Ancient Roman Fantasy

 I’m behind on a lot of things again, and it’s really bothering me. At the time I’m writing this I haven’t even answered Fun Fact Friday on Tumblr. We’re that behind! Part of this is a function of Camp NaNoWriMo (which I am also sucking at, thanks for asking). 

But good news! Soon I’m going to be further in the Wheel of Time than I’ve ever been before! I kind of can’t wait to see how it all ends.

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Ancient Roman Fantasy

I’ve been reading Britannia and it got me thinking about Roman historical fantasy, and what it would be like to see more fantasy fiction set in a world based off of ancient Rome. There’s actually not that much out there, that I recall anyway. There are a lot of fantasy stories where the alternate Rome is a faction in the story--The Elder Scrolls for example, but in the game actually in the Empire that Roman aspect is scrubbed away for standard fantasy setting.

So ancient Roman fantasy! Here are some things I would think you’d see if you were in a fantasy world inspired by ancient Rome. I will say that these are not all things that I would say HAVE to be in ancient Roman fantasy, and in a fantasy story you can play with what should and shouldn’t be in your invented world. But here are things that I think would be good elements to play with in the story.

[Military structure, armor, and titles will not be mentioned--those get copied enough, I think.]

Mystery Cults

You know Rome had a heck of a lot of mystery cults, right? Underground cults where people got together to have a weird religion, very often built off of an appropriated foreign deity, that catered to a certain group. Military men really liked the Cult of Mithras, for instance, whereas the Cult of Isis was popular with women. Yes, people would pay tribute to the emperor, and the state religion of traditional Roman gods and all, but they’d also do the mystery cults.

[Part of pagan Rome’s problem with Christianity was that they assumed it was another mystery cult, and were utterly baffled by these people’s refusal to pay tribute to the traditional gods and the emperor like all the others did.]

I suspect that many of these were also ways to, y’know, hang out, like secret social clubs that were kind of like open secrets? A way to talk to other people outside of strict public rules. 

Fantasy set in a Roman world would have these out the wazoo. If the main character isn’t in one, then someone he or she knows certainly would be. They wouldn’t be threatening human sacrifice-type cults, at least probably not, but there would be some strange rituals that wouldn’t allow outsiders. Probably like hazing, if you think about it.

Now this being a fantasy story, whether there is any truth to the god in the cult is up to the writer. I imagine Mithra, the Persian divinity, would be very weirded out by watching what Romans are doing in his name and absolutely butchering his life story to make weird hazing rituals.

Public Religion

You know what, let’s talk about how weird religion was in general in ancient Rome. This idea of religion as a private thing you keep to yourself? Nope! There were plenty of really large public religious festivals, and even religious orders that had more power than you’d expect. The Vestal Virgins, for instance, were able to pardon people that the law was pretty dead set on killing. There is this common idea that pops up in fiction that the Roman elites didn’t actually believe in the gods. Whether or not this is true is up to debate, but I’d like to see a story in which this is true, only to have an actual god show up and throw his/her existence in the face of the nonbelievers.

This kind of thing happens in Christian fiction a lot more often, but I rarely see this is in the context of a pagan religion. I think it’d be fun. And what do the gods think of all these ceremonies? The sacrifices, the augers, the big parades in the street? And how much power in this fantasy world would the priesthoods of different deities have? I imagine someone like the high priest of the king of the gods or the patron war god would have a lot of power, whereas the priesthood of the deities of the death, which people don’t like very much, would be a group of kind of nobodies, who nonetheless hold official position and you wouldn’t want to get on their bad side.

There’s also a tendency for Romans to assume that other religions were pretty backwards. I know a lot of people believed pagan religions were all tolerant of each other, and some were. But the Romans tended to assume that other religions (that weren’t mystery cults) were all barbaric twistings of true religion. So many of the Celtic and Germanic religions of the time are lost in part because the Romans didn’t record that many of the pagan religions, assuming their gods were just different manifestations of their gods, and applied those names to their gods as titles.  And they didn’t always get it right. Compare English and Spanish days of the week--the Romans assumed that Wodin/Odin was the Norse/Germanic equivalent of Mercury of all deities.

I imagine, in a fantasy version, in which gods could be real, they wouldn’t have much fun with that either. 

Political Corruption

We have this idea, and it pops up in Roman fiction all the time, that the tyrannical emperors wrestled power from the people, and before the Senate was a much more benevolent, representative government. History doesn’t bear us out. If your Roman fantasy counterpart is in the Empire or Republic phase, there should be a LOT of corruption. Rome in its Republic was in constant cycles of civil wars, public feuds, and all attempts at reform pretty much failed and the ring leaders were executed by the state or by lynch mobs.

Romans had tons of problems with their government. Part of the reason a totalitarian ruler took hold was because people were sick of government corruption and the cycle of violence. A dictator that would, at least in theory, clean up the mess of corrupt politicians who most certainly did NOT represent the people (made up of the ruling class), well, they liked that.

