**tl;dr – Both the Imperials and the Stormcloaks are flawed, but at least the Imperials' goals are for the betterment of Skyrim, unlike the Stormcloaks who are only out for themselves.** I'll be upfront – on my very first playthrough, I sided with the Stormcloaks, because the Imperials had just tried to decapitate me, and it looked like they were persecuting Ulfric and his followers for daring to rise up against oppression. The game sets you up to be sympathetic towards the Stormcloaks, because it seems like they’ve been betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect them. *You* feel betrayed, because the Imperials have *your* head on the chopping block next to Ulfric’s, simply because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time. The Imperials seem like downright *villains*. But the Stormcloaks are not all they appear to be, either. Underneath their banner of “justice” lies an inherent racism and hypocrisy that they sweep under the rug with their freedom calls. When they proclaim that “Skyrim is for the Nords,” they mean *only* the Nords. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Windhelm: The Nords force the Dark Elves to live in slums, and forbid Argonians and Khajiit from even entering their walls. They ran the Reachmen from their ancestral home, and forbid them from worshiping their own gods (sound familiar? Maybe the Thalmor invasion is poetic justice). The Imperials bent their knees to the whims of the Thalmor, true. But they did it for the good of Skyrim, knowing that if they only bided their time, the day would come when they could rise up and drive the Thalmor out for good. The Stormcloaks can’t see the forest for the trees – all they see is the vision of a pure, Nordic Skyrim, and they don’t seem to realize that by defeating the Imperials, they’ll be weakening Skyrim’s defenses – making it *impossible* to fight off the Thalmor. Are the Imperials without fault? Hardly. But at least their intentions are noble, and they can see the bigger picture. They may seem like a thorn in the side, but they are necessary for the survival of Skyrim and its people – *all* of its people.

The Nords of Skyrim are a free people, with few exceptions. They enjoy a robust system of roads, trade routes with all their near neighbors, if not overly friendly relations. Apart from a few marauding gangs, they can come and go as they please, as long as they respect their tenable position in the natural world. The imperials on the other hand, tend to eliminate this freedom. A prime example is the player, imprisoned and set to be executed for dubious crimes. They work with the Thalmor, a long lived race, for the purpose of extracting wealth and taking it to far off lands. The imperials also do not separate church and state, forbidding the worship of local gods. In contrast to their presence in Cyrodill, in which their culture of dominance and socialization worked to quell the invasion from oblivion, their poorly thought out, (attempted) annexation of Skyrim serves to hamper the plot, and provide only the illusion of choice. In a game where choice is essential to the draw and mechanic of the gameplay, the imperials represent a standardization of being that should not be accepted by the player or the ancestral inhabitants of Skyrim.