Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Witcher: Ecology & Side Characters

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

This is our final discussion with Trevor on The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski. We talk about the ecology of monsters, side characters, and how to problem solve using words. Thank you all for sticking with us through this series!Follow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @HistoryofPersiaDarius: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 bro are you fucking real man come on so one more theme that we sort of wanted to cover here definitively was ecology in the world of The Witcher. Because even though it's not a thing like he necessarily like he tries to address directly that often, like I don't remember if he ever actually says the word ecology in the book at all. But there are direct conversations about the concept of ecology in the book at all but there are direct conversations about the concept of ecology in the world i remember like at least two conversations directly that like gerald has with other characters about ecology and conservation and that sort of thing um this is a topic you specifically did want to include uh travers do you want to sort of start us off with like your thoughts about how this works in the world?

Sure. A lot of it is kind of intended as a metaphor for, you know, European colonialism. Like we talked about when we were talking about portrayal of race. tearing through resources and displacing species and other races just to be able to get at more land to farm more land to cut down more trees to build more buildings human settler stuff yeah um And this is framed by either Zoltan Chive or Yarem Zigrid, one of the Dwarven company leaders, kind of as an invasive species thing. this story does well is that even though you have elves who live all of these other races live for a really long time and elves are more attuned with magic and dwarves are super strong and gnomes are super intelligent well humans can have lots of babies and they they don't live as long but we fuck like rabbits and populate faster.

Those definitely, those, sorry to interrupt, those definitely Yarp and Ziggurin, because he was having that conversation with Ciri when they're on the trip that's just a fake out to see if they're loyal. Right. And that's kind of a textbook explanation for invasive species, which is what a lot of the monsters are implied to be. They're supposed to have come in the same convergence event as the humans. But they all come in with relatively small populations compared to the creatures that are already here and the intelligent races that are already here. intelligent races that are already here. And then they start sucking up resources and land as they rapidly expand in population. And part of this is, I think, informed by the fact that the overpopulation concern was still booming in the 90s. You know, that's not something we talk about a lot in terms of environmentalism and you know

concerns in modern politics because it's mostly been disproven but at the time when these books were being written there was still a lot of talk about how human beings were going to overpopulate the earth and that comes up every now and then still but but it's not as big an issue. Most of the time it's brought up now is for like really bad reactionary reasons. Yeah. Mostly. There is kind of something to be said in these books for they haven't industrialized. So prior to being able to artificially create nitrogen, we would have kind of capped out a population on earth but we can we have fertilizer now so that's not it's not really an issue yeah we had the green revolution

and stuff so that's that informs kind of how he portrays humans as an invasive species but it's still definitely invasive in a certain way which leads to environmental destruction at human hands and the out like the elves and dwarves being incredibly long-lived races definitively see humans as this like a pest essentially that's like that's come in and taken their land and their resources and that the elves at first a large group of them anyway thought that if they just sort of retreated and waited, humans would eventually just sort of die off like other species would do if they gobbled up too many resources. Well, I mean, that also with both dwarves and even elves, like the elves that do get kicked out of like Dol Blathanna, for example, they don't know how to farm because they didn't. You know, they don't um know how to farm because they didn't you know they they they didn't farm they didn't mass agriculture in any way they they were very like ecological that's from they talk about that is that that's like this in the second book i

think that's the first one that's the edge of the world oh that's right yeah it's the first book where they go to the edge of the world the elves elves are like, send that like Seder guy to like get food and try to learn how farming works. So it's like not only are humans like this weird pest thing that's shown up and is overpopulating, but they also consume way more resources in general, just like per person. Well, and or at the very least more land in general yeah because we need all these big open spaces for farms and raising animals and all that other stuff where the elves could just like live off what was in the woods i guess yeah you get the sense that there was a lot of destruction of food bearing trees right when the humans arrived which makes sense uh-huh which we still do yeah you know no how many people do you know who eat acorn bread like that's food you could eat it but

nobody does so we cut down the trees and yeah you know now we build parking lots but once upon a time you know planted wheat because that was the that's food yeah people don't think about how diverse the human diet can be um and we've just chosen for it to not be yes generally so yeah you sort of have this like do according to you know elves dwarves and gnomes this sort of dual invasion of humans and other monstrous species. I get the feeling that the monster species also more often just bother humans than they do the other races. That just could be a function of numbers. You know, like, like strigas and vampires might not bother elves that much

because there's just not that many elves. Yeah. Well, and you kind of get the sense that monster is a category defined by ordinary humans you know because there's a lot of educated humans and sorcerers who are concerned about dying off monster populations there's the one wizard who shows up in the story with three jackdaws and he shows up again at the whole wizard convention where the coup happens and i can't oh is that the same guy that makes sense pretty sure it's the same guy i can't remember his

name like he he's there when they're fighting with jackdaws and he's like tries to stop them from killing the dragon and then i'm pretty sure it's the same guy because at the banquet he starts complaining about people wearing shoes made of like the skin of rare animals and like there's no way that's not the same guy yeah so there is this interesting thing that plays out where at least some monsters are implied to have shown up around the same time as humans. But Geralt is repeatedly criticized for killing rare species and people treating them, at least, you know, the monsters as part of the natural world and the same level of less dangerous creatures. and in a world where new species regularly get dumped in from other realities i don't know how you even quantify what's indigenous at that point if you don't have really well recorded history like are the is the only is indigenous just by whatever's been there the longest you know what i mean or like if you've been there a certain amount of time do you then become indigenous

to whoever comes after you you know what i mean that's certainly how some of the dwarvish characters talk about it is like well the gnomes were here before us and the elves were here after us like they certainly see them even themselves and they're like second oldest on the totem pole sort of thing yeah they're even admit that they came from somewhere else. I'm remembering a very specific conversation that stuck out to me about this. It happens in the second, maybe it's the third book. Geralt has hired himself out to guard a riverboat, where he just rides up and down the river on this boat for this company

to guard against some river monster. That's the idea. Obviously, he also has like a secret plan where he's doing it to attract the attention of Rions and all this other plot stuff. But while he's on the barge, he has an ongoing conversation slash argument with a scientist about the monster

that he's been hired to protect the boat from. And the scientist like wants to says, Geralt calls it the wrong name. And it goes into like its scientific name, what breed of animal it is and like what environment it lives in and how it couldn't possibly live in this river because of the rivers, the wrong environment for it to live in. If it was here,

