The Ballad of Horny Geralt: A Look At Sexuality in The Witcher Trilogy (Patreon)

Enbies, ladies, gentlemen! Today I want to talk about the games, but with a very specific focus. Here it’s going to be important to understand the plot of Witcher 1, and a very brief overview of Witcher 2 and Witcher 3, and in another part of the series I’m going to talk in more depth about the plots, the development history, and the fan and critical reception of the games.

For now though, Witcher 1:

Witcher 1 is about Geralt of Rivia, miraculously back from the dead and freshly amnesiated (???), now confronted with a siege on Kaer Morhen the witchers' keep by sinister goons bent on stealing the witcher secrets. One young witcher is killed and the secrets are stolen, and Geralt embarks on a journey to avenge his comrade, regain his memory and get back the secrets of his trade from The Professor. Along the way he meets Alvin, a young boy who has powers a lot like Ciri's.

Alvin jumps through time half way through the story, and, learning about the apocalypse foretold in Ithlinne’s Prophecy, decides the best thing to help humanity survive is to get rid of all other races right away so they have time to work on surviving. Good job Alvin, you fucking nailed it.

Alvin travels back in time and establishes the Order of the Eternal Flaming Rose who are racist religious extremists who persecute and lynch non-humans and are generally pushing toward total genocide. They, through the salamandra gang and The Professor, steal the witcher secrets, set Geralt off on his quest, where he meets Alvin, and exposes Alvin to the race riots caused by the Order, causing Alvin to jump through time in the first place. Good job Alvin, you fucking nailed it.

Alvin’s plan is revealed to Geralt through endless monologuing, then Geralt kills Alvin with his silver sword - you see, that sword is for monsters - and then Geralt maybe later suspects that this grown man who was weirdly invested in winning his approval was actually a grown-up version of the boy he was taking care of before. Good job Alvin, you fucking nailed it.

Oh, and along the way, Geralt almost definitely has a lot of sex with a lot of women.

Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings focuses on the political upheaval in The Northern Realms caused by multiple assassinations of kings, and you, as Geralt, fight to clear your name of the murder of King Foltest and to help the political factions you most agree with.

Oh, and along the way, Geralt almost definitely has a lot of sex with a lot of women.

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an enormous and complex masterpiece, essentially in itself a massive game but including the DLCs Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine two whole extra games on top of that. The very simplistic overview is that now Geralt has his memory back he’s trying to reunite with his long-missing adopted daughter Ciri and then once he finds her help her prevent the end of the world.

Oh, and along the way, Geralt almost definitely has a lot--

The Ballad of Horny Geralt

A little bit of context here - in the books, women have a lot of sexual agency. Sometimes women are gay, sometimes they’re straight, sometimes they use sex as a means to an end, but more importantly, because this is the thing that’s really shockingly rare, they just enjoy sex because women enjoy sex in real life because sex is, pretty neat.

For example a central character in the last book - Nimu - is described having sex with a man, and that’s all we really know about him. The focus is on her, he’s a nameless, faceless manbody and the reason she was having sex with him is because it was fun. I know this seems like overstating something very plain, but typically women’s feelings and internal life when it comes to sex is more or less totally erased. All the focus is either on the feelings of the men or catered towards a presumed straight male audience. So the way the books treat sexuality is actually pretty refreshing.

Ciri, a teenage girl, is more and more the protagonist throughout the series. “The Witcher” originally refers to Geralt and by the end refers to Ciri. She’s “The Witcher”, and he isn’t. Correspondingly, Ciri’s sexuality is more and more relevant throughout, with her early fixation of the sorceresses beauty, her girlfriend Mistle later on and eventually her riding off into the sunset with Sir Galahad. Yes, that Sir Galahad.

In the games, however, although Ciri is an adult, she is barely there at all, and when she is, she certainly isn’t given much sexual agency. In fact her sexuality is treated as quite inappropriate, because she isn’t seen as the player or the protagonist, she’s seen as the protagonist’s daughter. In the spa scene on Skellige, Ciri sits around with the woman who’s been hosting her and her mother, and on first blush here my instinct is, the nudity here is pretty cool. Just some gals sitting around free-tiddin it. Great! But Ciri is covered up, very pointedly covered up in a specific way too, and eventually I have confront that this is telling us that women’s bodies can’t possibly be seen without being sexual, and furthermore that Ciri can’t be naked because she’s “our” daughter.

