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SPOILER INFO
Major spoiler of my game report "Always Lost, Always Hopeful". Mild spoiler of the Skyrim game.
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read "Always Lost, Always Hopeful"
Acknowledgements
Origins
Statistics
Structure
Differences from the official game
Takebacks
Game flaws
Language and names
End
Gender
The role vs. the real me
Plotting and spontaneity
Some other things
Final words
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, special thanks for song lyrics to:
Steve Harris, Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Blackie Lawless of WASP
Betty Thatcher (Renaissance)
Lou Gramm and Bruce Turgon of Shadow King
Neil Peart of Rush
Herman Rarebell of Scorpions
Manny Charlton, Dan McCafferty, Pete Agnew and Darrell Sweet of Nazareth
Vincent Crane, Nick Graham and Carl Palmer of Atomic Rooster
Phil Collins of Genesis
Biff Byford, Graham Oliver, Paul Quinn, Steve Dawson and Pete Gill of Saxon
Paul McCartney
Wolf Hoffmann, Stefan Kaufmann, Udo Dirkschneider and Peter Baltes of Accept
Bernie Marsden and Robert Hawthorn of Alaska
Chris DeGarmo of Queensrÿche.
[To avoid a possible misunderstanding: all my use of song lyrics is well within the legally permitted fair use. I mean, when referring to the clocktime 23:58, everyone is obviously allowed to use the words "two minutes to midnight" without asking Mssrs. Dickinson and Smith's permission. Very few people would have any idea that the chapter title "Expect No Mercy" has been inspired by Nazareth. Iron Maiden fans will notice that the headings of chapters 211 and 212 are inspired by an Iron Maiden song, everybody else don't need to care. And so on. The credits are here merely because I wanted to say how thankful I am to those distinguished artists, because the positive energy in their music has inspired me throughout my life like nothing else in the world has.]
Immense gratitude to:
Bethesda Game Studios for the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Sebastian Herbord for Mod Organizer
Sharlikran for TES5Edit
Blogger, the blogging platform
Wholehearted appreciation to mod authors:
Caliente for Caliente's Beautiful Bodies Edition -CBBE-
VadersApp for Realistic Body System remade
MongoMonk for EBD - EveryBodys Different Redone
Ashal for Skyrim SexLab - Sex Animation Framework
missjennabee for Expanded Towns and Cities
BeyondSkyrimDC for Beyond Skyrim - Bruma
AlexanderJVelicky for Falskaar
yourenotsupposedtobeinhere for Summerset Isle
Scarla for Aurora Village
SIDWULF for Skyrim Realistic Archery - Bows - Arrows - Crossbows - Bolts
Rob Vogel for Bard Instrumentals Only - Sing Upon Request
expired6978 for Extensible Follower Framework
sushisquid for True Yield
and a large number of authors of other mods and tools, particularly the many who have made admirable efforts to make Skyrim NPCs more beautiful,
as well as the people who kindly advise less experienced players on forums, especially Gopher for his many amazing instructional videos.
Last but not least, I am extremely grateful to Andreia and Angela for encouragement and useful advice that has really helped me make the novel better.
ORIGINS
"Always Lost, Always Hopeful" has been a very unusual project for me in several respects:
1. It's very rarely that I've written a female protagonist;
2. It's a long time since I last wrote in 1st person;
3. I don't think I have ever written in the present tense.
Somehow it worked out extremely well. I never doubted my hunch to dive in headfirst like this, breaking all the rules and habits, and my intuition was proved right. As far as I am concerned, "Always Lost, Always Hopeful" is a sweeping success.
I think one major source of inspiration, writing-style-wise, is worth mentioning. It's Carlo Manzoni whose series "La suspense del riso" is one of the most brilliant works of fiction I've ever read in my life. Before and during the writing of "Always Lost, Always Hopeful", I kept re-reading those novels at a leisurely pace. Mr. Manzoni's irony and his protagonist's disrespect for authority might have influenced the style of this game report to some extent (not that it contradicts my own personality) and possibly encouraged my choice of the first-person POV and the present tense.
It was already after I had completed ALAH that I happened to see the Japanese animation series "Kino no tabi", more specifically the first episode of the second (2007) season. It was really eerie how Kino's monologue in the very beginning resonated with how I felt as Laura.
Already during my previous game, I wrote a game report. That's the one I've published here under the title "Deflorator's game". Due to certain reasons, I stopped halfway and continued to just play. Its style was not consistent – the player character's POV ("I traveled to Morthal") alternated with the player's POV ("the quest wouldn't move on and I had to search the Internet for a remedy"). ALAH has been written strictly from the player character's point of view from beginning to end (me the player turning up only as the protagonist's higher self, an ethereal being who sends her prophetic visions and gets her out of trouble sometimes) without any mention that it's a computer game playthrough. (Although, of course, the reader can see from the screenshots that it's a game.)
At first, I had the idea that only other Skyrim players would ever read this game report, which is why I tried to represent game events as truthfully as possible, so that the reader reading, say, how Laura entered Falskaar, would get a truthful idea about what would expect him in Falskaar. Thereby I was making parts of the game report quasi-reviews of mods. For that purpose, I also adhered to the visions-rumors convention defined in my article Naming and terminology conventions. Eventually I realized "Always Lost, Always Hopeful" could well be read by people who don't know anything about Skyrim, and so I started taking things a little more loosely.
