5 Things I Learned Trying To Get Laid In 'Skyrim'

5 The Research Was A Baffling Rabbit Hole

Most Skyrim mods are easy to find. If these massive databases are brightly lit storefronts, adult mods are hidden behind the counter in a crumpled box, the storekeeper looking at you with judging eyes when you mutter your request. These are dark corners of the Internet, friend, and you'd best not tread in them.

The largest and most wretched hive of orc blowjobs is LoversLab, because nothing says eroticism like the cold, sterile confines of an experimental science facility. The two forums dedicated to Skyrim porn have a combined 578,389 posts. For comparison, Cracked's General Discussion forum and the Comedy Workshop, the beating heart of this site, have 522,291. There are more people dedicated to adding sex to Skyrim than there were dedicated to adding Skyrim to Skyrim. And if you think Skyrim is passe, you'll be pleased to know their reign of erotic Fallout 4 terror has only just begun.

The site is clad in a darkness perfect for late-night browsing in a home love left long ago. Only the porn ads provide brightness, along with reminders that you could at least be masturbating to real women who will never sleep with you as opposed to fictional women who are physically incapable of doing so despite the tragedy of being programmed to desire it very much. My initial strategy was the same as it is with my sexuality in general -- get in, do what needs to be done, get out, and never speak of it again. But the world of Skyrim sex lured me into its depths like lost Atlantis, tantalizing me with discoveries I'd never forget despite my deep desire to do so.

I would understand if these mods were buried in the depths of sketchy foreign file-share sites shrouded in spyware and silence. But users swap fictional sex stories the way other players swap tales of slaying dragons. Ripped middle-aged warriors proving irresistible to coquettish Cyrodiil schoolgirls, midget heroes having rough sex with their giant hermaphrodite allies, foursomes with ancient zombified warriors, a woman in the skin of a slaughtered bear having sex with an actual bear -- all these and more regaled like a bro at the bar bragging about his latest conquest to resounding applause from his bro brothers. In another age, these people would have gathered at the local gentlemen's club and discussed the merits of the new Tijuana bible about Little Orphan Annie getting a boob job and a fist up her ass. "Mm, yes, my manhood showed great interest."

These are not just people who want to see frost trolls get dicks. These are people who will stay up until the wee hours debating the appropriate contours of the dick and whether it ejaculates enough semen for a fictional ice monster. They've dedicated a massive chunk of their limited free time on this Earth to eroticizing a game about shouting at fantasy Norwegians. I went in expecting to find quick ways to make lightning boobs for your amusement, and came out hours later a changed man. I witnessed an anime-faced girl whose few remaining articles of clothing made her resemble a sexy SS officer give a blowjob to a hellhound in what appeared to be a tastefully minimalist modern apartment, an experience so far removed from the Skyrim I understand that it might as well have been two Martians reading each other love poems. I gazed too long into this abyss, and it ejaculated on my face.

4 The Technical Difficulties Were Ridiculous

I soon learned that adding sex to Skyrim is like adding missile launchers to your car. It's technically feasible, but the framework wasn't built to handle it and will buckle under such a precarious weight. Images that looked sensual became stilted and mechanical in motion, like a computer having a fevered dream of what love is even as it knows it will never be able to experience it. No amount of care put into these custom animations and textures -- and there are many, many hours of care -- can overcome the basic fact that Skyrim was not built with sex in mind. It's like trying to bathe in your kitchen sink. It's technically possible, but it was never intended for that purpose.

I have never seen a greater representation of the uncanny valley than a hellhound's bulbous penis clipping through the lips and teeth of a girl who's supposed to be uncontrollably aroused, yet whose dead eyes suggest an emptiness that a human being would struggle to comprehend, even one traumatized by the horrors of the concentration camps her outfit suggests she supervises when she's not fellating dogs. Something behind those eyes is begging for death even through her shell of a body can't comprehend the concept. It only knows, on some fundamental level, that it's preferable to its current situation.

But, as I was still naive, I thought I could make this work. I thought I could tell a story that was amusing, instead of unleashing a dark vision of a future where a dog penis penetrates a human simulacrum's mouth forever. The ability to give my character testicles larger than his head? Comedy gold. Sexy magic that makes people undress at my command? Sure, that could be funny. The ability to cast magic from my nipples? Obviously. Achieve orgasm from riding a horse? Why not! Alicia Painslut, who will fight by my side and orgasm if she takes enough damage, perhaps while on one of many new sexy quests like the daring raid of a sex-trafficking ring? Sign us up. A new and erotic main menu theme? Hell yeah. The list went on and on.

