Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Witcher: Real Weird About Sex

Episode Date: January 1, 2022

The 2nd part of our conservation with Trevor about The Witcher series. We talk about sex and the upsetting way the author decided to base the whole 2nd half of the series on it.*Content Warning*: contains an unfortunately necessary discussion about sexual assault of a minor from about minute 25-38 Follow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @HistoryofPersiaDarius: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69   patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

Welcome back everyone to part two of our conversation about The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski. Before the start of the episode, I wanted to jump in here to give a content warning. This episode deals with sex in the world of The Witcher, and specifically there is a conversation about sexual assault and surviving it and what happens afterwards. It is integral to the story, unfortunately. If that is upsetting to you, you may want to skip from minute 24 to about minute 37. However, like I said, it is sort of integral to the plot of the second half of this series.

So thanks, Zupkowski, I guess. Yeah, thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoy the episode. And now... Bro. bro are you fucking real man come on i feel like this is a natural transition point okay let's we keep bringing it up because it's so inescapable

it's so prevalent even in just the first two books there's so much as the song says let's talk about sex baby yeah so Geralt fucks Geralt fucks let's be fair heret fucks. Geralt fucks. He does. Okay.

All right. Let's be fair here. Everybody fucks. A lot. Wow. It's like the most realistic thing about this book. Is that everybody fucks a lot. Everyone fucks a lot.

I mean, Dandelion's whole deal is fucking. That's like his- And then getting in trouble for it. His main character, like he is a dnd bard his whole thing is his whole thing is his singing and fucking that's dandelion's whole deal he's also a spy sometimes because he needs money but like that's his whole deal gerald fucks quite dandelion's love conquests are so funny to me because it's like, some of them are so like,

it's like, oh man, you like, it's the classic, oh, you like knocked up that guy's daughter and then suddenly like an entire army of men were like chasing him sort of scenario. Or you get stuff like in the later books. Now I know this happens because it's referenced in the games, but it also like, i ended up going back and looking it up with anna like anna henrietta from um

tucson well she's like his previous lover because he's you know he's secretly i think he's a viscount uh like he who's just like i don't like nobling i'm gonna go be a bard okay can i i want to when i talk about things i've seen before i i didn't know that that was a thing that he was secretly a noble but just like goes around because he doesn't like it i have seen that before in a different fantasy series i don't know if do either of you know the author lloyd alexander he wrote the black he wrote the black cauldron which you may have seen the disney made it to a movie at one point that bombed he that the black cauldron was part of a series of books called the chronicles of pride ann oh i've seen that they're pretty generic sort of fantasy you've

got a hero and enemies i love them as a kid i have them all at home we'll cover them at some point catho because i just like them and they're really easy to read like you can read a book in like two days right they're like young adult fantasy books however one of the side characters one of the sidekicks to the main character i don't remember his name offhand his whole thing is that he's a prince who hates being or a king that hates being a king and so he spends his time wandering around the land being a bard that's his but that's just like a trope right like you know back gotta be back to the the prince and the pauper sort of thing you know that's just uh uh you know probably starts

as a morality tale about accepting your duty, and then someone's like, well, what if he didn't? Yeah. I feel like... And this will delay... I guess this can delay the sex just a little bit longer. But he... A lot of this series has heavy tropes that are pretty standard to the the genre

but it also kind of makes fun of the tropes a little bit too yeah it's somewhere it's self-aware it's somewhere between retelling fairy tales in a grim style and making fun of grim's fairy tales yeah because yeah because there are some moments in there where you're like oh where it talks about in a grim style and making fun of Grimm's fairy tales. Yeah. Because yeah. Cause there are some moments in there where you're like, Oh, where it talks about snow white. And that's literally what's her name at, in the first.

Yeah. They, they do reference. He does reference like standard fairy tales. Well, yeah, but like, but like,

it's like a huge deal. Like in the first one, Renfrey. Yeah. Yeah. like a huge deal like in the first one renfri in the yeah renfri is literally made out to be a really fucked up version of snow white and the seven dwarves where she at one point had been like running with a pack of pack of dwarves who yeah like were really violent and really awful and then all of them died except her. Yeah. Oh, side note.