Mind you, emperors weren’t always better. In many ways they could be worse. Sometimes they were tyrants. Sometimes they were puppets. Sometimes they killed family members. Sometimes they killed unpopular religious minorities. And sometimes people got sick of them. It got to the point that the Praetorian guard, the people tasked with protecting the emperor, got so fed up they had a habit of killing their boss. Which is kind of sad, actually--it’s the exact opposite of their intended job, after all.

Any representation of an empire anything like Rome in fantasy should be crawling with corruption. Whether that’s a bunch of two-faced politicians cutting backroom deals and bribing each other, or an emperor appointing his family members (or pets!) to important positions, or imperial guards that are the power behind the throne, there should be something rotten in the state of Rome.

Engineering Marvels

Look, the Romans had fantastic taste in design. One of the things that amazes people to this day is how well put-together their stuff is, for so many ruins to still be standing after all these centuries. Without these massive achievements in architecture and engineering, a fantasy version of Rome wouldn’t actually be a fantasy version of Rome.

There are other ways in which Roman engineering paid off. In warfare, they designed efficient weapons and war machines. The pilum, the Roman spear, for instance, was designed that you can’t rethrow it--after being thrown, the spear bends and becomes pretty much useless as a weapon. Your enemy can’t throw it back at you, and if it lands on a shield it immediately drags the shield down.

Likewise, siege weapons like catapults and ballista? Roman inventions (although in some cases, based off of earlier designs). Roman camps and defenses could be taken down and set up easily.

I’d like to see writers making a fantasy version of Rome with some of these inventions, but also with a lot of original designs. What other kinds of weapons could these not-Romans make in a fantasy world, with the fantasy resources at their disposal? If magic is a thing that can be harnessed, would there be magic projectile weapons? Would magic weapons only work for Roman soldiers? Would there be some kind of magic used in making even bigger architectural marvels? If this world has fantasy races, are any of them big enough to help with construction of huge monuments? Small enough to manipulate tiny, delicate mechanisms? 

Xenophobia/Nationalism

The Romans thought the world of themselves, but not so much of the people around them. Rome was civilization--everyone else was a barbarian that could do with some Romans around to show them how to properly live their lives (though of course, not become as privileged as the Roman citizens themselves). Rome was destined to rule the world, after all. Not everyone else was a slave, but they were, at best, second-class. They didn’t get the same rights, and certainly didn’t get much of a say in the way the government was run.

This actually continued after the Roman Empire’s decline. Some thinkers thought of Rome as the rightful secular rulers of the world. Hence you see people try to emulate them, or become their inheritors, with things like the Holy Roman Empire, or titles like ‘czar’ and ‘kaiser’ derived from ‘Caesar’. And also, notice that Dante Alighieri, in his Inferno, ranks the betrayal of Julius Caesar by Brutus and Cassius as on equal footing as Judas Iscariot betraying Jesus.

A character raised in a Roman analogue would have grown up with this attitude. Whether or not that belief sticks throughout the story is up to the writer (though if it’s the protagonist I lean towards ‘not,’ especially with the way modern politics are going nowadays), but it should at least be touched upon. If he or she runs into characters from other countries/provinces, it’d be nice to see how those points of view contrast with each other.

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Wings of Fire vs Tooth and Claw

 I have had dark thoughts of late, and I’ve been pushing them aside for the most part, but this week they’ve started catching up with me more.

The second part of the Witcher III Review will exist… one day. I have a lot on my plate right now.

Also I’m watching Dances with Wolves on Netflix? There will be a post about that on Movie Munchies.

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Wings of Fire vs Tooth and Claw

What is it like to write a book about dragons from the point of view of dragons? You know, considering how massive the fantasy genre has become, I don’t come across it as often as I would have thought. Mind you, there are plenty of authors who write sections of books from the viewpoints of dragons. But the entire novel? I don’t see it a lot. Sometimes people get around this by putting the dragon in human form for a large chunk of the book.

But not always! I had this thought on Thursday evening that I have read two works in which the dragons are explicitly not human in shape, and I haven’t compared them in my head. The obvious answer is that one is a long-running series aimed at children and the other is a one-off aimed at adults, but I still should have done this.

So.

Wings of Fire is a series of books by Tui Sutherland, one of the writers in the Warriors Cats book collective (or whatever that group was called) that went off on her own to write books about dragons. The books tell the story of a group of dragonets (young dragons), each from a different tribe (element and habitat or whatever) that have to work together to stop the civil war among dragons that’s engulfing their continent. Despite being for children, there is quite a lot of violence, which makes sense considering they’re dragons and it’s a war going on, but still.

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton is a book about a family of dragons following the death of their patriarch. The purpose of the novel, as stated by Walton, was to write a Victorian drama of the type she was fond of growing up, but one where it made sense for the strict gender roles to be the way they were. So biologically the female dragons are subservient. Also dragons have to eat each other to get bigger. The two major conflicts are about the daughters needing to get married, and the son-in-law eating more of his deceased father-in-law than was proper for the time.