Geralt shouldn't kill it because they're endangered. And then of course, at near the end of the boat ride, they get attacked anyway, and Geralt has to kind of fight it. And the scientist is like, well, I guess you're right. They do exist here. But I don't remember what that was. But I remember specifically that was like an ongoing conversation about, like, should these animals be preserved despite the fact that they kill people the scientists

like they should be preserved at all costs and gerald's like well how do you tell that to like when like a pregnant woman got snatched off a boat last week like does that still deserve to be protected even if that's what it's doing and the scientist is like well of course it does and then kind of changes his tune once it like attacks people yeah well this is you know this is something especially if you come from a community where lots of people hunt that is an ongoing conversation in our real world where you know humans and predators don't get along you know even if you ignore the fact that you know it's difficult to raise livestock in an environment with predators and say well we don't need to raise animals for food you know wolves and humans just aren't great environmental companions without a few thousand years of it of selective

breeding right so you know in the real world in the that comes up a lot in the context of hunting where humans kind of have to remove dangerous animals from a densely populated environment and insert themselves into that part of the food chain. So you get places like, you know, the state I live in where like deer hunting is not only a thing people do for meat, but a thing that the state controls and encourages because otherwise there's no predators for the deer. We've replaced the wolves with ourselves. And so we have to do the job the wolves used to do. Which is obviously not a perfect system because you also have you know microorganisms that

are supposed to live off of wolves dying in the woods but yeah you know you i'm not justifying it's it's not you know it's not a perfect system but also like humans and things that eat want to eat or can really fuck up a car, don't live well together. And that's kind of the issue that Geralt finds himself in, in the books a few times is that, okay, sure. You want to preserve this because it might be the last of its species, but it eats boats. So, you know, how, how do you confront that? Yeah. yeah you know how how do you confront that yeah how do we coexist with this creature that you say needs to be preserved when what it does is like destroy boats that people use for like daily life

and in the real world my my wolf has a opinion about that um And in the real world, we've worked out a system where we say, well, there are areas of unhindered wilderness where we just won't mess with it. And we've done a good job in the last 50 to 70 years of building environments back in our world. But there's, maybe it was just in the book i was listening to today there's a scene where uh someone is talking about druids who are another group of people in the witcher universe there's so many groups of people um who go to a king and warn him that in you know two to three years, he will have exhausted his fish stocks in the accessible part of the ocean. And the king tells them to come back in a thousand years

and see how it's going. Because with pre-industrial technology, it's hard to imagine destroying that much of the environment. But they're cohabitating this world with these other groups of people who are much longer lived and have a much longer term perspective on environmental consequences. Even the druids themselves, because they live longer. because they live longer. Because everyone who's not a human, their superpower is that they live forever,

and the human superpower is that they can reproduce faster than everybody else. Wait, side note, that's a weird little twist there, because for multiple characters, the price of giving up the human short lifespan to live longer, what do you have to trade for it? Your ability to reproduce. Oh, yeah. With minor unexpected exceptions. Yeah, there's exceptions, but it's funny that you said that all the other weird people are like their superpowers living a long time where humans reproduce a lot. Those people that live a long

time in many cases had to give up that ability to reproduce in order to live a long time like most sorceresses can't witchers generally can't like that sort of thing and even the other non-human races do it incredibly slowly like elves or dwarves or whatever so it's just just an interesting point. So we can go on, sorry, about what you were saying. No, I think that's relevant, and it's also kind of ingrained in the portrayal of humanity as an invasive species in this world. Yeah, it really is.

I do think that's interesting that we see that trope all across fantasy and sci-fi, is that anytime humans have to interact with non-human species be it fantastical ones or alien ones oftentimes humans are portrayed as the short lifespan high activity high reproductive species almost i don't know if it it started with tolkien but that feels like another tolkien-esque trope because Tolkien's whole thing was that mortality was, what's his name, was Iluvatar's gift to man was mortality. Yeah. But I'm thinking it even seeps into sci-fi for anyone that's played Mass Effect.

Oh, yeah. sci-fi for anyone that's like played mass effect oh yeah well well there's there there are other short-lived races too but like compared to the more higher races that are like in charge of stuff humans are like a short-lived high reproduction well yeah um they're definitely the highest reproduction in terms of mass effect like the the solar are like, they live for like 40 years. They're like a really short-lived race. Okay. But you know what I mean? You see this in other fantasy and sci-fi settings.

It's an interesting theme that sort of continued is this whole humans are the short-lived aggressive species. Yes. They're the short-lived ones that are go-getters because they're short-lived. Which I don't know if you've met people. A lot of us really aren't go-getters. I'm going to be honest with you. Well, I think we would be go-getters compared to 2000 year old elves who know that they'll probably wake up tomorrow and they'll probably be able to do whatever they want that's fair so another thing i think that goes with this sort of ecology thing with balancing the species we've got you know balancing this like do we keep the invade these species even though they kill people clearly that's a debate that's ongoing throughout the book gerald has some

very clear ideas about it let's talk i think that relates a little bit to his code, which I think we mentioned earlier. That's not really a code, but it's just Geralt's personal opinion about things. I think less than a Witcher code is he draws a line somewhere between certain kinds of quote unquote monsters and others, right? Like he has a line that he draws for what he will and will not kill.

How does he how did he draw that line? And is it actually a meaningful distinction in that line he draws? Because like it's not just intelligent species because vampires are intelligent, like other monsters that he kills are intelligent werewolves are intelligent but he'll kill them no problem but like but he won't kill dryads or a number of other monstrous types of creatures or species so where does he draw that line and is it actually like theoretically like does can that distinction actually line? And is it actually like, theoretically, like does, can that distinction actually be made or is it just an arbitrary line that Geralt drew?

