Quote Originally Posted by Errorname View Post
It's not magic, it's covert ops. The Thalmor's spies can use proxies to back promising anti-imperial voices and use those anti-imperial activities to justify further crackdowns which increase support for the anti-imperial movement, and repeat until it gets to a point where the rebellion is self-sustaining, and from the Thalmor dossiers we know that this is literally what they did.

And I don't think it'd be the same outcome. Notably without a noble to stick on the throne there's way less of a path to victory for the rebels. But the thing the Thalmor need to create is conflict that wastes the strength of the Empire during the interregnum, and I absolutely believe they could do that. Scattered peasant uprisings aren't as good as an organized rebellion, but they'll do in a pinch.



Given that in this scenario the most likely leaders are not educated nobles but rather veteran soldiers and well connected commoners I find it easy to believe, especially when the Elves are very prominently backing the other side in the war. The Empire allowing the Thalmor to operate within their borders alongside the Legions works against them. While the Imperial leaders know they're working against the elves, that's not how it looks to an outsider.
The traditions and psyche of the disaffected demographic make peasant rebellion an unlikely outcome of social unrest in Skyrim. If someone thinks they can do a better job, they just walk up to the Jarl and say to their face "fite me, I can do better jerb." and then, most likely, they get handed a sword and the Jarl disembowles them, because being a Jarl lets you have access to a lot of martial training and good equipment, and being a peasant does not.

Changing the script a little bit so that you have someone like Galmar, a veteran soldier who is tactically wise but strategically kind of useless, he does the same thing to start his message, but then he gets stuck a little bit, because if he wins, now he has to actually do a better job than the other Jarl, which isn't something he's all that well equipped for, and the elves kind of lost the ability to overtly manipulate him at this point due to having enough power that he can just tell all their overt agents to pick out their own coffins, and they have to be careful not to taunt and antagonize him so hard that the Empire itself starts taking offense and tells them to hit the road. A slower burn than Ulfric's sudden murder of the king and power grab also gives the Imperials more ability to wield their own power, propaganda and just generally negotiate with the guy. A hypothetical Jarl Galmar is a problem, but not one that can only be solved with violence the way Ulfric murdering the High King was. Heck, you put Jarl Galmar in Ulfric's position where he challenged the king, and its STILL less likely to lead to civil war because Galmar can't use the Voice in the duel so he just fights Torygg conventionally, which makes the duel feel more legitimate to the Jarls and gives Torygg opportunity to surrender and yield to a superior combatant instead of getting murdered.

This is why I keep saying that Ulfric is one of the only ones to take advantage of the situation to actually escalate it to actual war and violence.