There is a quest where a child hires you to kill an orphanage he was staying in because the woman that runs the orphanage was abusive towards the children, though he never does anything to her himself. That's the closest I can think of
Skooma is a common drug in Skyrim, and there are many quests involving skooma addicts. In the Redwater Den added by the Dawnguard DLC, there is a dead khajiit bandit who died from skooma overdose.
A few characters are addicted to alcohol, and a few are addicted to the drug Skooma - one optional side quest has you retrieving some Skooma for an addict who is experiencing withdrawal symptoms.
Horses are common in Skyrim and are almost always killable. (You can kill Shadowmere but she respawns at her death place after a while) and in Helgen, a dragon is shown to kill a horse in the middle of the town.
There are many other animals in Skyrim such as chickens, wolves, foxes, hawks, and etc. Some of them are programmed to be killed in certain events, and some NPCs will be seen hunting them.
It depends on whether you consider wolf fighting rings to be abuse. The quests concerning these rings are entirely optional but are easy to stumble upon in normal gameplay.
Some bandit/enemy camps double as dog fighting rings, usually using wolves instead of the ingame dog models. It's not always easy to tell until you are outside the camp.
Many dead animals, even if you don't kill them yourself. You will stumble across them in the wilderness. They include sabrecats, bears, foxes, goats, and deer.
You can kill rabbits, on purpose for their meat or on accident from how weak they are and how they might get close to you when fighting, but there isn't any point where you are forced to.
There are no cats in Skyrim that resemble housecats, but there are giant sabrecats that are often hunted by NPCs but they don't resemble cats very much other than their paws and body structure.
No alligators or crocs in Skyrim, but they exist in the lore of the Elder Scrolls games. You won’t have to see them or fight them in this game. There are the more lizardlike race of Argonians, who may look a bit like them to you, but they are not gators or crocs
THere aren't any sharks, but there are piranha-like creatures called slaughterfish that appear in the water. They can be pretty much be avoided entirely however as they only appear in water.
Babbette, a vampire permanently stuck in the form of a little girl, tells the story about leading a man who was attempting to lure her with candy to his death. That’s about all I can think.
One character proudly calls himself “defiler of daughters” which could be seen as a mention of it (it’s unclear whether it’s consensual or not). Many mentions of rape in the Vampire lore. Molag Bal is a daedric prince of domination and rape. A few other mentions
There is an early faction quest in which the main character will need to brawl with or otherwise intimidate/extort money from shopkeepers. There is also a child character who threatens to beat up other children, alongside verbally abusing them.
Your hands are bound at the beginning of the game up until another character cuts you free. Multiple characters seen in the beginning of the game also have bound hands, and one is gagged. Several characters and/corpses can be found in cages. One character and many corpses are webbed up by spiders. During a Dark Brotherhood quest there are three characters whose hands have been bound and sacks are over their heads. When entering a specific city for the first time, a man with bound hands will be lead to be executed. There are many more examples...
A person cuts their hand to open a door, and if you follow the Dark Brotherhood questline, you injure your hand to open doors by placing it on a pedestal, where it stabs up through your hand. You can also find bloodied and plain skeleton hands in various places like caves and dungeons, but it is unclear as to the fate of the owners.
Beyond vampires, there are straight up cannibals in Skyrim. One quest line involves the player eating someone, and you may play alongside Eola, a cannibal. There are also innumerable caves with body parts strewn about even on plates on tables, strongly implying cannibalism has taken place.
There are multiple Spells in the game that imply choking, either by name, or by the effect they cause on enemies, such as "Hangman's Noose", "Choking Grasp", and "Vampiric Grip", additionally, during the Dawnguard DLC, Serana will lift Arch-Curate Vyrthur off the ground by his throat.
There are multiple points in the game during side quests that the player is rendered unconscious, such as the beginning of The Dark Brotherhood questline, where the Dragonborn is kidnapped while they sleep and taken to a shack in the middle of a swamp, the visual effect when waking up, blurred vision, implies you were knocked out to ensure your transportation.
Sabre cat teeth are an alchemy ingredient that can be looted from enemy sabre cats, alchemists, or found in loot containers such as alchemist pouches. Mammoth tusks are a similar item, and although they are not an alchemy ingredient, they are requested by NPCs in a few minor quests as crafting materials. Horker tusks are also similar to mammoth tusks, but can be ignored entirely, as they can only be sold to general goods stores or used to craft optional mounted trophies if the player wishes to add that to a Hearthfire DLC home. There is no gore on the models, however, and looting an enemy's teeth or tusks does not affect its corpse in any way.