Okay, so--part of the problem I see with both of these series, though to different degrees, is how much they anthropomorphize the dragons. Obviously we need our protagonists to talk and have some sort of society, but they both take it really far and make it weird? By a longshot, this is more a problem in Tooth and Claw, which mentions a lot of things that don’t make any goshdarn sense for dragons to have: carriages, and trains, and human-specific clothing and such. Exactly how these work with creatures that are explicitly not human-shaped is never adequately explained. They’re there because it’s like a Victorian story. And admittedly, that’s the point, but it makes it hard to be immersed in the book when this apparent contradiction is staring you in the face the entire time.

Wings of Fire also has this problem, though scaled (no pune intended) back. Dragons use spears and scrolls and live in castles and it’s very weird. One would think that their hands/paws wouldn’t be that prehensile. There are a lot of things that show that they’re not human though--the word ‘talon’ is substituted for ‘hand’ (although a talon is a claw, the correct word should be ‘paw’ or something) and the tribes being biologically different is a huge plot point. 

Like yes, Tooth and Claw brings up wings and breathing fire, but other than those the dragons seem to live like people. The dragons of Wings of Fire still live in caves, still hunt wild animals, and don’t wear clothing other than things like necklaces, earrings, and adornments that actually make sense for a dragon to be wearing.

An immediate difference is also the role of female dragons. In Tooth and Claw female dragons are explicitly, biologically, physically submissive to males. This is part of the point of the book, to make a story where there is a reason the women act the way they do in Victorian novels. It’s also kind of stupid. Whereas in Wings of Fire, female dragons, and only female dragons, can be monarchs of a tribe. Any time a male dragon suggests being in charge as more than a behind-the-scenes type, the reaction from other dragons ranges from disbelief to scorn. 

And it strikes me as a bit odd, the notion of framing female dragons as submissive model Victorian-era “Angels of the Household” types. No, bump that--it’s downright WEIRD and WRONG and the more I think about it I’m absolutely baffled that Walton chose dragons--DRAGONS--of all creatures to try to make this point. The notion that dragons are ever depicted as helpless damsels feels close to heresy. They can be desperate or defenseless given the right character arc, but that they’re naturally this way? No, screw that.

I can’t say that I liked that.

Nor all the cannibalism? Tooth and Claw makes it so that dragons must eat other dragons to get stronger. This usually means that dragons eat their own dead (which isn’t too out there I suppose), and that elite dragon families eat any offspring that are considered too weak. This felt more like a dragon thing than [waves above] all THAT, admittedly. 

Wings of Fire doesn’t have any of that (that I recall), but there is a lot of dragon-on-dragon violence. Loads and loads of it.

But I think another way in which Wings of Fire comes out ahead is its depiction of humans. In Tooth and Claw humans are another nation with which dragons used to be at war with, and now they “enjoy” a nervous peace. A human doesn’t appear until the end, as an ambassador at a large party, and many of the dragons treat him with derision. In Wings of Fire humans are referred to as “scavengers” and they… don’t get along with dragons, unsurprisingly. We don’t get a lot of what their world is like, but dragons tend to see them as (at best) clever animals. Some dragons even keep them as pets. And that’s horrifying, but the dragons can’t understand their speech or actions, nor their habit of running and squealing at the sight of dragons.

A quick way to see if a dragon is meant to be sympathetic is how they treat humans. One dragon is introduced biting a human head off, and morally she’s one of the worst characters to appear on the pages of the books. There’s something about how characters treat others who are less powerful than themselves in there somewhere.

But this is part of what makes me like Wings of Fire more-- because the dragons and humans are explicitly different creatures who don’t work on the same rules. It’s not perfect, but the author actually puts effort into making the dragons actually different than people, and showcases that by displaying that humans exist in the setting, but don’t really fit very well in the world of dragons. They very rarely have any effect on the overall Plot. And because of that the story felt much more like it wasn’t about humans--rather than Tooth and Claw, which was very much about humans, just with some quick switches to make the story plausible.

Though, like I said, Wings of Fire is far from perfect in that regard. But it feels much more like it’s trying, and it’s more difficult to forget that it’s protagonists are dragons and not humans. Which should be a larger priority when writing nonhuman characters. And because of that, it works a lot better for me.

Also it’s less straight-up weird.

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Witcher III: Wild Hunt Review, Part 1 - Story

 I meant to finish this (this part, anyway) a lot earlier, but everything sort of ganged up on me and so I didn't go as quickly as I really wanted to in writing this. It's also... very disorganized, and I had envisioned doing much more with it--I mention later on in the essay that I had originally hoped to do this in even MOAR parts, with each major character getting full analysis, but let's be real here, there are so many characters in the game that doing that would take even longer and I'm stretched out as it is.

