The best stuff to come out of fandom is often the weirdest. Welcome to the world of DovahBear, an animated web series by Disney and Dreamworks animator Joe Bowers. It asks the immortal question, “What if an ordinary Skyrim bear were given the powers of a Dragonborn?”

The series is one of those things you don’t find on your own, but rather stumble across while looking for something else. With its first episode released seven years ago, and its most recent two years ago, DovahBear has been a fun side project by Joe Bowers. He’s a professional animator, and has worked for Disney, Riot Games, Dreamworks and other studios, and just can’t stop animating. He does it as a day job, he does it for fun, and the results are always hilarious.

Joe is obviously very well versed in the lore of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, because all the characters and locations in his animations adhere very closely to how they’re portrayed in the game.

The Episodes

The first episode was more of a one-liner. A bear of Skyrim is chasing a swordsman who turns out to be a Dragonborn. The encounter goes in a very unexpected direction.

The second episode of DovahBear picks up right where the first episode left off, with the bear still airborne from being attacked by the Dragonborn he encountered in the first episode. A most ambitious bear of Skyrim, the bear takes on the role of Dragonborn, with all of its responsibilities. He learns fighting skills, horsemanship, the joys of honey mead, and how to shout like a Dovahkin during a confrontation with a dragon.

The moral of Episode 2 appears to be “don’t drink and drive.” Watch.

With Episode 3, DovahBear has fallen off his horse from drinking too much mead, ends up floating downstream where he gets his big fuzzy butt shot full of arrows as he floats through a camp of Forsaken. After whipping up a quick healing potion, has an encounter with a mammoth, and ends up with lunch.

Episode 4 sees the DovahBear having taken over a little house called Breezehome in the town of Whiterun, from the very same DragonBorn he p0wned in Episode 1. DovahBear has a powerful sense of destiny, though, and before the clueless and useless Whiterun city guard can catch him, he makes good his escape in a surprising way.

If you think DovahBear is cool, you can get DovahBear swag on Bowers’ TeeSpring store and his Spreadshirt store. You can even get a 3d printed bust of the DovahBear if you want one. You can get them from his Shapeways store. Here’s the video showing how the busts were made.

If you have encountered something weird and wonderful like DovahBear that you want to share with us (or made it yourself, even better), email us with a link to submissions@scifi.radio and we’ll help you share it with the world.

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