The Thalmor can be found torturing Stormcloaks in their embassy, and in the Dark Brotherhood questline, you have the chance to torture some people until they give you money.
If the player jumps or falls from a high place, they can be killed by the fall damage. NPCs can also be "Fus-Ro-Dah"d from high places, which can kill them.
Optional, but in the character creation screen, the player can choose to give their character scars over their eyes, which could imply mutilation depending on the player's personal lore for the character.
Yes. You can fight with a variety of weapons, including swords and daggers and weapons of that kind of type, and they sometimes have like a stab motion attack animation. one of the killcam animations includes you stabbing the enemy (iirc)
Often in vampire hideouts, cannibal hideouts, Falmer caves, and in random caves. Blood, and bloodied skulls and hands. Various ingredients such as Human hearts, Dremora hearts, eye of sabrecat, spider eye, etc. include wet sound effects if you interact with them. If you follow a main questline with the Companions in Whiterun, killing the Glenmoril Witches in the Glenmoril Coven cave will allow you to acquire their heads. Once you loot them, you are stuck with their heads in your inventory until you fulfill the quest relating to them. Only then can you get rid of the extra heads. Looking at them in your inventory, flesh, bone, and spinal cord is visible.
As other comments show, there are storyline child deaths. In gameplay outside of quests however, children cannot be harmed outside of Player-made modifications to the game.
When first entering the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary, the character Babette, a vampire who is hundreds of years old, but has the body of a child due to becoming one AS a child, tells a story about how she killed an old man who was very..."doting" on her, calling her beautiful and sweet, before she, as vampires do, fed on his blood.
Yes. If you fight the Civil War, there are major, somewhat important characters that can die. A few major villains/antagonists die.. A few characters related to specific quest lines die as part of the story. Probably more that i’m forgetting (Counting the content added by the DLCs, as well as base game content)
At the first scene in Helgen you’ll see a boy and his father. Later in the game you can encounter said boy who will say that his father has died. You are also capable of killing the parents of some children
The player is capable of marrying more than one person in different cities as long as you own a house there... until the other finds out you are cheating on them. I haven't tested this, but have read about it.
Many of the dungeons are very dark and enemies can sometimes come out when you don't expect them too. This happened quite a lot to me however the game is usually pretty good about giving you audio cues for enemies.
In a special dungeon, there are thralls kept by a man whose will is trapped inside of soul gems. If the soul gem is removed from the pedestal, the thralls will turn on their master and attempt to kill him for imprisoning them.
There are wooden mannequins you can use to put gear on in houses you buy. There's a glitch that can cause them to move around like NPCs which can be scary but is patched in the mod USSEP.
The afflicted are a group of mortals cursed/blessed by the Daedric Prince of disease, Peryite. They have the ability to projectile vomit poison on opponents.
When you kill people and creatures, when others get killed by others and traps, and when you interact with wet ingredients such as hearts and eyeballs.
You can learn new enchantments by destroying enchanted items you already own, some of these being unique ones given as rewards for quests or looted from enemies and dungeons. Some Daedric Quests allow for artifacts to be destroyed, altered, or sealed away.
No, but there is a Destruction power type that has to do with electricity, as well as some enchanted weapons with those abilities. You and others are able to attack and kill with electricity attacks.
There is a quest called Discerning The Transmundane in which blood of an extinct elf species is needed to open a box. You can synthesize the blood you need using blood from all the other elf species still alive, and the device used looks like a box made of four tubes with needles sticking out.
Some places of worship are populated with comatose sick people being tended to by priests, but the resemblance to a hospital ends there as they lack any modern technology.
Sheogorath appears as the Daedric Prince of Madness. He and his servants act eccentric and his quest involves "curing" Pelagius the Mad, who is described as "insane."
In order to open a door during a main questline as well as in Dawnguard and a few other scenes, the player character must slit/impale their own hand to draw blood. This is shown onscreen.
In the Dark Brotherhood questline you're given a choice to kill a woman in Windhelm for a bonus reward. If you do, a few in-game days later you will find her mother's body and suicide note in the family house (which you may be required to break into for another quest)
Any Talos priest, especially the unavoidable one in Whiterun, shouts to the point of voice breaking a lot and sounding rough. It bothers an autistic person I know, but she deals with it by lowering the TV volume, muting, or running past him.
