When my 11 year old son took a guard’s arrow to the dome, it occurred to me I had failed as a parent. Rufus is—was, before the arm of the state converted him into a needlebook—my Fat Idiot Son, a mod for Skyrim that promises “a new level of realism, depth and challenge” via the introduction of “your useless, fat, stupid disappointment of a son.”
Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
I considered this a challenge. After several hundred hours, my Dragonborn has long since summited every height Skyrim has to offer. The bad, uh, evil dragon is dead. She either vanquished the vampire coven or joined it, I forget. That guy from the Morrowind DLC is dead or trapped in the abyss or something? And damn near every icon on the world map is a satisfying, completed shade of white. There were no worlds left to conquer, save one: parenting.
Rufus would be my masterpiece. The ultimate challenge, overcome. I would take the clay of this pimple-faced, impudent boy and mould him into a man. He would be my crowning triumph, my greatest creation. He might even surpass me.
I hate my son
The first obstacle to my rearing an heir was that I did not, in fact, possess him. When you pull the lever at Honningbrew Meadery, Rufus does not appear. Rather, a robed woman dashes across a nearby bridge (in my game, pursued by a sabre-toothed tiger, which may have either been scripted or a beautiful coincidence; I genuinely do not know) and informs you that your son has been abducted by a cabal of witches.
This would be his first challenge, I decided. His first roadstone on the long path to adulthood. Once I had broken him free of his cage, he and I would—mother and son—clear the area of his kidnappers. He would be blooded.
This plan was almost immediately derailed when Rufus chose to participate in our reunion by remaining stock-still in his cage, nose pressed against the rocks behind it, occasionally yelping “Hey!”
When he did turn around—which I did not witness, engaged as I was in the process of dispatching like 30 witches—the words “Woah! A dead body!” echoed around the cave upwards of 20 times.
This was not a great start to my parenting career, but I was undaunted. Once we were out of the cave, I tried to figure out what young Rufus could actually do. He posed as if he was holding a torch but his hands were empty, which did not fill me with confidence.
“I need you to do something,” I told him. In response, he told me that he didn’t have to take this from me. “I need to trade some things with you,” I tried. He took money from me. “It’s time for us to part ways,” I ventured. He laughed, as though I had made a joke, and kept following.
“Could you wait here for a minute?” was the last option on my menu, to which Rufus, my chubby 11-year-old boy, armed only with a small wooden sword, declared that he was going to go and join the Stormcloak Rebellion and promptly sprinted off over the horizon like a gazelle.
No matter what I tried, he would not listen, so intent was he on joining a racist paramilitary organisation. Only by shooting him in the back with a dragonbone arrow, sending him roly-polying into a nearby cairn, could I dampen his enthusiasm and get him to follow me again.
Party time
I thought I would try some combat again, given that this seemed to be the only one of Skyrim’s verbs my son might actually have available to him. I scoured my map for a cave I’d not cleared and settled on Bloodchill Cavern, which sounded like precisely the kind of bracing, hair-raising adventure to introduce a young boy to adulthood.
This was a whole thing.
Turns out, Bloodchill Cavern is one of the 6,000 creations that download themselves whenever you launch Skyrim’s anniversary edition. There’s a party? In a mansion? And half the people there are obviously vampires.
Rather than help me be a good mother to my son, Skyrim instructed me to sit at a chair and read a letter, in which someone—who I gather was now dead—revealed that he had invited everyone to the party because he hates them. The obvious vampires revealed themselves as obvious vampires and a large gargoyle backed my 11-year-old son into a corner, whereupon he began repeatedly uppercutting him.
Everyone died, an orc arrived, gave me 1,500 gold and told me to keep the mansion. My son was still ragdolled on the floor. I found these events vexing.
High society
Cave-diving, adventuring and combat were clearly a little beyond my cherub, so I decided I’d try introducing him to civilisation instead. Specifically, I’d introduce him to stealing from it.
Hunched by a fountain, I directed my scion to start with something easy. Say, a bottle of wine from the counter of a local merchant. This went alarmingly well, not because Rufus was a stealth prodigy but because the shopkeeper in question seemed to have abandoned hope in life and didn’t care that a small, rotund child had taken her stock right in front of her.
But pride goes before a fall, and here I must cop to an error in my parental judgment, which up to this point has been flawless. I knew that I could give Rufus directions like any other follower: by holding E and then directing him to the thing I wanted him to interact with. At some point, my memory had distorted such that I thought directing him at an NPC, while crouched, would make him attempt to pickpocket them.
It did not. Rufus drew his wooden sword and screamed “Die!” as he charged at a well-to-do man named Aquillius Aeresius. All the city leapt into alert. I was surrounded by guards, Aeresius’ wife was hollering, the man himself was fleeing in terror, and my son was repeatedly smashing a sword into his back as he begged for mercy.
It’s with a mixture of pride and horror that I tell you this turned out to be the only true kill my Rufus ever got in our time together. Aeresius refused to fight back, opting to beg for mercy instead, and the guards were preoccupied with me. My boy acquitted himself quite well in slowly beating the man to death for no apparent reason.
By this point I was surrounded by guard corpses and Aeresius’ wife seemed to have slipped into a state of dumbfounded shock, paralysed and mute in the middle of the road. Only a few guards remained. It hadn’t gone great, but perhaps Rufus and I would escape this one yet.
My boy, filled with bloodlust from his first kill, decided the final guard would be his. Sword aloft, he screeched “Surprise!” only to be immediately felled by a single arrow to the head.
But my kin’s made of tougher stuff. Up Rufus got, and once again began charging the guard, and then inexplicably decided to attempt something I can only describe as a flying scissor kick. He was promptly batted out of the air and ended up face down in the dirt of Solitude.
I do not think I am a good parent.