#thank you for the queation! always a delight to talk about this guy in my head

[ehlnofay]

So, I’ve been having thoughts about Sheogorath specifically and what he actually represents. Personally I don’t think it’s “madness” or “insanity.” His domain isn’t of the mentally or physically ill. Like think of that quest where you have to torture people until they break or you can kill them outright. In fact most of the quests aren’t about “madness” they’re instead about making sadistic choices or picking a side. I personally think that Sheogorath is more the daedric prince of Separation, and to a lesser extent Whims, Disarray, and Chance. And when you have unlimited power, it’s easier for those elements to turn cruel. It also keeps him as the opposite side of the coin to Jyggalag. I’d love to hear your thoughts/ideas on this though. I’ve been rotating a lot of the princes in my head lately because a lot of them really don’t match up with their supposed domain.

do I have thoughts on sheogorath? oh boy Do I. if you care to comb through my blog you will find such a number of incomprehensible ramblings on the subject, including but not limited to assertions that it is "a liquid" "a teenage girl" "my skrunkly my scrimblo my woman in the wallpaper" and a thousand or so word essay-thing breaking down the basics of my reimagining of the character that I wrote like a year ago (it's probably not very good. haven't read it in a while.)

suffice it to say that the sheogorath that exists in my head is a wholly separate entity to the one that exists in canon. I agree with you that "madness" as a sphere is pretty nonsense (pretty sure I've spoken about this before) - it's literally just what someone who doesn't know anything about mental illness thinks mental illness is, and as someone who knows a reasonable amount about mental illness, that does not work for me. I think it's really interesting that you've reimagined sheogorath's sphere based on in-game content and behaviour! I kind of went the opposite route and disregarded it entirely - my sheogorath is predicated mostly on my own experiences with mental illness and to a certain extent the portrayals of it that I would like to see. sheogorath's sphere, in my mind, is disorder and entropy (which also works as an inverse for jyggalag!), mostly presenting itself in very human terms but existing more broadly overall.

I think the most important part of my reimagining of the character, though, is that I completely scrap the cruelty of intention attributed to it in-game. I do not scrap the cruelty of behaviour - that's fitting - but at its core I believe sheogorath means well. it does not seek to cause harm. (I have a bit of writing in the works exploring this...) this idea is really important to me because, if you'll forgive some more personal ramblings, portraying what's supposed to be an embodiment of mental illness as malevolent is not only kind of harmful, it's inaccurate, at least to my experience. my mental illness is not a vicious foreign entity imposing itself on me to hurt me, it is a part of me that has been hurt and is trying as best it can to stop it from happening again. historically, working with my symptoms has given me much better results than trying to work against them. (they say when you're in a riptide, swim parallel to the shore.)