Sojourning Skyrim Again, or a Confession

Skyrim is nearly two years old, and the fun returns on the game have diminished little. After my Hard Drive Crisis of '13, I lost some of my save games--specifically my original character--but thanks to the Steam Cloud service, I retained the rest, specifically a female dark elf named Elaris. Burning stuff her thing. Burning it with * M A G I C *

I put about six hours into her game long before I got a new hard drive. By that point, I had returned to my original character, the defaultly named Prisoner whose Redguard background in one-handed weapons fueled his bloodlust. I had started Skyrim's expansion Dawnguard and joined a band of zealous vampire slayers to, uh, quite literally guard the dawn. My interests shifted back to The Witcher 2, so it was a long while before I traversed the cold mountain and Skyrim, home to Nords and giants alike.

I reinstalled Skyrim last week and saw only Elaris--no Prisoner--remained. I did not click on her save, instead I hopped into a new game. the long familiar intro of my character wheeled up to a small village in a prison wagon was still the same chore to sit through, but finally I was called up for execution, which meant I was called up for character creation. It's a curious thing that one's character should be birthed only a moment before they rest their neck on a chopping block. Leave it to those clever bastards at Bethesda.

Skyrim is a game of sandboxy freedom, and character creation is an extension of that. Want to be human? You've got four choices. Elf? Choose from a few different pointy-eared dudes. Cat-man? Sure. Lizard-lady? Fine. Dwarf? Go screw yourself.

Skyrim is part of a long series of games with an established lore that while they threw fifty different variations of fantasy tropes en masse towards your face, they wrote out the single best demi-human race the genre has even known: dwarves. Sure, dwarves are referred to and you can explore their steampunk ruins. But they're not Tolkien's brand of bearded badass. Oh no, they're just an extinct society of elves. There's a reason why The Hobbit focuses on a band of dwarves and not elves. Because elves suck.

And I don't mean this from an "elves are gay" position, because that's just an insult to the LGBT community. When it comes down to it, I cannot separate the word "elf" from its Christmas connotations. I've been immersed in fantasy long enough that I know full well that Tolkien was not referring to Santa's Little Helpers. I don't have this same issue with dwarves and Snow White because they mostly perform the same function. When they belt out "Hi-ho, it's off to work we go," you better believe they got some mining to do for gems and ore and stuff. Sure, we don't see them tear it up with ale and battle axes, but that's because Disney's a family company and they can't show that Sleepy's just in a perpetual drunken stupor.

So what do I go with in Skyrim? Khajiit, or anthropomorphic gypsy cat. Why? Because they're naturally stealthy, got claws they can use as weapons, and I DON'T LIKE ELVES