The Ballad of Himbo Geralt (Witchermania Part 1) (Patreon)

I've got a fever, a Witcher fever, and the only cure, is lots of long-as-hell videos about The Witcher. 

I first encountered the witcher franchise in 2015 when Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt was released and I…. bounced off it really hard. I played about 10 minutes. It didn’t run very well on my PC, and I found the heavy lore and story that I was obviously missing really confusing. And then I didn’t even think about The Witcher for 4 whole years until Netflix made a live-action series adapting the books?? Because apparently this series is based on books? 

After watching the show I got really invested in the franchise in a way I never expected, which from what I’ve heard might not be a totally uncommon experience.

In this video I’m going to cover the Netflix show, so without further ado let’s just jump right in. Let’s dive in. Just hop in there and splash around and have some fun.

The Ballad of Himbo Geralt

More than usual I think it's important to make some comparisons to the original books when looking at the show. Not because those texts are inherently relevant when discussing this one, but since the show is only at present one season long, it can serve as a handy guide for where the show might be going and therefore shed light on some creative decisions.

For example the focus on Jaskier - or Dandelion if you’re a bookler like me - and Geralt’s relationship is a solid foundation since they’ll be together through pretty much the entire series. Dandelion isn’t in all those stories in the books, but Jaskier is in all those stories in the show.

I’m really looking forward to more of this show, and Jaskier and Geralt’s relationship in particular. The gays can finally get the male-male fantasy relationship they’ve been waiting for. Lesbians have had Xena and Gabrielle for decades, this one’s for the boys.

I’m looking forward to Geralt’s travelling part expanding, meeting Zoltan the dwarf, Milva, Regus the vampire, just… in general, Regus.

There are other things I’m not exactly looking forward to but I’m very curious about. How would the show deal with the fact Yennefer isn’t in like 3 whole books because she turned into a statue.

I think when we get to Ciri being gay in the show there will probably be a bunch of angry pissbabies insisting that the gay agenda is being forced into the show even though it was in the books.

God I just imagined them doing that and now I’m furious.

However I think it’s more important to talk lore a little bit, because there are some things that are crucial to understanding Witcher that season 1 of the show just doesn’t give you. Knowing the general lore of the world can help you see where the show is making more artistic parallels - for example in the second episode when Yennefer is in Tor Lara, the tower of the gull, named for Lara Doren, Geralt and Jaskier are in Dol Blathanna, the land where Lara Doren (a sort of elven boudicca) made her final stand against the humans, and Filavandrel, who they're taken hostage by is leading an uprising against the humans in Ciri's time.

Other lore however, such as “the conjunction of the spheres” can shape the fundamental way you engage with the text.

The world of The Witcher is our real world but in a parallel dimension. There was an event called “the conjunction of the spheres” in which several parallel worlds merged into one, bringing some humans, vampires, gnomes, unicorn, dragons, and all that good good shit into the same world - but not a human world. This world first belonged to the elves.

Here’s the primer on How to read Witcher - it’ll be relevant throughout this series, but I’ll just say it here. This lore is giving us a cue to think about what if fantasy creatures and magic existed in the real world.
Now to make a distinction, many fantasy authors aim for realism. A popular example that would spring to mind is George R R Martin, but Game of Thrones doesn’t actually give you any textual cues to examine its realism. Nothing in Game of Thrones tells us that realism is going to be thematically relevant - George R R Martin doesn’t give a fuck what you think about his realism, whereas in Witcher, Andrzej Sapkowski personally holds your hand and walks you right up to the… allegory… pond… and he says… look at all these… allegories…

The books make Geralt not exactly a villain, but certainly not a knight in shining armour. To some extent even, that’s the basic premise of the series. This fantasy chooses not to focus on a brave chivalrous knight, but on a Witcher - a slayer of monsters - because it is in many ways a deliberate perversion of classical folklore and fantasy tropes.

The nonhumans in the world of The Witcher occupy a very interesting space in terms of racial allegory. The elves are, for the American audience, most immediately comparable to native Americans - "it was their land first". For Europeans, as an exiled stateless people accused everywhere they go of hoarding secret wealth, practicing spells and doing crimes, the elves are most immediately similar to Travellers, or with a little more interrogation of the medieval setting, the pogroms, the religious discrimination and the kinds of stereotypes, the closest historical allegory would be the Jews at the time of the Protestant Reformation. At the same time the elves are also similar the celts through the roman invasion of Britain. 

