Skyrim player DarkMaster06 didn’t waste a second pretending that their request on the Skyrim Mods subreddit was anything more than an elaborate “troll” mod. But they asked for it all the same: “This is my request,” they wrote. “Based on the Game of Thrones series, we should add a Starbucks cup to Dragonsreach.”
A couple weeks ago, as part of its race to an unsatisfying conclusion that could’ve been good if the showrunners had taken their dang time, Game of Thrones left a cardboard coffee cup in a shot that made it into the show. It became a meme faster than you can say, “Yeah, I know I said I was gonna cut back on coffee before, but I’m really gonna do it this time.” HBO has since removed the shot of the cup from the episode, but its spirit lives on.
Within three hours of the Skyrim Mods request post going up yesterday, two modders—Sphered and Johnrose81—came through. They whipped up their fresh brews in eerily similar amounts of time, but each of them took an intriguingly different approach to the subtle art of crafting a throwaway meme mod.
Sphered decided on a no-nonsense approach to this admirable brand of nonsense. Their “Mysterious Coffee Cup” mod adds a detailed Starbucks coffee cup to the throne room in the city of Solitude as well as, per the request, Dragonsreach keep.
Johnrose81 went all out, by which I mean, he ensured that his coffee cup appears everywhere. It appears in place of any and all tankards, and if you know anything about Skyrim and its Viking-inspired setting, you know that there are a lot of tankards.
“You’ll see it too much,” Johnrose81 said in the coffee cup Reddit thread. “Trust me. I made it, and even I got sick of it. It replaces ALL the tankards with this cup. It is funny to walk into a bar, and everyone is drinking coffee. I mean, you really notice how alcoholic everyone is when they’re drinking coffee, and you’re like ‘Man, they drink a lot of coffee.’”
Johnrose81’s mod is also, er, sort of lore-friendly—at least as far as out-of-place coffee cups go. All of the cups display a logo for “Skyland Coffee” instead of Starbucks, and the mod page reads like fantastical ad copy.
“Skyland Coffee offers all the caffeine needed to rescue a land from Thalmore, Dragons, Skooma Pushers, and Vampires,” it says. “Replace those dreary tankards for a fresh, clean recyclable coffee cups from your favorite brewer, Skyland Coffee.”
So there you go. Now you can relive an infamous Game of Thrones moment in Skyrim. Then you can quit the game, return in a few years, start a new character, and wonder why the heck everybody in high-fantasy-Norway is drinking Starbucks.