revoevokukil - Tumblr blog

[revoevokukil]

they are canceling me for the way i deal with grief. also, for the infinite number of destroyed universes

[revoevokukil]

shut up warhorse is giving me hans capon canonically singing henry a hero's serenade rhyming luck with fuck??? Istvan being the most intense motherfucker complete with henry parallelism? Red PTSD flashbacks and his parents' wedding memory??? I'm not talking about anything else for 6 months WE GOT MUTT BACK

[revoevokukil]

Love in The Witcher Saga

@fagflint got me thinking about pears

[revoevokukil]

how are you liking the dune saga? Did you finish reading all of it already?

I am currently at God Emperor of Dune, and I am probably going to stop after this one. By what I've read and heard, the quality of Herbert's ideas and writing decreases rapidly after GEOD. It also seems like the first four books form a natural set of meditations.

It's a madly relevant book for my interests. How can I say "no" when the Litany Against Fear encapsulates the central conflict of prescience and warns of the impending plot right from the get go? People commend Dune for meditations on ecological sensitivity, politics, religion, and power. That's cool. I fixate on metaphysics. And the genetics and eugenics (see gwern on this for a good time), since these underlie the madness of Dune's philosophy in an eerily similar manner to The Witcher. It's a bit like reading from the perspective of the elven Sages. However, I sense I have better uses for my time than reading its last two parts' brooding on sex; context around the author's life adds to the distaste, and as for love, its special role is implied sufficiently strongly in the first four editions (except in the case of Jessica, where it may be theorized that her bearing a daughter instead of a son may have been influenced by the future-Paul via the retrocausal influence of prescience).

Bears repeating then that I picked up the series for several of its core ideas. Herbert's style is not noteworthy, minus an occasional bout of descriptive poetry, and the characterisations are forgettable. Exceptions for me consisting in young Alia and Stilgar; the rest are dominated by the plot.

Something quoteworthy:

The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not . . . yet, I occurred. - Dune Messiah

[revoevokukil]

“That’s a good idea,” the elf dipped the brush into the paint. “Phallic worship was typical of early civilizations. It can also be used to forge the theory that the human race suffers from physical degeneration. The ancestors had phalluses the size of batons, and the descendants had no more than ridiculous twigs… Thank you, witcher.”

Happy almost a month belated birthday Saskia!!!!!! A quality book Avallac’h, heard u were a fan <33333 @kylooren / @commanderiorveth

[revoevokukil]

Ill be doing 12ish more portraits - this black paper is really hard to work with, so I'm taking the opportunity to work on my faces.

[revoevokukil]

I can't believe that The Rats didn't know Ciri was nobility. That girl was born and bred to rule, do you think a year or so in a witcher keep is going to rid her of all those mannerisms?

And The Rats are street kids. They are uneducated and obnoxious, but to stay alive they've got to have a keen sense for opportunity and a cutthroat willingness to put themselves first.

So this little high-breed girl wants to travel with them? Sure. At first, she's easy to manipulate and then later turns into the most bloodthirsty of them all. Why not let her put the target on her own back?

It's war, there's chaos everywhere, no spare coin and little food to go around. The market for hostages isn't good - especially when you don't even know where this one is from. No one wants to take a risk on having to feed another random street urchin whose parents might have just been well-educated servants.

Ciri is worth more to them, for now, as one of their own. And I'm sure they liked her! Even cared for her in their own way. And I'm sure if the price was right they would have sold her out in a heartbeat.

And I'm sure that Ciri, later in life, would wake up one day and realize that. One more trauma to add to the list; another group who found her uses more important than her.

[revoevokukil]

I love the ambiguity of the term ‘WIP’. Is it a project in it’s third draft? A final draft being queried? An idea I came up with six months ago and haven’t written anything about yet? You don’t know. Nobody knows. 

[revoevokukil]

Tremendously fond of Avallac'h not being accustomed to joking, but also sporting the sense of humour of a sardonic 12-year old.

[revoevokukil]

Source of inspiration：

‘You did come alone,’ Avallac'h said seriously.‘But not by choice. Fate has brought you here and we helped a little.’ ————The Lady of the Lake

[revoevokukil]

Would love an illustration of Sapkowski punching a giant needle through a pile of books that inspired him, creating a wormhole through all of them, with his own series on top. Ard Gaeth made. Spacetime folded.

[revoevokukil]

When we talk about Ciri, we don't talk much about her own latent ability to see/predict the future, and what it could imply. It's Sunday morning; time for a tea cup theory sesh.

So, coming off Dune - a clear influence on some storylines and characters in the Witcher - could Ciri's capacity for prescience (foresight, prophecy, visions) have blocked her choices and actions from being accurately predicted and seen by someone like Avallac'h who - as an Aen Saevherne - otherwise has abilities almost identical to Kwisatz Haderach?

Was Ciri's escape from Tir ná Lia a certainty or a probability?

