#lol idk what to tag this as i dont rly have a dedicated witcher tag on here

[communistkenobi-archive]

Mr kenobi pls tell us ur spicy witcher opinions if u have any

I have lots of Witcher opinions!!! Fair warning though this will be long and rambly and winding lol

To preface, most of my enjoyment of the Witcher comes from the third game. I’ve read several of the books (though not all) and seen some of the TV show, but the third game is the one I generally return to when I want to experience the Witcher world again (although I highly recommend the two short story collections, The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny. Those are my faves from the book series and are also the ones that the games borrow most heavily from). Witcher 2 is also pretty good but I’ll focus on W3.

I started replaying W3 recently after (sorry for what I’m about to say, I promise it will be relevant) finishing Supernatural and desperately wanting a better version of the monster/bounty hunting genre. What’s most compelling about the Witcher, to me at least, is that it’s not afraid of its own shadow. It accepts the logical conclusions of its own premise - you’re a guy who’s paid to hunt monsters and that’s exactly what you do, but “monster” is not some neutral or objective category. A lot of monsters are just creatures whose homes have been disturbed by the local population not respecting the environment around them, and are understandably angry and violent because their way of life is being threatened. A lot of monsters (especially spectres and other spiritual creatures) are manifested as a result of human beings committing horrific acts of violence, cruelty, and betrayal - people who are now begging Geralt to clean up their mess. A lot of monsters aren’t monsters at all but people that the citizenry have declared monstrous because they’re a little too good at practicing medicine, or they’re too successful in their intellectual pursuits (frequently these people are women, although men are also labelled as such). Often times the pretext of “hunting monsters” is thrown out entirely and people come up to Geralt and straight up ask him to kill their neighbour because they stole their shit, or to “get rid of” elves or dwarves that are minding their own business but have the misfortune of living too close to some paranoid and bigoted person.

Geralt’s position as someone who specialises in hunting monsters isn’t akin to “pest control” (which, hilariously, Supernatural frequently makes reference to when the brothers try to describe their own job to outsiders). Geralt is a necessary reactive measure to existing political and social conflicts, frequently called upon by powerful people to uphold the status quo and often violently punished when he does not do so. His presence in the game is inherently political, and his status as a Witcher puts him in the same category as “monster”, meaning he’s actively shunned, feared and despised by the same people begging him to save their asses.

And the very interesting thing about the game is that, like, yeah sure you can choose to be a dude who cleans up the messes of rich people, protect their property, and generally be a violent asshole to people and creatures who don’t deserve it. But you can also not do that. And it’s often much more difficult! Sympathising with the monstrous and the marginal will commonly cost you a lot of money, or favours, or even threaten your life. And even if you aren't punished for that sympathy, it usually requires you to work through the problem in your head and come up with an alternative solution that is more labour-intensive than simply killing the thing you're contracted to kill, like figuring out how to break a complicated curse or how to solve an interpersonal dispute between people. Sometimes you piss off an entire town by not, for example, killing a bunch of innocent people they started beef with, and forever after are met with insults and pitchforks should you return. But the game makes it very clear that you have to choose one of these two things. You can’t do your job “neutrally” because there is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to hunting the things that society deems as monstrous or deviant. People often remember Geralt’s speech from the trailer (and the books) “evil is evil, less, greater, middling, makes no difference. […] if I’m to choose between one evil or another, I’d rather not choose at all”, and the game is very aware that that is the basic premise of Geralt’s character and works towards disabusing him of the notion that he’s able to remain neutral.