Sex scenes, much like action scenes, can be exciting and titillating and therefore good simply on their own grounds. And that’s pretty cool. In a story with sex scenes you can have two characters express who they are and what they believe in, and then come together and create a shifting power dynamic and unite their two bodies. In say, Dragon Ball Z, you can have two characters express who they are and what they believe in, and then they come together and create a shifting power dynamic and unite their two bodies. Geralt of Rivia and Goku… um… what was I saying.

I just want to be crystal clear that I think eroticism in media is absolutely fascinating, and if I weren’t on YouTube there are essays I’d like to make about the delineation between porn and other media, the long-running erotic webcomic Alfie, and a deep dive into eroticism in video games. I am firmly pro-filth.

If you want to explore this topic more:

Dan Olson did a great job of looking at sex and relationships portrayed on screen in his trilogy on Fifty Shades of Grey, and a positively stunning job looking at what can make a sex scene great in his video about Tuca and Bertie. God I fucking love Tuca and Bertie.

Patty Taxxon has an excellent video talking over why the Netflix animated anthology series Love Death, & Robots is horny in just the most tedious way possible. The horniness itself isn’t inherently bad but it reinforces a very straight male sexuality and a very narrow one at that, and even beyond that the way female bodies are sexualised is done in an actively dehumanising way.

And that’s more or less the root of the problem with Witcher 3.

There are little things that wind up being super gross, clumsy careless shallow treatment of sexuality that stumbles ass-backwards into troubling territory - for example the recycling of different character models is a bit janky, but recycling the character model from the baron’s young daughter who we are surely supposed to see as analogous to the daughter Geralt is searching for, and using that same character model for a sex worker that Geralt can have sex with… is… what’s the word here… bad.

To be fair though, that’s how mistreatment of horniness generally is, right? Folks just clumsily follow their instincts and sometimes the result is total ass.

The sex scenes in the game generally use the character models in several predetermined animations with dip-to-black cuts in between. It’s procedurally generated sex. Hot, right folks? Not just that, but the dip-to-black transition with the brevity of each shot culminates in a style that just feels embarrassed to be doing what it’s doing. I’m not asking for there not to be sex scenes, but watching a sex scene that feels ashamed of itself is very offputting.

I think the dip-to-black is supposed to be somewhat classy while also implying that some time is passing between each scene, but considering that the time between each scene isn’t all that long diegetically, it feels a lot more like the camera is saying shut your eyes, stop looking. By contrast, something like Edgar Wright’s montages which show quick-cut events with some time passing in between using simple jump cuts communicates a mood and sequence of events much more effectively, and this is actually closer to the style that they use in Witcher 2, so in a way even though the characters in Witcher 2 were uncanny valley cursed flesh-puppets it feels like they took a bit of a step backwards with the sex scenes of Witcher 3.

Furthermore one of the pre-generated animations has the woman Geralt is sleeping with react with fear when he takes off his shirt and shows his scars. Now on its own this could be sexy, it could be compelling, with a character who has a certain dynamic with Geralt it could advance the plot and show us something about his character - hell, this is the way in which he’s supposed to be sexy, right? Women want Geralt because of his bad boy dangerous lifestyle. Except for two things: This is one of a set of stock animations that are all meant to be as uncomplicatedly sexy as each other, and the proc-gen sex scenes only happen when Geralt employs sex workers.

So watching this scene, the male-power-fantasy of him frightening this sex worker and her being afraid in a sexual context is just troubling. Especially as it has no relation to the rest of the text. Again, this could be, done deliberately, a very interesting creative choice. 

I talked about this in my look at the Netflix show - Geralt is fetishised by women for being a dangerous man, and the flipside is that he’s seen as someone who will come seduce your wife, and this stereotype is dangerous to him. This has some historical precedent.

CD Projekt almost never make Geralt sexy anywhere in the series. The famous bathtub scene shows they probably had good intentions for putting a little something for everyone, buuuuut the rest of the time the camera is very much allergic to the naked male body, except to glorify Geralt’s powerful muscles. For everything it will show you of the women Geralt sleeps with, it never once shows you Geralt’s bare ass or dong.