There isn't one clean allegory, instead Sapkowksi's northern realms teach us about how racism works in a mechanical way, while also driving home the personal human element.

If we compare to say - ugh - Max Landis' Bright, we can see two models of racial allegory using fantasy races. In Bright, the humans are the immediately apparent norm. Even with Will Smith as the protagonist of the film, this obviously puts humans as allegorical to white people ("fairy lives don't matter today"). So when we learn that the elves are all rich and seem to control systems of government and the media… Well.. 

Or to look at another aspect, the film points out really heavily that the racial differences matter. When people are being racist in Bright, they talk about the physiological differences between, for example, humans and orcs. So your right brain is sitting there saying this is racism, racism is bad and your left brain is sitting there saying everything they are saying is true and so altogether your takeaway is racism is bad but I can't deny the facts. 

On the other hand in the world of The Witcher whenever we encounter racism it looks like racism in the real world. People in the real world aren't just walking up to you and talking about biological differences between the races. Stefan Molyneux maybe, but people, not so much. Instead the racism against nonhumans takes the form of accusations of crime, of inherent tendency towards poverty and immoral behaviour and rumours of secret wealth. Not to mention, of course the idea that "they think they're better than us". At the end of the day, if the elves think they're better than the humans, that doesn't make them worse than the humans, it just makes them as racist, and that isn't a good reason to be racist. 

Either way, when you hear the examples of racism in The Witcher they are pretty universally dispelled as lies and racist gibberish. So your right brain says this is racism and your left brain says this is lies and altogether your takeaway is racism is gibberish bullshit. With a little more introspection you might even realise the racism only ever appears to reinforce a power dynamic.

With all that How To Read The Witcher out of the way, let’s look at episode 1 which is also about how to… read The Witcher…. There’s a lot going on in this series okay?

The first two books in the series are collections of short stories which is why the first season is so episodic. The first two short stories take place after this one and characters call Geralt the Butcher of Blaviken, which lets you know, when you get to this story, in Blaviken, that you should really pay attention.

If the books are anything to go by, Andrzej Sapkowski seems to really despise a few groups of people, chief among them academics, historians, and centrists. A repeated theme through the whole series is Geralt declaring like a big smart centrist boy “I’m not going to get involved, this will surely work out well for me” and then it works out like total pigshit.

What is a centrist? On first blush it’s someone whose politics is ambivalent or indifferent - they’re “in the center”. However In electoral politics in countries like the US and UK, two frontrunner parties are really the only ones that have a shot of getting in, so voters have to pick one of two sides. So I ask again - what is a centrist? Functionally, it’s someone who chooses a side while convincing themselves that they belong to neither. How much centrists suck is a crucial Witcher theme - we’ll be coming back to it.

The Butcher of Blaviken story, The Lesser Evil is named after the conversation Geralt has with Stregobor about Renfri, and that he has with Renfri about Stregobor, in which both parties beseech him to kill the other saying that doing it will be “the lesser evil”.

Geralt, big, and smart, and seeing points on both sides, says “Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling [...] makes no difference [...] If I’m to choose between one evil and another, I’d rather not choose at all.”

Now on the surface this is a pretty slick quote. I even see this attributed to Sapkowski as if it’s what he believes. I see this on memes, I see this on T-shirts, I see this quote in my nightmares, because this is where people who stan for Geralt and take everything he says as the uncritically endorsed message of the story run into their greatest nemesis: Basic Media Literacy.

What happens in this story? Geralt tries to stay uninvolved and not take a side, and warns Renfry away from confronting Stregobor. Renfri, who explains that Stregobor had her raped and has been ruining her life since childhood is not going to back down and drop it, so Geralt fights and kills her men, and then her. What does he get for his troubles? The villagers turn against him, throw rocks at him, and run him out of town, and Stregobor gets away scot-free. Geralt even earns a moniker that haunts him everywhere he goes from now on: the Butcher of Blaviken.