I just want to, because I brought it up, I had to bump his name from the chronicles of, of, of, of pride. And the King who hates being a King and chooses to be a bard, his name is Fluter Flam. I want to spell it for you. F it's F F L E W D D U R. F F L A M flute or flam is his name. He's a King by birth who chooses to be a bard. So again,

that was just something that I'd noticed. And I was like, I've seen this before somewhere. And like you said, it's probably just a trope that like, yeah, like I hate being in charge. i just wandered the world and sing songs and fuck me that's also that's also bizarrely part of one of the things that made me think that the people in this book were humans from earth is is was these weird connections to grim's fairy

tales um like you get you get a bit in that first book with like is that like a goldilocks bit with the bear in the woods or is that beauty the beast i think that's beauty and the beast because he's like turned into a monster but beauty is a vampire yeah she's a literal like she turns into a bat well he goes through a series of actual women and then eventually attracts this like vampire and then the and and then the whole point of that story is that there's a nugget of truth to the whole like love did set him free like love what did set you free but also she was a fucking insane vampire okay but that brings us back to our point here which we're getting into is this is sex in these

books as we said before everyone fucks all the time. Even big bear men. It's even big bear men. People fuck all the time. Everyone fucks. And he goes through a lot of pain to make sure that you know that it's consensual with the bear man. Yes, the bear man definitely makes sure that the women want to

fuck him. Hey, to his credit, he's like one of three fucking characters who actually cares about consent? Who regularly brings up consent. Yes. But it's like Sapkowski felt like he needed to with Big Bear Man. I don't want the weird monster to rape women. I just want humans to do it.

Yeah. It's like, I want to make sure people know this guy is a good person. So, yeah. So this will be, I'm going to give this as a general, I should have done at the top, but a general warning for people who are upset by sexual assault or rape. We might just. We'll try to beat, we'll try to beat around the bush. Generally, when we talk about Syria, what happens to Syria?

We can't really. But this next section a little bit is going to be a little iffy. The first bit won't be. I think we're going to talk about gender relations generally in the world and how people view sex. But near the end of it, I think I'll do a little warning again just for people

who really don't want to listen to a recommendation about sexual assault. It will be important to maybe reiterate again because it is important to the bones of the story yes but before some of it is before we get to the the, the the load bearing sexual assault of this story house. Let's talk about generally like sex and sexual relations in this world that Sapkowski built. As we said, everyone's horny all the time. You also have those weird dichotomies where like.

Everyone's horny, there's sex workers everywhere. People fuck a lot, but also women are just constantly abused for being promiscuous, like either called, you know, whores or sluts or whatever constantly. Despite the fact. Yeah. But despite the fact that everyone wants to fuck them all the time,

but of course it's the very, yeah, sort of your, I can only speak for, you know, very European of the whole, like, the women are supposed to be chaste, but like, everyone's having sex anyway, but like, so they're not chaste at the up all the time like there's you know sex workers are just a thing that exists that everyone can go to women are just like half naked often in like lots of situations you wouldn't expect sorceresses are basically half naked like all the time because they can be i guess well who's gonna tell them no, right? Yeah, really.

I mean, it's a really- They just turn to you and literally just twist your windpipe and be like- The other thing that's really important to this story is that generally all the women we come across really want to hook up with Geralt. And the ones who don't, Dandelion. Yeah, they either want to hook up with Dandelion or Geralt. Like one of the two. I mean, let's be fair.

You've got a giant himbo or like a musical twink. So like pick your type. Like whichever one you're into, this story provides for you. It's sort of like this podcast, you know? Whatever you're into, we provide. And both of them are celebrities like that's in a way that is not something that you know it's actually something that the show actively like decided not to do and it's not something that you necessarily get across in the games because it's

dandelion's not as much a focus but dandelion is is famous dandelion is a bona fide rock star who sings about gerald all the time so gerald everyone knows who gerald is too like he's he i see gerald it has to be the most well-known witcher of all time simply because he's right he's friends with a rock star yeah a rock star who gets all of his stuff from gt's stories because it's like, where else is he going to get it? The Enderline watches Geralt do stuff and then sings a song about how badass it is. So when they walk in together, it's like the rock star and his muse, essentially. They do try to get that across in the games, too, because there are moments when you're talking to somebody and you're like, at the beginning of the third one, you're looking for Yennefer. And you're like, I'm looking for a woman like this and this and this.

And they go, oh, you're looking for Yennefer Vengerberg. And you're like, what? Well, she's also famous, but for different reasons. She's famous because she's just a really powerful sorceress. Well, yeah, but she gets mentioned in his songs a lot. Well, because he wrote a whole ballad about Geralt and Yennefer. Yeah. But Dandelion being

a very successful bard contributes to the fact that everybody knows who they are and everybody is interested in them. Yes. Even though Geralt is weird and a witcher. He definitely gets... He's an artificially albino witcher. Yeah, he's a witcher he definitely he's an artificially

albino witcher yeah he's a witcher who went further than other witchers because they were like took particularly well to these mutations so we'll give you more Geralt has what you see in other books called like he gets exoticized by women

constantly where they're like ooh he's weird like he's big and strong and silent and weird. And he's got weird hair and weird eyes. Now, obviously some women are turned off by it, but there's clearly a lot of women who are just like, man, this dude's weird as hell. I want to hook up with him. And then obviously a lot of women want to hook up a dandelion because he's a rock star or whatever, you know, typical, typical famous singer reasons. You know, he's Mick Jagger or whatever. I don't know.