Like I, I personally, I feel like it's, it's not like, I mean, it's as arbitrary as when you, when you sit down and think about it, a lot of times it just has down to how much damage those monsters, in quotation marks,

not only are capable of, but are willing to do. It's like, if something is negotiable, he negotiates. But if something is entirely non-negotiable, like if he tries to negotiate, it doesn't work. There's nothing he can do about it. And then he gets backed into a corner where it's fight or die. You know, that's, you know, fight or kill. But, like, even with, like, the Bruxa,

like, he talks to her first to get a beat on what her deal is. I still think he always intends to kill her, though. In that story, yeah um but but obviously with somebody like regis joining his party later on not every vampire is immediately on the chopping block i feel like with with gerald it comes down to personal motivation and and i feel like it's really a like anthe-moment decision that he makes. Something to keep in mind with Regis, and I am thinking about this because it's something that I listened to today, is Geralt doesn't know Regis is a vampire until he has saved a little girl's life.

life so regis has not only been traveling with them but has proven his own altruism by the time gerald finds out what he is and even then gerald tries to throw him out of the company because he assumes regis is dangerous it's not until regis has helped him multiple times against Geralt's wishes that Geralt accepts him. And Regis eventually explains that in this universe for higher vampires, blood is an intoxicant, not a source of food. So what does he eat? Food, as far as I can tell like he eats fish oh uh yeah he's doesn't he make like a certain kind of like a moonshine yeah he makes moonshine out of mandrake which is yeah ludicrously toxic um okay so yeah he can just eat people food, generally. Yeah, so, but Geralt assumes, baseline, that he's like other vampires and must be addicted to blood as an intoxicant. And says, I won't kill you, but I don't trust you, go away.

And Regis ignores him until Geralt will listen. So Regis is a Twilight vampire, the twilight books, where he just decided to not drink blood. The specific story is that he developed the vampire equivalent of a drinking problem,

got so hammered on human blood that he crashed into a building while in mid flight and was stabbed, burned, and beheaded hammered on human blood that he crashed into a building while in mid-flight and was uh stabbed burned and beheaded by a group of villagers and then had to recover underground for 50 years and then gave up drinking forever one of those anecdotes that sapkowski just tosses in there. This is why Regis is so cool.

But also in Season for Storms, he has a werewolf friend. Geralt does. But Geralt also has killed werewolves. Well, so I think... I think it does come down to one-to-one, like, specific scenarios. Geralt's line starts at, you starts at a definition of sentience.

And then beyond that, there are some things that he talks about as monsters because they are on average destructive and dangerous. But I think in reality, beyond that level that he considers sentient, it's actually the same decision-making process that he makes with people. He doesn't have any compulsion about killing people if they are a threat. He actually kills way more people than he does monsters throughout the game. Well, exactly.

So I think it's actually the same kind of threat assessment. It's just that some of them, the people around him consider monsters. And so he folds that into being a witcher. And other times, if he's able to successfully negotiate with the werewolf and tell the werewolf to go live in an isolated cabin in the mountain somewhere, he's happy to do that instead. There is one, though, I think it was in the last book I read where he like points out at times some villagers paid him to kill the werewolf and the werewolf just like didn't even fight back. They just like cowered in a cave and just stood there while Geralt like just murdered

it. Like it was just it was like a passing anecdote of like the work he had done recently to get the money to pay that like private investigator guy. And he's just like, oh, yeah yeah that werewolf didn't even fight back he just walked in and killed it while melt on the ground and i'm like that's a bit cold yeah the concept of werewolves is not explored in the main books it really only comes up because there's a werewolf character in season of storms so he kind i think like he had that story on his mind with this character because he kind of retroactively creates this this idea where a lot of werewolves consider themselves a threat oh like they think i am a threat to society and i should i should be stopped they wreck you know

they recognize themselves as cursed and dangerous so you know that is an element of it but also like you're right gerald you know we don't know what happened with that particular werewolf that he talks about because that story is definitely in there so it counts like you're right it is so it just comes down to very much girl just making a decision on the spot of like threat assessment and sentience level and his own how he just feels about it yeah i think if he considers it sentient, it's entirely based on in the moment threat assessment. And if he doesn't, he considers himself a pest exterminator. Yeah, anything that's non sentient, he's just like, I don't care, I'll kill it. Well, not. I mean, I don't think he'd kill like a unicorn or something. Well, unicorns are sentient though yeah but does he know that and i don't think he could anyway because he'd like raise his sword

and it would poof into a different dimension okay that's fair so it's like yeah they they'd be like i don't think you're a virgin he can't yeah he can't and he cannot pirouette fast enough to get to a unicorn so you know like outside that one weird example like everything that he can sit that is sentient is bipedal outside of unicorns and he can kind of use that as a baseline does it walk on two but there are non-sentient things that walk on two legs too well right sort of well. Sort of. Well, to be fair, actually, no, I'm counteracting my own example immediately because the very first story is him killing the Striga. But he doesn't kill it. He beats her and transforms her back. He cures her.

So the Striga was the thing I was going to bring up next because the one we see, he cures. But that is obviously not his policy. He definitely kills lots of Stigas he's it's mentioned multiple times and part of that i you know based on all of the other patterns that geralt exhibits in the series my guess would be that in its cursed monster form Geralt would not consider a Striga intelligent. And if he doesn't have all of the very specific information needed to cure it, he's not able to take that alternate approach. So he could only cure this one because he knew so many of the details surrounding its transformation that he believed a cure was a likely possibility that seems to be how it's explained in the story it's also the first story that sepkowski wrote so who the hell knows yeah that was that the one he wrote to submit to the magazine i believe the first one

it's also the most monster fighty of any of the monster fights yeah it's got the longest monster fight where he literally goes through step by step taking the potions and like the like setting up and how he hides and what he's gonna do let's say that that that striga thing is very clearly the setup for what would become the games more so than really any other story. Because it's in the first game, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

The, well, it's used as the intro cut scene in the first game. Ah, like the first game, when you boot it up, if you don't click anything, it has like an animated cut scene of him fighting and curing the

Striga. Well, I can see why that would be the base of the games. Cause it's very much has all the game mechanics in it. Like it has the signs. He takes the potions. the games because it's very much has all the game mechanics in it like it has the signs he takes the potions he makes the signs he does like all the he does the fight like and then the rest of the story every other monster he kills is very much like more much more brief like can we count i think we can probably count if it's like sections that were describe him actually killing a monster for a bounty.

Less than two hands, I think. I think not quite every short story. No, because a lot of the short stories don't. I mean, the short story, the end of the world, he doesn't kill the satyr, right? He just like gets captured by elves and then saved by some sort of harvest goddess. There are ones where he kills monsters that he's not getting paid for. The last one in Sword of Destiny.