An example: for finding my way around in that navigational horror Granite Hall, I physically used the map I had drawn during my previous games. In this game report, I first made the protagonist say her higher self had given her a map. Later I realized it would make a lot more sense for a woman to simply ask people on the street where this or that was. And so I sacrificed some truthfulness for the sake of plausibility and changed that part in Chapter 14.
In Deflorator's game report, I failed to realize the importance of pictures. I had the idea that a game report was about text, that my readers would want information and a story. So the first chapters of "Deflorator's Game" were almost text-only, with just one picture at the end, illustrating one of the events talked about in that chapter. Then I gave in to the urge to have two pictures per chapter because it was such a pity to discard so many beautiful screenshots. Eventually it dawned to me that there was no reason why I shouldn't have several pictures per chapter.
"Always Lost, Always Hopeful" is, as you can see, very picture-heavy. The pictures occupy roughly half of the space. I hope I didn't overdo it. But then again, the modded Skyrim gameworld is so beautiful. Maybe some readers don't even care about the text and just enjoy looking at the pictures.
STATISTICS
I started this game on 21.06.2019 and decided to finish playing on 16.08.2021. The game lasted 521 real-world hours which makes 40 minutes per day of playing during 2 years and almost 2 months. (In reality somewhat more, because I presume technical delays such as waiting for the next scene to load are not included in the official time count.) This is about the same as my previous game as a male Nord named Deflorator (555 hours during 2 years and 1 month, 44 min/day), although significantly less in Skyrim time (9 months now vs. 12 months then).
I posted the first chapter on 21.06.2019, the text of the epilogue on 17.08.2021 and the absolutely vital pictures for the epilogue on 17.09.2021. On 24.11.2021, I added some more pictures to the epilogue. From that moment, "Always Lost, Always Hopeful" can be considered a complete story, meaning it's a readable illustrated text that has a definite ending. Yet, it's not finished, meaning that I will continue to correct mistakes and improve wording here and there, as well as add little pieces of dialogue and such. I might also add extra pages such as galleries of beautiful pictures that didn't make it to the game report but are still worth showing. That said, I don't intend to make any major changes to the game report itself.
STRUCTURE
"Always Lost, Always Hopeful" is a game report. It's not a novel in the classical sense, because it's unplanned. I started without anything like an outline. I wrote it as I played, which means that while I was writing, say, Chapter 20, I had no idea what would happen in Chapter 30 (except that, having played two long games before, I knew in general what the game would be about and what the protagonist was supposed to achieve).
Nevertheless, "Always Lost, Always Hopeful" has elements of plot and structure in the sense that when I felt some event needed to be explained better to the reader, I would add bits of text into earlier chapters to make the event more plausible.
By and large, there are five lines of events in ALAH:
1. The protagonist's amnesia
This is entirely outside the game. Physically in the game, the events just start at a certain moment in a certain place, and the game is not concerned with what has happened before or what the protagonist's background is. In a written story, that won't do, though, because the reader will surely want to know things like where the protagonist came from and how she ended up in that situation. So I couldn't leave those questions hanging in the air. I solved the problem at first by making the protagonist not remember anything. That's pretty much the only way to handle a situation where your player character really doesn't know anyone in the game world and is supposed to start finding things out from the scratch.
Obviously, I the real person knew a lot about the game already, but I tried to make it look like the protagonist didn't know, and where it was unavoidable, I made her have prophetic dreams or hear rumors and such. It is a bit of deus ex machina at times, but I couldn't remove knowledge that was in my brain.
As concerns Laura's past, her family, full name and such, I had absolutely no idea in the beginning. In that sense, her "amnesia" is genuine. This means, I didn't plan when she would remember what, for the simple reason I hadn't the faintest idea myself. It was at moments during playing when I suddenly got ideas like "how about Laura has an elder brother and a younger sister?" When I thought it was a good idea, I found a proper place in the story where to say it, usually in the chapter I was currently writing, sometimes somewhere earlier.
Or, at a certain point, I figured that now Laura's memory was advanced far enough for her to start remembering names. Whose name would be suitable for her to remember first? Maybe her mother's? And then I did some research into Nord names in Skyrim and made up a suitable one and found a suitable place in the text of the game report where Laura could remember it. And so on.
2. Ending the war in Skyrim
Achieving the peace in the so-called Skyrim civil war is considered a minor task in the game. In fact, you have the choice of joining one of the warring parties and winning the war for them, or you can remain neutral, in which case you can (and have to) negotiate a truce at a certain point. However, the participants make it very clear that it's merely a temporary cease-fire agreed upon only because the dragons (see point 3 below) are perceived as a bigger threat, and as soon as the dragons have been destroyed, the war will go on.
My protagonist being a woman, I let her feel deep compassion with the people and strive to achieve real peace, which she (as well as I) considered a lot more important than some silly dragons. Physically in the game, I couldn't change the fakeness of the peace. Most notably, roadside skirmishes between the Imperial and Stormcloak soldiers continued in spite of the truce. In the game report, however, I didn't mention them and thus made it look like the war was truly over.
3. Killing the dragon Alduin
This is the main objective of the Skyrim game. The war is merely a setting. Me, being far more interested in dealing with people than with dragons and demons, made the killing of Alduin a minor objective in the game report. In fact, since I had disabled essentialness in my game tweaks (meaning, no creature was immortal in my game), Laura was able to kill Alduin much earlier than the game with the default settings would have allowed her to. Thus the achievement was much less dramatic than the developers of the game had meant it to be. And of course I continued to play after Alduin was killed, quitting the game only when I felt like it, at which point I made up an excuse for the protagonist to leave Skyrim, in order to make it plausible to end the game report at that particular moment.
