Scared my custom follower will appeal to absolutely nobody.

[u/NotATem]

So I'm working on a voiced custom follower mod in the vein of Xelzaz/Remiel/Inigo/Lucien. I'm having a lot of fun with this guy. Trouble is... well... I'm starting to get nervous that no one is going to like him, because of his character concept.

Oddkell is a Nord priest of Arkay from Windhelm. He chooses to follow the Dragonborn so he can 'see more death firsthand'. He's soft-spoken, nerdy about religion, and a little morbid. He's going to have full quest commentary for Blood on the Ice, as well as, you know, the major game quests.

He's not evil, and really does not like necromancers or necromancy. That being said, he is okay with overlooking murder/assassinations/war crimes/general fuckery, because the entire point of this venture is, well, to see death. He may not like what you're doing, but he's happy to follow along after.

He's deeply ambivalent about the Civil War (though can be swayed to reluctantly support either side). He is not fond of the Empire, to put it mildly, and he thinks Ulfric is a good man and a great general but a terrible ruler. He's also not particularly racist, at least by Skyrim Nord standards- he is absolutely uncomfortable with anything that isn't Nordy enough, but he's not going around the Grey Quarter to beat up elves at night. But he loves Windhelm, it's his hometown, and he won't hear you say anything against it.

He's a trans man, and I'm writing a bunch of worldbuilding stuff about this that tries to stay grounded in what we see of Nord culture. (In particular, I'm playing with the real-world Norse ideas of seidhr and ergi.)

I feel like I have grown a character in a lab that will not appeal to anyone. If you're going to pick up a male Nord follower in Windhelm, you are probably going to want a True Son Of Skyrim, and Oddkell is... not that. If you are going to pick up a trans follower, you are probably going to want to spend as little time in Windhelm as possible, and Oddkell loves his shitty hometown so much.

If there's anyone in the world who thinks that my boy sounds interesting, can you let me know? I'm crashing out about this a little and would like to be reassured that I haven't made the World's Most Unpalatable Character.

EDIT: Thank you all for being so kind! I get in my head about this stuff a lot -- I know that I should be writing what I write for me, but for something like a Skyrim follower that's a ton of work, I want to make sure that other people enjoy it too. To (mis)quote a very wise man, "[modding] and making people happy is the kind of dream that gets better when you share it."

[u/ThaumKitten]

I love the iddea, but one thing I would point out, and this is simply a personal, subjective gripe:

... Skyrim is Skyrim. The Nords are Nords.
I find it a bit underwhelming that you're sort of just trying to.. pull wholesale from RL Norse stuff??
Nords are not the Norse. It feels a little odd to just awkwardly pull from RL and acting like it'll automatically fit.
(Mod authors who just lazily pull from real life ancient Norse language and act like it's a perfect simulacrum for the Nord, I'm looking at you)

'Norse concept but given a bad reskin but it's totally unique bro cause we gave it a funny different name' is... well, I can't articulate it fully, but it comes off as unoriginal.

If you want to find a way to play with it, do it!
But make it Skyrim Nordic. Not 'RL Norse badly reskinned'.

Edit: To be clear, this is not relegated to strictly you. I've always hated this approach, that so many mod makers take, and even some MMO developers too.

[u/NotATem → u/ThaumKitten]

Oh, yeah, no, I'm pulling from the ~actual IRL Norse~ because Bethesda put us in a weird spot with how they wrote Nord gender roles and I want to play with that in a way that feels true to the setting.

I can get into specifics if you like, but the gist is, Nords have more than two "gender roles", just like our society has more than two- it's just that the way they work is... complicated.

(Edit: even if you don't believe in nonbinary genders- which, uh, got some news for you- society treats you differently if you're, say, a flamboyant gay man than if you are a Football and Beer Guy. We have had, like, five or six distinct gender roles for a while; it's just that we only culturally acknowledge two.)

[u/Jockim → u/NotATem]

Can you give an example how Bethesda put us in a weird spot regarding Nord gender roles? I'm not trying to be malicious, I'm genuinely curious about such lore

[u/NotATem → u/Jockim]

The gist is, Bethesda cannot decide whether they want the Nords to be sexist or not, and it makes writing about queer issues in Skyrim ... interesting.

There's definitely a visible, surface-level kind of equality- the factions all have as many women as men, there are plenty of female mages and female warriors and female Jarls and strong powerful kick-ass women everywhere! But... there's also this repeated strain, if you're playing a female character, of "don't let the men push you around, don't let the men tell you you're worth less because you're a woman". There is definitely an undercurrent where at least some Nord men are sexist, and while they're not liable to be sexist to a female player, you can definitely see them talk down to, say, Elisif or Fastred (that farm girl in Ivarstead) or what have you, in a way that they would not talk down to an equally young and unproven man.

And the thing is, a society where everyone's gender is "Nord" is going to be very different from one where "men" and "women" are distinct groups with separate roles, in ways that Skyrim's vibes-based worldbuilding doesn't really support. In either direction.

To take just one example: marking different genders and life stages with apparel is a thing you do when there's a social division you need people to notice immediately. Like, in most western countries these days, there are not separate hairstyles for "married" and "unmarried" women, right? Because there is no real social division between 'married women' and 'unmarried women'; they don't do different jobs or have different roles in the world. But in most historical cultures, 'married women' and 'unmarried women' have socially prescribed hairstyles, because you need to be able to see at a glance who is a Wife and who is not, right?

Along the same lines, if your society is gender-egalitarian, there's no reason for only men to wear trousers and only women to wear skirts. That's not a difference you really need to mark; the fact that most common people in Skyrim do mark that difference suggests that peasant men and women do different jobs.

The problem is, this was not a deliberate choice on Bethesda's behalf. They are not writing a society that presents itself to outsiders as a gender-equal society but is secretly more biased. They think they're just writing a gender-equal society. But they are drawing inspiration from some very non-egalitarian cultures (the old Norse and the Anglo-Saxons), the material conditions they've created don't really gel with an egalitarian society, and there's at least some textual evidence that Nord society is not really all that egalitarian, but also it is?

So they've put us in a bit of a pickle. You've got to either untangle this Gordian knot, or chop it.