A lot of player-choice-focused RPGs struggle with the morality of the choices presented to the player, and I think the Witcher does a very good job with it (especially with small scale, self contained conflicts that don’t tie into the overall story). Mass Effect goes the easy route and literally colour codes the morality of your choices, enforcing an almost metaphysical system of ethics that is determined by the game mechanics itself rather than a conscious engagement the player has with the conflict in the game. But with the Witcher you have to pay attention to what people tell you. Often times quests will require you to get multiple perspectives on a given conflict, and everyone will tell you a wildly different story that favours their own goals, biases, and motivations. And you have to make a decision based on incomplete and inaccurate information, and the game will not tell you if you made the “correct” choice. There is no higher moral power telling you what’s good or bad, you have to make that decision and then live with the consequences. There’s also sometimes no way to know how a certain event would go down had you decided the other way unless you look it up online or choose differently on your next playthrough. Sometimes the consequences aren’t even immediately apparent, and come back to haunt you (sometimes literally) many days or weeks or months down the line. The game is not, like, “paternalistic” with its own information, it doesn’t present an objective omniscient view of what “really” happened with X quest or Y character. I think that narrative choice reinforces how lonely Geralt is. He’s never given the freedom of abstaining from asking “is what I’m doing okay?”

Now the game isn’t without its problems of course. A huge problem is that it deals with deviance and marginalisation without ever meaningfully engaging with race and racial politics. Like yes elves and dwarves are mistreated, but they’re also all white, and the story sometimes even does a “both sides are bigoted” thing with elves. iirc this is more prevalent in Witcher 2, and it’s been a while since I played the main game of Witcher 3, but I remember those criticisms being part of the discussion of the game(s), and they’re well-founded. The game also doesn’t always hold true to the philosophy I’ve outlined above. Not every quest is some deep moral quandary, and sometimes you just kill stuff for money. Which is fine! But it’s not always consistent.

The OTHER thing I find really interesting is that the game is set in a vaguely feudal society but has a fully realised institution of science (iirc this was established with huge help from witches, which is a very cool and interesting concept). Now I’m not a historian or an expert on the exact sequence of events that lead to the Enlightenment in our own history, so this is going to be incomplete and probably reductive in some way, but I’ve read critical reviews of Enlightenment era intellectual discoveries (ie the time period commonly referred to as the birth of modern science, which came after the collapse of feudalism) and its function in society, and a major criticism of the movement is that scientific logic and inquiry was often used in colonial pursuits and ambitions by the state, and was, to modern standards, completely made up horseshit (things like eugenics and race science more broadly is a huge product of this).

And in the game it’s also sort of like that? At the very least the Witcher doesn’t uncritically endorse scientists and intellectuals as inherently good or noble people in the way a lot of media with generally liberal politics does. But IMO it’s critical of these institutions in a non-reactionary and non-anti-intellectual way - oftentimes you’ll find the notes of a scientist or otherwise “intellectually minded” person, and their experiments are just like horrifically cruel bullshit with no real point aside from punishing creatures and people these scientists have deemed as beneath them. Science that only seems to reinforce the status quo (categorising things as “monsters” and then leveraging that label to do terrible things to them) is often the reality of the day. Again, not always, but often. Which is super compelling!

ALSO also idk where to put this because it's a comparatively minor point, but I looooove how much of a bitch Yennefer is. Like unapologetically an asshole to a lot of people while still remaining sympathetic, and especially if you read the books you can track her development into a kinder and more considerate person over the course of many years. She was one of the few bright spots in the Witcher TV show for me and I loved her actress’s performance.

Anyway lol I very much enjoy the Witcher. It’s championed by a lot of dumbass centrist gamer bros as the pinnacle of rationality and logic and “both sides” style of debate that terminally annoying nerds love (which to my great shame was my perspective on the game when I first played it as an 18 y/o), but in my opinion the Witcher is very alive to the contradictions and irrationalities that exist in human societies and is very eager to explore them. It earnestly asks the player to reckon with what exactly the label “monster” does in society, the power it has, and who benefits from that label being applied to various people and supernatural creatures. Geralt often remarks that he’s not a bounty hunter, that “a silver sword for monsters and a steel one for humans” is a fundamental misunderstanding of the work he does, and the game deliberately problematises the human/monster dichotomy in a way that isn’t misanthropic or reactionary, which is pretty impressive!

I have other criticisms of the game’s overall story that are hard to talk about without me playing through the entire game again to jog my memory, but it’s easily one of the favourite games ever and I love it a lot. Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone are both amazing additions as well and add a lot to the game.