4. Relationships
My protagonist traveling back and forth across Skyrim and some adjacent regions, it made sense that she would develope a number of friendships and even intimate relationships, and so would her helpers who were traveling with her. Sex is actually made possible physically in the game, thanks to mods, but social interactions are outside of the game, as well as, evidently, beyond the mod authors. The game doesn't support anything beyond extremely basic dialogue, and in spite of thorough searching, I wasn't able to find any proper social interactions mods before I started this game. (Mantella appeared long after this thing was completed.)
The physical facts as to when the protagonist would meet one or another person she liked were determined by the quasi-randomness of the game events. Whether or not she would have sex with them was entirely my decision. I made up all the conversational and emotional stuff to develop their relationships as plausibly as possible.
Unsurprisingly, I found that by dropping in little pieces of conversation and relationship here and there (such as at the end of chapter 74), I could make the story a lot livelier.
5. Side quests
The Skyrim game includes a large number of other quests, shorter or longer, that bear no connection to the main quest and are just meant to give the player the feeling that he is not pressed into following a plotline but is free to explore the game world and do what he pleases. If "Always Lost, Always Hopeful" were a real novel, those minor undertakings unessential to the main plot ought to be omitted, because the ruling dogmas of creative writing prescribe that every detail has to somehow move the plot forward. However, since ALAH is a game report, I left the side quests, because the point is to describe a certain period of the protagonist's life like one would do in a travel report.
DIFFERENCES FROM THE OFFICIAL GAME
Whereas I had been very critical of sloppy programming in Deflorator's game report, I adopted a completely different approach in ALAH. As much as I could, I explained game glitches away and rationalized illogical features, trying to make things make sense to the reader.
Among other things, I made up a hypothesis to explain what the Psijic Order's goals were, which I haven't seen anyone else do anywhere. I also gave a plausible explanation to the Nords' hatred towards Dark Elves (chapter 199). I mean, non-explanations like "they just hate them because they are stupid and don't realize hating is wrong," are manifestly idiotic.
Something I couldn't accept and rationalize, though, was the Falmers' blindness. Its reasons are explained in the official Skyrim lore, but the pointless cruelty of the Dwemers was really far-fetched, and more importantly, I found it profoundly disgusting. Apart from which, the common belief that Falmers are blind is refuted in the Skyrim game by the existence of Falmer archers. An archer who is able to hit his targets can't be blind. That ends the dispute. Period.
I'm not the only one who has realized that. After Laura's game, I saw a mod that eliminates Falmer archers. But I didn't have (and wouldn't have had) that in Laura's game. Instead, I took the liberty of making Laura find out the Falmers' blindness was a myth, with Lydia offering an explanation to the persistent rumor – there's a certain category of people who enjoy repulsing other people. Which, by the way, I believe to be precisely the reason in this case.
One flaw of the Skyrim game is that one gets very rich rather quickly. That is mainly because user-created potions are priced absurdly high. With many ingredients being abundant, it's hardly an exaggeration to say that Skyrim alchemy is like a licence to print your own money.
Having noticed that flaw in my previous games, I wanted to make it more realistic in this game. For that purpose, I established the rule that Laura may not sell potions. Whatever potions she didn't need, she gave away to one or another alchemist for free.
The reverse side of the coin is that the player is painfully short of cash in the early stage of the game. It didn't feel right (nor safe) to have Laura steal things from people's homes. Instead, I created a rule that when a man becomes her boyfriend, he will give her some gifts after each of their next sexual encounters as long as their relationship lasts.
Whereas the potion-selling ban did reduce income noticeably, the boyfriends didn't turn out a significant source of income, because the real poverty stage passed relatively quickly anyway. Dungeon-looting and such proved much more profitable than spreading one's legs. For the same reason, Laura never needed to make use of the option to work as a prostitute which I had created.
All in all, the realism of the player character's wealth was much better than in my previous game. Even though Laura became a multimillionaire by the end, she needed, for example, to save money for some time before she could afford a house in Solitud. (I had made houses much more expensive.)
Most of my deviations were trifling. For example, a certain mod-created corpse was in several pieces physically in the game, but I found it too silly, so I said in ALAH that it was in one piece. Or, the spells to get to Summerset and back to Skyrim actually work from anywhere, but I found it too cheaty, so I pretended they only worked in Winterhold and Shimmerene, respectively (and kept strictly to it in the game). And those who have played the game know, obviously, that Elenwen was not "smart enough to keep her mouth shut" (chapter 178) during peace negotiations.
TAKEBACKS
It is obviously very easy to reload a recent save when something goes wrong in the game, as well as (as I hardly need to tell you) very dishonest. There are a few mod authors who seem to consider it normal that you try a difficult task, fail, reload, try again, and so on. There is no doubt in my mind – that is absolutely unacceptable in a game like Skyrim. The adventure would no longer feel real. Takebacks are only justified, indeed inevitable, when your player character gets killed, simply because it can't be reasonably expected that you go through tens of hours of the same conversations and tasks again.