In the beginning cutscene, a guy panics, realizing they were being taken to be put to death. He further tries to flee once he's out of the wagon, where he is then shot by arrows.
There is a woman in Windhelm who will commit suicide if her daughter is killed during a quest. NPCs in the city who knew the character can occasionally comment on this as you walk past them.
Brunwulf Free-Winter and Ulfric Stormcloak, both found in Windhelm, reference their experience in the Great War in a way that implies PTSD but doesn't outright state it, with quotes like "There's no glory in war. It's just something they tell soldiers so they'll risk their lives" and "I fight for we few who did come home, only to find our country full of strangers wearing familiar faces".
If you choose to play the Civil War questline, in the first quest after the Battle for Whiterun, your fellow soldier will ask you if you also have nightmares about the screams from the battle.
Yes. SPOILERS AHEAD. Most of them are optional sidequests given in Raven Rock, Ivarstead and for the Thieves Guild (during The Pursuit and The Dainty Sload); falmer caves often have lakes and rivers and underwater passages. There's only two you can't avoid IIRC. In the Dragonborn DLC during The Path of Knowledge you explore a submerged Dwemer ruin and at one point it's almost inevitable to swim underwater to progress the quest. In one of the main quests for the Thieves Guild the room you're in starts to fill with water and it's hard to find the exit before it fills completely, so it's almost impossible not to end up underwater.
When you level up, there's a "Hoo, hoouh" and loud ring of swords clashing.
Daedric prince voices are louder than anything else, especially when you find Meridia's beacon and follow that quest. Also Hermaus Mora, the creepy, many-eyed octopus-like daedric prince of knowledge.
At various points in the game, different spells or effects cause bright flashes. There are also several cutscenes which feature bright flashes. I don't believe there are any repeated flashes.
Not really present much in Skyrim other than like one quest but a lot of the lore of Elder Scrolls could seem similar to breaking the fourth wall (CHIM, Zero-summing) but it isn’t really
In the Dark Brotherhood quest line, your first contract option is to kill a homeless man named Narfi who seems to have some developmental disability, based on the dialog options, voice-acting and other context (including a separate side quest involving Narfi not knowing his sister/ caregiver is unable to return to him because she died). Some might interpret murdering the disabled guy as ableist behavior. It's not clear who ordered the contract or why but seems implied someone in his community considers him a nuisance and wants him gone. He has no weapons or ability to defend himself.
Fantasy world, no Judaism (one can argue the Skaal are Jewish-adjacent as a monotheistic minority living in a separate village, but there's no prejudice against them)
The closest thing is that during one quest called The Mind of Madness, in Pelagius's Mind; there is an attractive-looking woman called "Sultry Maiden" who doesn't have any voice lines and doesn't have much relevance to the quest, but in early versions of the game she had a deep male voice, and that may have been some small attempt at a transphobic joke, but it was very hard to notice even when it was in the game
Bandits may often yell at you depending on your race. (Ex. 'You'll make a fine rug, cat! if you're a khajiit) (Ex. "Die, you Orc filth!" if you're an orc)
To avoid triggers, don't download or install the Dawnguard and Solstheim add-ons. You have frequent encounters on the mainland with the equivalent of hellhounds, seen as black and grey with red, glowing eyes, described as colder than death. On the island continent of Solstheim, you encounter fire zombies with red, glowing eyes (using fire won't work on them) that look caked in ash and melted wax (reminiscent of corpse wax -- don't look it up, please just trust me on this).
Others are: Gargoyles, seekers, Hermaus Mora, daedric lords you can summon or fight, and following the vampire's questline going through a portal into the Soul Cairn.
There's an implied mention of beastiality in the radiant dialogue between Thrynn and Cynric Endell in the Ragged Flagon Cistern, but no actual beastiality. Unless marrying a werewolf counts.
Haelga's bunkhouse has a bed with manacles attached to the headboard. Leather straps are nearby, and she is known to have multiple lovers, implying BDSM happens there.
In the Elder Scrolls lore, there’s quite a bit of stuff about the existence of the people of Nirn not being “real” and stuff like that - but it’s not really mentioned in Skyrim
Santa (et al) are not mentioned in this game. However, there are some fan-made mods which introduce "Saturalia", an in-universe equivalent of Christmas, including Father Saturalia and his workshop.
Underneath Dragonsreach, there is the skeleton of an unknown person, floating in the water. The player can drown if they are underwater for a long period of time.