Dandelion is more of, I don't know. He's not a Mick Jagger type. I don't know. He doesn't strike me as the sexual salty type. I don't know though. He certainly, the consent is not enthusiastic type. I think he's very much like if she doesn't explicitly tell me, no, I'm not going to stop. Yeah.

At least certainly early on. Yeah. That is one thing I wanted to bring up is that these books are weird about sex all the way through. But for different reasons. Jesus Christ, they are are weird about sex all the way through, but for different reasons. Jesus Christ, they are so weird about sex. In the first couple of books, they're weird about sex. And that just like, it's just very horny, just painfully horny. It's like the first, the very first thing in The Last Wish.

Yeah. And again, it, that to me, and I don't necessarily mean this is negative, but it very much strikes me. It's just like, this is a guy who was writing a fantasy story for a magazine, right? Like, of course the main character fucks. Like, you know what I mean? Like it's not surprising to me that that's, I've read way worse fanfic than that online where everyone's horny all the time. And so like the first book two books the collections and short stories are much more just like i want to call it like sort of openly almost normally horny i mean that normally and just that like the main characters are dudes that want to have sex a lot like you

get that later on in the books they're weird about sex for very different. And I would say more uncomfortable reasons. But early on, it's just that everyone's very horny all the time. And even if you put a little bit back from in story, Sapkowski really, really needs to tell you how hot every woman is. He does not introduce a single woman into the story without telling you what she looks like, like in a mostly sexual way. Like if there's a barmaid, he's going to tell you how hot or not she is. If there's a woman or not, someone has to talk to for any reason. So if Kousey is going to tell you how sexually attractive she is and what her breasts look like.

He does not fail to mention their boobs whenever possible. And it is a coin toss whether or not he is going to include a scent. That is a running thing. My man is into boobs and smells.

I like gooseberriesberries chamomile every woman has a smell i feel like he picks the smells not because he knows what they smell like i think he picks them because they sound like they smell good what the hell even is a gooseberry right seriously i feel like i feel like if you put it in a different context, you could very well frame it like the whole Bonnie Python, you know, you know, your, your, uh, mother was a hamster and your father smelled elderberries. It's like gooseberries.

I've never smelled a gooseberry in my life. I don't know what it smells like. And she smells like gooseberries. What's the other thing? Lilac. Lilac's a good smell i'll give him that um i don't know if lilac and gooseberries smell good together but every woman at least all the women that gerald gets like physically close to i i think has a smell and we're gonna know what their tits look like because sapkowski has to tell us with the smell thing, I'm 98% sure that it's just Sapkowski being Sapkowski. But it's also like a 2% thing where it's like, I mean, he has enhanced senses. He'd probably be able to tell what he's smelling, right?

It comes up in other perspectives, too. So I feel like that kind of throws it out the window. I'm pretty sure Dandelion also notices how women smell. I was trying to give him a 2% benefit of the doubt, and it's gone now. But so again, yeah, just in the base narrative, Sapkowski will make sure to tell you how attractive all the women you have to interact with are. He's just going to, and in a way that he definitely does not tell you how hot every random male villager you run into is. So for our mutual benefit, I Googled gooseberries.

They are related to currants. They do not flower. And as far as I can tell, they have no scent to speak of. See, he really did just pick it just because it's just like it just sounds cool oh boy you've done it again very strong i've never actually been close to a woman vibes yeah but again like that was he has a son who who was the reason he submitted to that particular contest.

But just, oh, God, man, I know why Reddit likes this guy so much. Oh, buddy. I saw a post, this reminds me, I saw a post just like yesterday it was some complaint i'm gonna give away specific you know you know uh you know probably unpleasant parts about my own personality and the fact that like i play league of legends sometimes and that like there's been a lot of complaints going on in league about like character design and that basically all the new like characters in league are often just like hot anime girls as opposed to like monsters or whatever.

But somebody pointed out that like, if the only women you've ever seen in your life are anime girls, you're going to think all women look like anime girls because you've never actually seen real ones. And I get, I get that sort of Reddit vibe from Sapkowski. He was like, this is what women smell like.

And you're like, are you sure, buddy? I mean, from sap caski was like this is what women smell like and you're like are you sure buddy i mean i've been playing modded skyrim for a decade because for some reason they haven't made new games why had they just put out another one a new version of skyrim exactly um damn todd howard you've done it again there's like 140 000 mods and i swear to god 90 000 of them are just hot anime girls in some level or another yeah it's just make women hotter and also change their skeletons so they'll be naked when you take their clothes off i mean one of the most pop the game i spend the most time playing is crusader kings 3 which is being a paradox game is eminently moddable and one of the most popular

mods is just to make all the characters hotter and to make you be able to undress them whenever you want oh good so this is universal and also a key plot point to this book series yeah game gamers are universal like yeah yeah we're talking about we're talking about the sphere of people who like made the first couple god of wars yeah sweaty nerds sweaty nerds are universal and we just know that's i think sapkowski is smash x to bang the siren in the bed they also did that like the first i'm pretty pretty sure i'd ever played it but i remember hearing like in the first witcher game you literally get like collectible cards for everyone you hook up with yes i i told you about that yeah you get you get a collectible card for every single woman you hook up with there's like 15 or 20 in the game you collect there's there are

two there are two that are mutually exclusive to different playthroughs, whether or not you fuck Shani or you fuck Triss. And that second one should really piss off everyone in the universe who's ever read the books. Because Geralt sort of had a fling with Triss when he was like super drunk. Well, they had a little bit more of a thing.