SHOW GERALT’S BARE ASS YOU FUCKING COWARDS

^always sunny clip “give us the dong”

In Witcher 2 there were horrible problems too. The most outstanding thing to me is the treatment of Ves, a mulan-esque character in the Temerian blue stripes under Vernon Roche - Roche, okay, Roche. Roach is Geralt’s horse, Roche. Roche. She’s Roche’s right-hand woman, and clearly an excellent fighter not to be messed with, and for some fucking reason the writers thought it would be an interesting plot development to have her sexually assaulted twice. Not just that but also Geralt can sleep with her, because of course he can, because what the fuck. The sex scene with Ves happens between the two times that she gets assaulted and to trigger it you have to beat her in a duel. I’m having trouble with this one, guys. What the fuck were you thinking.

In the leadup to the sex scene Ves says she doesn’t want to just be seen as a seen as a sex object, and I think this shows the writers had some kind of feminist equality struggle in mind for her, but then why would you then have her assaulted twice and also have her be literally a sex object for the player. She says she doesn’t want to be seen as a sex object but she has her needs as a woman, which aside from being pigshit writing, comes roughly into the ballpark of the sexual agency women have in the books, but then, again, why in the holy cursed fuck would you do this???

This could be the clearest example of where they were trying to achieve some sort of point, or message about female sexual agency and gender equality and then right at the last minute all the writers took boner pills and started typing the rest of the script with their dicks.

Similarly, they incorporated a whole bunch of mages from the books in Witcher 2, and it’s pretty cool to see most of the Lodge of Sorceresses represented, and not just as copy-paste personalities of the same scheming evil witch over and over but as rounded fleshed out characters somewhat like in the books. However, the treatment of these sorceresses has some weird viagra-script jank too.

Book context time:

After the insurrection on the Isle of Thanedd by anime villain and best husbando wizard Vilgefortz on behalf of Nilfgaard, the mages of the continent got all fucked up. See, every king has to have magic or else he’s just gonna get punked in a war against another nation that has magic, but Vilgefortz’ loyalty to Nilfgaard let him pull this top ten anime betrayal shit and so afterwards, some of the sorceresses formed The Lodge on the understanding that mages in the lodge would never turn on one another in the same way again.

By the end of the books those witchy women have become a problematic political power and they’re yet another one of the factions who were trying to get Ciri to have a baby for them so they could rule the world, and so in Witcher 2 we see that every other political power is pretty wary of the sorceresses. This leads to a bunch of the sorceresses getting fucked up and/or killed throughout Witcher 2, which frankly can end up feeling like the writers just taking out some sort of repressed anger against women at points.

It leads into the persecution of magic users and witch-hunts in Witcher 3 which is done way better but it stills feels odd in places here.

Alongside that, there’s Philipa Eilhart specifically. Witch, political schemer, badass, and Magic Lesbian Laser Owl. In the books Philipa’s gayness is an interesting point. Other sorceresses in the lodge are sometimes weird about her being a lesbian but for the most part it doesn’t really come up, and she’s just a very cool character. In one scene she receives a late-night phonecall - sorry, maaagic phonecall - and she has lipstick kisses on her, and the witch she’s talking to thinks to herself about how it would have been easy enough to get cleaned up before answering the call. It’s clearly Philipa owning other people’s homophobia and weaponising her sexuality against them. It kinda rules.

In Witcher 2 by contrast, Geralt walks in on Philipa having sex twice. It’s not the middle of the night, it’s whatever time of day you happen to go to her house, and it’s not her pulling a power move and stunting on you, it’s just there for the enjoyment of a presumed straight male audience. 

Look, there are parts of Philipa, relating to her sexuality, in Witcher 2 that are really well written actually. When Saskia is poisoned, Philipa cures her, and as a final step kisses her with a magic petal on her lips. One of the guys in the room makes a comment about this, which distracts the audience away from why is she doing this to dude shut the fuck up, and that’s actually really clever, because the kiss wasn’t necessary and the twist revealed later on is that Philipa was actually enthralling Saskia with a spell, and inkeeping with the books, this seems like the exact kind of thing Philipa Eilhart, Magic Lesbian Laser Owl, would pull to disguise her nefarious schemes. Fuck yeah.

