Touch the Skyrim was a webseries by Griffin McElroy and Nick Robinson, the creators of Car Boys and CoolGames Inc.. The premise is simple: each episode, Griffin loaded The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with a number of ridiculous Game Mods, then played the game while Nick offers commentary and tries to spot all of the mods. The mods stack up over the course of multiple episodes until the game is either rendered unplayable or transformed into something that Nick (who doesn't like "vanilla fantasy") actually enjoys. When this goal is achieved, Griffin uninstalls the old mods and downloads new ones, and the whole process starts over.
The series went through five "versions", with each version marking a new set of mods:
- Version 1.0 followed Bone Dogg, a skeleton warrior who causes chaos and violence to the town of Whiterun, the world of Skyrim, and eventually to the fabric of time itself.
- Version 2.0 followed Susan Crushbone, an orc "sex princess" on a quest to bring peace to Skyrim by making love to, well, basically everyone.
- Version 3.0 followed Sagness Jambone, a brontosaurus elf with huge middle fingers, on his quest through the Mushroom Kingdom.
- Version 4.0 followed Nick Griffinbone, a villager who becomes the mayor of Skyrim.
- Version 5.0 followed Samus, aka Susan Crushbone, and is a collection of the best of the previous mods, intended as a Grand Finale. It ended abruptly due to Nick Robinson being fired from Polygon note , leaving the series with No Ending.
Touch the Skyrim provided examples of:
- Actually a Good Idea: 3.0 is largely spent in the "Super Skyrim Bros." mod, which Nick and Griffin poke a fair bit of fun at when they aren't ripping it to pieces with console commands and other mods. When they get through the end of it, they walk away with genuine praise.Griffin: Alright, this is the best fuckin' mod I've maybe ever played in this whole game. I can't fucking believe how much shit went into this mod.
- Ambiguous Gender: Judging by 2.0's many, many sex scenes, Susan has a penis. However, no explicit attention is drawn to this detail, and it's not used as a punchline.
- Anachronism Stew: A common element, due to the various mods. Most prominent in 4.0, which replaces horses with cars, swaps dragons out for fighter jets, and adds an X-Wing to the top of an otherwise ordinary stone tower.
- Black Comedy Burst: Even in a series full of comedic murder, ordering Minecraft Steve to kill his dog stands out as unusually dark.
- Brick Joke: In episode 2, Bone Dogg sends all of the Greybeards toppling off of High Hrothgar, rendering the main quest unbeatable. Near the end of episode 4, he somehow runs into the one they needed to talk to at the bottom of the mountain,
to Griffin's delight. - Cast Full of Gay: Through the use of sex and romance mods, both 1.0 and 2.0 feature numerous same-gender relationships.
- Chainmail Bikini: All of the armor in 2.0 turns into this when worn by female characters.
- Chaotic Stupid: Griffin and Nick's preferred play style. They ignore or actively break every storyline they encounter, make up their own quests (that they often immediately abandon), and spend most of each episode running around killing NPCs and trying to break the game.
- Comedic Sociopathy: Much of the show's humor comes from Griffin's constant over-the top murders of NPCs.
- Crossover: A lot of the mods incorporate characters or elements from other franchises, such as Sonic the Hedgehog or The Legend of Zelda.
- Crossover Ship: In-Universe, Susan Crushbone is paired with characters from multiple other video game franchises.
- Cut Short: The series ended one episode into what was intended to be the final arc.
- Dance Party Ending: Episode 7 ends this way, which Nick and Griffin claim is how all Bethesda games end.
- Dem Bones: Bone Dogg is a reanimated skeleton.
- Died Standing Up: This is Bone Dogg's death animation.
- Driven to Suicide: Bone Dogg's final episode sees him jump off a cliff due to a combination of his failure to fix the Time Crash and the fact that the world flooded somehow.
- Establishing Series Moment: The opening of v1 sets up what the series will be like. First, all of the trees are hands reaching up to the sky. Second, "Skeleton" appears in the list of playable races. Third, Alduin is replaced by Thomas the Tank Engine. These three mods alone establish that Nick and Griffin are not going to be playing Skyrim as we know it.