This is Geralt’s one big speech moment in the show and it's just the setup to him showing his whole entire ass. The whole Witcher series sees Geralt slowly realise that he has to get involved and care for people. It’s kinda his central arc. Still somehow centrists take this away as a pro-centrist story, because of that one line, but what does this actually say? It says that if you try to not pick a side, all you’ll end up actually doing is helping the worst side and making things even shittier than they were going to turn out anyway.

I mean in the episode there’s even a pointed long silence after Renfry asks Geralt what he believes in. 

The show did change out something about Renfri. Her band was originally a bunch of dwarves - a reference to snow white, because in the world of Witcher fairy tales are real but they’re hyper real, which is the point. Sometimes I just lay awake at night imagining the episode 1 fight scene with Geralt taking out Renfri’s seven dwarves instead.

Also added into the show and not in the book is a very explicit look at how self-fulfilling prophecies work. The conflict of free-will against fate is not exactly a theme itself, more a narrative device to look at how society treats people when it’s already decided who they are. The point here is that if you're told that you have some sort of cursed destiny, and therefore treated like shit by everyone, there is an antagonism between you and society that makes you society's bad guy.

This is a theme we’ll continue to see, with for example how the elves are treated by the humans. FIlivandrel fighting back to try to reclaim the land. The elves are stigmatised by the humans and treated like the bad guys, and then even them fighting back for self-determination fits into the human narrative that they’re the bad guys. You can see this in real-world examples of how racial minorities are treated too. Some Americans still use the phrase “indian-giving”, which is based in the myth that Native Americans gave the settlers their land and then reneged on their promise. Or if you think about how people talk about the Black Lives Matter movement - “racism is clearly a problem, but the people trying to fight to change anything are rocking the boat too much. If I have to choose between violent fascists and violent anti-fascists, I’d rather not choose at all.”

Episode 2 starts in a place called Posada - presumably which is posadists come from. That was my very very niche leftist Witcher joke, you can support the channel by going to patreon dot com slash curiovids and--

We should talk about the fetishisation of the witchers and Geralt in particular. It’s much more of a thing in the books, and the short story that episode 2 is based on is a prime example. Posada has a Deovil problem, as they put it. Geralt and Jaskier engage in some debate about whether any such thing as a “devil” exists, and Geralt posits that a lot of monsters are simply invented to either explain human beings’ bad behaviour or to make people behave a certain way, but either way they’re curious. They go and meet Torque, the Sylvan, and realise that the villagers have tried to get rid of this “deovil” themselves. 

Geralt goes back and asks the villagers about what they did and why they did it and they produce a book of the specific ways to get rid of various magical beasts and monsters. The method for getting rid of deovils is highly specific although basically a really mean prank where you go and eat food with him but offer him shitty bad things instead - honey for you, tree sap for him; soft cheese for you, soap for him; nuts for you, iron balls for him - which is why he has iron balls. I love this short story a lot, but I understand why they couldn’t fit it all into one episode of television.

Anyway, Geralt gets them to show him the page of the book where it describes witchers and it basically says if you have monster problem hire a witcher but make sure to pay him, cos those greedy witcher sure love getting paid for… work. It also says, in no uncertain terms, that if a witcher comes to your town, he will fuck.

This is the start of a repeating theme throughout the series where Geralt is seen by women as a sexual novelty to be experienced and exploited. Looking at the show again, in the striga episode he is literally working to pay off a pimp as the driving force of the episode. When he meets Yennefer, she gets him to undress and bathe for her, and all their dialogue implies she wants sex as payment for her healing magic. She says after “fortunately for you your company and conversation have been payment enough”

There is a direct and repeated comparison between Geralt working as a Witcher - using his body for money in a way that is unappreciated and stigmatised by society, that is dangerous for him and is hard to get people to appropriately compensate him for despite the obvious service he provides - and sex workers.

On the one hand this works really well in the show where Geralt is played by Henry Cavill, beautiful man, adonis, hunk, and on the other hand it works really well in the books, where the most common adjective used to describe him is “hideous” - like why do these women want to be with him besides this fetishisation? Is it his tendency to kill rare animals? Is it because he smells so much of onion?