Not what Three Jack does. He does kill... Like ghouls. He doesn't kill anyone in Cintra. He just cures the princess uh the princess um he killed with the doppler he doesn't kill the doppler he doesn't he does kill the weird things that attack him on the bridge that lead him to siri in sword of destiny yeah i think they're he never even says what they are he kills the sentient atlantis people but those he does kill them in his estimation well he then tells the king to fuck off well like i

think he considers them sentient but he also only kills them because they are actively trying to murder him at the moment i think i don't think if they didn't attack him i don't think he would have killed them he kills a centipede monster in the first time we see brokilon yeah he kills a weird centipede monster trying to eat siri yeah so we're still i think and then you know he kills the the kikimora whatever i'm like yeah he kills a kikimora he won I'm like. Yeah. He kills a Kikimora. He won't see him kill it, but he does kill it. And he kills the, whatever that big fish thing is in, in blood of elves.

I'm up to like maybe five. Yeah. Like there's, I guess that, I think there's less than 10 throughout the entire series of like times. Oh, he kills that weird. Um,

when he's in the city with yennefer when she's like two-timing with the wizard he kills the monster that lives in the trash heap oh right at the beginning right at the beginning like of that story section he kills that monster yeah and he does the same thing at the beginning of the jackdaw story um when he kills the basilisk off screen yeah he kills the basilisk off screen most Yeah, he kills the basilisk offscreen. Most of the short stories, I think, open with him having just finished. Yeah, but if you narrow it to ones that we see him do, even if you count the basilisk,

because it's happening concurrently while a scene is going on, I still think we end up with less than 10. Yeah, there's another one in Tower of Swallows because he's doing a favor for henrietta but this monster killing story has very little monster killing um it's mostly like world events happening to a guy who kills monsters for a living and him being so wildly out of his depth that like stuff just happens to him your total shoots up if you throw in season of storms uh okay because it's just a series of short stories of him killing monsters yeah and it's not trying to build the

plot because the main plot has already been told okay um and kind of the overarching plot of season of storms involves artificially created monsters. Oh, okay. So that could probably get you up to like 13. Okay. Over the course of this entire series. Yeah.

But so, but when you just count that, I think we stuck at less than 10, which again, I think is an interesting choice for the story that if you asked a random person on the street, they'd be like, Oh,

witchers are monster killers. That's what it's about. And when like 90% of the text of this whole series has nothing to do with that. Well, yeah, because I think, again, most people's initial impression of what the books are is what the games are. Yeah, yeah. And the games are, you know,

even relative to the lore of the books, have to artificially, ridiculously inflate the number of monsters. In order to make, you know, playing the game fun. Right. Because if the game was if the game was as monster packed as the books, you wouldn't be doing a whole lot. Yeah. It would be Geralt standing at a wizard's feast being uncomfortable yeah and the thing is is even in the and there's still plenty of that games um but like um they still are rpgs at their at their core um but like um in the books monsters are essentially

disappearing like the witchers were so fucking good at their job that for those like couple hundred years when they were in best service when there are monsters everywhere they essentially pushed all of them back to borderline extinction and so now you know a witcher it's like one of one of my favorite bits in the last wish is when they're like reading that old rune book and no one can read it but the old lady like says oh you pay a witcher a copper for this a gold for that and a silver and a half for this and he's like if you think that's what it costs nowadays that you're hilarious um that scene is unrelated uh it's very funny to me for a different reason because there is a joke in there that i assume could only make sense in polish and props to

the translators who had to figure out how to make you know whatever middle polish dialect she was speaking oh yeah you know translate to readable English because they talk about how it's so easy to fall into the rhythm of this old fashioned pattern of speech. And that's not a thing in English, but they had to try and portray it. Yeah. Yeah. We're like the,

yeah, the, the, the villagers have a very unique speaking style. That's supposed to be older or something. And like suddenly Geralt and dandelion are both kind of doing it well to me that was just like to me that's just like i don't know like i went to you went to england for a little too long and suddenly you start like saying a few words with

an english accent or something i guess my name because it ends in a an er uh trevor so yeah i have to put a British accent to introduce myself to people from the UK I'm Trevor I'm Trevor it's okay I pronounce it Dandelion

so you know I think unless we have anything do you have anything more to say about sort of ecology that we have

going on here any more important points I want to point out the great frost even though it's not explained very well yeah there's because he's definitely included climate change in his story on purpose you know he takes the time to mention it yeah it's not focused on and it's actually more focused on in the you know lore snippets that you get at the beginning that are talking about the world in the future, where it's already started to happen. But I think it's at least worth acknowledging that Sapkowski intentionally said, like, climate change is happening in this world you know it's not global

warming it's you know getting cooler but the metaphor is obviously intentional yeah it is interesting that he went out of his way to be like this is a thing it's not important to the main plot really but I'm gonna make sure you know about it yeah in the case of the world though unless i'm mistaken it doesn't necessarily come across as like human made in the same way that our situation is here yeah i would say it's more unavoidable because of humans yeah the because the solution to it is something to do with the elder bloodline that has all but died out because of human presence humans murdering elves yeah so there's there's some implication that humans have made it so that it's impossible to prevent

but not necessarily that they caused it which again i think is maybe kind of in line with popular discussion of you know environmental issues in the early 90s yeah yeah before it was you know pretty definitively human caused well al gore hadn't come out with an inconvenient truth yet so nobody knew what he no one knew what they were talking about well exxon mobil executives knew oh yeah let's say there are newspaper snippets from like 1912 where people like if things like this continue actually we could see a temperature increase over the next 200 years it's like jokes on them 200 years my ass well we get the same stuff. It,

you know, about different things now, you know, at our current pace of whatever, you know, we will destroy some part of the environment. And then they give some ludicrous time span. It's like,

well, yeah, I know that the science is that's true, but if you're telling the public, you need to lie and say it's an emergency. Well, and also most of the time they end up being wrong anyway and it happens faster than they thought i mean i think which we point out that it is the middle of december and two days ago it was nearly 70 degrees

here yeah i went i took my dog for a walk in shorts yeah i was wearing i was wearing shorts a t-shirt and sandals uh on like two days ago so it's happening faster than we think. Yeah, people forget it's like four, I think four average degrees of difference between the Ice Age and now. That's good. Something ridiculously small. Bring back the Ice Age.