I think it was right after Yennefer broke up with him. So it was a hardcore like, you're a rebound which and then he regretted it so yeah he regretted it forever and then but like trish never gets over it no no trish never gets it remains a main she keeps trying to seduce him while he's like well she's like crapping her pants yes i mean it it comes back uh when they form the mage's lodge in the tower of sparrows that you know tris and yennefer still can't get along because tris hooked up with gerald a few times and they they mutually blame it on their political differences at that point in the series but then every time you get a perspective from one of them,

it's about Geralt. That's, that seems so funny to me from Yen. Cause she's like, there's a lot of times this book would not pass any vague sense of a Bechdel test because even when you're getting a woman's perspective, it's always, it's just like Yennefer thinking about gerald or tris thinking about

gerald well yeah or you know who somebody else should be having sex with you know if you ex if you extend the bechdel test to talk not talking about a man or not talking about another woman in the a third woman in the context of a man it might fail like forever like like well yeah i mean regardless that they like even like allison bechdel was like i don't know how this became a thing i sent it as a joke to a friend of mine again i use it the same way there's there's literally a podcast i've listened to sometimes it's called the bechdel cast where the same way. There's literally a podcast I listen to sometimes called The Bechdel Cast, where the idea isn't that

this is some sort of hard and fast rule, but it's a lens for viewing the way women are written in the story. Oh, yeah. It at least draws attention to the fact that oftentimes... And in the lens of this story, the only time you get women interacting

in not a way about sex is like when... In some of the scenes where Yennefer is like first mentoring Siri, like when they're at the temple of Melita, like even then, even then sometimes it is, but not always.

I was about to say, all you technically need to pass Bechdel test is a single scene where two women are talking to each other, not which occasionally, occasionally they do maybe once or twice i'm gonna say i imagine in later books at certain points members of the lodge have to be getting political um um yeah the first time the lodge meets i think would be the series is seen definitely guarantee it but then the second time the lodge meets it's all about getting siri hooked up with a man so and the rest of the meetings are about that

and i i it's unavoidable because what the the thing you't get to, if you didn't get to the back half of the series, is that series sexuality is actually the main conflict of this series. Oh, good God. So I... Why? To reinforce the content warning. Why? This is going to have to involve discussion of sexual assault and specifically sexual assault of a minor. OK, let's yeah, let's just do that right now and get it out of the way, I think so. We can talk about that and then we can go back to a little bit about sexism generally in the world and other people hooking up and stuff and how like literally everyone wants to flash their tits to Geralt. But like, let's let's right now make it clear this next little bit here is going to be directly about sexual assault of a minor.

Who, even in the story world, many people refer to as a child at the point that the assault happens. Many people are still calling her a child at this point. So clear warning, maybe skip a few minutes, five, 10 minutes. I don't know how long this will take. Skip a few if you're very uncomfortable with sexual assault that out of the way all right i'm just gonna give the very i'm gonna give the brief basic rundown and then we can talk you guys you especially you trevor can tell me what that means going forward for the rest of the book at the end of time of contempt uh baptism of no it is time of

contempt end of time of contempt after siri gets out of the get she gets found in the desert by some trappers who are like hunting for her for nilfgaard she gets taken to a town she sits in an inn next to a captured bandit outlaw his name's like kane or kale or kaylee she gets sit next to this captured outlaw there's two groups of bounty hunters essentially and kaylee and siri are the respective bounties that they've caught while they're sitting in there the men make many jokes about raping women and make jokes, references to assaulting Siri before that can happen. The Kaylee's bandit outlaw friends attack, free them people. They break free. Okay. There's fighting. They break free. They run off.

Siri gets essentially accepted into this group of bandit outlaws. Sort of. She gets accepted into the group. Who are all, you know, upper, middle, upper teens. Or early, or 20s. Or, you know, one of them's an elf, so who the hell knows. Yeah, so they're like late teens, early 20s, most of them. By the way, at this point, Siri is 14.

Yeah. 14 or 15. Cause we don't get exact years as the story progresses. Yeah. But like if you did the timeline from like what age she was when Geralt finds her, you could probably figure it out. She's like 14 or 15.

The first night she's in this, she's so she meets the bandits to go. They're like, all right, you can chill with us. You're cool. Everyone goes to bed. Immediately after everyone goes to bed, Kaylee comes sneaking over to where she's sleeping and is like, hey, you rescued me earlier.