So here it is: the first part of my review of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. I don't think the next part will be out next weekend, but hopefully it won't take as long.

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PART I: STORY

My intention was to write a review for The Witcher III: Wild Hunt when I started it. But part of the problem with that is that it’s a massive game, so there’s quite a lot to talk about and it’s going to take a while to unpack.  I’m splitting this up into sections, and those sections might be split into subsections. Before we get started a couple of disclaimers:

First: I have read only three of the books in the Witcher saga, and I have played neither of the previous two games. So while I often say you shouldn’t have to read/watch/play supplementary material to understand plot points, the previous entries in a series don’t fall under that category. So I may complain about how something is handled or explained, but if it’s covered better in previous media then consider my criticism with a grain of salt.

Second: I tend to lean away from dark fantasy as a subgenre. It’s not my thing most of the time. I didn hear a lot of good things about this game and found it on sale, so that’s why I got it, but while I did enjoy myself greatly, this isn’t the type of story I usually go for.

So! Let’s start by talking about the Plot of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt! In a slightly condensed way:

The story picks up after the end of The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings, where Geralt gets his memory back and has been searching for his love interest from the books, Yennefer. He’s also been having dreams about his adopted daughter Ciri, and thinks she’s in danger. He does find Yennefer quickly enough, and they’re drafted by Ciri’s biological father--the emperor of Nilfgaard, the invading nation bent on world domination--to find Ciri, as she’s been seen in the area.

So it’s up to Geralt to track down Ciri in the last known locations she’s been seen: the war-torn no man’s land called Velen, the cosmopolitan and corrupt city of Novigrad, and the rugged islands of Skellige. Along the way he runs into a LOT of old acquaintances, and new ones, and finds out that Ciri’s being chased by the Wild Hunt, an army of extradimensional elves that hope to use Ciri’s incredible powers to take over the multiverse, which would also kill her in the process.

Geralt eventually does find Ciri, and tries to gather all of his allies to make a stand against the Wild Hunt at the witcher fortress of Kaer Morhen. But while they do survive and Ciri doesn’t get taken, Geralt’s mentor Vesemir bites it and the Wild Hunt escapes to fight another day. Geralt and company then form a plan to lure the Wild Hunt somewhere in which they can’t escape, and cut off all of their backup from their home dimension, leading to a climactic battle in which Geralt fights and kills Eredin, the King of the Wild Hunt.

And then Ciri destroys the White Frost, this extradimensional winter force that goes around destroying worlds or something.

THE END!

Unless you get the expansions. The first one, Hearts of Stone, has Geralt get involved with a disgraced Redanian nobleman named Olgierd von Everec, who turns out to be unkillable because he made a deal for wealth and power with an unsavory being calling himself Gaunter O’Dimm. Gaunter helps Geralt, so Geralt has to in turn help Gaunter fulfill Olgierd’s contract: grant three impossible wishes, and then Gaunter gets to take Olgierd’s soul, for which Gaunter will grant Geralt any wish he likes. However, Geralt can interfere and try to save Olgierd instead, and defeat Gaunter in a game of wits.

The second expansion, Blood and Wine sees Geralt traveling south to the duchy of Touissant. The duchy’s being terrorized by a monster killing high-ranking knights, and the duchess has hired Geralt to investigate and kill it. Turns out that the creature’s a Higher Vampire named Dettlaff, and then Geralt’s old previously-thought-dead vampire friend Regis turns out to be Dettlaff’s friend and encourages him to investigate further to find out why Dettlaff has gone on a killing spree. It turns out to be about more than it seems--Dettlaff’s being blackmailed into killing knights, and the blackmailer has more than just killing aristocrats in mind, shaking up the entire duchy with the ambition of overthrowing the established order.

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Alright, so let’s talk a bit more about the game’s Plot and how it works. After the introductory section in White Orchard, you have the three main regions (it’s kind of two, as you don’t need to go to a different part of the map to go between Velen and Novigrad, but let’s just stick with what the game tells us): Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige. The investigations in all three regions can be done in any order. I did them in the order they’re levelled at, and they’re listed in the story, but the player doesn’t have to.

This first part, which is helpfully labelled ‘Act I’ by the game’s wiki, is also the majority of the game’s Plot. Most of the game will be spent exploring these areas and dealing with the tangle of subplots there. And so when Geralt finally does find Ciri, the story feels a bit… rushed? And of course, yeah, things should pick up after that happens, but it feels a lot like most of the game is slow build, and then it’s one major battle after another. Maybe it’s just because I also do quite a lot of the side content, but going from hours upon hours of Plot interwoven with deep and complex character arcs to straight battles felt a little jarring to me. There’s a scene between Plot sequences which is where you can tell Ciri that the Emperor wants to see her, and it’s so awkwardly sandwiched in between important cutscenes that I thought I missed something, or that it would come up again more organically later.

