Highlights
- Sweetrolls are a recurring joke in Bethesda RPGs like Elder Scrolls and Fallout, often involving theft and children.
- Skyrim’s memorable sweetroll references extend beyond city guards, with NPCs and quests dedicated to the pastry.
- The sweetroll joke dates back to 1994’s Elder Scrolls: Arena, becoming a long-running meme in Bethesda’s gaming culture.
Bethesda’s core franchises, particularly The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, are rife with charm and memorable moments. These series have inspired countless memes over the years, with Skyrim perhaps being the most meme-rich, helping to form the backbone of early 2010s gaming culture on the internet.
Elder Scrolls memes generally stem from comedic or bizarre dialog spoken by NPCs, with classics like “I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee” being among the most quotable. “Let me guess, someone stole your sweetroll?” spoken by many Skyrim city guards, is yet another commonly riffed-on line, perhaps due to its apparently random nature. It’s clearly meant to belittle the player character, but the mention of a sweetroll is so specific that it makes the line just strange enough to be memorable. This is maybe the most recognizable piece of sweetroll-related dialog in Bethesda’s games, but it’s far from the only one.
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Bethesda RPGs Have a Sweetroll Obsession
Sweetrolls In The Elder Scrolls and Fallout
Skyrim‘s sweetroll meme goes deeper than just the confusing jabs hurled by city guards. Several children NPCs will also make references to sweetrolls, with Jarl Balgruuf’s daughter Dagny regularly lamenting the low-quality sweetrolls of Whiterun. Various unnamed children can also be heard exclaiming “Give me back my sweetroll” at several points in the game. One of the more subtle, yet no less absurdly funny, sweetroll references occurs in the Dragonborn expansion, wherein players can find a stash of the pastries in thief Glover Mallory’s basement.
Similar sweetroll references and funny jokes can be found in Oblivion. There are several surface-level comments and nods towards the treats, as they are available as a consumable item and lauded by Skingradian baker Salmo as his greatest product. But perhaps the most iconic reference is a piece of dialog that can be spoken by a number of different NPCs, describing a time that they were attacked by thugs while carrying their sweetroll.
A pattern begins to form when looking at all these sweetroll references: so many of them revolve around someone either stealing or attempting to steal the treasured dessert. The sweetroll-stealing phenomenon isn’t limited to The Elder Scrolls, as several Fallout games also feature the pastries, with Fallout 3 having the series’ most iconic sweetroll-related shenanigans. In an early Fallout 3 mission, Lucy Palmer gives the player character a sweetroll as a birthday gift. Local vault bully Butch then attempts to force the protagonist to give them the sweetroll, allowing players to either fight back or acquiesce.
Sweetrolls can also be found in
Starfield
, but only as a consumable item with no obvious joke or theft-related story attached to them.
The Origins of the Enduring Sweetroll Meme
Sweetrolls first appear in 1994’s The Elder Scrolls: Arena. When players are creating their class at the start of the game, they are asked how they would handle a hypothetical scenario where three kids their age try to take their sweetroll by force. This scenario is posed again during the class creation process in Daggerfall and Morrowind. The answer the player gives determines their initial skill point distribution.
So, it turns out that the sweetroll joke is as old as The Elder Scrolls itself. The sweetroll thought experiment featured in Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind explains why the pastry is associated with theft and children, but why a sweetroll is the subject of so much thievery and violence remains a mystery. Perhaps sweetrolls tie back to a long-running inside joke at Bethesda, or maybe its like so many other Elder Scrolls memes, in that it is simply entertaining and absurd for no specific or logical reason.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Skyrim is the fifth major game in the Elder Scrolls series. Considered one of the greatest games ever made, it has been released on several generations of consoles. Since its initial release over a decade ago, Skyrim has become one of the bestselling video games of all time.
- Released
- November 11, 2011
- Developer(s)
- Bethesda Game Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Bethesda Softworks
- Engine
- Creation Engine
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Use of Alcohol
- Expansions
- Skyrim: Dragonborn , Skyrim: Hearthfire , Skyrim: Dawnguard
- How Long To Beat
- 35 Hours
- X|S Enhanced
- Yes
- File Size Xbox Series
- 29 GB (DECEMBER 2023)
- Metascore
- 96
- PS Plus Availability
- Extra & Premium (Special Edition)