I'm going to pay you back for that. I'm going to thank you. And begins to sexually assault her. He like pulls her shirt down and starts going to town. He's going to rape her before he can do it one of the other bandits a woman named arrow um mel no uh i thought was the one started with an a i know i just listened to it yesterday but i i just watched this kit or listened to this character's death

scene like an hour ago um missile missile i was close i said arrow it's missile how do they know what a missile is anyway so missile catches kaylee in the act of trying to rape siri and like kicks him off and like pulls the knife and is like, you're a piece of shit. Get away from her. And he's all put out and he's like me and like scuttles off at this point. I'm like, well, that was uncomfortable. At least that's over.

Missile then lays down. And I was like, oh, she's going to protect Siri to make sure this doesn't happen again. Wrong. Missile then immediately just picks up where Kaylee left off. And at first Siri is given the same reaction. She's terrified.

She's disgusted. Explicitly stated that she is terrified. And then missile just like keeps at it. And eventually Siri gives in and is kind of into it maybe you can tell me in a second if that's if that's explored later at the beginning of the next book but it's written somewhat vaguely however what's not vague is the next morning she gets up, goes to the river and tries to scrub her skin off. Like she scrubs herself for a very long time to scrub herself clean. If anyone here has had any interactions with people who have been raped or sexually assaulted,

a common coping mechanism afterwards is the idea that you need to wash yourself clean and you can't get clean. is the idea that you need to wash yourself clean and you can't get clean, which is explicitly what Siri does the morning after these subsequent, like in a row, sexual assaults happened to her one by an attempted one by a man. And then a successful one, I guess by a woman. And then he's just, and then that just happens.

And then Sapkowski's like, and the band went on to be successful bandits all together as a family. He then like literally goes right from a sexual assault to, they were all cool together. And they were a family because being alone is terrible and being together is great. Despite the fact that like two of the members of this group assaulted her in the same minor in the same night. So that really weirded me out personally, because I very much attached myself to the other couple of books, this idea of like Siri as the child that needs protecting.

You know what I mean? That very sort of like we must take care of her. She's a child. That, I don't know, just being a little open, like that hit with me strongly. You know what I mean? This very sort of like, especially Geralt's relationship with her, this very like protective relationship with her. That was very emotionally impactful for me. And then for him to end the book with

our like child being sexually assaulted was incredibly uncomfortable and really soured my feeling for the books and the author a lot really quickly at the end of what I felt was an otherwise compelling story. So go ahead and make this worse for me and tell me what happens afterwards. Oh, she and missile become girlfriends. Um, yeah,

no, it's, it is remarkably fucked up. So you sexually assault a minor and then start a relationship because she's never had a relationship before exactly she's been groomed it is i believe intended to be this groomed abusive relationship yes but in that kind of Stockholm Syndrome way that's really common with childhood sexual abuse, where they become attached to the abuser, and especially in a character like Siri's case, they don't have a context for sexuality so their context for sexuality develops around that abuse and you see this more in the next two books of not just missiles abuse of siri even though siri at some point stops perceiving it as abuse and self-perceives it as a relationship but this gang the rats uh that is their default

view of sexuality for all of them is you know even you know by the end of that arc even siri is talking about how well when you rob somebody it's your right to ravage them like that's a that's a quote and and there's a character who then tries to seduce siri and i'll get to why this keeps happening in a second who calls her out on being an abuse victim you know she's absorbed into this extraordinarily violent gang and starts killing people with them their whole thing is like they kill for fun like they are they are horrifying murderers and robbers who all happen to be under the age of 22 and And like, but that is Ciri's kind of entrance into maturity is in this abusive, violent situation. And it really shaped, you know, and it's intended, I think, to shape how Ciri interacts with the world going forward.

Because she does come around to the fact that it was wrong at one point but never in a i was a victim sort of way and it's it's not good it is a driving thing in gerald's motivation because he starts having prophetic dreams of seeing what is going on in Ciri's life and being horrified by it and that's kind of a driving thing of like holy fuck we need to go rescue her but you know she the it's never properly resolved and I think that's a huge mark against Sapkowski, is that there's never any reckoning with the fact that this was abuse outside of her trying to scrub herself clean that first time. In fact, it becomes more like a consensual relationship the longer it goes on, which is worse. Which is worse and also a class which is worse than also a classic case of long-term abuse yeah yeah or eventually it goes on long enough that

the victim believes it's consensual um and in this case becomes attached to the point of you know riding into an ambush with the intention of if i i have to save them i have to at least save missile we can escape together um and it's extremely traumatic because she then watches this you know profoundly abusive found family get brutally murdered i'm assuming by the nilfgaardians by bonhart that you know which witcher hunting assassin that i mentioned um okay okay okay just you know and it's not you know the most graphic battle scene or fight scene in the series but it's you know intentionally one of the darker ones just to emphasize series experience with it because it's these books are a series of siri experiencing