Want some mammoths again? Let's go. Well, I mean, we're going to be on a boiling age. Yeah, it's not as much fun. It's not. I think the final thing I want to do I think we should do here at the end of the episode

is I don't have any more sort of big themes. I want to devote the last little bit here to just what I call just like libelous slander against side characters like i think this is the point where we can express any opinions we have about various characters whether we like them don't like them i don't know if you guys have opinions about that i wanted to include it because i have opinions about them and i feel like i want to share them

because that's why I'm here. Cause I like mostly we've talked about the big themes. I think now should be the fun part where we can just talk about sort of his characters, the ones we like, the ones we don't like. Cause there's quite a lot of them. I've already said before, I didn't particularly like Yennefer that much. I think he tries hard to like make their relationship stormy and volatile. And I think he does a little bit too good of a job. And I don't personally find her that relatable.

My my favorite Yennefer moment is the letter she sends to Geralt making fun of it. Well, pissed at him for saying your friend, which just says friend over and over again. That's it, to me, that like, when I, when I, when I read Blood of Elves, that legitimately like,

that cracked me up. She's like, well, since we're great friends, we do what friends do. I was like, Geralt, you fucking idiot.

I mean, to be fair, Geralt, 90% of Geralt's interactions with Yennefer are him just being a dumb himbo. That's what he is. But, but also Geralt, you made a wish with an immortal,

omnipotent interdimensional genie to be in a relationship with her inescapably forever to save her life. Do they ever explicitly say what his wish was, or do we just have to infer that it would be together forever? Yeah. Well, it was because like right before it happens there's like the priest is like it's like there's not really any way he could prevent it from killing her as soon as he's done unless he ties his fate he ties his fate to hers but that doesn't they're only explicitly say, I wished for us to have to love each other and hate each other forever. Oh, no.

I think what he might have more explicitly wished for was, like, I wish for our fates to be tied. You know? I mean, or... You know... Which then lines up nicely... For this to never end, which would explain how goddamn rocky

their relationship is yeah the whole time no he's just real horny for gooseberries but again like if if you if you take the the end of the books as the end instead of like moving on to the fan fictions that are that are the games they let them go to avalon together i mean like their fates are effect well i mean sure um well no because like i have an esk location that may or may not be them just dying well except gerald comes back canonically in the future with nimue she runs into him on a trail and it's he doesn't say who he is but it is a person who is described as having all of gerald's physical character traits uh and nimue runs into him a hundred years or so after the main story ends killing a monster on the road and it's not explained how that happened but is it just him like saying like oh he's alive maybe

yeah i like and so i think after the gate you know at least after the first two games i don't know if witcher 3 was out yet and it's kind of a nod to and the adventure continues sort of thing but also means gerald recovers from his injuries at the end of the books and can come back to the real world yeah because like okay because yeah because like it's pretty obvious that before at least before the games came out i know the ending of the the last book before you know the it's kind of a gray isles thing yeah where where they yeah they because because yennefer and him essentially get pitchforked. And then death by mob. And then Ciri takes

them to Avalon. Yennefer passes out or potentially dies trying to heal Geralt. There's a whole thing like witch hunts start up right after the series kind of concludes and uh-huh you know there's an age of like genuine conflict against mages where they're all but wiped out it there's some weird stuff that is implied to

have happened immediately after the books that isn't explained and is contradicted by season of storms occasionally um and and i don't know how much that has to do with sapkowski leaning into the games kind of almost as a marketing thing because they were making them you know they were making his books popular again um they were getting them translated yeah it was it was getting them popular outside of were the books translated in English before the games came out? No, the first two games, like the guys at CD Projekt Red had to... CD Projekt Red are Polish. You know, had to have read it from the Polish translate,

you know, the Polish original. Well, because they're a Polish company. Polish, but no, they were marketing those to English-speaking audiences with no official English edition of the books. They were like weird, wonky fan translations. Yeah, and the first... No wonder the first one is just collecting bang cards. Well, I mean, that's a side thing you could do.

The first one's a very weird game because you can play it isometric or over shoulder. Like you can do, there's multiple different camera angles you can use. It's definitely more like a CRPG, like a classic, than the other two. The other two are very hard, like over the shoulder, third person action games.

I think the only gameplay I've ever seen is from probably it's from two and three. Yeah. Well, three especially. I'd like to hear your opinion on Dandelion. OK, this this will be interesting. Dandelion. I hated this motherfucker until I didn't. I'm going to be honest with you.

I hated this motherfucker until I didn't. I'm going to be honest with you. For the first, most of the first two books, I found him to be foppishly insufferable. Every time he appeared, especially in the first book, all he did was whine about everything. Complain, complain, complain, and get in Geralt's way when Geralt's trying to do stuff. He very much came across to me like the annoying sidekick in the first book where he like,

sometimes they hang out together, but like he does not actually useful in any way at all. And all he does is bitch about whatever's going on. That's how he came across to me reading the first book and for a lot of the second book until the story with the mer people and little I, um, if you remember that one, that's the one where they go to that town that's got the, the Duke is trying to hook up with a mermaid and they've got to fight sea people. But at the same time there's a side story going on with little I,

who's another bard, who's a friend of Dandelion. And she just falls head over heels for Geralt while they're there in town. And it becomes this whole will they, won't they, where Little Eye is obsessed with Geralt, loves him, and wants to be with him forever. And Geralt's like, I don't feel anything for you.

I can't give you what you want. You know, he like Aragorn's her. He's like, I can't give you what you seek. And Little Eye's heart broke. And like, it's weird. And then at the end of the story, they had this big weird thing where Dan or Dandelion eventually is like, look, I'm sick of you two in this weird will you won't you space like have it out with each other. Talk about your problems, hook up and let's be done with it. And they do.

But then the story ends with like it's like, oh, and Geralt never saw saw Little Eye ever again Geralt didn't know that four years later she died in an epidemic he didn't know that Dandelion was there and watched her die and that Dandelion like carried her and buried her according to her last wishes holding the gem that she still had and that Dandelion wrote a song about the two of them, about Little Eye and Geralt, that he never sang to anybody. And that, to me, was the first time that, like, Dandelion became a three-dimensional character. Like, that was the first time it showed that he had, like, people that he genuinely loved and, like, feelings that he had for other characters in the books. That he, like, genuinely had affection for little eye. That wasn't just a woman he was trying to hook up with.

