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SPOILER INFO
No spoilers. This article discusses some general aspects of follower combat behavior.
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Mikki was killed in legitimate combat and there were no extraordinary circumstances to justify bringing her back to life. Therefore I continued to play, sad as I was. After I had called it an evening (in the real world), I began having second thoughts and eventually decided to resurrect Mikki after all. These are my reasons, in the order of importance.
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1. Joy of playing
This is a personal and deeply subjective reason anyone else neither has to agree with nor can argue against. I was walking around doing things in the real world and occasionally thinking about past events and future plans in my ongoing Skyrim game. I realized I was looking at hundreds of hours of playing with the knowledge that Mikki is dead and there is no one in the game who could replace her. (Vera may be programmed to act exactly like Mikki but she is not as pretty.) It's not like the game would give me no pleasure at all if Mikki wasn't there (she's nowhere near as important to me as Lydia), it's simply that when a game has lasted mere 56 real-world hours, it is far too early to start fantasizing about how things would be different in my next game.
If I were participating in some kind of a Skyrim competition, then naturally I couldn't resurrect an NPC for the reason I like her too much to let her die. But this game is only for me. I am not trying to prove to anyone how good a player I am. So if I, after careful consideration, come to the conclusion that something significantly ruins the game for me, it will be okay to change it.
In games that last 2 or 20 hours, I would never do things like saving and reloading in order to correct even grave misfortunes, because there will soon be another game where I'll be able to do things better. But my current game of Skyrim will be essentially my alternative life for real-world months to come, and I am just not ready to live it, constantly remembering that Mikki is irreparably lost. Maybe I will grow bored with her after another 50 or 100 hours, like I got fed up with Amalee in my last game, but at least she ought to have a chance. She didn't deserve to die so early, because she has given me only a small part of the pleasure she could have given.
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2. The followers' reckless combat behavior in Skyrim is implausible, indeed crazy.
In my Skyrim games, I have often enough been in an ideal spot to shoot the enemies like fish in a barrel and noticed with horror my stupid followers far ahead, charging at the enemy with a battle cry.
Imagine if a Skyrim-like world were real. Someone has pledged to obey all your orders. She will remain standing in one place forever if you tell her to. She will strip naked in a public place if you tell her to. Yet, she won't take any orders from you concerning elementary cooperation and coordination in combat. It obviously doesn't make sense. There may be many mindless brutes among the Skyim men who will insist that any caution whatsoever is unmanly, and rush to hack the enemy to pieces with their battleaxe, but someone like Erik is certain to have enough discipline and common sense to accept orders from his superior, and the same will most certainly apply to any female warrior, apart from possible exceptions like Uthgerd who is seeking death because she knows that a woman who looks like the result of a mating between a bulldog and a locomotive has very little chances of ever finding herself a man.
In other words, the almost complete lack of player control over the followers' combat behavior is a serious flaw in the Skyrim game and utterly unrealistic. When the creators of the game have been too sloppy to make things realistic, the player is entitled to do it on their behalf. The follower mods add some rudiments of follower combat behavior management, and it is very useful but not sufficient. Things being so, I am entitled to interfere with brute force in most grotesque cases.
For instance, I realized just recently that when I am at safe distance and I see my follower quite unnecessarily attacking a hostile being from whom she could just run away, I have the right to summon her with the command moveto player. After all, every halfway sane human being above three years of age understands the command "Come here!" It is undisputable that almost every even remotely mature human being understands the explanation "Look, we can easily shoot them from here, so don't go rushing into close combat." And there cannot be a bodyguard too stupid to understand that by getting unnecessarily killed they are failing in their duty to protect their master.
Neither Lydia nor Mikki cannot be killed with one or two blows. I am absolutely sure that they got killed in that battle because they failed to realize that they are being injured too badly and have to run away from the enemy who is stronger all right, but also slower (that is true for both giants and mammoths) and attack again after having gained safe distance. That kind of cunning may be unreasonably complicated for the Bethesda programmers to implement, but considering how the algorithm is routinely making followers endanger themselves with implausible stupidity (even with their combat strategy set to "archer"), I think it's not dishonest for me to compensate by resurrecting them in those cases.
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3. In vanilla Skyrim, followers are protected anyway.
Yes, I have disabled all immortality in my current game, with the reservation that should I discover that some important line of events can't progress because a questgiver is dead, I have the right to resurrect him. I also made Lydia essential after her recent death. But the point here is: if the game developers themselves have envisioned the game to be played with followers who can't be killed by enemies, then my resurrecting them, even with immortality disabled in general, isn't something extraordinary. And it's certainly not as cheaty as fast travel which many players seem to consider perfectly normal.
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4. If I can resurrect even myself after getting killed (in fact, the game does it automatically), why couldn't I resurrect a follower?
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So these are the reasons why I considered it appropriate to make an exception from the rule "dead is dead" and bring Mikki back to life.
