A screenshot from 2014 of one of my Dunmer, Hlerli Aran, in a very modded save.

I was introduced to Skyrim (and The Elder Scrolls in general) somewhat later in my lifetime. I missed the initial hype train for the game, and the air of the gaming community during its release. Oblivion was my first - I was 12 or 13 at the time, and I pirated it to play on my shitty little laptop that ran off duct tape and prayers. I've probably sunk a good couple thousand hours into the game, if for no other reason than it just being an unhealthy dose of escapism for some queer neurodivergent kid dealing with her parents' divorce. At some point I pirated Skyrim and endured playing the entire game on 10-15 FPS. And man, it was unhealthy, but it's home, y'know? Loading in to be embraced by the pines of Falkreath, the warm eternal autumnal colors of the Rift, the cold, desolate snows of Hjaalmarch. And like most queer neurodivergent kids, I developed a similarly unhealthy attachment to the Dunmer, because who wouldn't want to be a cool problematic grey elf. It is from Skyrim where my comfort character, Alfredo, was born. When I received my EVGA 3080TI - the most expensive piece of computer equipment I ever bought (and a throwback to my beloved EVGA 1070 Hybrid) - the first game I played with it? With the super expensive bougie graphics card made for, like, super spanking new games? Skyrim.

I think the thing that got me hooked on the Elder Scrolls was its rich lore. It's cool to go between each of the games and go "oh shit, I remember this from that book!" or "Oh man, that's what happened to Sinderion?". It was simultaneously incredibly dense (there's an entire section of the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages dedicated just to the lore of the game), but also loose and fast in a way where headcanoning about aspects of the series's world was encouraged. Narrators are unreliable, mods are canonical, just have fun with it. For example, some people have their player characters interconnected in some way - their Dovahkiin being the bastard child of their Champion of Cyrodiil and Martin Septim. For others, their Dovahkiin IS their Champion of Cyrodiil. Maybe your Argonian Dovahkiin is literally the child of a dragon and a moral. Contrary to what some on r/TESLore will tell you, you can have a lot of fun theorycrafting and headcanoning.

There is also the whole "you can do anything" angle to Skyrim, even if this phrase ended up being significantly more limited in scope than the grandeur that Todd Howard was boasting. You can climb that mountain, you can go on a wacky wild murder spree in one hold and have a party with the Jarl of another.

Sometime in high school, my mom caught on that I really liked this funny fantasy game and bought me the Anthology box set for my birthday. I still have it to this day, and I was even able to get the Skyrim map framed. Seeing my girlfriend (who is also a huge TES nerd) react to seeing it was priceless. But it serves as a testament to how much this game means to me. It's fun, it was there for me during some really rough times during my life - from my parents' divorce, to my high school years, to the nerve wracking experience of moving out and across the country - and it's a genuinely enjoyable franchise. I tried giving ESO a go - first during it's really terrible launch, then years later when it's gotten through the growing pains of live service games - it's a cool game, but it could never really stick for me gameplay-wise. Maybe I'm not much of an MMO player, though.