Takebacks can be subjectively justified when a loss is psychologically devastating to the extent that the game would cease to give you pleasure. It makes no sense to play maybe hundreds of hours waiting it to be over so you could start the next game. In my previous game, for example, I had decided I would not put up with the death of Lydia, and it really happened that I had to resurrect her. However, in that same game I also lost Jenassa (in Fort Amol; that's why Laura has this irrational fear of that location even before she ever sets foot in it), and it was very disappointing, but I didn't resurrect her, because like her as I may have, I was not so fond of her that the game would have ceased to be enjoyable without her.
Before starting Laura's game, I had also decided I would not let Lydia die, but it never happened, maybe because this time I thought of doubling every follower's max level with TES5Edit. (It's ludicrous how the vanilla game caps your followers' development so that from a certain point on they could just as well not be there.) The deaths of Kharjo and Rayya hurt a lot, but I decided I had to put up with it, otherwise the game would have started to feel too cheaty. But the death of Jordis at the doorstep of the triumphant end (and in such an absurd manner as explained below in the section "End") was too much, so I reloaded an earlier save and in fact ended the entire game soon.
The quasi-takebacks in two appalling situations – 1) when Laura was caught by slave traders and lost all her inventory and 2) when I was uncautious in the Secret Enclave and lost Rayya the first time – were not deliberate. I honestly forgot to save and had to continue from an earlier save when the game crashed. However, I still felt it would be fair to record those episodes somehow, so I made them nightmares Laura had.
(By the way, Laura's first encounter with the slaver near Mixwater Mill in chapter 23 was entirely unplanned. I just had a hell of a luck! I had no idea at that time who the man was and what he might have been up to.)
The takeback of the "adventure" of the mod Tava's Blessing was deliberate, because the mod was so profoundly pointless and the characters so full of bitterness and hatred (I hazard a guess – reflecting the mod author's personality) that it was ruining my joy of the game overall. I reloaded a previous save and turned that unadventure into a nightmare in the game report, to serve as a quasi-review of the mod.
Also, Laura's dream about Alessian Ruins in chapter 240 and her strange reluctance to go to Kagrenar in chapter 51 are there because I actually went to those places in the game, but they were screamingly nonsensical, in fact unplayable, which is why I found it justified to reload an earlier save.
Laura's description of her past dream about getting killed by a horrible animal in chapter 1 comes from a mod I had installed when I started this game, but as it rendered the exit from the Helgen dungeon utterly impossible to survive, I had to uninstall it and start the whole game again.
What I did without any pangs of conscience were what I call "overdubs". This means I sometimes reloaded a save and created a suitable situation for nice screenshots for the game report. For example, there was no other way to show how Laura was approaching Folkvangr on a boat. In the game, you don't get to see the island from afar. Freecam (accessed with Keypad 3 ) is the only way.
The overdubs had obviously no effect on the game and therefore constitute no cheats.
GAME FLAWS
I had to alter stuff to get over game bugs and glitches. For instance, in Chapter 149 I had to go to Cloudrest and I just couldn't – the game crashed whenever I got near. As I had to report on a completed quest, I brought the questgiver to nearby Corgrad with the console command moveto player and was able to talk to him and get the quest completed. In the game report, I made up a plausible reason for the questgiver to visit Corgrad of his own accord.
Unfortunately, something about my mod configuration caused quite a few quests refuse to move on at one or another point, as well as the game to crash in some mod-added locations, most notably in Markarth and in outdoors (but not indoors) in Amber Creek at the late stage of the game. I had to use console commands a lot and explain the problems away. For example, I wrote in chapter 52 that the Bitchen guards who were supposed to demand money for letting us enter the city simply opened the gate for us. In reality, they couldn't be talked to and there was therefore no way to enter the city through the front gate at all without cheating. Or in chapter 247, I wrote that Markarth had turned back to normal, the shops had re-opened and such, but that was not actually the case; Markarth officials and almost all traders remained non-functional throughout the game. Frustration with all that was one of the factors that influenced my decision to end the game somewhat prematurely.
I strongly suspect that the weird behavior of quests was caused by the mod The Choice Is Yours . I didn't have it in my previous games and didn't experience anything like the massive troubles I had in this game. I strongly advise against using that mod. (I didn't even really need it. I just thought it would make things a little more convenient and wouldn't fuck up anything. Was I ever wrong!)
One very unfortunate bug is people's size changing, sometimes right in front of your eyes as you play. That's why there was no avoiding of, say, Jenassa's relative size to Lydia's changing from picture to picture.
The reason why Laura gets magically teleported into another (nearby) location in chapter 204 is because the mods Beyond Skyrim – Bruma and The Frontier to Cyrodiil failed to work together – whenever the player character went too close to the Thalmor Checkpoint, the game crashed. I tried many times, loading from qasmoke and restarting the computer, but it was hopeless. That's why, in order to be able to travel to Bruma at all, I had to coc my player character somewhere, and I chose the cave which was between Skyrim and Bruma and was in fact meant by the mod author for bypassing the border post if necessary.
I altered a number of scenes where the game made an NPC attack me and my followers against obviously hopeless odds, such as Chief Yamarz in Fallowstone Cave. I also made a couple of changes in people's relations, such as changing Idolaf Battle-Born from Alfhild's husband into Jon's elder brother, because it's utterly unimaginable that a man in such a community as the Nords in Skyrim would take his wife's last name.
I wish there were a way to make one's followers stop fidgeting – currently, the group photos are a disaster. I did some overdubs, freezing them in place with the command tai , but they're still far from perfect. I hope the readers will understand.
