Dagmar
Defender of the Bunnies of Skyrim
The fact that I've only played either quest line once purely to experience the game content and lore and that I've been pretty explicit about the fact that I find them both uninspiring and disappointing and declined to ever do them again does count.
My arguments are about what the game content, i.e. what the lore supports and refutes. The fact of the matter is that in this thread advocates for the Stormcloaks make a lot more false assertions about the lore and game content and ignore a lot more than the advocates for the Imperial Legion and the Stormcloak advocates that are more lore and game content knowledgeable don't tend to stick around in this thread for whatever reason.
There's a notable predisposition for many of the Stormcloak advocates to put Ulfric on a pedestal that's simply too high for him to reach. He clearly isn't a white knight/white hat cowboy. He's grey and he's meant to be grey. It's what makes him interesting and it's rather disappointing that so many Stormcloak advocates don't want to acknowledge this and in doing so repeatedly take premises that have little to no merit such as that the Stormcloaks represent all Nords even though it's clearly a civil war, or that the Markarth Incident never happened, or that the segregation policy for the Dunmer in Windhelm doesn't exist or isn't racist or that Ulfric has no role in its enforcement, or that Ulfric is motivated by purely altruistic motives, or that losing Skyrim doesn't impact on the Empire's ability to oppose the Aldmeri Dominion.
There's an opposing absurdity proposed by some Imperial Legion advocates that Ulfric and the Stormcloaks are akin to Nazis but it's not stated with the same frequency as the fallacies by several Stormcloak advocates. It's also so transparently stupid and Godwin-like that I generally don't even feel compelled to address it but I have done so every now and then.
The only other claims that I tend to pick apart from Imperial Legion advocates are the notion that the Empire is in a position to rescind the White-Gold Concordat any time soon, that Skyrim is under threat of invasion from the Aldmeri Dominion if the Stormcloaks are victorious (rather easily refuted by common sense and knowledge of the geography of Tamriel) or pretty much any assertion about the status of the Aldmeri Dominion because the game and lore is extremely opaque about it.
When it comes to making assertions about the lore, Imperial Legion advocates are generally more conservative because they don't generally feel compelled to place the Empire on a pedestal. The bulk of the argument comes from ideology, i.e. which is the greater good and worse evil and that generally doesn't tend to be extremely lore dependent and is a philosophical debate. IMO it's the morally ambiguous debate intended by Bethesda as as opposed to many of the absurd debates that some of the Stormcloak advocates have engaged in throughout this thread.
But no matter how much you read on Ulfric's actions, no one can fully understand what goes on inside his head. During the great war, his torture and etc changed him, he may still be an imperial at heart but just can't bring himself to go back because of that deceit (plus he would be executed). The White Gold Concordat happens, and Talos is "banned" blah blah blah. Many people were bitter because of that, but they still had their little shrines to Talos. Now Ulfric is hired by Igmond to take back the Reach, and at this point he is little more than a time bomb. He believes he is fighting for the good of the people, to reinstate Talos as a divine and win back the Reach. Those thoughts alone probably pushes him overboard. After that, he feels even more betrayed (I'm not sure exactly what happens) because Talos is not "legalized" and he believes the men whom he lost died under his command, and were effectively stabbed in the back by their own empire. Not to mention his encounter with the Dominion. He was most likely too shame faced to go back to them, and at this point his ambition for power begins to kick in. Like I said, lots of squandered potential... (note I just thought this up and thought it could portray Ulfric in his best light). Feedback appreciated!
