Children should go to amusement parks. Roller coasters, bumper cars, sugar rushes – it’s an experience designed for a certain age. By the time you’re a teenager, the cotton candy doesn’t melt like it used to. The gravity doesn’t tug the same way. 

In real life, there’s a time and a place for everything. Indie rock, Bukowski novels, ironic T-Shirts and Harlem Globetrotting always struck me as things best done by young adults. Backpackers of the world need to hop on a plane before they sell their soul to careers, spouses, and movie night with the kids. Even if you’re single, hostels, drugs, and all-nighters are a young man’s game. You don’t want to be the creeper who travels the world in his late thirties. Or in the words of William S. Burroughs:

Have you forgotten something gramps? In order to feel something, you have to be there. You have to be 18. You’re not 18, you are 78. Old fool sold his soul for a strap-on.

You have to be awake.

When you’re young, you want to be in a place where it’s okay to scream. You want to have late nights and good tacos and watch the night bleed out on a fading scrim. Where were you when you weren’t there? Somewhere you shouldn’t be? If you’re young, attractive, and have cash to spend, then more often than not, you were. The rest of us though – old, ugly or poor – we’re still fucking with a strap-on. We’re traveling the world on paper airplanes. 

Yet there’s one thing the virtual world grants us that the real world cannot. Agency. In our little sandbox, we can run over hookers and eat cotton candy and ride dragons to work, and it will all make sense because it doesn’t have to. The rules are ours to make, the roles are ours to play. You can read one book and burn another, grow a beard and shave your legs. There is no great watcher to govern our behavior, no clock to tell us when it’s time for bed or time for work. We’re flying high. We’re free.

This is why people lose their shit when you make an essential NPC. It’s a violation of that fundamental contract, the notion that your game is to be played your way. The problem is, while the choices are yours, these decisons are made half-blind. Essential NPCs are always involved in quests. There’s no reason as a developer to give the player the freedom to shoot themselves in the foot, no matter how green and rancid and athletic it looks at the time.

And while there are essential NPCs, there are none that are permanently so. The tag is removed the moment the applicable quest is finished. They can all be killed eventually, but not until they’ve played their part. Because sometimes, even when the world is your playground – and all of us are nothing more than toys for your amusement – there is a time and a place for things.

You just have to wait until you’re a little older. Then you’ll understand why.

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.