There's a number of undeniably unrealistic features I was unable to avoid, most notably:
1. Even when badly hurt, you can still fight at full strength – until, from one moment to next, you drop dead;
2. When you are carrying almost as much weight as you are physically able to, you still don't get tired;
3. As long as you keep your mouth above the water surface rather than dive underwater, you can swim endlessly without getting tired;
4. You can swim at cold weather with your clothes on without feeling any discomfort afterwards.
There are actually mods to correct points 1 and 4, but I wouldn't change any of the above, because:
1. Somehow one encounters very few evenly matched enemies in Skyrim. The large majority of enemies are very weak and a few are absurdly strong. If low health made one's hits weaker, the first couple of hits would be fatal in most fights, meaning stronger enemies would be even more unbeatable and weaker enemies would be even more pathetic. That would hugely diminish the enjoyability of battles which leaves much to be desired as it is.
2. The insanely low carryweight limit in Skyrim makes weight management a major pain in the ass. The last thing one needs is more burdens. In fact, I find the game outright unplayable unless you cheat yourself to more carryweight. I did it by creating a rule for buying it (explained in Chapter 24), because there's nothing to do with all the money anyway.
3. There is physically no way to make the player character tire while swimming, which is a pity. All one can do is reduce the ludicrously high swimming speed and I did that in this game.
4. The snowy regions of Skyrim are already visually so depressing that you hate being there. With the added realism of getting cold and having to gather firewood to light campfires, I might have hated the game to the point I wouldn't have wanted to play it.
LANGUAGE AND NAMES
I don't know why the creators of Skyrim chose to name spruce trees "pine" in game dialogue as well as in the variables names, and numerous mod authors are keeping to that screaming nonsense. I have grown up in the midst of spruce forests and pine forests, and not even in the most drunken state could I possibly mistake a spruce for a pine or vice versa. At the time of writing this, I can't recall having ever seen even one pine tree in the Skyrim universe, vanilla or mod. (I don't give a rat's ass if there are trees in Maryland that look like spruces but are biologically classified as pines. The world of Skyrim is supposed to be Nordic and the trees in the game look nothing like North European pines.)
I knew that "daedra" is actually the plural form, but the singular form in the official lore is so manifestly nonsensical that I chose to use "daedra" as the singular and "daedras" as the plural instead.
I added the common English plural ending -s to a number of game terms where the weirdos who created Skyrim had thought it would be so cool when singular and plural were exactly the same.
I introduced logic into the rather chaotic system of creature names in official Skyrim, harmonizing the use of initial capital (uppercase for creatures able to speak, including Rieklings and intelligent Pahmars (the latter don't occur in Laura's game, but they exist in at least one mod I have used in my earlier games), lowercase for the creatures unable to speak, including giants and wild pahmars), solid and separate writing, and the naming of the creatures' polar varieties (snowbear, snowfox, snow-sabercat, snowtroll instead of Snow Bear, Snow Fox, Snowy Sabre Cat, Frost Troll).
Mock names such as Gaybores instead of Greybeards, Pigmasks for Miraak's Cultists, Penis Occultus for the Penitus Oculatus, The Drunken Husband for The Drunken Huntsman, were not made up specifically to make Laura more witty. No, I actually used those ironic names long before this game, either simply because they sounded funny or because, hey, come on, who can remember Penitus Oculatus? (I'm not even entirely sure I spelled it correctly here.)
I just had to rename a mountain on which many trolls lived Mount Nexus, because it's outrageous how a certain forum routinely tolerates cheap, mean personal attacks against people who express dissenting opinions. (Apart from which, it's inconceivable to me that in any sane human being's brain a mountain could be associated with a throat. Naming not a valley or a ravine or a cave but a mountain "throat" can only be meant as a deliberate crazy joke. But it's not funny or witty in the slightest. It's just totally weird, like a horse riding a man.)
END
Why did I end the game when there were still some things left to do, most notably a major mod-added adventure that promised to let me see the Dwemers and that I had been eagerly waiting for a long time?
Well, it happened because of a quest added by another mod. It turned out really crappy and I decided not to pursue it further. However, Laura ended accidentally up in its main location while she was looking for something else. So I let her walk around and talk to people while she was there. I learned they were a particularly nasty lot, so Laura killed most of them. When she was near an exit, I had to make a choice – leave the remaining bandits alive and proceed with my original goal or go back into the dungeon and exterminate the few remaining ones.
My gut feeling told me to leave this pointless quest behind, especially because the mod was clearly buggy – while Laura and her followers were slaying the bandits in one cave, the ones in the next cave remained friendly, so Laura was able to make one surprise attack after another. Profoundly evil as the bandits may have been, I felt like a miserable butcher.
But then I thought: let's go in anyway, surely it won't take long. Soon Laura ended up in yet another cave with many bandits. When she attacked, one of them ran up to her followers and stabbed Jordis to death instantly.
That was more I than could emotionally handle. The deaths of Kharjo and Rayya, although extremely sad, were a part of the game I had to put up with, but here I was so close to the end, already contemplating on the text of the epilogue. The death of a follower at this point would have ruined my joy of the entire game.
After some reflection, I realized that the bugginess of the quest actually rendered the recent events implausible and merited a takeback. In fact, had I been thinking properly and followed my own principles, I would have never gone to that last cave to begin with.
