscape and adopted brown as their color doesn't sit right with me lol. Morrowind has way too much brown in it already. And there are lots of cool mushrooms that aren't brown in the real world, let alone a fantasy world!

The weight is hard for some to bear
Dwemer scrap metal is so heavy that I assume that prosthetics would be made from a different alloy (Dwemer metal can't all have been the One Alloy To Rule Them All, right?) but might still be very heavy.

Animaculi engineers focus on giving them the ability to move in various terrains, but not necessarily in the same way that a living spider, for example, would
For one thing, centurion spiders only have six legs 😅

"I never realized even something as basic a motion as walking differs greatly between people."
I went through a phase a long time ago where I spent a lot of time looking at how people walk after watching a video about walking styles in animation. It is interesting how much variation there is in-between the stereotypically 'feminine' walking style with a lot of swing in the hips and a stereotypically 'masculine' style with a lot of swagger in the shoulders. I much later met a few people who study gait variations in different terrains and in people with certain disorders, and they sure could say a lot about walking.

But just as he prefers the robes worn nearly universally in House Dagoth, their forms almost the same between men and women, over the more divided and slight fashions of Mournhold
While I ended up going with this worldbuilding for the fic, based on how the few characters from 1E dress in the game, there's a part of me that wonders if the universal fashion back then was 'as little as you can get away with portraying in a T-rated video game'. Or maybe becoming a living god makes one not care about clothes anymore.

Traditionally, such things are written in Aldmeris, like all formal documents of both the Chimer and Dwemer, which would have obviated any need for translation. But Nerevar has insisted that they be provided in the languages their people all speak.
I think it's a neat detail that the Dwemer apparently started using Aldmeris more after they allied with the Chimer, who presumably would have held it as a prestige language like later elves, but it's also kind of curious to me that they used it before then as well, since I don't really get the feeling that the Dwemer would have prestiged another language above their own. Maybe it was simply a tradition from their earlier days, just as some of their legal principles originated in Altmer law?

The scene of them reading in front of the hearth was inspired by the time I was poking around in Tel Fyr, and just off the bedroom there's a small room with a hearth, a bunch of pillows, and some books (and snacks). It was such an unexpectedly cozy thing to find in there given Divayth Fyr's selfcest clone daughter-wife thing that it stuck with me. That also reminded me of scenes from historical books where a family gathers around to do handiwork while one of them reads aloud from the latest magazine or something.

Chapter 7:
"Sometimes I feel like I can hardly keep your brothers straight,"
Me too, Ayem, up until about this part of the fic in the writing process.

"Would you ask of me a favor you think I would be unwilling to agree to?"

"I might, one day," Nerevar says.
He did eventually write Much that I did was at your command, at great cost to myself, and my honor., so presumably there was something that he might have been less than enthusiastic to do for Nerevar... I really do wonder what that sentence might have referred to.

and is known for her skills in alteration and thaumaturgy magics
The TES universe either seems to go through changes in its magic systems very quickly or have some stark regional differences if you try to reconcile Arena and Daggerfall with Morrowind (in only thirty years, everyone forgot how to go through walls, thaumaturgy was ditched and its spells split between multiple other schools, and conjuration was discovered). I like to think it's something like biologists arguing over taxonomy, only you can't DNA test a spell.