labingi

I don’t think I’ve written about The Witcher before, probably because its first two seasons didn’t make a strong impression. I modestly enjoyed them, but with S3, I’ve reached a level of fannish interest that’s sparking some disjointed reflections.

NB 1: Yes, the show has gaping structural problems, which haven’t bothered me too much because I haven’t been invested in following that story structure; I watch more for character and curiosity.

NB 2: I haven’t read the books or played the games; I’m referring to the TV series as a story in itself. I gather that many (most?) book/game fans don’t like this adaptation because it is far afield from the source material, and given my own response to Interview with the Vampire, I totally get that. Neon Knight has an interesting interesting video on this. Anyway, to book/game fans, my show-based reactions may be frustrating, which is totally understandable. Spoilers behind the cut

Character Stuff
Let me start with Geralt and Yennefer. Writing people falling in love is hard, and it’s harder in this mini-series streaming format than it was in TV shows with 22+ episodes/year. In S1, I didn’t enjoy G/Y. I found their initial meeting and almost immediate fall into bed clunky, likewise, their weird wanderings through suddenly seeming to know each other well (partly down S1’s non-linearity). But we’re over that hump now; they’ve known each other a long time, and they work fine as a couple (though her S2 betrayal basically got a reset with no consequences). Overall, I feel for G/Y a bit like I felt for D’Argo and Chianna in Farscape: I get why they’re together; they’re well written (often). I’m just not very interested in their relationship, probably because I don’t connect strongly with either of them as individuals.

That also expresses my feeling for the found family they form with Ciri. All three characters work well together. I believe they love each other. I’m just not emotionally compelled, probably, again, because I don’t relate strongly to any of them.

What is compelling for me, though, is Jaskier. This came as a surprise to me because the semi-comic relief sidekick is a type of character I usually don’t connect with. In Blake’s 7, he’d be Vila, whom I like but don’t fannishly adore, like

vilakins does. :-) In Xena, he’d be Joxer, who annoyed me. In Buffy, he might be Xander, a character I liked fine but rarely thought about.* And in S1, Jaskier fell into that zone for me: occasionally annoying, mostly just not a focus of interest. But by S2 that began to change, and it changed a lot in S3, partly due to his growing up. I mean, characters in this story just don’t physically age, but he’s got to be 20+ (?) years older than when we first met him and it shows (in character, not physically).

What got to me in S2 was his feelings of being abandoned by Geralt. Thanks to both good writing and good acting, his pain and anger were palpable. I do think the series tends to resolve interpersonal conflicts too fast, at least among the principals, and it did with this one too. But it was gut wrenching while it lasted.

S3 continued with good emotional impact.

(Sidebar: one thing I enjoyed in S3 was a tendency toward “not really betrayal?” plot threads, where it would appear that two characters are scheming behind their comrades’ backs, but then one of them is like “So I was talking with So-and-So, who thinks that we should do Thus-and-Such.” It’s a nice partial subversion of the betrayal trope. Anyway, Jaskier got at least one of those.)

And then there’s Jaskier + Radovid. (I get that this is totally different from the books and that book fans would be creeped out and frustrated by it.) As I suggested above, I don’t think The Witcher writes romance especially well. It writes established relationships fine, but its falling-in-love threads tend to be flat for me. But, boy, (for me) did they get chemistry out of Jaskier and Radovid, which is all the more remarkable given that Radovid is at least half played as a scheming, cowardly, spoiled prince. He shouldn’t be likeable—but, for me, he kind of is. Because he’s also played as reasonably smart and sincerely interested in Jaskier, in his music, his insight into people, etc. And part of the intrigue for me is that I couldn’t, till the end of the season, tell if Radovid’s feelings are sincere or not—and I still don’t know how much that matters in the face of self-interest. This places me as a viewer in the same place as Jaskier, knowing that this guy is a self-interested schemer, but also suspecting that that’s not all he is and kind of at sea about how much to give him the benefit of the doubt. With a decent amount of build-up over the season, this is much more organically tense attraction than I felt from Geralt and Yen in S1.

It’s also surprisingly rare, I think, to see a character fall for someone in spite of knowing/strongly suspecting they’re up to no good—not because of it, like they’re sexy because they’re mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but in spite of it, like, Oh God, if only they weren’t (probably) on the other side. (Note: I’d say Geralt falls for Yen because she’s dangerous; he’s troubled by it but also very taken with her because of it.) All this makes for a fresh and interestingly ambivalent relationship.

I also like that Jaskier seems to lean heterosexual but homoromantic. That’s a rare split, at least in modern times. Now, this season tells us he’s up for having sex with a man, but in general, we’ve seen him far more invested in sleeping with women, yet without showing much deep emotional attachment. The two most emotionally intense and vulnerable relationships we’ve seen him have are with Geralt and Radovid. The rarity of that pattern makes it intriguing to me.

Worldbuilding Stuff
I spend a lot of this show confused about what is going on politically. That’s partly because I haven’t put the time into figuring it out, but it’s also because they do masses of infodump with little organic development. My partner observed that (early) Game of Thrones did it much better, and that’s a good comparison. For example, GoT using the opening credits to show you the map was very helpful. A more one-to-one comparison would be the symbols the opening credits of each show ends on. In GoT, we see the four emblems of the wolf, lion, stag, and dragon, representing the four main families in the “game.” In TW, we get some new emblem each episode, representing something about the episode, I guess, but I rarely know what it’s in reference to.

Gender: You know, I was going to say I like how The Witcher handles gender. I was going to say:

It’s depicting a western medieval-ish world that has something very close to gender parity. That’s not easy to believably pull off: there are multiple reasons why our real medieval world was so virulently misogynistic. Christianity is one of them; women’s comparative lack of physical strength and reproductive freedom within a rigid hierarchical system are others.

The Witcher obviously doesn’t have the Christian issues, but it effectively doesn’t have the other issues either because of magic. Magic, at which women are least as good at as men, operates as a physical force (even in literal battle) and levels out the differences in physical strength. I don’t think it’s been explicitly discussed, but I have to assume it also gives women effective contraception, and, thus, largely eliminates reproductive servitude. It probably also reduces infant mortality, which also frees women from lives devoted to childbearing. This all makes sense and doesn’t rely on empowerment through warrior women being physically as strong as men, though the show has badass warrior women. Overall, I think it works quite well—well enough that one episode’s throwaway line about how powerful women have always been called insane rang false to me. It felt like an observation from our world, not theirs.

I was going to say that, and I think it has some truth, but then a couple of things happened:

1) The last couple episodes started going really explicitly misogynistic in worldbuilding (ex. the history of how women were excluded from the “Brotherhood”).

2) My partner, quite rightly, pointed out that all my points only refer to a high level of power holders, whereas typical village women are still, as Virginia Woolf might say, probably being knocked around the room. Fair point.

So I guess what I’m left with is, okay, it makes sense that this would be a misogynistic culture (for those minus magic, at least). But I do kind of lament that my initial take was off, because it is really, really hard to write SF&F works that feel like they have true gender parity.

* I notice of these three examples, B7 is the only one in the present tense. It is definitely the only of these I repeatedly go back and rewatch.