So it just sucks that when it comes so her sexuality in other regards, flop flop flop click clack here’s the script all done hope you like it.

Especially as, by contrast, Dethmold is revealed to gay very late in the game and in the same scene he’s shown with a male lover, he’s grooming himself, something he hasn’t really seemed focused on before, and then Vernon Roche busts in seeking vengeance for earlier and murders and mutilates him. It just reads as a pointedly homophobic attack. Lesbians are there for you to gawp at, gay men have to be punished.

With how sensitively Witcher 3 seems to have approached queer characters by contrast, I’m really deeply saddened by this. Right now in Poland a fascist anti-LGBT movement is endangering queer people. Some LGBT people are fleeing the country, others face smear campaigns, abuse, violence, possibly death. The Polish Prime Minister Duda is part of this campaign that’s trying to rid Poland completely of LGBT people, while calling them subhuman, accusing them all of being pedophiles, and all told, seeing all this from a Polish development studio makes me feel like the people writing The Witcher 2 are the kind of people we need a lot less of, but mostly it just makes me angry, and sad.

At the end of each part of this Witchermania series there will be a link to resources to fight against the hateful fascist movement currently affecting Poland. I encourage you to check it out, sign, donate, share.

https://lgbtqpl.carrd.co

The problems of the horniness of the franchise go back to Witcher 1 and in that game, in fact are really fucking disturbing. In The Witcher you initiate sex with women by choosing certain dialogue options - often totally benign seeming ones - and then instead of a diegetic sex scene taking place the game shows you some blurry shapes moving around and you get a “romance card” for each woman. These are attainable for almost every female character in the game, with romance cards for women as developed and important as Triss Merigold and as nonspecific as “peasants”.

It’s incredibly sketchy on top of being triggered so often by totally implausible dialogue options. One woman has sex with Geralt after he saves her from bandits. Abigail has sex with Geralt in order to persuade him not to turn her over to a lynching mob, and Alvin is just kind of… there??? It’s often commented on that Triss has sex with Geralt while she knows about the memories he’s lost and she hasn’t told him about his relationship with Yennefer. Now, Triss kind of is Yennefer in this game, and I’m not sure they knew they were going to make sequels, but nonetheless it feels like this game’s understanding of consent is iffy at best.

Now, that isn’t totally without its place - Book Geralt is much more of a collectible trophy to women than they are to him. He doesn’t brag, he doesn’t keep a tally, he doesn’t collect trophies like the god damn Zodiac Killer, but women are interested in him for the novelty so he doesn’t always have all the agency in sexual situations. 

In a blogpost series describing playing The Witcher, kateri describes how The Witcher makes having lots of sex with lots of women deeply deeply unsexy:

“So, you exchange your imaginary ingame gold for imaginary offscreen ingame sex, and I sit here wondering why. Why would a player choose this? Why would [Geralt]? Is he that desperate for human contact? Is it a reaction to his mutation, his monsterism, his visible separation from the rest of humanity, that he needs to constantly reaffirm a physical link with his fellow creatures, via his cock?”

And the thing is, yes. Geralt is all those things. He does need to reach out for human contact, he is really lonely, he does seek intimacy and affection almost completely through casual sex but I sincerely do not believe that the developers were trying to create this effect. I think they saw a series where women are sexually empowered and thought cool, let’s make a game where you are at any moment only one dialogue option away from accidentally boarding the bone train.

“Could you give me some elvish lessons” “Where’s the ealdorman’s house?” “what did you want to tell me?”

I know Geralt is a straight man - for now - but the heteronormativity of this game feels honestly overwhelming when Geralt says more openly sexual things to men and nothing happens. When he meets Yaevinn from the Scoia’tael they have a whole exchange about lying in the shade of the trees praying to the forest together and i’m sorry is that not what that is???

They’ve accidentally perfectly replicated the effect from the original where Geralt wanders around, lacking deep intimacy and connection, and is fetishised and prized by women as an exotic dangerous sex object in a way that makes him quite lonely, and if that were deliberate I would say it was quite beautiful, but… it’s not… is it.