trauma over and over again i feel like that's what a lot of the main plot of this book is siri experiences trauma well yeah and there's an interesting thing where the adults in her life at least think that this has happened to her that she has been assaulted before um with the black knight of nilfgaard who becomes this boogeyman in her nightmares i think that's kind of implied it it is implied by series by how adults understand series recollection but they're the recollection because that's how as adults they perceive the recollections of a traumatized child. Ciri was actually just scared shitless because her whole family had just died. And this terrifying black knight in her nightmares was just trying to get her out of the burning city. Yeah, because he did actually save her but when she

just but when she recounts the story to adults they're like sounds like some bad stuff happened to you but that is something that is brought up in gerald's perception of the dreams that he's having so from the you know from the beginning of the novel's part there are these things about siri you know at that point 12 or 13 years old as a sexual being and she like asked yana for multiple times about like whether she can't do magic properly because she's still a virgin or something yeah and at you know in the beginning that feels like the portrayal of puberty of an adult man trying to write a teenage you know a young teenage girl and at least at that point jennifer is very takes the approach i think an adult should who was like that's the stupidest

thing i've ever heard right and then you know there's some other there's some other things like uh what's his name yara the boy that she likes the temple like the one the one man in the entire temple the of of priestesses who we as we've established fuck um but you know so there are these recurring things in the first half of the series about siri sexuality you find out in baptism of fire with the uh mage's lodge that there is this genetic trait that has died out among the elves but passed into a specific line of um human monarchs the line of cintra the child of the elder yeah um the the way it ends up in cintra is this stupid convoluted scene that's just kind of making fun of medieval royal families but eventually this what is originally an elven genetic trait that was present in multiple ancient elven sages but has died out over time

so is what makes siri the last child of the elderblood. And all of this stuff about her, because there is a prophecy saying the child with the Elderblood is the one who's going to save the world from the Great Frost, is motivating all of these people to want her genetic material. They all really want her to have babies and and that's the thing is that

it depending on how you read the prophecy it's either siri or everybody seems to think it's going to be siri's child and some of them that's because they think it has to be a man and others the witches think that it's going to be a daughter for reasons that i can't really understand so you've got the witches trying to find siri and pair her off with some northern monarch to create a northern counterbalance to nilfgaard you've got vilgefortz trying to I think take her reproductive system out of her body to artificially inseminate it. There's this whole

horrifying... Vilgefortz is a weird motherfucker. Yeah, there's this whole like weird surgical OB-GYN chair with a bunch of dead women that Dykstra discovers at one point um and is what siri gets strapped into in the you know in the final battle uh is and you know she escapes and fights people

because she's a extraordinarily violent badass like gerald is by the end. But they, so Vilgefortz has his own really weird sexually fucked up thing going where he's trying to perfect this technique so he can use it on Ciri. And then there's Emhyr var Emrys who wants to find and marry Ciri and make her the Empress so that their child together will be the ruler of the world. Darius, do you know who Emhyrvar Emrys is? What his secret identity is?

No, I don't. Ket katha would you like to tell him so you know how uh apparently uh pavetta and her husband died off the coast of skelling is it doony of Skellige. Is it Dooney? It's fucking Dooney. It's fucking Dooney. He wants to marry his own daughter? Yes. He arranged entering into the royal family of Cintra to double up his bloodline in... Is this guy a Crusader

Kings player? What is going on? He, well, he's got a really bizarre like background where his father was like usurped from the throne or whatever and then he got cursed um like instead of being killed um and then he works out this really complex plan to like come back and become the new emperor so the whole reason that storm happens that destroys their ships he plans that or some shit well he meets vilga forts at some point and they're in cahoots from some time after he marries pavetta so he

kills pavetta on purpose so he can disappear and go back to nilfgaard and become the emperor yes and then later and then later on he's like damn i need to go getgaard and become the emperor. Yes. And then later on, he's like, damn, I need to go get my daughter. And that is why they invade Zindra. So he can find his daughter. Yes, so that he can marry his 13-year-old daughter. Who, at the time of the invasion, actually was like...

nine. Yeah, it was like ten-ish. Yeah, uh-huh. the what the fuck but so you've got these three competing groups who all want to all want siri specifically for reproductive reasons just so that she can have a child who will be inordinately magically powerful what none of them realize is that siri is inordinately magically powerful on her own. And I think the only person who might actually realize that to its fullest extent is probably like Yennefer. Yennefer knows to some degree, and that's why Yennefer,

and Yennefer recognizes when the Witch's Lodge meets that they will discover that and goes off on her own crusade to try and find siri independently because she doesn't want the other witches to find out what siri is you guys tell me at least this is a slight side check does unifer end up actually being generally a good person throughout towards the end of the books? Yeah, overall. I'd say overall net positive of a person. Yeah, like the second or third best witch. Who are the better two? I would argue that Margarita Lozantilla,

who's like the... She's like in charge of the college, right? Yeah, she's the headmistress of the school. I'd argue that she is a morally better person. And so is Triss. Well, yeah. In the book, she's a morally better person. Yeah, Triss, you know, both of them fall into the lodge partially because there are so many more powerful people who will fuck them over if they don't.