At the same time, something even more important dawned to me – I was no longer ready to accept a follower's death. I couldn't put up with it. This meant I had to stop playing. You can't have an adventure, potentially killing enemies, if you can't accept the potential death of one of your team. That would be dishonest.
That's why I took back all the way to Riverwood and made Jordis have a prophetic dream of getting killed and Laura deciding not to go into the mountains to begin with. I made up a cathartic conversation on the hillside south of Hviterun (it was a lot of work to get Laura ja Jordis to physically walk next to each other!) and ended the game report somewhat abruptly.
[However, I have to admit that while writing this, I've been having thoughts of continuing the game, maybe with Lydia, Jenassa and Valdimar, or maybe another man instead of Jenassa, possibly even turning an NPC into Laura's brother Cortoran. They would do that Dwemer quest and I would write a story titled "Laura's New Adventure". But it's unlikely. I have so many other interesting things to write. Then again, I don't know how long I can endure never being able to travel in the Skyrim game world again. We shall see.]
GENDER
You may be wondering why I played as a woman.
At one point before this game, I made a baffling discovery – many players don't identify with their player characters!! Instead of looking at the game world in the 1st-person view and imagining "This is all happening to me," they hover above and behind their player character in the 3rd-person view and think "This is someone whom I control." That explains the mass obsession with sexy armors. A stunningly large proportion of Skyrim mods on the Nexus site are nothing more than yet another "armor" that would leave half of the body bare. They are obviously meant for men who play female characters in 3rd-person view.
One guy explained this phenomenon in a forum discussion like this: "I don't play as a chick. I play a chick." It is my impression that most men whose player character is female fantasize about controlling a woman, but they have no idea how to achieve that in the real world, because they are ignorant of female psychology. That's why they enjoy having a figure representing a woman on their computer screen who goes exactly where they tell her to go. They enjoy trying different armors on her (which, as I realized at one point, is essentially the same thing as little girls in the real world dressing up their dolls), preferably erotic ones, and last but not least they enjoy their power to make her strip naked whenever they want her to.
My motivation for having a female player character was completely different.
First and foremost, I wanted a different kind of experience after having played Skyrim for a thousand hours. I was dying to spend more time in the Skyrim universe, but how in heaven's name could I make it bearable to go to the same places, meet the same people, go through the same dialogues yet another time? "Maybe by playing as a woman," I happened to think one day. Since I do identify with my player character and imagine it's all happening to myself (for the life of me, I can't understand what is the point of playing if you think it's just a story happening to someone else), I thought that imagining myself as a woman, trying to act like a woman, figuring out how a woman would react in one or another situation might be an experience different enough to make the repetitions bearable.
The second trick for making the repetitiveness of the Skyrim game bearable was to write a game report – a proper game report this time, entirely from the player character's perspective. Apart from which, taking a break from the game periodically in order to write things down would give me time to process the events emotionally, thereby making the pleasure last longer. It's like watching a TV series that is being aired only once a week – during the week you occasionally revive the events of the previous episode in your mind and speculate on possible developments in the next one.
So I did that and indeed succeeded in making my game very different from the previous ones and very enjoyable.
I must admit that over time I also took a liking in putting beautiful clothes on my player character. But that was not to make a chick look sexy so that I the sexually frustrated player could enjoy watching her. I did it because I had gone into the role of a woman, and when I imagined myself a woman, I realized a woman would plausibly want to look attractive (which, mind you, doesn't mean slutty). In the beginning when Laura was weak, she had to wear the strongest armor she could get her hands on. But when she had gotten strong enough, she could afford to discard armor pieces that didn't look good. I made her do it because it was a woman's natural behavior. I still played in the 1st-person view almost all the time, meaning I didn't look at her all that often. I dressed Laura up beautifully in order to make her feel good about herself.
Overall, getting into the role of a woman went really well. I became even dismayed on Laura's behalf because it was so impossible to find beautiful shoes!
Having said all that, I realized at one point, between completing ALAH and completing this commentary, that a number of my Mf erotic or romantic scenes outside ALAH have been written from the woman's point of view. During the years I had written scenes involving men and women, I had never realized it, but the fact is that somehow it had come easier to me most of the time to only describe the man's external behavior and his observable reactions, and lay out in detail what the woman thought and felt and intended.
Now, one could easily explain it by saying women are interesting to write whereas men are dull and boring. But this is only half of the explanation. While I have little difficulty in describing my own emotions, I somehow don't feel comfortable describing a fictional male character's feelings. Not that I don't know what they are – it simply pains me to envision them and put them in words.
This revelation forced me to review my contemptuous attitude towards the men who play chicks. Maybe I have more in common with them than I used to think. (A little more, not a lot more, of that I am still sure.)
THE ROLE VS. THE REAL ME
I am relatively feminine for a man. For example, my sense of direction is as good as nonexistent; also, my unmanly fascination with psychology should be obvious. The protagonist Laura is essentially the feminine aspect of myself, not at all an attempt to make women look ridiculous. My being very intuitive and emotional, Laura's reactions to the game events and the NPCs' behavior are largely my own genuine reactions. For instance, the description of Laura's anger in chapter 32 is exactly my own, and so is Laura's repulsion at the terms of the peace treaty in chapter 178.
Laura's occasional complaining about the poor indoors lighting reflects my own detestation of the appalling inadequacy of that game element. I can't stress it strongly enough how I hate it in computer games when I'm not able to see properly.
