The Elder Scrolls is wild because there's all these huge historical race wars and feuds but then you play the games and 95% of the time it'll be a Nord, his Dunmer wife, a Khajiit and an Orc co-owning a brewery or whatever together and vibing. Guess it's almost heartwarming in weird way.
this is a big failing, i don't know exactly how morrowind treats you if you roll an argonian but i suspect the game isn't made too much harder/impossible---the devs are too cowardly to put class/race into a game in a way that actually effects the player. oblivion is more cosmopolitan & apparently peacefully presiding over a whole continent with equality so it kind of makes sense.
skyrim is especially bonkers---"skyrim for the nords!" why yes of course there are a dozen elf-owned businesses and farms in stormcloak territory, we don't want it to appear as if the racism regime is racist! not just from not wanting to constrain the player, i think they tried to make the segregation seem tame so the player wouldn't be impacted by what segregation actually is like (and think something ought to be done). yeah there's a ghetto associated with the dark elves but they can leave whenever they like, there's 3 sympathetic nords to 2-3 racist ones, dark elves aren't barred property ownership. it's just the aesthetic of racial oppression without any substance, god forbid we make a player think or feel something about racism
If you truly build that kind of systemic racial oppression into a game then it's incompatible with allowing players to choose the race of their character because you're basically building multiple games in one, at least one of which is about doing systemic racial oppression. Game development is a business after all, there's no market for doing twice as much work to sell way less copies (because who really wants to play a KKK orc instead of more fun escapist fantasy)
tbf, I don't think you don't need to impede the player themself that much to give a much stronger impression of systemic oppression. In Dragon Age: Origins it's definitely a lot more present, though it doesn't really affect the player themselves ultimately. Like the ghettos ("alienages") in the game are definitely a lot more enforced compared to the Grey Quarter in Skyrim (i.e. they are walled off with guarded gates, and they get locked down occasionally when e.g. riots happen inside), though an elven player isn't ever actually barred from entering a city or anything, other than during the origin quest. And the same goes for the other origins, specifically mage and dwarf commoner, the player basically only really faces the systemic part during the origin quest, after which them being a Warden kind of just supersedes all of that? (Though people will still give you shit, especially if you are an elf)
That is the smart to do it. You limit the player based on their race/class at the beginning to help them understand what it feels to play that role. But give them a big upgrade in social power that lets them logically overcome how systemic oppression limits their character, but still have options to role play. They also give you two Fereldan humans to back you up.
i dunno i'd have a lot of fun subverting an unjust hierarchy with ultraviolence, that's still power fantasy 
Yeah true, a lot of games do pull punches when it comes to showing that sort of thing. Witcher 3 and Deus Ex Mankind Divided come to mind, where you're ostensibly playing a persecuted minority but they're still massive power fantasies where you can basically do what you want, it's kinda jarring.
The witcher 3 is especially ridiculous, you're a witcher a genetically enhanced human trained as a killing machine, you openly carry 2 fucking swords and the dumbass humans are openly racist against you and provoke you to fight several times.
It makes sense when the state guards are openly racist, they have power to back it up but it makes absolutely no sense when a couple of peasants in the middle of nowhere do it ๐
Rascism being stupid is historically accurate though
I mean isnt that real life also
I mean, yeah. That's pretty much canon.
I love that during the Oblivion Crisis the Hist went "Alright everyone huddle up. We're going to turn you all in to hulking, horrifying super-soldiers. Then we're going to counter-invade the Deadlands of Oblivion so hard that Mehrunes Dagon will shut down all the portals in terror that we're actually going to win. Everyone in? Okay, break!"
And then they did that.
But think of all the ~~chucklefuck capitalists~~ ~~gusanos~~ slaveowners who had everything taken from them!
An-Xileel should not have stopped at Morrowind. 
A one-page visit of a high population Elder Scrolls forum and all of its "hippity hoppity Argonians are property" le epic chud takes indicate you are right.
An-Xileel should not have stopped at Morrowind.
I refuse to take the side of lizards that also have mammary glands, no matter how many threads about the Hist you write!
A magical fantasy setting with walking trees and elves that can turn into carnivorous liquids and cat people that form ladders to climb to the moon is where lizards with boobs are too far 
Everything about the Argonians is kind of a mess, though. Like there's lore that basically says they're mindless lizards if they don't get socialized into the Hist, but then there are tons of Argonians born outside Blackmarsh who mature into normal sapient beings just fine even without access to the Hist hivemind. There's lore that says they're cold-blooded, but they exist without issue in freezing climates anyways.
They're somehow less clear than the Khajiit, which are nonsense but coherent within their silly framework. Like Argonians pretty much boil down to "the Hist did it, and when the Hist clearly didn't do it they actually did do it somehow," which is the boring kind of nonsense explanation.
The usual excuse for contradictions in Elder Scrolls lore is that the sources are in-setting and are unreliable narrators.
Yeah, you just have to read about the wild racist shit slavers thought about their slaves
There have been some attempts to try to hammer the contradictions into something interesting.
Like, there's a bit in ESO: Murkmire, where you see a vision of a Ayleid getting confused because the organs of the Argonians he's dissecting seem to be changing and don't match with stuff he's seen in other creatures.
Uncritical support for our Saxhleel comrades in their just war against the Dunmer slavers. Also love the lore tidbit about the Imperial Legion trying to invade Black Marsh and getting absolutely clowned on before running back to Cyrodiil and declaring "nice work conquering those 5 square inches of Black Marsh boys, chalk up another W for the Legion!"
The canon lore tidbit of what happened in the Oblivion crisis always gets me.
The Daedra opened portals to Black Marsh for an invasion, the Hist just said "absolutely not". Every single military in Tamriel struggled against Dagon's Daedra, from the Nords to the Aldmeri dominion. The Argonians not only completely slaughtered the Daedra that stepped into Black Marsh, they pushed the Daedra back to the Deadlands and they had to seal the Oblivion gates from the inside to avoid being overrun.
sheogorath deserves some credit for the small moon
Such a prankster that one.
They're def the best honestly
did you know they can canonically trans their gender with the Hist
I heard pretty bad things about ESO Lore and Roleplay communities, so I put it "I am not in it, I dont need to engage" folder
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