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Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis or Raichu emerging from Pikachu, Skyrim Grandma Shirley Curry has reached a new, impossibly powerful form. She has become Oblivion Grandma—Grandma Remastered, roaming the hills and dales of Cyrodiil with sprightly abandon.
Curry, who was born in 1936, has been a stalwart of the Skyrim YouTube scene ever since her first upload a decade ago. Barring the odd break and hiccough, she’s been a regular since then, uploading roleplaying-focused Skyrim vids that have even earned her a nod from Bethesda itself. Now she’s branching out, getting menaced by conjurers, taking issue with UE5, and gradually falling in love with Oblivion the way I did in 2006 (when Curry was a mere 70 years old).
The streamer has two Oblivideos uploaded at time of writing, titled Learning and Still Learning, alternating between being wowed by just how pretty the remaster is and taking issue with the ways the game differs from the more familiar Skyrim: “I press F and it puts [weapons] away… R used to put my weapon away! Oh god, I wish games would leave what the alphabet stands for alone and keep it the same for their different games.” She’s not a big fan, at least at first, of how it feels to move around in TES 4 either—”Just absolutely ugly movement.”
But Curry warms up to the game after a little bit, finding herself particularly smitten with how dang pretty the whole thing is, roaming the outside walls of the Imperial City snapping screenshot after screenshot. As someone who poured most of my adolescence into roaming OG Oblivion, it’s pretty fun to see it through fresh, thoroughly Skyrim-pilled eyes.
Anyway, I do wonder how long Skyrim Grandma will stick with Oblivion. Curry’s second video sees her venture into one of the game’s approximately eight bajillion caves, which is probably the exact wrong place to send the Skyrim Grandma if you’re looking to convert her to a new game.
It’s dark, brown, and labyrinthine, and I’m reasonably certain Curry’s whole experience reaches its nadir when she’s forced to reckon with the opaque and beautiful mystery that is Oblivion’s lockpicking system, letting out a very aggrieved sigh as she grapples with it before eventually giving up and hitting auto-resolve (been there, grandma). Someone tell her about that Oblivion lockpicking cheese method.
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I do hope she sticks with it, though. In fact, I hope she becomes so thoroughly enamoured of Cyrodiil that she decides to fire up Morrowind, and we get the first Morrowboomer from the Morrow-Silent Generation.
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