Right. Like it finally showed me dandelion in like a three dimensional space. And I found that I really liked that story. I found that story impactful. And I was the first time I found dandelion as a character that i didn't see as just an annoying sidekick obviously gets more fleshed out the further on you go you find out he does spying work and he has all this other stuff going on and i liked him more after that but it wasn't until that story in sort of destiny that i was like oh you have three dimensions and you're not just the annoying guy

because the whole time they're in like they have this role with the doppelganger or whether at the edge and edge of the world all he does is bitch it's his whole character trait he sings and he bitches and i found that really annoying personally. I think maybe the feeling of how aggressive the bitching was is exacerbated by audiobook. Could be. It makes me think of A Wrinkle in Time and how much less I hated Charles Wallace when I was reading him versus when I was listening to him. That makes sense. reading him versus when i was listening to him that makes sense and and i think it's the same way here because i like i get if i heard his voice differently i could easily imagine myself really hating him in this book in in the last wish especially but like some of the moments that

sepkowski wanted dandelion to be like funnily like where he wanted his bitching to be funny I found somewhat effective especially in the last wish the story itself where he just like rolls to the border and he's like he's innocent

yeah and yeah moments like that. And also moments towards the end where he's like, what the hell? They're all probably dead. Oh, they're all dead. They're dying.

And then, and the, the one guy is like, no, they're not dying. And I was like, what's going on? It's like,

they're not dying. Well, the poor guy was in love with Yennefer and like walked in. Yeah. And walked in. Yennefer and Geralt just like go into town and he's just like that's um that's also in in my in my head one of the few episodes of the show that I actually really was like that's that's pretty that's pretty close it's pretty good one of the ones I didn't have as many qualms with this as the others like I think that's just a good story but yes that's my opinion on dandelion

or dandelion or yaskier or whatever you want to call him i really didn't like him until i found a story that i felt gave him like good three-dimensional character and like motivation and like feelings and was like oh okay this is much better now to me you're not you're not just a uh a foil straight man to be there with gerald's like stuff going on while you're just freaking out about everything because you're the normal guy um dan dillion does definitely does play as like the normal guy in like a story full of weirdos yeah it's like all these sorcerers and and and witchers and sorceresses and this guy's just got a loot and he's like to be fair it's a really special loot that he got from an elf so yeah that he

after getting like the shit kicked out of him the shit kicked out of him by an elf that like that's another moment when i think it's actually really funny he's like at the end he's like man if i'd known all i had to do was get the shit kicked out of me and i get a loot like this i would have signed up to do that and you're like it's like look at this thing it's perfect i would just like to sing the praises of every named dwarf character. Oh, they're all great. For being, especially in audiobook form, just some of the most entertaining characters in the entire series. But also for just being great little exposition machines. machines anytime there is an a dwarf with a name on the page he is going to tell you infinitely more about the world than every other character in the book yeah between especially like the last

book or two between um yarpen zegren and the dwarf at the bank that yennefer talks to like when she and siri stopped there before like the mages thing they're just like like you said here's exposition that that dwarf at the bank shows up in the games oh does he the one that like yennefer yennefer saved his family from a pogrom at some point in the past yeah he's like indebted to her forever yeah but yeah you're right the dwarves are fun characters uh but they i never thought about it that way they are just exposition machines every time they show up it is to move the plot along when he didn't have a better way to do it he just throws in a talkative dwarf yeah because now that i that I'm thinking, like now I'm remembering Blood of Elves,

isn't there a bit where they're like driving the carriage and they're with them? It's Yarp and Zegred talking to Ciri a lot of the time and basically telling Ciri how the world works, how it really is. I mean, Yarp and Zegred lays more of the foundation for understanding the interdimensional nature of this setting than almost any other character. Than, like, any other wizards do.

There are a dozen mages and, like, 30 priests and druids who pop up over the course of the story. And not one of them seems to be more knowledgeable about the origins of this world than Yarp and Zegred. Does Yarp and Zegred survive to the end of the series? I don't think he comes back. We never see him again after he gets betrayed? Aw, that's sad. I liked him. Yarp and Zegren and his boys?

No, they come back once, and one of the boys has died very briefly one of them dies well one of them dies in blood of elves when they get attacked by the squirrels and then i believe yarpin at least makes it out at the end but they do participate in the final battle the final battle is very much uh against nilfgaard the outside of the Ciri plotline is very much an Avengers Endgame sort of thing. He just goes back and he's like, every character who I could logically make appear is going to

participate. Well, you said there's a Witcher there. Yeah, one of the Witchers comes back. Yarpen Seagren is there. I'm assuming there's a bunch of sorcerers that aren't dead yet are there. Most of the sorcerers that aren't dead yet. Are there any of them? Most of the sorcerers are busy trying to capture Ciri at the time. Yeah, well, never mind.

But, you know, there's... Towards the end of Lady of the Lake, it's either... Every named character is either Vesemir, who's still in Kaer Morhen, or either fighting Nilfgaard or chasing Ciri. But it's one of those two. Does Vesemir ever leave Kaer Morhen? No, I think he's retired and he's like, I'm not messing with that shit. Yeah, in the books he just sits up there.

Just hangs out. He's basically just the retired guy that hangs out there. Mr. Musical Dude. What a champ. Just hangs out. Just an old guy that hangs out. Just a grandpa that hangs out up there. Any other side characters we want to flag up specifically?

Any other fun little side characters that you think are interesting? I mean... I really like Nenneke. Oh, yeah. Mother Nenneke. She seems pretty on the straight and narrow. She actually is honestly looking out for the best interests of Geralt most of the time. Most of the time.

Even if she has to look some fuckers in the eye and be like, you're not going to kill us. You wouldn't dare draw your sword here, you dumb bitch. The people of this town would overthrow your mayor so fast. It's like, don't even try it. Well, here's an interesting thing about Mother Annette. How old is this woman? Because she's just, like, she's supposed to be a human priestess.