My ambition outweighed my common sense, and I downloaded far more mods than I needed. But these mods are not simply switches you turn off and on. You have to change the core files of the game to make them work. I lost an entire workday poring through documentation, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides, and to limited success. The only sentence grimmer than "I spent a day of my life installing erotic Skyrim mods" is "I spent a day of my life trying to install erotic Skyrim mods and mostly failed."

Furthermore, mods can often conflict. You need to install A for B to work, but A doesn't work alongside C, but you can't lose C if you want D. Trying to get everything to play nice together, and all within the depths of a file system I didn't fully understand, was maddening. Sometimes the game simply crashed, like it knew what I was trying to accomplish and refused to be an accomplice to it. After many hours I got the basics working, but like a mad scientist destroyed by his own unholy creation, I came to regret my hard work.

3 What I Did Accomplish Was Terrifying

My idea was to write a story about Throgg, a humble traveler. Just look at him, starry-eyed and full of hope.

The goal was for Throgg to get into a variety of sexy shenanigans like the hero of a teen comedy. Instead, he found himself in a surreal sexual nightmare, like H.R. Giger crossed with the wet dreams of a 12-year-old who touches his action figures inappropriately.

Many mods technically worked, but they were pale imitations of the already pale imitations they were supposed to be. Throgg's erection was merely a green cylinder without texture, like the peg from a child's shape-matching toy. He thrust in the general direction of his partners' ill-defined orifices but was rarely accurate, instead preferring to penetrate their torsos or nearby air currents. This was of no concern to his lovers, who played their role in this grotesque pantomime without complaint. They can speak no objection. Such is not their station.

The true horror wasn't the sex but the world I created. Let me walk you through a typical seduction.

Overwhelmed by the irresistible "excuse me, pretty lady," Adrianne immediately quits her previous topic to flirt, which in this context means do what I say. The voice acting cuts out, because she no longer has a voice.

She then abandons her work, personality, and dignity.

Escorting her to a private bedroom was an option, but why bother? In Throgg's world, impromptu public sex is just something that happens in between dragon attacks.

Adrianne will agree to whatever I suggest with uncontrollable lust, because she's no longer a character, merely a dialogue tree that produces different animations. We strip down and embrace.

We go straight to having sex on the cold, wet cobblestones, foreplay being as foreign a concept in Skyrim as the jet engine. After some listless animation our clothes teleport back onto us from the void we had discarded them to, and Adrianne chides me like a stranger. We are not lovers. We are not even friends. She came out of a fugue state, released from her bondage as a sexual servant to a confused God she cannot see or even comprehend.

I walk two buildings down and immediately seduce another unresisting woman. She says yes, not with passion but with resigned nihilism. She comprehends the madness of her world but has no answer for it.

Ysolda and I have sex in the road. This is of little concern to the populace, who haven't been programmed to respond to public indecency and insanity. This guard just wants to chat, despite his desired conversational partner being preoccupied.

Adrianne then walks by without comment, unconcerned that the man she slept with moments ago is inside another woman. She is not programmed to be jealous, or even self-aware. That would be inconvenient. I could even still buy goods from shopkeepers after magically making them so aroused they'd rip off their clothes and publicly masturbate, because these aren't mods to add adult realism. They're meant to annihilate what little realism the game had.

I understand why someone would want to add sex to Skyrim. You can have PG-13 sex in games like Fable and Dragon Age, because you're roleplaying as a powerful, attractive adult -- why wouldn't romance be an option? But here it's enacted by unaware participants as part of a fantasy of endless sexual conquest so clinical and detached you feel like a scientist observing a foreign species, complete with statistical tracking.

Throgg didn't get shenanigans. Throgg was the vessel through which a hollow mockery of a world was gaped at like oh so many train wrecks.

2 I Couldn't Help But Keep Trying

Only in retrospect did I appreciate the full horror of what I had unleashed. At the time I was simply pissed that my idea wasn't working. Why could I craft and equip a leather horse cock but not see or use it? Why was magic still casting from my hands? Why was Ms. Painslut not where I was told she'd be? Had I done all that one-handed research for nothing? Even the sex was deeply flawed. I'm no sexologist -- I'll even admit that I sometimes have trouble finding a girl's ovipositor -- but I'm pretty sure it isn't supposed to look like this:

Or from first-person, this:

Or, God help us, this:

I couldn't tell Throgg's story with such blatant technical errors. Who would spend 10 minutes reading a column about Skyrim sex tourism if they didn't believe in the world? But I like to think of myself as fairly computer savvy. If I had friends, I'd be the guy they called for tech support after accidentally installing 17 toolbars and malware that turns their cursor into a unicorn. So I was going to try again, and I was going to treat this task with the absolute seriousness it deserved. On a beautiful autumn Saturday, when other people were busy not squandering their precious days, I locked myself in my room with the goal of making Skyrim sex work. Why yes, ladies, I am single.