Again, that’s not too much of a complaint, because naturally the story picks up after a certain point. But it’s weird that it all comes rushing together at once when the beginning of the game is much slower paced. Then again, I did get annoyed at the slow beginning at first, because it felt as if as much fun as I was having, the story was barely progressing. I’m kind of thankful that it picks up.

I was worried that I would be lost when playing the game. I have some basic knowledge of the setting and the Witcher stories, having watched the series, and read the first three books. But that wasn’t really a problem? I suppose it couldn’t have been--this game being as popular as it is, I don’t think everyone that played it and enjoyed it had gone through all of the material. And I’m glad. I don’t know if it was easy to make a game that was a conclusion to the Witcher saga and yet still accessible to noobs, but I very much appreciated it. 

Not everything is explained in a way that satisfied me--the White Frost for instance. It’s explained in-game, but it feels a bit hastily put in towards the end of the game, and if you didn’t read any of the in-game books it feels right the fudge out of nowhere. Pretty much everything about the Wild Hunt’s origins and backstory, including most information about the Aen Elle, felt as if it wasn’t given enough breathing room to be developed. The histories and relationships of countries that weren’t Redania or Nilfaard were all a bit hazy.  Yes, there’s an in-game glossary and database, and that helps, but that mostly just gives you the gist of things, and there’s clearly a lot more going on. Again, I suspect that if I read all of the books and played the previous games this would have worked better, but as it was I just kind of nodded and hoped it would become clearer and only some of it did. Most of it wasn’t necessary to understanding the Plot, or the game, so it wasn’t a huge stumbling block, but it is a problem I had.

THEMES

Human Nature & Morality

I got very frustrated with this game’s very dim view of humanity and morality, but to its credit, it makes for a very interesting and unexpected experience. Most of the people you meet in the Northern Kingdoms are selfish jerkfaces, happily calling Geralt a freak to his face until they need his help killing a monster. Several times you are given a quest where even if you make the “Good” choices, a ton of people get horribly screwed over in ways you never could have foreseen.

It is… irritating, to say the least. The Church of the Eternal Fire embodies this the most for me--they somehow have an iron grip on the city of Novigrad, happily burning mages and nonhumans, and the common folk are happy to let them because humans are sheep unless they’re named characters. Novigrad is explicitly under the control of crime lords who think very little of the Eternal Fire, but somehow they still hold institutional power because they’re sponsored by Radovid (who also doesn’t have institutional power in Novigrad, we’re told).

The Bloody Baron questline embodies this writing at its best. The story involves Geralt’s interactions with a local warlord called the Bloody Baron who is, quite frankly, a horrible person. He is looking for his missing wife and daughter, and when he hires Geralt to look for them, he conveniently leaves out that he would frequently get drunk and beat his wife. Also his men frequently commit war crimes. He is not without noble qualities--when he never harms children, and he helps Ciri when she’s in trouble. And he does show genuine remorse for what he’s done to his family.

Is that enough? Does that mean he gets a pass? That’s up to you, the player. The game doesn’t depict him as a good guy. It doesn’t portray him as a completely evil guy. But it doesn’t whitewash what the man has done, or what he’s still allowing to be done in his name. How you react to him depends entirely on how the player feels about him as a person. I don’t know if you can decide to let him off the hook completely--and I don’t think you should. But whether or not you give some measure of understanding when he tells his side of the story, or whether you decide that he’s still the Worst, that’s on the player, and that’s great.

It helps that there are two different endings to his storyline, neither of them particularly good for the Baron. One of them has more hope for him redeeming himself, true, but not in a simple or clear-cut way.

So yes, I do get frustrated with the way the game is so much of a downer, thematically. But it leads to some very complex and interesting human interactions and I appreciate that the game is brave enough to go there.

The DLC Blood and Wine is a bit more optimistic in its depiction of human nature (along with a more colorful world), but it still has a lot of stories that rely on people being absolutely terrible to each other. The ending can also very easily be made a mess of without even trying because of how terrible people (mostly Syanna) can be.

I think it’s executed pretty clumsily at times though. The treatment of Nilfgaard by the story comes to mind. Nilfgaard, a massive invading empire happy to commit war crimes and that’s never happy with enough land or territory, in a video game developed by a Polish game studio, based on a series by a Polish author, practically screams Soviet and Nazi parallels. And yet while the game doesn’t depict them as nice, it kind of lightens their depiction from what I remember in the books. They’re depicted as not a good, but a better alternative than Radovid’s madness and extremism.

When a game makes a villain a genocidal religious extremist maniac turned up to eleven, and dials down the canon fascist/authoritarian traits of another villain, I feel like we run into a problem. Because it seems like they’re saying, “Yeah, it’s a brutal authoritarian dictatorship, but at least they’re not racist zealots!” 

I don’t like that this dichotomy is even a question. And toning down the side of authoritarianism don’t sit right with me. 