But she knew Geralt as a kid. And Geralt is at least 90. Did she know him as a child? She was his teacher at the temple school, is what she says. Oh, she was his teacher at the temple school is what she says oh she was yeah well i assumed gerald was even oh i didn't know how old gerald was but i assumed he was like a couple hundred years old or something i don't know he's like i think like mid-hundreds yeah i kind of put like 120 like i assume like sapkowski had aragorn in mind when coming up with that concept like here's here's a warrior with a destiny who's older than everybody but he's not like these

immortal beings that surround him yeah he's not and even even like vesemir is like, like two or 300. And then, but Yennefer is like older than him by a mile. Isn't Yennefer's, I don't, I don't know if they ever say it, but isn't she like seven or 800 years old? Yeah. I rewatched the show and they, they shrink the gaps a lot. So they imply that Yennefer is like maybe, you know, a hundred years old, but that doesn't really mesh with anything that's discussed about her in the books.

So do they mark, they don't mark dates at any point, do they? In the show? Yeah. They, they cast sly little references. Oh, that, well, yeah. So she would be 100 because she meets young Foltest. Well, and more to the point, she goes to the sorcerer's school

around the same time that Calanthe wins her first battle is stated in the first episode, which you don't catch if you don't know that it's that asynchronous timeline thing. Yeah, because they do a weird asynchronous timeline bit where like Yennefer, Geralt, and Ciri's stories are being told at the same time in the episodes, but they're asynchronous with one another

in terms of when they're happening. Which would be confusing if you didn't know, but like the first two books are asynchronous constantly. The first two books, time jump all the time between like sections or chapters. Yeah. But it gets a little bit confusing because you'll see the same characters

show up in different ones without like i i picked up i only picked up on it after like three episodes yeah i it's like episode three where it becomes really obvious but i re-watching it i realized um that they do include something that's supposed to signal it in the first episode at least yeah okay but in the books yennefer is like 700 years old that's at least the implication is that that's the implication because like Triss is supposed to be like a young sorceress and I get the indication that she's just like closer to much closer to Geralt's age than like Yennefer is yeah so I'd assume she's like you know 100 or 150 or something yeah yennefer is i think at least implied to have to like predate the anti

witcher fervor that destroyed kermoran i think so so yeah it's implied that she knew what it looked like before it got destroyed or something like that yeah there's you know or that you know she had met other witchers or that she had heard about other witchers and knew why there were so few because gerald is the first one she meets but yeah so you know 400 plus somewhere in that ballpark yeah and then and then gerald can't be much older than 100 if he is. Yeah, he's right around the 100-year ballpark. Do we ever see his mother again after the one time he runs into her in Sword of Destiny? No, but apparently there is an untranslated short story that is about his mother meeting his father. Is his father somebody important, or is he really just like a guy?

He's a guy who's good with swords just a guy and like and a and a mother who's a sorceress but somehow had a kid she's like one of the like almost no sorceresses that can actually reproduce apparently i would guess that you could probably figure out gerald's rough age based on that short story if it were in english because i'm sure it references events that you could use to kind of piece something together translators get on that shit i need to know inquiring minds need to know i assume i assume i assume uh dandelion is like 30 or something. Oh, they stated explicitly in the, um, tower of swallows.

He is not quite 40. By tower of swallows. Okay. So he's in his like, he's like in his late thirties for most of the novel. Yeah. Because he, his,

uh, autobiography is 50 years of poetry. And he comes up with the title uh during their adventures and they all start ribbing him and they're like you haven't been doing poetry for 50 years you're like 35 i was an embellisher dandelion i think i may have said his name both ways multiple times throughout this episode yeah i just thought it was weird that we met his mother like one time and it was just like oh that's who she is goodbye but i mean again there's a lot unexplored like i think it would

be cool to learn way more about uh zakaria like the weird dragon worshipers with like amazonians besides like the one time you see them in the with three jackdaws but like it'd be cool to see to know more about that place besides that but then again i'm getting into your territory where like there's a lot of like you know milestones out there that it would be cool to know more about the author's just not going to give you that i mean sometimes go ahead oh no sorry you continue i was just going to make a note about age i looked up the wiki oh it just says that it's a common misconception that he must be over 100 years old um but while his age is never specified directly

uh sapkowski said he's over 50 but tells no one how much over so humans and a 60 year old witcher would look no older than a 45 year old man so he's probably in the 60 to 70 range yeah he but he he doesn't want people to think that he's an old man when they give him jobs so he never tells people's name oh well see that now that's that makes it confusing because gerald is implied to have been there when care moran or been alive when care moran is destroyed um it's it it's it okay it says um because uh this assumption is whoever uh he must be over 100 years old because the care moran pogrom occurred then this assumption is whoever falls the school of the wolf was functioning years after the massacre and according to blood of elves the last boys are trained there about 25 years

before the action of the novel. Ah, okay. So he was not alive for the Kaer Morhen. Got it, but Vesemir was. Vesemir was. He's an old man. What had you said? Sorry.

Oh, Zacharia and like... Oh, I was just going to say, sometimes that gets you the Silmarillion. Yes. And sometimes other times that gets you Potter more. You're right. In this instance, I'm glad we got neither.

Again, it's just, like I said, it's a dangerous game asking what's over the horizon because yeah, you said it could be the silmarillion or it could be wizards used to get rid of their poop with wands until before they like muggles invented bathrooms so like yeah so i my my one suggestion to anybody doing elaborate world building is before you tell the public let an editor have a pass at that

maybe don't tweet it directly out maybe maybe don't just say you know when asked there's such thing as a Jewish wizard that there is one his name is Anthony Goldstein

and you're like okay pick the most generic like, bleep. Our JK Rowling hate episode is going to be a whole episode where we just hate on JK Rowling. I've already explicitly stated it's going to happen at some point. Maybe we can do that for like April Fool's Day

or something. Like our episode on April Fool's Day will just be this is JK Rowling and this is how much she sucks as a person and a writer. Because you can hate on her for both of those things. Yeah, we think that the dwarves in this are coded Jewish badly. You would think the dwarves in here are bad. On the note about her, because you have no reason to invite me for that episode, and I don't have a ton to add, but I did a semester at the university where she went to university.

Oh, God. So many things are just ripped straight from the city of Exeter. I'm so not surprised. so not surprised um like the the best described things in the series are just buildings that actually exist in that town and um my favorite one is that uh gringotts has never explicitly been confirmed but is very clearly based on the exterior description of a gay bar called the vault. She was like, I need to describe the bank. What's it look like?

