Elves are Jews with Pointy Ears and Gay Magic”: White Nationalist Readings of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

submitted by Alienhunter糞大名 from gamestudies.org

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[–]proc0 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I suspect this author is not a gamer. I read a lot of that, and to summarize, Skyrim isn't doing enough to prevent certain interpretations based on extreme political views. So "white nationalists" can play the game and do the things they want to create their ideal world. Oh no! Obviously that's the point of a sandbox game, and wow some people with extreme views like to express themselves in it. So I guess we need to change all games, and censor certain game features, because muh racism and whyte peepo bad hnnng

[–]Alienhunter糞大名[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

I suspect that the author may have had to churn out a paper quickly after a long gaming session and find a way to justify browsing stormfront and Skyrim as an academic activity. It's somewhat brilliant actually I wish I had the balls to just fuck off and pass Skyrim binge sessions as serious research but alas I was under the horrible misconception that academics are supposed to have academic value and studying was more work than play. How stupid I was.

Now my eyes are opened and I know that all the world's problems are actually caused by the Thalmor. They control the banks. They control the Black Horse Courier. They staged the emperor's assassination and oblivion crisis as a false flag to seize power. They want to ban Talos! They want to teach your kids necromancy!

This is a very serious topic absolutely in dire need of academic attention, and definitely a justified topic for a collegate research paper based off of random forum posts from anonymous strangers who may or may not be anyone including the author and may or may not be trolls, and a single video game. All to come to the absolutely shocking conclusion that people read parallels of real life situations in fictional media. Color me shocked by this revelation. Gastly who could have thought a racist would choose to interpret the world and media through a racist lense? Riveting and absolutely ground breaking discovery. Why there hasn't been an academic work this influential since N. O. Obreckt's titanic paper. "The blatant pro monarchical and intentionally anti-worker bias dog whistles present in Super Mario Bros."

[–]LtGreenCo 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

What the hell was this a PhD thesis? Fucking clown world.

[–]1-800-FUCKOFF 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

This is what all humanities papers are like nowadays. Basically long essays where they present opinions and made up garbage pulled from other papers of the same sort and try to make you believe any of it is scholarly work presenting the result of "research". It's a web of bullshit that's essentially all ideology. None of it has any scientific basis, you just have to make it sound authoritative and complex and it's basically assumed you know what you're talking about. The dog park rapes and male penis as an abstract concept (paraphrasing, forgot the exact title) hoax papers proved that without a shadow of a doubt.

Massive academic circle jerk that's 95% sophistry and 5% hot air.

[–]Q-Continuum-kin 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

In some regards it's worse than that because they pull real data from actual scientific work then write up a sociology paper with a conclusion unrelated to what the actual scientists presented.

My classic example is always a paper where neurologists counted a type of brain cells called BSTc in actual cadavers. A very small number of those cadavers were of people who identified as trans. When they averaged out the number of cells those MtF trans brains were closer on average to the average female brain. For many years every TRA would cite this as evidence that MtF brains were literally female. I once had a TRA give me a list of say 20 papers "proving MtF have female brains". When I checked the sources it turned out that all but 1 paper was just a sociology paper which referenced the same original BSTc paper.

The thing is that the number of trans brains in the study were not even statistically relevant. There were many arguments made about attempting to early diagnose children based on this data point without realizing that the procedure required dissection of the brain. They also couldn't comprehend the way statistics work in that far more straight men had the same count as the MtFs because the counts were a normal distribution. It also didn't take other reasons for the count into consideration such as neuroplasticity.

Eventually the original scientists were forced to come out and tell people to stop using their paper to create their own conclusions then they released a follow up study which essentially debunked the entire ecosystem of sociology papers which claimed to use this research for their conclusion.

This is really much worse because it gives their BS narrative so much more credibility in the eyes of the media and the public who are largely scientifically illiterate. For me it was relatively easy to debunk their "evidence" but they overwhelm you with information so the average person can't even understand how to argue or verify the sources and even if they are able it's just so much shit to sift through that most people just give up the moment they see 20 papers linked.

[–]ClassroomPast6178 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Alan Sokal’s original publication and then the more recent The Grievance Studies/Sokal2 affair expose the worst of what the humanities and social sciences have become. The fact that they changed nothing, except made journals check IDs before accepting submissions, as they were more upset by the fact that they were tricked but not interested in addressing what was exposed because it turns out that social science and humanities publications are a massive scam set up to enable third-rate academics to keep their jobs/get tenure through publishing garbage in low tier journals where the reviewers are just passing publications so that their garbage gets passed too.

I have multiple publications in top tier medical journals and this shit makes me sick.

[–]Horror-Swordfish 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I mean, sure, you could liken the Stormclocks to white nationalists, and I guess some idiots on Stormfront do that. You could also say that the Stormcloaks aren't so much against other races being in Skyrim as much as they are against losing their independence to the Empire. Skyrim is populated with people of all races and it never seemed to me in all of my hundreds of hours in the game that Nords or even the Stormcloaks had any particular problem with the existence of Khajit, Argonians, Bretons, Redguards, etc. They just don't want to be ruled by the Empire.

I know it's meant to be morally grey, but I always considered the Stormcloaks to be the good guys because most Imperials I run across are dicks. The battlecry "Skyrim is for the Nords!" just means "Skyrim is not for the Empire!"

If anything, the fucking Altmer are the racial supremacists, looking down on literally everyone else and attacking people for just daring to pass by them on the road (see also: dick Imperials that do that too).

[–]LordoftheFliesAmeri-kin 2.0. Pronouns: MegaWhite/SuperStraight/UltraPatriarchy 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Altmer will even blast other elves for both being "lesser" variations and not being fully signed on with the "elves uber alles" creed that they're pushing.

[–]Alienhunter糞大名[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You can compare a lot of stuff with real world inspirations if you want. I don't really care about that, it's more the ludicrous notion of writing a scholarly paper on that shit. Like if I wrote a paper called "Call this number for a good time, the queer aspects and counter homophobic anti-faggot literary trend low class bar men's rooms stall free speech zones".

[–]Adventurous_Ad6212 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I hate the look of elves in skyrim

[–]Alienhunter糞大名[S] 3 insightful - 6 fun3 insightful - 5 fun4 insightful - 6 fun -  (0 children)

You have been permanently banned from participating in r/thalmor for posting hateful racist content. You can still view and subscribe to r/thalmor, but you won't be able to post or comment.

If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team for r/thalmor by replying to this message. Your pathetic pleas will be ignored.

Reminder from the moderators: If you create another character to circumvent this ban, that will be considered a violation of the of the White Gold Concordat and you may be subjected to the Dark Brotherhood.

[–]1-800-FUCKOFF 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

"Here's a research paper presenting what is no more than my own subjective opinion presented through subjective opinionated systems developed by two other researchers and described in other papers. This is my contribution to the web of bullshit that passes for academic research in the humanities departments of our western world universities. I'm hoping a lot of my colleagues over the next few years will quote and reference this paper to strenghten their own opinion-presented-as-academic-research papers."

Seriously, the fact that this garbage passes as an academic paper is borderline mental retardation. The topic isn't scientific, and neither is this paper. Fuck the people who contribute to this farce.