Saturday, May 28, 2022

Geralt's Day Job

 I’m reading Blood, Sweat, & Pixels which is about the video game industry, and everything I’ve heard about it makes it sound like it sucks to be a video game programmer? I’ve also come to the realization that I’ve been re-reading a lot of books, so I’m thinking I’m going to try to read some new stuff for the next three or four Book Diary entries.


And I’m concerned that my Facebook is getting eaten by the Book Diary. Oh well; it’s not like most people much cared what I posted before anyway.


I don’t know what my computer’s doing? It was acting like it needed an update (being slow, taking half an hour to do anything), and then it didn’t? Which usually means it needs to update and won’t tell me, but now it’s working mostly smoothly. Hm.



Geralt’s Day Job


Alright, I realize this is such a non-issue, but for some reason it bugs me, so I’m putting it out there: Geralt being a witcher has so little an effect on the Plot of the Witcher novels that it might as well not be there.


Okay that’s harsh. 


But.


So many years ago I tried reading the books of The Witcher before I’d picked up any of the games. It didn’t go well. This is not a reflection of the books’ quality. It is, however, a reflection of how confusing it was to figure out which one was first. I think I tried Blood of Elves first, because that’s the one that is listed as  the first book in the editions in Barnes & Noble. That’s a mistake, by the way. While it’s the first novel, it’s not the first story in the series. You’re much better off if you pick up The Last Wish first, and then Sword of Destiny, both of which have short stories that set up what happens later in the novels.


The short stories are actually the parts where Geralt actually does his job on the page. The idea behind the original stories was that Sapkowski had the idea that in a fantasy world, in which there were monsters, there must be someone whose job it was to deal with monsters. The short stories often featured twisted and dark takes on well-known fairy tales and legends, with Geralt acting like an experienced veteran surrounded by people who don’t understand the magic circumstance they’ve found themselves in.


One of these stories features something called ‘Law of Surprise’, which basically has Geralt lay claim to Princess Pavetta of Cintra’s unborn child. A sort of ‘Take your firstborn as payment’ thing witchers do. When the child is born, Ciri, and her parents die and her kingdom perishes in fire, Geralt ends up protecting her as a surrogate father figure. In the first actual novel, Geralt takes Ciri to Kaer Morhen (Witchersville) where she trains for a bit before the Plot really picks up.


After leaving Kaer Morhen, Geralt’s job as a witcher, who hunts monsters? Is kind of… not a part of the story at all. It doesn’t go away completely, not yet–when he and Ciri first get separated he’s wandering for a bit and takes witcher jobs to get by. We don’t actually see these happen for the most part. The most we get is Geralt riding after dealing with a manticore, and a quick rundown of jobs he takes while he’s on the road. After that? Welp… not really. He identifies a couple of monsters, I guess. He’s able to tell one of the characters is a vampire, but he’s shown to be wrong about a lot of the features of vampires.


And I understand that once the Hero goes on his Quest, that he’s supposed to be out of his comfort zone. Things change as the story goes on, and as the story pushes Geralt forward, he’s put in situations different than what he’s used to. And I get that the story establishes that witchers are starting to become obsolete as there are less and less monsters in the world. It’s not as if you always expect protagonists to always use their day job when they’re going on a Quest to save the world or rescue a family member or whatever.


But you know what? That’s kind of dumb.


Look, this is a fantasy series set in a fantasy world, in which our main character is of a profession specifically created for this world. And so it’s more than a little silly that said profession isn’t a large part of the story, and the author has deliberately written the story in a way that our lead doesn’t really have much chance to do his actual job.


This is something that the games kind of fix–his job as a witcher isn’t a huge part of the main Plot there either, but it does come up more often, especially since more of the foes faced are supernatural rather than mercenaries and bandits and such. And because The Witcher 3 is a massive RPG with sidequests, there are contracts you can take to kill monsters for local villagers. The designers made it so that, wandering around the game world, you can’t really swing a cat without hitting some kind of monster.


And a book is not a game. I get that! But by the end of Tower of the Swallow Geralt basically admits he’s not a witcher anymore. And that’s annoying. Because a part of why I started reading these books was that the idea of a guy who hunts monsters for a living is a great concept for a fantasy story, and so that the books more or less abandon it once the Plot gets rolling is frustrating.


I’m not saying that The Witcher is bad, by any means–I don’t think that. But I think that the novels should have incorporated actually being a witcher into more of the stories, rather than it becoming an artifact to make the books more recognizable to fans.


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