Oh, it looks like the vault, which like, if you've read, if you grew up with the books makes visiting the town kind of fun. And you're like, Oh, I get it now. But also it's like that it's it's called the vault

and you were like it's the bank joanne is an incredibly is a wildly not inventive woman i'm just gonna throw that out there i just wish she would admit it ah no sorry she's got castles to hide in and like, and like women, like trans women to be mad at for reasons. Um, I actually have one closing point. He does a story. He does a writing thing. It's an author thing. He does that. I find a little frustrating at times where a lot of the drama and tension comes from people just refusing to explain anything at all where like there are times in the books where like a lot of drama could be avoided if like jennifer would just like say what was happening or jennifer is a terrible she's a horrible communicator but she's not the only one like number of times but like gerald will also do it too. When Geralt stumbles in on the coup, they're like, why are you here? Who involved you? He could just say, I don't know anything. I was taking a piss. I'm here on accident, but he doesn't say that. They say, why are you here? And he goes, I don't know.

Like you could save yourself so much trouble by just being like, I don't know. My medallion rattled and that was weird here. So I came to look at what made it rattle. Like you could just say that and solve yourself a lot of, a lot of trouble. There's a lot of points in these books where people just like, outright refuse to explain themselves, which I get some people do in real life at times, but it happened enough that I was like, you know, if these people just like use their words, we could have avoided most of this going on right now. Or people just would or people would just be willing to just tell the truth.

Like, holy shit. Well, I mean, here's a proposal. Just just a theory. What if Amir wasn't so obsessed with being the father or you know the next king of nilfgaard being the king who rules the world and he was cool with it being like his grandson and just went to calanthe and was like so i'm the heir to the most powerful kingdom in the world i'd like to marry your daughter i need 400 troops to take my castle back and because of the specific bloodlines here your great-grandkids could be the kings of the planet who wants it because i feel like she'd

have been into that do you want an alliance with the empire of nilfgaard well the show the show actually does this i think slightly better than the books do where they kind of give a reason why no one would want that it's because at the time and i think it i don't know if it's mentioned in the books at all but like because it would be one of the later novels but like nilfgaard wasn't respected before emir took the throne like it was like they're still they're still the biggest kingdom they weren't any they weren't as big first of all i mean like emir became the guy who was expanding like i feel like there's a lot of opportunity in the exiled king of a country comes to you and is like hey we you can you can be my backer while i take over this

that's happened a lot in history like that's a normal thing like how many times did that happen in you know in your expertise in you know like the persian empire uh constantly where there's like hey i have a claim on the throne and these seven people will back me and then there's a civil war about it now you shouldn't go to the crazy expansionist state to get your backing because then you just become a province well that's the thing like it's like at the at the but like nilfgaard wasn't and neither was sintra i feel like neither one of them at the time were crazy expansionist. Yeah. There's a lot of opportunity for like more open political alliances in this world to bear a lot more fruit than all of the shady backroom. They go full like pre-World War I Europe with their alliance system where it's like everybody doing backdoor deals with each other constantly about things. All I'm saying is this is one of those stories where like a lot of the world's problems could have been solved by people just explaining themselves for more than like five seconds.

Or not just responding to questions with like, you don't get it, Geralt. And then just walking away. Like, yeah, of course he doesn't get it. He's dumb as shit. Explain it to him. He is emotionally. Why haven't you been reading for the last 400 years? Like you've been thinking about this for four centuries.

My man spent like like 15 years getting his brains beat in so he could stab vampires better. Maybe take the time to explain to him an alliance or something. You could do that, but nobody bothers, and so we have drama instead. It's fine. Just explain things sometimes,

maybe, in your plots. I get you need to have drama hidden from characters, but to me, it's like those movies where like you know you can solve this movie plot with like a single phone call it's that kind of thing like you can solve this incredibly easily if one of you thought for more than two

seconds every show produced by the CW for the last 20 years you know if you just call them you could figure out that the woman you saw him with at the restaurant wasn't his new girlfriend but was instead his sister and it's not Dooney so he's not trying to do some weird

incest with his family or full test the list gets long if you think about it for too long and look we're back to this shit I think this is thank you everyone for suffering with us for what will be, I assume, three separate episodes, but basing on time.

If not four at this point. The four, it might be three, which is great because it'll carry us through the new year. I appreciate everyone taking the time to listen to us. Again, our guest today was Trevor. People, I'm going to do the thing podcast you, I'm going to do a little plug zone. Trevor, if you want people to find your work and thing podcast do, I'm going to do a little plug zone. Trevor, if you want people to find your work and what you do, where should they do that? Well, you can find my podcast, presumably wherever you're listening to this, just by typing in

history of Persia into your search bar, or you can go to historyofpersiapodcast.com. If you want to find me on social media, where I am less political than this because it would piss off all the monarchists that follow me, you can find me on Twitter at historyofpersia and on things owned by Mark Zuckerberg at historyofpersiapodcast.

Yeah, I forgot. There's probably a bunch of monarchists that like you because they want to hear about like the kings of Persia or something. there's so many of them i'm sorry if i interact with you on twitter too much i'm going to expose you i'm sorry no it's it's great i'd love for that to happen it'd not be my fault as always if you want to follow us you can follow the show at swords and sock pod uh you can email us at swords and socialism pod at protonmail.com

please if you have you know questions recommendations or you want to hear more of our thoughts about why this guy is so weird about sex let's just do that on twitter where i talk about sex anyway so uh you can follow me at himbo underscore anarchist you can follow katho at uh stupid pooba 69 don caballero right yeah there we go finally i've been waiting for someone like no one on twitter has mentioned it at all but i'm assuming that's because most of my twitter followers are like 18 the thing that made me think of it was just that you mentioned flying out of the pittsburgh airport in your uh oh episode yeah yeah yeah and it's just like oh yeah maybe this is attached to a pittsburgh man i was like okay like okay wait that might be relevant thank everyone for listening this has been fantastic well i don't have no idea what we're going to be doing after this it's going to be a while because these episodes are going to take up

a few weeks and it took a while to research for this one obviously because i read like four books so uh i'll probably tweet it out whenever we figure out what the next books are going to be so thank you everyone for listening i appreciate it uh bye bye bye see ya Appreciate it. Bye. Bye-bye. See ya. Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. are you fucking real man come on