The modder Kukielle has spent thousands of hours creating her own followers for the role-playing game Skyrim. The 2011 RPG still has 20,000 average players on Steam thanks to such an active modding community. But Kukielle’s work on mods should now be over. As she says in an interview with a gaming magazine, she is tired of the daily contempt. Skyrim’s community always takes but gives nothing.
What mods is Kukielle known for? The modder Kukielle is known for designing her own followers for Skyrim that are advanced, have their own voice lines and interact with the game:
Their most famous mod is called “Daegon and Kaesarius” (via nexusmod). The mod gives players two followers with over 6,000 voice lines that interact with each other. The mod has been downloaded 475,000 times.
Kaesarius is a sword-wielding, sinister mage-rogue. Daegon is described as a “pyromaniac witch”. Both followers are fantasy characters that fit certain tropes and fantasies, with Kukielle emphasizing that her mods are not sexually charged, although many think that into the characters.
Additionally, she has launched a follower named “Little Witch Taeka,” which she has also invested thousands of hours into.
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Modder explodes after a comment and throws everything away
What was going on now? The modder posted a music video on the community site nexusmods and wrote that her debut album was out. However, the video only received 247 views in 8 days and the thread in the forum was largely ignored.
A post that then responds says that “the mixtape is okay and stuff,” but where is the new update for Taeka’s new mysterious boyfriend? The mod is fine, but it lacks the hot sex friendship of the other, larger mod.
Kukielle is apparently fed up: At the request of the fans, she spent so much time giving Taeka even more romantic content, which she never wanted, and is now fed up. She won’t do anything anymore.
“The Skriym community only takes and never gives back”
Kukielle explains that she invested thousands of hours into the female companion Daegon, fulfilling every wish the fans had, and then invested another thousand hours to undo everything and continue working on the character. But people are never happy with it.
Skyrim’s community always takes and takes, but never gives anything back. She always gave in and adjusted her work and it killed her. It makes her sick every time she logs into Nexusmods.
She doesn’t do anything anymore.
Modder invests an insane amount of time in Skyrim – but it’s never enough for people
This is what the modder says: Gamesradar spoke to the modder, who earns about $400 a month for her work via Patreon. She says:
I put thousands of hours into developing my characters until they felt real in every situation they could find themselves in. They were redeveloped from the ground up multiple times, each time more advanced, and they could do things that had never been done before in a game… I wanted a character with real personality that I could identify with. I wanted to have a best friend.
Modder thinks she’s seen as a ‘slutty sex kitten’
Being one of the few women in an industry that is 99% male, I am constantly belittled and called the ‘slutty sex kitten.’ I have never created sexual content, but people talk about me as if I do […]
Gamesradar adds: Some of Kukielle’s mods are marked as adult-friendly on NexusMods, but the modder emphasizes that they are not explicitly sexual and that the warning mainly has to do with swearing.
She says she has put many years of her life into a job that doesn’t fulfill her. Now she wants to make music to be remembered for something she really enjoys.
When a hobby becomes an unpaid profession
This is what lies behind it: It’s cynical to look at it from the outside and comment on it coldly, but these are patterns that you see in many things related to gaming, whether with content creators or in e-sports. When a hobby requires the same effort as a job, and you spend as much time on the hobby and have to make as many compromises as you do for a job, it is a difficult and stressful situation.
Because with a job there is a salary as recognition and the possibility of career advancement. In a hobby, that reward is purely the feedback from the community and other people – and that feedback, as you can see, is fickle. Because the fans have their own perspective and their own interests. They don’t know how the artist is doing and don’t tailor their feedback accordingly.
There are beautiful stories where someone makes a breakthrough out of such a hobby and with the support of sites like Patreon and ultimately gets a dream job. But for many, such hobbies that are pursued with the intensity of a job remain a hobby that creates frustration.
Perhaps as a positive ray of hope: Apparently Kukielle has now gained some popularity on Patroen after her outbreak; her earnings there have increased by more than $100 in the last few days.
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