#the only thing i can think of is in battlespire theres tigerskin rugs everywhere but like. its battlespire

[foulserpent]

do you have thoughts or feelings on the tes fanon about tigers being weird semi-immortal spirit like dragons? i love the aesthetics of it all and i feel like it could be another neat ancient cyrodiil thing but i have no idea how they would've interacted with like, the early alessians or even the ayleids (other than that "tiger sport" thing)

yeah i really like it and i feel like it might be one of those things that at least a Couple of writers regard as canon and slip in here and there bc theres Just enough in there in canon for it to seem like theres smth to it

like "tosh" apparently translates to both tiger and dragon. and i believe this was from one of thos eso Q&As, which i take with a grain of salt, but like that tracks considering "tosh raka" (which obv is "akatosh" switched around a little) who is of the tiger people and became a dragon and is kind of maybe implied to have mantled akatosh?

and then getting to extra-canon dev sources, i know MK's shit has it come up a few times, like particularly irt tiber septim. since according to MK he was obsessed with tigers (and called guars tigers bc they had stripes and the dumbass couldnt pronounce "guar") and his "favorite bedtime story" heavily features tigers. which is SUPER interesting if you choose to accept it it pretty much directly states that tigers used to exist and are gone now

and this wouldnt have even been a result of the stupid "tiber septim making cyrodiil temperate" thing (probably) bc it was apparently his childhood bedtime story. like it implies that tigers used to exist, were generally feared, maybe were supernatural (they talk in the story but its written as a folktale for children so take that with a grain of salt).

and its (probably) not like tiger is just the cyrodiilic word for dragon since they are described as cats but i think theres a heavily implied connection

yeah idk exactly what to make of it... personally i tend to favor mundane worldbuilding lol and interpret it as being considered a sort of "royal" quasi-mythical animal in cyrodiil considered to have ties to akatosh (and whether they actually do or not is unknown) but i absolutely do buy into the potential for it being deeper.

edit: the alessia tapestry i textured for a mod has tiger motifs on it for a similar reason. kinda loosely defined headcanons about them being seen as symbols for royalty, secondary to the Dragon of course but