However, Laura ended up liking tomato juice which I just can't drink, and (intitally) hating cheese which I eat every day. Furthermore, she felt very good in Windhelm, a city I rather disliked in my previous games. I don't know how it happened, it just did.
A significant difference between Laura and myself was the way she was dealing with the NPCs' offensive behavior. Imagining I was a woman, I was almost always able to swallow an insult and move on rather than kill the arrogant prick or capture and whip the feminist bitch as I often did in my previous game as Deflorator. (For that matter, this was one important reason why I decided to play as a woman to begin with – a part of Skyrim's creators are evidently mean bastards who love to enrage their players. In the role of a woman, I suffered far less rage than I had in my previous games as a male character.)
One notable exception was the killing of Pelin Varlais in chapter 104 which I still feel very bad about. There I was as a woman utterly unable to endure an insult every man would only laugh at. As a matter of fact, the situation was caused by one monstrous, outrageous bug in Skyrim that occasionally makes friendly NPCs say devastating insults to the player character with a voice that is not their own. I haven't been able to find out what causes it and I can't imagine what may have been the motive of the sick scumbag who programmed those lines.
Imagining myself as a woman, I felt supreme joy from the irony of drinking milk and eating a sweet roll after a most dramatic battle in chapter 116, an unspeakably unmanly behavior in Skyrim where men actually use the phrase "milk drinker" as an insult.
The way Laura rejoices when she can leave decisions to other people is, of course, typically female and not at all like myself. Also, Laura apologizes a lot and is more self-ironic than I ever could.
Laura being a woman and I being a man, her sexual behavior is inevitably different from mine. In spite of being very sensitive and perceptive, I am sexually dominant, but I couldn't possibly be like that as Laura, because I despise masculine bitches. Laura's behavior in intimate relationships reflects by and large my idea of a decent woman. (Except that I'd hate to have a girlfriend who abhors anal intercourse.) I intentionally made Laura avoid behaviors which I can't stand on women – above all, refusing sex to one's steady partner, and expressing disrespect of male genitals or sexuality.
Laura being a decent woman, her first sex with a new partner is always in the Missionary position, except when the man is her subordinate, in which case she doesn't need to play shy.
I had to make one important compromise, though. Skyrim sex being so awesome, I couldn't possibly limit Laura to one (or even two or three) boyfriends. Hence her promiscuity – which in turn leads plausibly to occasional feelings of guilt and discussions about her self-doubts, such as with Jenassa in chapter 151 and with Jora in chapter 230.
I did my best as Laura to get attracted to men, but I couldn't avoid some bisexuality. Some Skyrim (mod-enhanced) women are just so breathtakingly gorgeous.
Overall, I daresay I succeeded very well in getting into the role of a woman – except that I had played for quite some time (less than one game-month, though) before it occurred to me that women are supposed to have menstruations. :D
There was another blunder which I didn't notice until long after the whole game report had been completed: Laura was never actually seduced. Practically every time when Laura went to bed with a new male partner, it started with her feeling sex-hungry and then choosing a man. She was subtle about it (usually), letting the guy think he was seducing her, but nevertheless it was always her initiative. Not once did she let herself be lured into bed by a man she wasn't already desiring. It was most certainly not my intention, I simply failed to think like a woman in this respect. Having realized that, I went through all the scenes which led to sex with a new man, and made bigger or smaller changes to about a half of them, giving the man significantly more initiative, as would have been natural. (By doing this, I ended up developing a casual sexual encounter with Athragar into a multi-episode story of gradual seduction. I also made up several episodes of unsuccessful seduction attempts by Jon.)
However, the contradiction of Laura first being annoyed with Lorm's bossiness, yet later starting to act in an increasingly submissive manner with Valdimar happened naturally during the game – not reflecting my own nature, of course, just getting into the role really well.
PLOTTING AND SPONTANEITY
Considering how unplanned this game report is in general, it's not surprising that character development happened spontaneously as well. It seems that the more deeply I was able to get into the proverbial shoes of a woman, the more feminine my player character became. For example:
Over time, Laura becomes increasingly reluctant to kill, which is of course very plausible for a woman. At first, when she is innocently getting to know the world and is really weak, she doesn't spend much thought on the people and creatures she kills. She is busy enough staying alive. But as early as in chapter 31 she finds herself unwilling to fulfill a not-so-important mission at the cost of killing people who have done her no harm. As time goes on, she not only feels increasingly awful because of the war that is ravaging Skyrim, and goes to great lengths to put an end to it, she is also really happy when she discovers a way to prevent wolves and bears and such from attacking her, so that she is no longer forced to kill them in order to defend herself. She even becomes so sensitive to life that she grows reluctant to kill Falmers, fiercely hostile and cruel as they may be. And, last but not least, Laura has a lot of compassion with Alduin right to the end.
There are occasions where Laura decides something, then changes her mind and then changes it back again, such as in chapter 179. (FYI, that was precisely how I changed my mind while playing.) Novelists tend to be afraid of such things, but in the real world it's commonplace for a woman to change her decision simply because she suddenly feels different, without any logical reason.
I found it really great how Laura said in the beginning that she and Jenassa are too different to ever become friends (which I even honestly believed when I wrote the first chapters), yet in chapter 103 Laura already acted as if asking Jenassa's advice in a difficult situation was the natural thing to to, and eventually they grew really touchingly close. It was entirely unplanned. It just happened as the events developed and I'm really happy it turned out that way.