And also because they're both kind of traumatized by the political events that have been happening and just want to get but i would argue they are both still better human beings than yeah well well there's there almost seems to be a bizarre like like almost one-to-one where like the week generally if you're not that strong of like a like tris tris is powerful in her own right but compared she's very young relative to like the rest of these sorceresses so it's like and then you get people like yen who was who's like 300 years old maybe and okay so i just want to say for the record i think we're now past the part where we're directly going to be describing any like sexual assaults i think

probably right right but we can still say now though that like the rest of the story still essentially revolves around people wanting siri to reproduce and then the people the other people who i'm assuming are essentially jennifer and gerald who is like leave me alone oh oh there's a um and then the wild hunt um is a group of inter again interdimensional slaving space elves who they want siri so that she can bring the elder blood back into their bloodline with their king because if they get access to that they can reopen slave passages and essentially conquer the world again yeah they what they want is to have free reign of of interdimensional travel okay if you you know what those guys remind me of actually i don't know how deep either of you i know you might be catho if you're deep into like D&D lore, that's just, is it the Gith

Yankee? The Gith Yankee are the mean ones that slave. Yeah, the Gith Yankee who are essentially like. The Gith Zerai are like Jedi monks living in an astral plane. The Gith Yankee are just like weird astral space pirates who are essentially immortal because they live in the

astral plane. And then their whole deal is just like going into the material world on slave raids and then disappearing back into the astral plane again. I mean, it's very similar to that. The way that they're depicted visually in game, because they are like the main villains of the third game, it's like they show up and they're like, they do have like a giant boat.

So they're basically just, they're just the gif Yankee. And, and they, well, yeah, but they also like ride on skeletal horses through the sky. Like,

it's like weird. Like they have both. Johnny Cash style ghost riders. Yeah. I was just about to say ghost riders. They are, they are ghost riders in the sky. Yes.

Johnny Cash was just singing to say ghost writers. They are ghost writers in the sky. Yes, they are ghost writers in the sky. Johnny Cash was just singing about the Wild Hunt. So even they, so there's four groups of people. Yeah, there are four individual factions that just want to reproduce with Ciri to get her magical DNA into their bloodline. And then there's like two people

aside from siri who are like this is probably a bad idea let's not do that and those two people are her adoptive parents yennefer and gerald don't don't the elves actually like semi all they they're like the who get closest to succeeding they capture her yeah i he the elves and Vilgefortz. The king wants it to be consensual. And he's like, well, we can make you be alive forever. You'll come around eventually. But the king is also super turned off by her. Yeah.

Because she's a human. And he's like, I do not find you attractive. So he just can't get it off. Well, to be fair, a lot of people call her ugly again for like a lot of the book they switch to pretty oh right around right around the time after right around the time she gets sexually assaulted yeah um weird right around the time she becomes a sexual entity everyone starts calling her pretty weird yeah so that's so that's the thing is that so much of the book is revolving around how people perceive series sexuality because you that is you know kind of the motivation for all of the antagonists

i'm gonna be honest with you that sucks yeah that's a really shitty story construction i'm sorry like i don't like it i'm not a fan i very much think that he came up with the elder blood gene as a concept and then didn't care as much as he should have when he was weaving it back in. He's like, this is a cool idea. That's how it feels to me because, and maybe that's just because I want to give it some benefit of the doubt that he wasn't like, what if everybody just wanted to assault this girl? Assault this like 15 year old girl. I'm assuming she gets her magic back.

I'm assuming she gets her magic. Obviously she gets her magic back at some point. Cause at the end of time of contempt, she can't do magic. So not exactly. And this is kind of the last thing that I think is a really... This is the most interesting thing about how Ciri's fate and sexuality get portrayed. Is while she's... You met the unicorn in the desert.