- Even Evil Has Standards: The show may run entirely on mass murder, but Griffin and Nick are still very freaked out whenever a child NPC wanders into the background of scenes involving sex or nudity.
- Extreme Omnisexual: Susan's conquests even extend beyond the playable races of Skyrim to include Sonic the Hedgehog and Crash Bandicoot.
- Eye Lights Out: When Bone Dogg dies, his eye lights go dark.
- Forced to Watch: A non-villainous example. Minecraft Steve is made to stand by and watch as his wife, Susan Crushbone, nails Crash Bandicoot.
- Game Mod: The whole premise of the series is built on abusing these.
- Gendered Outfit: The Batman armor turns into a generic Chainmail Bikini when Susan puts it on, though it's due to interference by another mod rather than anything inherent in the Batman mod.
- Gentle Giant: TestJeremyBig and TestJeremyBiggest, gigantic human men who just stand around peacefully and die instantly if placed in combat. They're actually animation tests hidden in the vanilla game and aren't meant to interact with other characters, but one of the mods in 2.0 displaced them.
- Girl on Girl Is Hot: Defied. Nick notices a male NPC watching while Susan makes out with a female NPC and asks Griffin to remove him, calling the guy "creepy".
- Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: Bone Dogg has these.
- Hell Is That Noise: Griffin uses the "killall" cheat on a Batcave full of clones of Sonic the Hedgehog and Crash Bandicoot, and the resultant cacophony of death grunts is so awful that he insists he's done and tries to end the video there.
- I Kiss Your Foot: Discussed. A jarl's son tells Susan she should kiss his father's foot, and Nick jokes that the sex mod Griffin's installed probably has an animation for that.
- In a Single Bound: Griffin occasionally changes their jump height with console commands to this effect, such as having Susan Crushbone jump 15,000 feet to get to the College of Winterhold without having to climb all the way up.
- Loads and Loads of Loading: The sheer number of mods running at any given time inevitably results in this.
- Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Susan will bone down absolutely anywhere, including populated banquet halls and snowy mountain paths.
- Naked People Are Funny: Nick and Griffin get a kick out of "Dibella's Compulsion", a mod that strips NPCs of their clothing.
- Our Orcs Are Different: Susan is technically a revisionist orc, though "sex princess" is a fairly unique interpretation of the race.
- Reveal Shot: In 1.3:Griffin orders Bone Dogg to kiss his husband, Proventus Avenicci. The screen goes black.Griffin: It's loading a romance scene.The screen fades back in, revealing Proventus' dead body.
- Right Through His Pants: All of the lovemaking in 2.0 is fully clothed, with the justification that Griffin and Nick would get fired if they included nude lovemaking in the videos.
- Save Scumming: Griffin makes liberal use of quicksaves, usually to roll back after killing everyone in a given area.
- Stripperiffic: All of the female characters' outfits turn into this in 2.0. Griffin and Nick discuss the Double Standard of the lack of "sexy dude mods" and ultimately decide to rectify it by stripping every character to their underwear.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: A regular feature of the series.
- In 1.0, perky Zelda music plays even as Bone Dogg slaughters NPCs.
- In 2.0, Griffin plays "Simple and Clean" by Utada Hikaru every time Susan kills someone with the keyblade.
- 2.2 sees the fight music unexpectedly replaced by a mashup of DMX's "X Gon Give It To Ya" and Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe".
- The preview for 2.3 has Erik Satie's "Gymnopédie No. 1" playing over clips of Susan and various NPCs having sex, smoking weed, and dancing.
- So Unfunny, It's Funny: One of the mods in 2.2 replaces the Loading Screen text with "dad jokes".
- Theme Tune: A perky, jazzy instrumental riff.
- Theme Naming: "Bone" appears in every protagonist's name so far.
- Time Crash: Bone Dogg causes one of these thanks to some unfortunate mod and cheat code combinations.
- Wacky Fratboy Hijinx: Referenced when Susan "pantses" the Archmage of the college of magic.