In chapter 183, Laura kills Ulfric Stormcloak in order to achieve lasting peace in Skyrim. She is able to firstly get access to Ulfric's bedroom at night, and secondly get away with the murder, and thirdly, to avoid an unimaginable outburst of rage among his supporters, thanks to the fact that she is Yrsarald's girlfriend, which she became in chapter 38. Now, while I was writing chapter 38, I had no idea that Laura would end up having to kill Ulfric. I didn't add Laura's relationship with Yrsarald afterwards to make it possible for Laura to kill Ulfric. Laura's meeting Yrsarald in chapter 38 is entirely genuine. It just happened, without any thoughts of using him somehow in the future. Later, when I was deeply shocked by the cease-fire negotiations having gone so disastrously, horrendously wrong, and was trying to figure out my options, the relationship between Laura and Yrsarald was very convenient. If it hadn't existed, I would have had to come up with a different plan. (At this moment, I can't imagine which, and I'm very happy it played out the way it did.)
At the time Laura agreed in chapter 13 to find some Ayleid artifacts for the collector Nuri in Falkert, I had no plans whatsoever of making Laura an Ayleid fan. In fact, I knew as good as nothing about the Ayleids and I didn't care about them one way or another. I wasn't even sure I wanted to do the quest at all. It so happened that I did by chapter 102, simply because Laura traveled past the locations of those artifacts during her adventures and I thought why not get the artifacts while she's there. It was only in chapter 209 when Laura stumbled over an old mod-created Ayleid ruin, that I came to really like the Ayleids. Still, before chapter 260 I had no idea that the Ayleids had anything to do with High Rock where Laura was from. (I hadn't seen that book in my previous games and never had any interest in researching Ayleid history.) At the end, I was delighted of those three events fitting together so beautifully – and in an entirely unplanned way.
When Laura nearly lost her life in chapter 105, I didn't plan it to happen exactly after reaching her goal of killing 100 forns. It was entirely accidental. An amazing, eerie coincidence.
SOME OTHER THINGS
One feature of the Skyrim game I'm extremely happy about is that the locations appear on the game map only after the player has discovered them. At the beginning of the game, the map shows only the landscape features without any locations. (To be more precise, the default map displays all the nine hold capitals right in the beginning, which I consider an unacceptable spoiler. I corrected it with TES5Edit before beginning this game.) This enabled me to show the readers maps which actually reflected what Laura actually knew about the world at that particular moment.
I had mild doubts about the units of measurement. I have to admit millimeters sound a little weird in a fantasy world like Skyrim. But it would have been unacceptably confusing to put up with the perversion of inches and feet. That's why I left the metric units.
I still kept the pounds, though, because the Skyrim weight units (unnamed in the game) bear no resemblance whatsoever to the real-world units; in particular, suggesting that one Skyrim weight unit equals one kilogram would be obviously absurd.
ALAH contains a (small) number of remniscences that can be understood only by those readers who have played the game. For instance, when Laura had the intuition that the butcher Fjolmund of Morthal was hiding something, yet decided not to try to find out what it was, it was because I knew from my previous games about his wife-turned-vampire locked up in the basement, and killing her wouldn't obviously have done anyone any good. Laura's dream in which Falkert was a puny pathetic village refers, of course, to unmodded Skyrim. And the mention of a Khajiit traveler who wanted to count the steps from Ivarsted to High Hrothgar is a hint on the mod INPC which I had in one of my previous games but not in this one.
However, don't look for a deep meaning in everything. The fact that I made a long series of pictures in Morthal (chapter 228) and in no other location, doesn't mean I hold Morthal for especially beautiful. I just happened to walk around on that day, taking screenshots, and when I went through the pictures later, I noticed they could make a nice series. That's all there was to it. No planning, no special purpose, just coincidence.
Peoples' birthdays (apart from Laura's which is a very symbolic date for me in the real world) are chosen completely at random. I literally used a random numbers generator and fitted the game events to those – not too successfully, I'm afraid. I regret that I didn't let Jordis have a proper birthday party, but while I was playing, I was too impatient to waste time just hanging around in places. That's one of the flaws of this game report – Laura is always rushing from one place to another, rarely stopping to just chill. But it can't be corrected afterwards, because it would totally screw up the dates and clocktimes and thereby the whole structure of ALAH.
FINAL WORDS
To be perfectly honest, I can't imagine why anyone would want to read about someone playing a computer game. But considering how much computer game fanfic is being written (which means that at least a part of it is also being read), and especially the popularity of live streams where someone plays a video game and other people can watch it in real time, it is not too far-fetched to presume that there is also a market niche for "Always Lost, Always Hopeful", which is a somewhat different kind of playthrough, letting you watch the game events through the eyes of the player character accompanied with a lot of writer-invented content.
This work hasn't proved as popular as I had hoped. Readers have praised my writing skill, but evidently few people can be bothered to read 274 chapters. To me, though, "Always Lost, Always Hopeful" is a sweet memory of one very, very beautiful part of my life. Apart from which, I tremendously enjoy my own writing. I regularly read this game report, a couple of chapters on most days, and when I reach the end I start again at the beginning. The pleasure I get out of it far outweighs the disappointment of never having acquired thousands of fans. No offense, but what ALAH means to me means a lot more to me than what anyone else might think about it.
I'm grateful to you for reading it all the same. :-)
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