War

Part of the reason that everyone’s so horrible to each other and to you, the player, is because there’s a war going on. It brings out the worst in people. Part of that is because of sheer desperation--many of the resources are being commandeered by soldiers and people are getting killed right and left. And part of it is because there are nations and ways of life falling apart because of the war, and obviously that’s going to put a lot of stress on the citizens of the Continent. 

War brings out the worst in people.

We don’t actually see any major battles in the war, but we see the aftermath. Velen is scattered about with ruined villages and battlefields littered with corpses and carrion-eaters feasting on what’s left. You’ll find bandits and deserters throughout that are picking through what’s left. Bodies are hanging from gibbets and trees of criminals and deserters. It’s a very bleak place and it adds to the atmosphere of a world that’s fallen so far from where it should be. It makes an oppressive atmosphere, one that’s suited for the story they’re trying to tell. Because this isn’t just high fantasy, it’s high fantasy with quite a lot of horror thrown in. And much of that horror isn’t monsters, or rather, it isn’t JUST monsters--it’s the conditions that allow monsters to thrive: the rampant death and destruction brought on by war. 

Still, I think the war storyline leads to some really stupid moments? There’s a questline you can pursue about assassinating Radovid, the king of Redania, because he’s crazypants. And it’s fine, but at the end of the storyline, it’s revealed that the conspirators made a pact with the Emperor of Nilfgaard to kill Radovid, and that in return their country, Temeria, becomes a self-governed province of the Empire. And then one of the conspirators decides he’s going to kill your friends so that he can rule Redania and defeat Nilfgaard in the war, because he doesn’t want his country to be sold out just so Temeria can exist. Which is a fair point, but killing Geralt’s friends isn’t a smart plan; it hinges on Geralt walking away, when the reason he joined this assassination plot in the first place was so that he could help his friends. I can’t imagine why any player would just walk away unless they really wanted to know what happened. War brings out the worst in people sometimes, yeah, but not that much stupid.

Public Opinion

Public opinion has a lot of sway on what people do and how they interact with each other. The most prominent example of this is when we learn that the invasion of the Northern Kingdoms isn’t actually all that popular back home in Nilfgaard, and that one of the Emperor’s worst fears is that he’s deposed by his people once he gets back home. If you end the story in such a way that he loses the war, that’s exactly what happens--he gets assassinated as soon as he gets back.

There are plenty of people who hate Geralt on sight because he’s a witcher, and nobody likes witchers that much. And that’s fair--they only kill monsters for a price, and in a war zone not everyone can pay that price. Furthermore they had a habit once upon a time of taking children as payment, hoping to train future witchers, and most kids don’t survive the process. And the reason they stopped taking them was not because it’s bad, but because the process to make more has been lost.

In short, getting good PR is essential. There aren’t a lot of people who thrive despite having bad reputations. Building and keeping a good reputation, even if you’re a complete bastard, is a large part of how those in power stay in power. And having a bad reputation even if you’re very noble can get you in trouble, or even killed.

One thing that did kind of bug me is Geralt’s fame. There are times when it seems as if plenty of people know who he is--after all, Dandelion is his PR guy, and that man’s the most famous bard and troubadour on the Continent. Other times Geralt introduces himself and no one has a clue who he is. And I get that before widespread media not everyone everywhere will have heard of him, but even with that in mind it’s pretty inconsistent how famous he is. It tends to be “Geralt is as famous as the Plot needs him to be for this particular story/quest to work.”

Still, it’s a cool concept to explore in a fantasy story. Not a brand new one, of course, but one that fits perfectly with the world as it’s built.

Relationships

You can play Geralt as the most ruthless, heartless, inhuman bastard imaginable, and he’s still humanized by his relationship with Ciri. You can’t change the fact that he cares about his adopted daughter and wants to help her out. Sure, you can be a terrible father, but it doesn’t mean that Geralt doesn’t care, just that he’s bad at it.

There’s a running idea throughout the story that yes, people can be utterly terrible, but what brings them back, or gives them a shot at bringing them back to the light, is the love they have for others. Maybe it’s parental love, like Geralt and Yennerfer for Ciri, or Strenger for Tamara; maybe it’s Syanna’s twisted love for her sister Annarietta (if you play the cards right). 

Heck, the Emperor of Nilfgaard is humanized (slightly) by the love for his daughter.

The characters who are irredeemable are the ones who aren’t connected to anyone; who can’t connect with anyone. Cyprian is a serial killer that gets his kicks murdering a different batch of prostitutes every night, and no one cries if he gets killed or if he’s a beggar in the street getting pelted with rocks by children. Caleb Menge is only interested in hurting people because he’s so paranoid of nonhumans and mages that he won’t connect with anyone. 

When these connections are lost are when we risk losing our humanity. When Geralt thinks Cyprian might have killed Ciri, he gets pretty scary. And in the ending in which Ciri dies, he becomes a much colder killing machine. When Syanna is convinced that her sister doesn’t love her, she becomes a power-hungry murderer. When Detlaff finds out that he was never loved in the first place, he becomes omnicidal. And of course Olgierd can’t--what makes him monstrous is that his deal with Gaunter turned his heart to stone. And even though he knows that he should care about people, he can’t, so he gives up and just tries chasing thrills to try to feel something, being an absolute bastard.

