Sheogorath

For a guy who's the physical manifestation of madness, he's pretty chill. Why is this, apart from occasional incidents in the lore, most of his madness is just pranks and mild randomness. If you into a mental asylum irl, you'll be faced with all kinds of crazy people like people with multiple personalities, people who scream to no one, and people who rub shit on the walls. Why is sheogorath, the manifestation of mental illness, so mild-mannered?

Because being the Daedra of something does not mean you ARE that something.

Sheogorath enjoys madness. just like Hircine likes hunting.

Because he makes people mad it's enjoying to him.

From experience, most crazies, irl, aren't stark raving mad unless some catylist pushes them over the edge. many fight it for years or even decades before it becomes too much.

the other thing to consider for him is that he was formerly the daedric prince of order. there might be a holdover compensating as well.

finally, they never should have done the shivering isles for oblivion when they did. they would have been much better off with some of the concepts that have dropped between now and then. Shivering isles and as such sheogorath wasn't crazy enough because gaming hadn't gone far enough yet.

but, i offer a theory as to why it was so grounded. Sheogorath's madness rides a cyclical nature, during the events of the game and the time period surrounding it, the land became less crazy (enough that bethesda could allow it to be represented that way) because sheogorath himself was less crazy and the reason why it didn't change immediately after the storyline is because it took time for the new sheogorath (the PC) to become crazy enough to truly be sheogorath.

So what concepts did they drop from him??

Writers have a boner for trickster gods
this is mostly a good thing

Sheogorath isn't quite "madness," he's more like a manifestation of the random, of change, while Jygga is a manifestation of logic and stasis. "Both" of them are pretty unusually pure in how Anuic/Padomaic their natures are.

Nah he's more like a manifestation of mental madness, not eldritch one. His plane looks mundane, because that's what humane madness is. It's extremely superficial with scars that run deep. It's why his reality is divided between two extreme, one that looks like a depressing fucking swamp, while the other looks like a sunny forest made for frolicking.

Deadra are not the manifestation of their areas, this is simply them pushing their personality and beliefs trough godly powers.

Big-red-totally-not-demon deadra who does destruction might go on rampages and annihilations but he isn't destruction itself, he just enjoys it.

>From experience, most crazies, irl, aren't stark raving mad unless some catylist pushes them over the edge. many fight it for years or even decades before it becomes too much.

This.

Not so much psychological madness as complete unhinged random psychotic babble. Sheogorath's randomness usually manifests itself as heavy psychosis, since the conclusions and leaps of logics his mad victims/worshippers make are so completely random and illogical, but there's no connection between Sheo and other psychological issues like depression, anxiety, addiction, identity issues, anger management problems etc., at least not as far as I know. Instead, he gives humans a glimpse into the random chaos and disorder of Sithis, or maybe the Padomaic. And in TES, there is nothing "eldritch", as everything above the physical realm is just different gradients of spiritual purity of the two sides, which the physical realm is also really a subgradient of.

Because it's hard to make a fun game about the god of clinical depression.

Except, if I remember correctly. In The Shivering Isles. He is actually the Daedra god of order who has been cursed by the other gods to be Mad.

Dropping a moon on Vvardenfel was a pretty rude thing to do. That part wasn't mild mannered.

Well, we can go down the list of what makes a psychopath. In all reality psychopaths aren't all cult-like or bat-shit insane, there are more subtle clues:

>Glibness or superficial charm
>Grandiose sense of self-worth
>Pathological lying
>Cunning/manipulative
>Lack of remorse or guilt
>shallow effect(genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
>callousness/lack of empathy
>Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

I think our daedra fit the examples given to the extremes and therefore considered pretty fucking mad.

Sheo is confirmed to be patron of all kind of madness. SI often shows that this may or may not be visible one. There are many kinds of madness.

That is true, but no longer the case after you complete his quests. This is obliquely confirmed in Skyrim by Sheogorath himself.

Not only that, he is confirmed to be Champion of Cyrodil by few details and probably only daedra with human look at the world, albeit it seems to be slowly fading into standard Sheo. Still, he seems much more... Human.

This guy gets it. TES lore is generally fucked and twisted, but that part is pretty simple - unlike in Warhammer, gods/daedra) do not necessarily embody the thing they are a patron of

This

No, the gods and their planes in TES are literal personifications of their spheres, and their personalities are more or less bound to mortal expectations.
The Khajiit, for instance, view Sheogorath as a different creature, a cat god of Skooma.
I guess a way you could look at it is that the Daedra in particular are more like rulers of the concepts their presiding over. But the gods themselves began as these concepts.

Most of the time he seems pretty manic and thinks and acts in non-sequitor manner.

Honestly, madness is very loosly defined concept.