Editing Catfolk (section)

==The Elder Scrolls==
[[File:Khajiit Family.jpg|200px|thumb|right|A family of Khajiit. Given how these things work it is very possible that the housecat the catgirl is holding is the father of the tiger in the back. TES is weird like that.]]
{{topquote|If you have coin, Khajiit has wares.|Any Khajiit merchant proving that money overlaps the barriers of race and language.}}

Yeah, [[The Elder Scrolls]] is technically /v/ rather than /tg/, but it's popular enough on /tg/ to get its own article, so it counts for here.

In the world of Nirn, the indigenous catfolk are a people called the Khajiit. Like the [[lizardfolk|Argonians]], khajiit predate the arrival of elves in Tamriel, the continent where all the games take place. This gives them some unique cultural aspects, most notably in that whilst their pantheon has some clear similarities to the mainstream religion of Tamriel, they believe their gods to take the form of mighty dragon-cats. They are a tribal people, with related tribes forming greater groups called clans, and matriarchal, in that a (typically hereditary) female khajiit called a Clan-Mother, who has authority over her clan and with greater government matters being settled by meetings of Clan-Mothers.

Of course, because Tamriel is full of racist pricks, the khajiit have traditionally suffered from prejudice and oppression, even being kept as slaves in some provinces. Ironically, they share a strong, mutual dislike for the argonians, despite both being in the same boat.

One thing that makes khajiit unique is how mutable they are: all khajiit start life as a non-morphic kitten, and grow up into a unique form based on the states of Nirn's two moons - the large moon, Masser, and the small moon, Secunda - during that kitten's birth. This can result in anything from the standard humanoid cat, with different sizes and appearances earning different names, to creatures that resemble housecats with human sapience, to sentient tigers and dire tigers. In fact, there have been ''seventeen'' named variants of khajiit, all based on the different moon statuses, although they are readily grouped into four categories based on Masser's state: Large Quadruped khajiit are born when it's Full, Large Biped khajiit are born when it's Waxing, Small Biped khajiit are born when it's New, and Small Quadruped khajiit are born when it's Waning.

For obvious reasons, the moons are an important part of khajiit culture and religion. Indeed, their one supreme spiritual authority is a being called the Mane; a living god-king born on the incredibly rare convergence of Masser and Secunda, which in the khajiit tradition forms a third moon. He's known as the Mane because for reasons of tradition, all khajiit shave their manes (head-fur) to represent the dawning days of their race, when only the Mane was allowed to wear a full mane. In fact, he's traditionally supposed to weave the shorn-off manes of all his tribe into his own hair, which leads to modern Manes being gigantic shaggy balls of fluff that can't even walk under the weight of all that hair.

Another way the importance of the moons to khajiit is shown is in their holy mana, a substance they call "moon-sugar" due to believing it originated as crystalized moonlight before being carried in by the tides to the region where the sugarcanes they produce it from grows. Khajiit do have a massive sweet tooth, but they also consider moon-sugar to be sacred, and consuming it is very important to their religion. Unfortunately, this has only made their reputation with other races worse; see, moon-sugar functions like a drug when consumed by any creature other than a khajiit, who have racially immunized themselves by ingesting it in just about every sweet food they make (which is just about everything). On its own, moon-sugar is a fairly mild drug, but the problem is, if you mix moon-sugar with nightshade, you can create a super-nasty opium-like narcotic called "skooma", which is irreversibly addictive and tends to really fuck you up.

One rather notorious book in Daggerfall mentions that, like real cats, the males have barbed penises.