Humans need other humans to be… human.

CHARACTERS

Okay so in my head, I told myself I’d do an in-depth profile on every major character. And then I started listing characters distinct and important enough to do profiles on and HOLY FATHER FRANCIS this game has a ton of characters and if I’m hoping to get anywhere at all with this review, we are not doing that. 

I’ve talked a bit about how this game has complex characters and I like that, but also that the game sometimes goes into dark or morally complex places when it doesn’t need to in order to make it grimdarker (??) for the heck of it. For instance, Djikstra comes to mind--he’s an incredibly intelligent, if ruthless, former spymaster-turned-crime lord that decides to kill Radovid for turning the country to garbage. And he immediately turns on his allies the first opportunity he gets, not counting on Geralt interfering because… we need the Conflict Ball here, I guess. It makes his character arc in the game feel less than fulfilling.

For the most part though, even if I don’t like all the character writing decisions, I get that I’m not supposed to--and I can choose to make Geralt react in a way that somewhat reflects my own reactions. I very much enjoy that Geralt’s character arc is heavily determined by player choices. Geralt can be a hero of the downtrodden, and I think the game subtly steers you in this direction with the way that the story goes. But you don’t have to go that way at all. You can make Geralt the biggest jerkwad in the history of the Continent, ignoring when people are in trouble, or demanding more money from people who are offering their last pennies to you to kill a monster.

Yennefer is… alright let’s get straight to it: she’s kind of terrible. She’s aloof at first, and I get that because she’s concerned with finding Ciri and doesn’t have time to sit and reminisce with Geralt about old times, especially considering she’s still a bit upset about Geralt having a romance with Triss while she’s been out. And I think, after playing this game, I get what the romance between Geralt and Yennefer is supposed to be: these two very flawed individuals who nonetheless are trying to make a relationship work despite their own flaws, and making it work through all of the difficulties. Thing is that Yennefer has some incredibly unsympathetic moments of dickishness or pettiness that made me think, “Wow, you’re not someone I really want to be around.” Mind you, I still steered Geralt towards her because I’m a stickler for canon, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing.

The third point of this love triangle is Triss, who the game very much paints as a nice, sweet girl who just wants to help the downtrodden whenever she can and also happens to be an incredibly powerful sorceress and also is madly in love with Geralt even though they broke up a little while back. Which okay, makes her a very distinct option from Yennefer. But what this overlooks is that (from what I understand) Triss took advantage of Geralt while he had amnesia and couldn’t remember Yennefer. This is glossed over in a quick bit of dialogue and Geralt doesn’t hold it against her, but it’s still a thing that happened, and while complex characters are fine, it’s frustrating to ignore that complexity in order to make the love triangle a more conventional one to the audience.

Ciri is a good character, but like I said, it seems the game doesn’t develop her enough on its own. As a character she stands out, but she’s not in most of the story, and her powers are so vaguely-defined it sometimes feels like she’s exactly as powerful as the Plot needs her to be. The ending involves her fighting the White Frost by herself and destroying it, but I have no idea what that entails, why she’s the one to do it, and how she does it. This might be another one of those ‘I should have read all the books’ thing, but it seems like something that should have been given more details.

Given that she’s essentially Geralt’s daughter, and she’s the one the entire Plot of the saga hinges on, I figured she should have more. It’s not too egregious considering she’s given playable sequences, and once she’s physically in the story she takes up a large part of it. And the times when she’s not there are almost entirely about trying to find her. I just wish I had a better handle on her relevance to the setting. Mind you, her role as a character is very well defined--I was never at a loss as to what she meant to Geralt, Yen, or Triss. And I think it’s commendable that the writers managed to get that across even for people who aren’t superfans of the novels.

Eredin is… not a fantastic villain. Maybe he works better for book fans, but for me, most of his motivations and backstory are only referred to and not very well explained. So he’s just some generic bad guy that’s trying to get Ciri so he can take over the multiverse. I think? From what I can tell he’s also the de facto king of elves from his home dimension, which doesn’t sound right to me, but we’re only given one other elven politician there, Ge’els, and he seems more like a steward or chancellor than a king.

Baron Strenger is one of the best characters in the game. Not in that he’s necessarily fun to watch, or that he’s a cool guy (because he’s not), but he’s one of the most complex characters I’ve seen in a video game and the freedom with which the player gets to judge him is really interesting. It’s not pleasant, but I think his storyline is the best in the game? Yeah, he’s a garbage man, let’s not diminish that. But in the end he realizes that. 