Yeah. The unicorn comes back because the unicorns, like Ciri, can at will control of space time. Uh-huh. Or, you know, at will travel through space time. Ciri is a, you know, the way that wizards are able to travel through space, Ciri can open portals through dimensions and time. Which if you want to say,

this is your third book in a row with folding space, that's absolutely valid. We're tessering again. All this tessering. Oh, by the way, I don't know, Trevor, side note. I learned afterwards, after we recorded that episode about Dune and about the Space and Guild tessering oh by the way i don't know trevor side note i learned afterwards after we recorded that episode about dune and about the spacing guild tessering if you just read the first book of dune he doesn't describe the spacing guild tessering he just says that they can like see

the future and plot the course it was david lynch when he made his movie adaption, he's the one that said that the Spacing Guild actually tessered. And Herbert liked it so much that he wrote it into the later books. I love when authors can interact with their own adaptations that way. Yeah, so he literally said, the only way he conceived of it before was that they just knew where everything was going to be so they could plot the safest course and david and lynch was just like i know they just like tesser through space and herbert was like and her and herbert was like was like that's a really great idea i'm gonna make sure i explain that in the next book i write yeah herbert didn't fully take the the tester because lynch makes it seem as though the spice gives people tessering abilities whereas yeah no i'm just saying that he liked the idea that herbert then wrote it in so that's where

that actually came from in dune is from david lynch so props but here we have our third book in a row where people are folding space time and siri can just do it at will yeah so Ciri doesn't really get her magic back, but she gets this additional ability to teleport. And at first she does it trying to escape from somebody. And you get this fun kind of montage of her popping up in both completely alien worlds and also hopping in and out of earth at, at different time periods. And you get from series perspective descriptions of like 18th century Prussia. So she's, yeah,

she's just doing, she's just randomly teleporting. Cause she can't like control it yet. Exactly. And, but she is kind of picked up and shown how to interact with this newfound power by the unicorns. So she gets the blade from the second book of his dark materials and can open little rifts into other dimensions whenever she wants. More or less, yeah.

There's a lot of her teleporting in the witcher three and that's what she's doing is she is hopping in and out of reality yeah the whole thing that that sets off the plot of the witcher three is that the wild hunt finds a way to detect when she jumps so they they start hunting her down across space time across space time and they can go anywhere pretty much so they keep tracking her down and keep hunting down entire like villages anywhere she's been anywhere she's come in contact with they keep tracking and like showing up repeatedly following behind her and so the whole thing is you're trying to catch up to siri before the wild hunt catches up siri so but the thing that i find interesting in how that plays out in relation to what everybody wants siri for is that canonically in this universe unicorns are only typically able to or interested in interacting with virgin women.

Which is a classic trope. Which is a super classic trope and something that I think in other contexts would be treated as a myth by Sapkowski. But like multiple times, different characters describe how that used to be a profession before unicorns stopped coming to this world on a regular basis. Cause they kept getting murdered. Because people were hunting them and because they didn't know they were sentient four legged horse creature. Yeah.

Kethel, you know who else uses as a major plot point? Unicorns only touching virgins, Madeline, the angle in the book, many waters. That is an important plot point in many waters by madeline laingle that's interesting that is that is also the book where people uh have sex with angels so okay so she goes off the deep end a little bit. Many Waters is the book where the twins, Sandy and Dennis,

go back and hang out with Noah, like the Noah. Oh, yeah. I knew she got weird. Right around the time he's building the ark, and angels are on Earth, and some people hook up with them, and unicorns actually touching virgins is an important plot point. So I just wanted to mention that, that that's not the only time I've seen this happen.

But why do the unicorns also interact with Ciri, even though she's definitely not a virgin at that point? So it's not stated outright. But I think, you know, the implication is that it's, you know, her sexuality that everybody's after is kind of nullified by her decision to not do it by her, you know, unlocking to use, you know, MMO terms,

the ability to walk away from her fate and just go somewhere else. Yeah. She gets to do like a sort of born again, Christian type thing where she's like, she's reverging. Yeah. That were or you know because how sexual everything is about it it's more i think that aspect of her destiny is ignored oh okay okay you know yeah so that's no that's not part of her existence in the universe anymore. So the unicorns ignore it.

Yeah, there's certainly some implication that the unicorns are able to hang out with her because she's not going to, you know, be the mother of the king of the world. She's decided she doesn't want to just, you know, be a reproductive vessel. Exactly. Women with women with agency oh boy so yeah there's there's just a lot leaning on siri and siri having or not having sex in this whole story i will say i'm going to be honest that makes me incredibly the end of the book I just read and you explaining that part I will admit does make me significantly less excited

to read the final books of the series because it doesn't seem like an entirely enjoyable premise to base the rest of the books on I'm sure there's lots of other cool stuff that happens because I do generally like the world Sapkowski built.

But, like, the fact that that's sort of like a tentpole of the story to me is just kind of a, excuse the phrase, a bit of a turn off. Yeah. I think kind of undeniably

the yeah um i think kind of undeniably the like that is part of the story you know that is the motivation for the story but the things that everybody does while being motivated by that are still really interesting okay hey and you get the gerald crew i do i do want to i do want to hear about the fellowship the gerald gang I do want to hear about the Fellowship. The Geralt gang. I do want to hear about the Fellowship. And that is the end of part two of our conversation

about the Witcher. We appreciate you sticking with us through whatever that just was, but I promise next week is going to be much less upsetting. If you want to follow any of us, our social media links are down in the description. And thanks for being a listener. See you next week.

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