It's noted in Dune, how prescients are more or less blind to the movements of other figures with foresight, because people with oracular powers act on the information from the future and actively alter the future this way (disrupting the ability of other prescients to accurately predict the future). They stand "outside" the vision in lieu of an inherent ability to introduce variance in it.

A clairvoyant can't even necessarily see the definite future, but they can see Time so totally (the "when" is not a place), all its possibilities included, that they can create the future; matching, at that, with their goals. They are like ultra-heavy bodies in a field, warping it around themselves. However, if there are those standing outside of the vision, then dictating the future is not entirely possible, for there will always be unknown agentic elements that can turn the tides.

Ciri would be such an element in Avallac'h's and the prescient elves' prophecies and vision of time eternal.

I am pointing to this lore crossover, because let's face it, the Bene Gesserit and later Leto II's breeding programmes are exactly the kind of thing that was done in regard to Hen Ichaer, the Elder Blood, among elves. Breed prescient beings capable of seeing the past, present, and future (i.e. time total; the now) AND moving themselves in time and space (that's the Aen Saevherne) AND from time to time get a Chosen One for whom it's possible to open the Great Gate of Time (that's Lara's would-be child or Ciri's children). Secondly, Ciri, the child of destiny and hope, is so because of a kind of 'uncertainty field' that surrounds her -> she is, arguably, the most agentic, free will-questing character in the tale. The story ends up being about (ensuring) her ability to choose - to doom, to save, to act as she wills regardless of her parentage, powerful actors' manipulations, or the world's expectations.

(Sure, The Witcher is reeeeeaalllly loose with its causal structure (things go the way they go because magic aka "the will of the author, who plays within folklore tropes and story analogues", mostly); it has nothing on Dune in this regard. We can have a classical mechanics Ciri, a quantum-Ciri, or a magical/literary-Ciri. But the ambiguity allows for crossover-theories like this one, so that's fine by me.)

At Tir ná Lia, Ciri has visions of a future where things unfold without her interference: Yennefer drowns, Geralt freezes to death. It's not conscious foretelling, it's inherent to her thanks to her genes. Genes of elven Sages, who see past, present & future - total time.

Considering the aim of the Golden Path then, an analogy: one hypothetical result of the mutations introduced into Elder Blood via mixing human genes with elven ones results in Laplace's demons (Sages) creating a mutation in their own genotype down the road that even the demons themselves can no longer predict.

Making Ciri a Child of Hope in the sense of a truly free, indeterminant wild card, the nature of whom enables uncertainty in the outcomes of the fates of others connected to her choices. Because she herself remains elusive to actors who've a hand in tracing the blueprint of the universe, an act which in itself creates a future that cannot be avoided. The mutant Ciri is a genuine child surprise.

"A universe of surprises is what I pray for!" - Leto II

Analogously to Dune, where the end goal of the Golden Path is for humanity to be rendered undetectable by prescient beings and given a chance to survive by remaining outside of the constraints of a deterministic universe. By, what looks like, evolving a free will.

[revoevokukil]

Literally squirming with glee at this

vs

the eternalism Auberon explains to Ciri in LOTL.

[revoevokukil]

I wish age gap discourse hadn't spiraled the way it has because I want there to be a safe space to say "Men in their 40s who date 25 year olds aren't predators, they're just fucking losers"

[revoevokukil]

Update: I have finally read Dune. I am half-way through the saga. I predict (& hope) I will get the chance to be insufferable about this mad creation in relation to The Witcher as soon as I have reached the bottom and, oh, there's such a long way to go yet.

[revoevokukil]

Does Vernon Roche look at Foltest starting a literal civil war over his children and go 'damn, what a good, loving father?'

Like how does he read that whole situation given how loaded his way of talking about Foltest is? Does he even realize that what Foltest is doing is borderline nonsensical? Does he even care? Does he wish his father gave that much of a shit about him?

[revoevokukil]

Neutrality? Indifference? She wanted to scream. A witcher looking on indifferently? No! A witcher has to defend people. From the leshy, the vampire, the werewolf. And not only for them. He has to defend people from every evil. And in Transriver I saw what evil is. A witcher has to defend and save. To defend men so that they aren’t hung in trees by their hands, aren’t impaled and left to die. To defend fair girls from being spread-eagled between stakes rammed into the ground. Defend children so they aren’t slaughtered and thrown into a well. Even a cat burned alive in a torched barn deserves to be defended. That’s why I’m going to become a witcher, that’s why I’ve got a sword, to defend people like those in Sodden and Transriver - because they don’t have swords, don’t know the steps, half-turns, dodges and pirouettes. No one has taught them how to fight, they are defenseless and helpless in the face of the werewolf and the Nilfgaardian marauder. They’re teaching me to fight so that I can defend the helpless. And that’s what I’m going to do. Never will I be neutral. Never will I be indifferent. Never!

Ciri Blood of Elves Andrzej Sapkowski (via melancholiafactory)