Serana from Skyrim still delights gamers with her habit of resurrecting goats and chickens in battle instead of experienced warriors
A good RPG companion watches your back, carries your loot, and stays out of the way of your sword. Serana from Skyrim watches your back too, just in her own way: mid-fight, with half a dozen sturdy warriors lying around, she can decide to raise a goat from the dead.
That exact scene recently made the rounds on Reddit. According to the poster, the bodies of about five Forsworn lay next to the vampire, and out of all that choice, Serana picked a humble hoofed animal. The GOAT joke, as in "greatest of all time," was right there for the taking, and pretty much everyone ran with it.
The choice does have a fairly boring explanation. Serana, the companion from the Dawnguard add-on, reanimates the closest suitable corpse. On top of that, necromancy spells in Skyrim have a level cap on targets, so a seasoned Forsworn with a hagraven heart may simply be "out of her league," while a goat always makes the cut.
It doesn't stop at goats. Serana regularly raises chickens, hares, and other small fry. One player shared a touching story about a "battle chicken" that flailed around the battlefield uselessly for a couple of minutes before crumbling to ash. Killing it so Serana would pick something stronger felt wrong. Another commenter put it plainly:
Her father does say she always favoured keeping a pet.
The habit has a darker side, too. At Frostflow Lighthouse, where the keeper's family was killed by falmer, Serana once raised every member at once. The player had to put them down a second time and apologize to the dead on her behalf.
Little wonder a mod called Serana – Necromancy Removal has been sitting on Nexus Mods for a while, stripping the vampire of her urge to practice necromancy altogether. Complaints pile up even without that: a reanimated corpse can't be looted, and it also breaks sneaking.
The Forsworn never learned how to win in Skyrim in fifteen years, and the goat still wins.
