Originally, I wanted to do a census of all the NPCs added by the mod, but that was too much work. So I whittled it down to data on the followers alone.

The pie chart is more or less what you would expect when factoring in the location of the game. Still, minorities collectively make up more than two-thirds of the mod’s followers, which is fine given diversity is lore friendly on such a micro scale. The chart shows I definitely need to add more Elven followers – Raynes and Rumarin are the only ones of their race, and both are male.

Surprisingly, Orcs make up the second largest contingent, although that includes Duraz. The Undead, at a healthy 7%, may also have a say in the coming election.

This chart lists the followers by class. In the interest of space, the Thief class bundles together both thieves and assassins, which interestingly enough are split along gender lines, with males (Raynes, Vawkes) being the killers and females (Morndas, Jade) being the cutpurses.

The most common classes are Mage and Warrior, but this chart doesn’t break it down by type. Meaning, given there are five schools of magic and heavy/light weapons and armor, it makes sense these two would have greater representation.

The one part that might be a bit skewed is the number of male mages, but males in general outnumber women by 2 to 1. This is because female voice actors are harder to find, and the issue of whether women exist on the internet is still up for debate.

I don’t know the exact date that the word nerd stopped being an insult. There’s no landmark court case like Plessy v. Ferguson that tells us when it was reclaimed from the jocks. It was something that just happened over time. When science and technology weaved its way into the universal mindscape, and math jokes and comic books became as ubiquitous as pop music, the word nerd came along for the ride.

The word otaku probably underwent a similar arc. The first time I heard the term, it was being explained to me by a Japanese college student, and it was definitely not in a flattering sense. Now words like otaku, NEET, and hikkikomori are almost romanticized by oddball dramas and nerdcore hip-hop. The otaku is not just a protagonist, but an iconoclast, a hero. He has no need for this three-dimensional prison when the world in his hard drive is infinite. He has renounced the very sun itself, that fiery ball of vitamin D, for what amounts to a bamboo dart of warmth. Yet as unnatural as it may seem, every morning it’s there to greet him, with a chirping of the soundcard and a custom wallpaper on a high resolution screen.

He even has a theme song:

If we’re playing semantics though, true believers will tell you that none of this stuff is nerdy. They will tell you that when we talk of games and #trends and anime, we are squarely in the realm of the geek. The nerd, he busies himself in a fortress of data, and has no concern for the calculus of culture. The geek studies gadgets, the nerd studies neuroscience. The geek plays chiptune, the nerd plays cello. The geek dabbles in irony, the nerd is an intellectual.

Thus when it comes to nerds in Skyrim, I don’t think of mages. Mages wield cool staffs and conjure zombies and shoot fireballs out of their hands. Mages are geeks. Alchemists, now those are some fucking nerds.

For the most part, I found the vanilla alchemists to be too at ease with themselves, but this is likely because they’re shopkeepers, and the provenance of social awkwardness has always been isolation. Not in the geek/otaku sense, where a computer connects you to thousands of other humans every day, but in the O.G. Revenge of the Nerds cut-off-from-humanity-so-I-can-be-alone-with-my-plants sperglord sense of the word. 

Kianna, similarly, is a research alchemist. Her contact with the outside world is minimal, and it shows in her speech. In fact, she’s played brilliantly by Kelly Parrish, whose nasal, staccato rhythm is perfectly off beat. Kianna’s not entirely self-aware, meaning her charm isn’t intended, but rather a product of her lack of nuance (and repetition of alchemy jokes she herself considers awful).

Nevertheless, given her intelligence and location – a laboratory as opposed to a say, a party full of brutes or nobles – when she does speak to the player, she’s perfectly comfortable. In her realm, all that matters is the chemistry in the beaker, not the chemistry of the room. When she speaks to the player, she does so from a position of strength.

In the land of jocks that is Skyrim, that’s all a nerd could ever ask for.

Some characters in the mod are symmetrical. Gorr, for instance, is for the most part a classic brute. He doesn’t think, he acts. His arms look like two anacondas swallowed a rack of bowling balls. His stomach is built like a cello, with its heavy, earthen laugh. The warhammer on his back isn’t designed to make peace, just leave you in pieces. Don’t fuck with Gorr, is what I’m saying.

Still, I can’t help but add a few softer touches. He’s sensitive to the plight of the mudcrab, and hypersensitive about his stew. The larger projection – the size, the strength, the personality – attempt to characterize Gorr, while the smaller strokes – the warmth, the sensitivity – are there to humanize him.

I’m a sucker for that sort of juxtaposition, characters who embody all the things we expect and yet still find ways to surprise us. It reminds me of Spencer Murphy’s photo of Katie Walsh. In spite of the mud-stained uniform and battle-worn stare there’s something bright about this photo, something inscrutably feminine. Which is surprising given we aren’t shown any cleavage.

So it’s not exactly strange to me that one of my favorite lines in the mod has nothing to do with NPCs of the interesting variety. It’s about a vanilla Breton whom I first mistook for the leader of a swarthy group of pirates, the de facto Captain of the Red Wave. She even had a cool fucking name. Her name was Sabine Nytte.

She was shorter by half, but stood taller than all. She was a giant.

For me, Sabine as a character mirrors the compromise open world games have to make. Vanilla NPCs are an outline, just detailed enough to provide an illusion of depth. Engaging them is like reading a book where half the lines are redacted. It’s not that players don’t have the imagination to fill in the blanks, it’s that they shouldn’t have to. So, to help rectify this, what mod NPCs like Salty-Throat do is add depth in a way that is true to the vanilla character. By telling Sabine’s story and that of the Red Wave, he makes them all a little more interesting.

That isn’t an indictment of Bethesda. Ironically, their resources are far more limited in this respect than a mod author’s, for one simple reason – they can’t use volunteers. Like Sabine and Gorr and dirty Katie Walsh, it makes for an intriguing juxtaposition. If you compare the budget of Interesting NPCs to that of a DLC, it isn’t shorter than just half. It’s exponentially smaller. Yet it’s because the actors and composers have been generous enough to donate their time that the end result is what it is.

All of this I suppose is just another excuse to thank the people involved in this project. Their resumes may be small and their credits may lack stature – but when you look at what they’ve accomplished – it’s hard to say they’re anything but Giants.