The fundamental challenge of the show was communicating a lot of complex themes, worldbuilding and lore and compelling characters while also adapting two anthology books of short stories that are presented in a non-chronological order, and how the writers rose to meet that challenge was… mixed.

There are a couple of gripes I have, like how Yennefer’s disability is treated simply as an obstacle to overcome and cure, which does honestly send low-key Josef Mengele messages about disability.

The use of the three interwoven timelines in the first season of the show is really fun. The first two books in the witcher saga are collections of short stories detailing mostly Monster-of-the-week style stories as Geralt runs around having a neat old time slaying monsters, sometimes not slaying monsters and hanging out with his good pal Jask..Dandelion. Yup I’m never gonna get used to that.

There are certain early stories that are really important for various reasons - the butcher of blaviken, the last wish, the striga, filavandrel and the deovil - and so those basically have to make the cut. There are other short stories I personally love that I would have liked to see but I kind of expect are getting passed over in order to get from the short story anthology into the novel series for the start of season two. The novel series is a lot more Game-of-Thrones-y and it probably isn’t too much of a reach to say Netflix want this to be their Game of Thrones.

For the greater world building and exploring who Geralt is, and what nonhumans represent, and because it makes me cry I love the short story about the doppler, Dudu Bieberfeld, and we probably won’t see it.

For the characterisation, I love the story where Geralt and Istrid have a macho-man showdown over Yennefer but she just ditches them both. It contains a piece of folklore that is used to concisely explain who Yennefer is as a character and what her relationship with Geralt is like at its core.

The ice queen who enslaves men by piercing their hearts with ice, but wants to live in warmer climates, so ends up trapped between keeping her lover enthralled in a miserable situation and trying for real happiness but potentially losing him. 

Maybe we’ll still see some of that, that would be cool. I suppose they wouldn’t put so much time into characterising Istrid and Yennefer and Istrid’s relationship if that wasn’t going… somewhere?

Nonetheless what we get in season 1 of the show is a lot of fun and the writers have done a great job of enriching smaller characters and also filling in story like Ciri’s time between the fall of Cintra and finding Geralt.

There are some really janky and confusing edits throughout season 1 though. I don’t mean so much to do with the interwoven timelines, although the show didn’t seem to really lean into either disguising its chronology or openly acknowledging what was going on. I mean things like throwaway lines that are meant to explain crucial information but aren’t really marked by the editing so don’t stick with the audience. For example, the entire cinematic language around the doppler character tells you that they are sinister and creepy and queer coded and they use unusual pronouns and they say “children are our favourite” and the overwhelming impression the show leaves you with is that this character is a creepy queer child molester, which is kind of garbage enough on its own, but Kahir delivers a line acknowledging that dopplers - who again, are one of my favourite parts of the books, and a pretty clear queer allegory in the books - are usually nice and well meaning and helpful but this specific one is a baddie. The edit really doesn’t back this up or make this linger in our minds though so all we really remember is… “children are our favourite”. (“would you do me? I’d do me”)

There are also well-meaning moments where they’ve tried to include cute stuff from the books, and I obviously appreciate that. For example, in fact, the iron balls that Torque the Sylvan ate - and again there’s a throwaway line to contextualise it, but nothing about the visual language tells us it matters so we just kind of move on and the iron balls never make sense. “You’re a dick… with balls”

There are uncomplicated editing mistakes too, like when Yennefer is discovered by Tissaia it reads like Tissaia just showed up later the same day. You could change the structural editing of that episode to fix this by just cutting away to a different storyline first before returning to Yennefer, making it less immediate.

When Geralt accidentally makes a wish and gets the first cut from the Djinn, it’s supposed to be disguised by him picking up sharp pieces of the lamp, but the edit just looks like ass and doesn’t really communicate anything. It also only happens because he’s picking up the shards of pottery in the ditziest conceivable way by stacking them all onto one arm, confirming that Geralt is a buff and beautiful airhead.

Vilgefortz. After Vilgefortz is defeated at the battle of Sodden it’s just confusing. Do you know what’s going on with Vilgefortz? I do, because I’ve read the books, but do you?