I wanted the other witchers to get more screen time than they did. They’re really cool characters! Even if Lambert’s a douchebag. They did get a fair amount, but once the siege of Kaer Morhen is over, they’re gone too. And that’s a shame because I would have liked to have seen Geralt interact with them more, or see a few other witchers. The idea presented in the early books that witchers don’t have emotions is clearly simply not there in this game because there isn’t really an attempt to have them be emotionless. Which is fine--most writers are very bad at writing supposedly emotionless characters.

I also desperately wished to see Geralt and Letho hang out more, though I don’t really think there’s any good reason for them to do so. Really, once I read up on this guy’s story I wondered why Geralt would even talk to him.

The Skellige characters are all right. I felt like they were a bit disconnected from the main story, and I’m still very unclear how they’re related to everything? I know that they know Ciri, but I don’t quite know how or why, even though I know she spent some time there when she was young. Why did she go to them? Why are they all cool with Geralt? I dunno. If it is explained in-game, I don’t remember it now. They’re all cool, interesting characters, and in some ways a more thoughtful look at the ‘viking warrior’ type of character and why that isn’t always great. 

I thought about dedicating a different section to the DLC characters, but I’ve already dipped into a bit here. So I’ll talk about some of those characters; however, I should note that the villains in the expansions carry so much more depth than the main villains of the main game’s Plot. Which is impressive, considering that the expansions’ runtime is shorter.

Olgierd is an interesting case of a man who sold his soul, because he has no emotions, but he remembers what they felt like, so he keeps trying to feel them again. There’s the lovely bit of dialogue between the dog and cat:

“At least he loved his wife.”

“He didn’t. He only remembered that he should.”

Which is a thing I feel like a lot of writers don’t think about when they write characters who have lost emotions.

Gaunter O’Dim is a terrifying character that works (for me) precisely because most of what characterizes him is implied rather than outright said. It’s quite plain to the player that he’s the Devil, but it takes quite a while for Geralt to get there. He’s a fantastic villain, even if he doesn’t have anything against Geralt personally, because you know that you can’t trust him from the start and he’s so unimaginably powerful that he doesn’t have to actually use any of his offensive powers to be scary. But when he does use his powers, he’s one of the most horrific monsters I’ve ever seen in fiction.

Annarietta, Duchess of Toussaint, is a nice contrast to the nobles of Velen and Redania, as she’s someone that is actually apparently good for her country, and despite the fancy trappings of nobility isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty in the pursuit of her nation’s good. But her pride still sometimes gets the best of her, and the fact is that her nation puts her up on way too high of a pedestal. Which she sort of buys into sometimes? Like yes, it gets annoying, but it’s supposed to, and I don’t think it’s bad writing.

Regis is… another book character I don’t know. But I liked him. He’s a bit too apologetic on Detlaff’s part, but it’s clear theirs is a friendship that Geralt isn’t a part of and so of course from the outside it doesn’t make as much sense. He’s a likable enough vampire character, and one that thankfully isn’t an angsty douchebag. It’s way too common to see that kind of character, even in fiction that’s meant to be subversive.

Detlaff is a great villain because as his story goes on you find out that he’s not really that bad of a guy at the start. Yeah, he’s temperamental, and lashes out at people, and in a Higher Vampire that’s dangerous. By the end of the story he’s become a rabid animal that has to be put down--but you can find yourself hoping that there’s another way.

Syanna is a bit of a difficult character for me because she’s kind of a garbage person? And yes, as you interact with her throughout Blood & Wine you see why she’s a garbage person, but it seems very much like the “good” ending is letting her get away with a lot less punishment than you’d expect, and that’s… a bit frustrating. Not that I wanted Syanna to die horribly, but she caused quite a lot of suffering and I get that many players probably don’t think she deserves just being imprisoned for it, but that’s the only way for you to have a “good” ending for that storyline.

CONCLUSION

This is a game that I think would have been more rewarding in its story if I had a lot more familiarity with the source material--both in that I would have better ideas behind events and character motivations, and the themes might feel more familiar to me. 

[Hearts of Stone didn’t really have that much of a problem in that regard, because it’s clear that the story of that mostly goes into new territory for Geralt as well.]

It is, however, extremely impressive how much of the story doesn’t feel confusing though. We’re about nine installments into the story, and I, someone who has only read three of those installments, didn’t feel completely lost in the world or the story. And clearly plenty of people agreed with me, because this game won tons of awards, acclaim, and sales. It makes me reflect on plenty of other long-running serieses, both in games and other mediums, that cut back on continuity and story in order to appeal to newer players at the expense of telling stories that make sense (coughAssassin’sCreedcough).

The story has some noticeable pitfalls, especially once you start digging into the details. I can chalk most of these up to the constraints of time and technology when building a video game. There’s clearly a lot that didn’t make it into the final game, but what is there is pretty astounding. Writing a game this complex, with this many outcomes and choices, is an amazing achievement and I think even if there were aspects that I didn’t like, overall it’s one of the greatest games, in terms of writing, that I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.

Next part will talk about gameplay.