I wiped the game clean for a fresh start. I watched several lengthy video tutorials. I found the right documentation on LoversLab in a sea of outdated and irrelevant information, and I studied every word written with the technical forthrightness of your phone's latest patch notes. I downloaded only the mods I knew would be essential to Throgg's story of elf blowjobs. I installed them one by one and carefully followed the instructions, ensuring files like sdsRomanceBoobJGive.pex and AP_Fisting_A2_S4.hkx went where they belonged.

I fired the game up. It crashed. I took a deep breath and imagined the entire universe being consumed in a sudden cataclysm, forever eliminating all evidence of the sadness that had unfolded in my room that day. Then I downloaded a special mod manager.

Mod managers are programs designed to ensure that all your mods are up to date, have the prerequisite mods installed, aren't conflicting with other mods, and so on. If, say, "Schlongs Of Skyrim" and "Slut Shout" weren't getting along together, this should let me know.

But there was a problem. Two, if you count that staring at that screen on a Saturday night made me want to put a gun in my mouth. While I was able to resolve the worst issues, it became clear that I had again screwed up somewhere when installing everything, presumably because it's hard to follow instructions when your eyes are bleeding. Skyrim sex was still an illogical nightmare, and Ms. Painslut still taunted me with her continued absence. She was going to get such a beating if I ever found her. But that night I had an even more pressing problem. There were only two beers in the fridge, and I was going to need a lot more.

1 I Was Left With Deeply Disturbing Questions

In the end, I did make one breakthrough. I could make dogs fuck me.

I think we both know which option I chose. But I didn't do it as part of Throgg's wacky adventures, a premise I had at some point abandoned without even realizing it. I did it because I spent a day of my life figuring out how to let a dog fuck my Skyrim character, so goddammit, I was going to let a dog fuck my Skyrim character.

I watched with exhausted detachment as my mighty orc stripped and kneeled on the cold cobbles, like a prisoner of war being told to kneel in front of an empty trench. As the dog emotionlessly mounted me, his penis invisible because I had mercifully erred somewhere, a child walked by. "You're naked!" she laughed before running off, unconcerned as to why an animal was squirting something onto my anus. Then, when it was over and Throgg began his walk of shame, this message appeared.

I stared at it, uncomprehending. What was it trying to say? Was it supposed to be "You love fucking animals," an acknowledgment that I enjoyed the services this mod provided? Or was it a sarcastic "You love animals, fuck," as in "Holy shit, you are way too into animals"? Was the dog-fucking mod mocking me? I closed the game, turned off my computer, and sat in silence.

I realized that little girl was right. I was naked. When you've dedicated that much time to letting a virtual dog sodomize your virtual stand-in, I don't care how ironically detached you are -- you ask yourself some questions. Like, "What does it say about modern civilization that people have the free time to design dog-fucking mods, and then I get paid to write about them?" And, "Is there something seriously wrong with me? Like, on a fundamental level?"

I was also conflicted about my failure. Was I an idiot for not figuring out the technical nuances of a system that a forum full of people who jerk off to video games had mastered? Why did that bother me if the only people who would judge me for my ineptitude were those same masturbators? Had I let my employer down by failing to deliver the Skyrim sex travelogue I had promised? What am I doing with my life if that's even a valid question? When's the last time I talked to another human being? Why is my penis out?

I found satisfactory answers to some of those questions, but others still haunt me. And while I haven't played Skyrim since that fateful day, I think I'm going to wipe it clean and give it a go. Throgg and I are going to smash some heads, and that's not a euphemism. And if in some forgotten corner of the map we discover Alicia Painslut, we will simply tell her we have no need for her services and leave for our next adventure.

You can read more from Mark, including all about how he got mad laid in Oblivion, at his website.

Skyrim is a pretty transformative experience here at Cracked. See how it prompted Robert Brockway to deal with his boring personality in 5 Personality Flaws 'Skyrim' Forces You To Deal With, and see the other side of the Skyrim relationship (what has our world come to?) in 10 Days As A 'Skyrim' Widow: The Dark Side Of Gaming Addiction.

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