There are also strange writing decisions. When Geralt chooses the law of surprise in Cintra he’s just seen an enormous amount of chaos and upset because of someone choosing to be paid by the law of surprise and inexplicably he picks it as well. It’s not even okay with the people there, Calanthe is furious.

There’s a reason for this.

In the books when Geralt calls law of surprise and ends up entitled to Pavetta’s child, he does it on purpose because he needs to claim a child by law of surprise because that’s how witchers take kids to make more witchers with, and he says this out loud. In the books, especially at the start, Geralt is basically, a bit of a bastard. 

But in the show, Geralt is played by Henry Cavill. Superman. You can’t make Superman a bastard. Can you imagine if you made Superman a cold, uncaring individualist, making mercenary calculations about human life and weighing up what kind of reward he should expect for saving people?

So the solution the show has roundly landed on seems to be to transform Geralt into what the kids are calling “a himbo”. A himbo is a pretty, muscular, well-meaning and kind man who is also as dumb as a bag of beans. Scholars of the forbidden art of “anime” might be familiar with Goku, the original archetype of the himbo.

I’m not judging here, I’m a well-known thembo, the non-binary counterpart to the himbo, and many of my friends are female himbos, or fembos.

So in the show instead of declaring his deliberate intent to claim law of surprise in hope of stealing an unborn baby, Geralt witnesses all of the stress and hostility and hassle wrapped up in claiming law of surprise and then, asked to name his reward for saving Duny, just kind of says “Hey, you know what would be kind of fun?”

It’s consistent to his character throughout the season. His catchphrase in the show even is just him saying “fuck” when he realises he’s stumbled ass-backwards into a bad situation.

The big thing viewers take away from the second episode is Jaskier’s song Toss a Coin to your Witcher and damn yeah fair. It slaps. It’s so catchy. Joey Batey who plays Jaskier said in an interview that even he hasn’t stopped singing it since he first heard it. Not just that but the scene slaps too, it slaps my entire bod. Jaskier is going to write a truthful account but decides to make a racist ad-jingle for Geralt instead because he thinks it’s more fun. It’s so good!

But what viewers should remember is Geralt and Filavandrel debating. It’s a crucial scene. In the book Geralt and Filavandrel have this incredible conversation where they’re both right in different ways but they’re also both wrong and they need each other’s perspectives. Filavandrel is leading his people in a sad and desperate way but Geralt is wrong in a more insidious way, and Filavandrel is actually teaching him about the basic personhood of elves and nonhumans, and why assimilation into human society on the humans’ terms would necessarily make them second class citizens and Geralt doesn’t get this because Geralt is frankly, kind of a racist - but when Geralt is played by sweet gentle himbo Henry Cavill he can’t be a racist, so he just says “why don’t you go live with the humans” and Filavandrel says “we can’t live with the humans because of racism” and Geralt goes “oh. Yeah.. Racism… :(“

It isn’t just Geralt though, to be fair. Everyone in the show is a bit less of a bastard, except for arguably the villains - creating a clearer delineation between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. The show has undergone himbofication just like Geralt himself.

The themes are there but they’re nice, and simple and pretty. The characters are there but they’re nice and simple and pretty. The story is there but it’s nice and simple and pretty. It’s notable even that the worst parts of the show are where they’ve resisted the himbofication. Look at the doppler - they took something kind and good natured and made it sinister and gross. That’s just antithetical to the himbo philosophy.

When I say all this I don’t say it to be negative. I’m glad they mostly leaned in to the himbofication of the show, and here’s to many more seasons. I can’t wait for himbo Avallac’h the elf, and himbo Emyr var Emreis, and if we’re lucky, some thembo dopplers, and fembo Ciri, and how the fuck they’re going to deal with Yennefer being a statue for three seasons.

I should get to the books, but that isn’t where I went first. When I watched the show I went on to play the games, so first we’re going to look at them.

So: what if there were another adaptation: a complex, wide-ranging story that embraced the rich themes of the books, introduced fun new characters, developed on the ideas of the original in a slightly different and interesting way, and also, was incredibly, unrelentingly, intensely horny?

Geralt will return in The Ballad of Horny Geralt