A Differing Perspective on Towers and Thalmor

So /u/MKirkbride’s short and mysterious post about the Thalmor “winning in the end” has stirred up a lot of talk around here, and continuing speculation about how they’re going to destroy the world by destroying the Towers. This is really, really ironic considering the intended subject matter of my question that MK posted that answer in his AMA to. Literally my exact point there was an attempt to highlight how nonsensically unrelated everything we know about the concept of Towers and what the Thalmor are all about appear to be to each other. I feel it maybe deserves going into more detail over, so I’ll outline my exact thoughts, theories, and speculation on the subject:

The reason the Towers were built, according to Nu-Mantia Intercept, was to establish ownership of the world and stability of existence. They were built by the Aldmer specifically to reconstruct and emulate the hierarchical, ordered societies of their spirit progenitors. A structure to look upon and say, “This is the symbol of the powers-that-be. Its builders are our lords.” The original purpose of Lorkhan’s trap in Nirn was to tear down this hierarchy and give all spirits an equal chance to shape their own fate. Nothing was built, everything was chaotic and natural. The Aldmeri construction of Towers in imitation of Ada-Mantia was a refutation of this sentiment. A stark, alien, geometrical contrast to the natural landscape, jutting out of the ground and forming a nexus of tradition that society would invariably coalesce and evolve in the shadow of (aad semblio).

The Towers are not what ended the spirit realm. So why would destroying them re-establish it? The goal of the Thalmor is to revert their existence into the dominion of Anuiel. The thing that the Towers are guarding is the reversion of Nirn into its primordial state when it was ruled by Lorkhan, a Wild West of sorts with no rhyme, reason, or order. “The House of Sithis."

To further substantiate this, let’s look at the game most directly related to the destruction of a Tower and its main architect: Oblivion and Mehrunes Dagon. We know, from the central plot of an entire Elder Scrolls game, that Dagon wants to bring White-Gold down. Why? Because he wants to tear down the aedric hierarchy and revert Tamriel to its primordial state as the dominion realm of Lorkhan. Now why would the Thalmor of all organizations, the most bitter ancient enemies of all things Padomaic and Shezzarite, share this goal? Why did they fight and die in a futile attempt to defend Crystal-Like-Law from Dagon’s hordes instead of reinforcing them on the battlefield?

Because destroying the Towers does not give the Thalmor what they want.

Nirn/Tamriel was created to give Lorkhan the wandering spirit his own realm to preside over. He did this by stealing the power of the scions of Anuiel and using it to shape the mortal plane. The first Tower landed on Tamriel at Balfiera as the antithesis of the unstable realm of the Arena. Undeniable in its image and presence, an assault of aetherial engineering upon the House of Sithis, it served as a meeting place for spirits to record themselves in a controlled, static, environment, and determine fate in a way possible nowhere and nowhen else in the Dawn. After time solidified, the descendants of Anuiel began to build their own towers as a way of reestablishing the power that had been stolen from them through an emulation of the ancient order and law their spirit society had operated under, and to show that it made them dominant over those who were incapable of the same feats of engineering, whom they considered beasts and savages.

To try and put this in the simplest terms possible, let’s just envision two directions: down and up. Lorkhan destroyed the spirit realm and bled Aetherius to create the world, sending all the spirits downwards from their high stations into mortality so that the lesser ones might be free from the rule of the greater. Dagon’s invasion was an emulation of this to tear down the false realm the Aedra and, by inheritance of conquest, the Empire had set up on Lorkhan’s grave. The goal of the Anuic forces is to build themselves back up from this lower position to a state of immortality far more advanced than their current state, the reconstruction of the spirit realm of Anuiel and re-establishment of what they consider to be the rightful hierarchy of spirits. Ancestrally, the Aldmer claim the spot at the top of the food chain here. They get the best spiritual existence and all the lesser ones are fucked over. The Thalmor take this to the extreme. They’ve constructed and advanced their society and technology over the eras to climb ever closer to their memories of the gods, but they don’t believe it will be complete unless they can get the rest of the world to emulate the spiritual hierarchy as well. Aad semblio Anuiel.

So what about the current state of the world exactly does not mirror the image of the spirit realm? Well how about the fact that it’s ruled by a Mannish Empire with a human sitting on the Divine Throne at the head of its pantheon? That’s something of a large discrepancy that needs to be rectified in the Aurbilogical record books. The Thalmor want to “unmake” the world. Destroying the Towers does not unmake the world. It reverts it to its primordial Dawn state, the lowest point in Aldmeri spiritual existence and crowning achievement of Padomaics Aurbis-wide.

To restore existence in the image of Anuiel, existence must be liberated from the limits imposed by Lorkhan and the will of Sithis. It needs to be ascended from. To the Thalmor, humanity is the weight dragging existence down into the doom of mortality. They don’t want to destroy the Towers, they want to destroy or enslave everything different from them. They want complete control, not the Padomaic chaos of the Dagonites. And once they have control, that’s when they get to unbind the Dragon and rejoin Anuiel. I’m not going to pretend like I know even close to what their exact method for accomplishing this is, but if anything they’d want to use the remaining Towers and the power they exercise to their own ends to help further this cause.

Basically I think that while the Towers are a key component when it comes to the fate of the world, simply destroying or deactivating them is not the only way to go about freeing oneself from its present constraints of mortality. They are nexuses of power, and the Thalmor have proven to be more about repurposing power to suit their own needs than squandering it.