But you can easily avoid the worst of all this, because now it’s time to say do not play Witcher 1. It is so fucking boring. The walking is so slow, the levels are so long and poorly laid out, and oh, god the drinking - suddenly out of nowhere you need to drink with someone to get information out of them and now you walk even fucking slower. The first two chapters are so goddamn ugly too, and you spend sooooo loooong in them. I talked to so many people who quit before the end of chapter 2 and honestly I can’t blame them, all the best bits of the game are after chapter 2 and chapter 2 is about as long as the rest of the entire fucking game.
The quests are padded out by extra busy work just thrown at you to keep you from progressing. The worst bit is that it’s all done with a lot of love, there’s a lot of background detail to put together because the guys who made it are huge nerds for The Witcher, but that just doesn’t make it good! In chapter 2 you need to get 10 magic stones to progress and each has its own quest and not a single one of them are fun. 2 of them, 2 separate fucking quests for these stones involve just paying 500 orens which, you may not understand, is so many orens.

Listen, I am not hbomberguy, when I tell you this game is boring I am not trying to sell it to you. Don’t play it! Don’t! Unless you’re a huge fan and you just really want to NO NOT EVEN THEN DON’T PLAY IT.

This is really just speculation on my part but I suspect Witcher games fully playing as Ciri might be on the cards in the future and I hope CD Projekt can work out their sex problems before that if they do it. I certainly don’t expect to see sex cards in future games or Ciri having sex in front of children she’s supposed to protect.

Once again, I’m not asking them to stop being so horny, I’m actually asking them to think harder about being horny. Be horny better please, CD Projekt Red. It’s actually a huge shame when they don’t think enough about how the male gaze affects their art because it is incredibly relevant to one of the biggest central themes of the games:

Masculinity & Fatherhood

The first of the novel series The Blood of Elves starts with Ciri training at Kaer Morhen, the witcher’s keep. It’s actually the sequence that inspires the opening dream from Wild Hunt, including a great scene where Geralt teaches Ciri that witchers don’t fight by parrying blows away from themselves, but by deflecting themselves around the blows, which is some anime shit and I am extremely here for it. 

Ciri is worried she can’t be a good witcher, because she’s weak, because she’s a girl. He tells her that the strongest man in the world couldn’t deflect a blow from a monster like the ones they fight, so Ciri doesn’t need to be strong, she just needs to learn the ways of the Witcher. It’s a lovely scene and it’s formative for Ciri’s character going forward. 

Not long after there’s a pretty hysterical moment where Triss Merigold shows up at Kaer Morhen and observes the 3 witchers and a baby disaster situation they have set up, and tells off Geralt and Vesemir and the others for not having the first faintest clue how to raise a teenage girl. Apparently, Ciri getting her period, and how that might affect her training as a ruthless killing machine for 10 hours a day never occurred to a single one of them. Powerful smart lads here at Kaer Morhen.

Fatherhood is an important personal theme in the witcher series, and the games play it up even more. Even when Ciri wasn’t in the first game Geralt still had little Alvin to take care of, and with Alvin turning into the CEO of elf-racism the first game really clearly sends the message that our individual actions pale in comparison to the effects of culture and community. It takes a village et cetera. 

The game lets you make choices throughout but none of them stop Alvin becoming Mr. Racism and that’s because it’s the fraught, tense and deeply racist society he was raised in that really affects that. So I guess just go ahead and have sex in front of him, it doesn’t matter.

Alvin isn’t simply your kid, he represents the average child in your society. This is why he time travels back and changes his name and lives another life. He’s your son and he’s also a stranger. The solution can’t just be for you to individually do a better job raising him - that too, but society has to improve, and that isn’t up to one single person.

The Wild Hunt is absolutely bursting at the seams with dads - and often not very good ones. 

There’s The Bloody Baron who abuses his wife and daughter, there’s Emyr who wants to wed Ciri in an incestuous marriage so he can rule the world. The game seems to be begging us to consider the question what’s wrong with dads?

The game even opens with Geralt riding to find Yennefer with his dad, Vesemir - his adopted Witcher dad anyway. We don’t know much about Vesemir from the books and this opening doesn’t give us lots to go on either. He’s an old witcher, he looks a bit like Geralt, and he loves The Godfather.

Vesemir is a father to other witchers just as Geralt is a father to Ciri. Not by blood but by situation. He claims them by Law of Surprise. The name “child surprise” sounds like a wink at the idea of an unplanned unexpected baby, and this idea explored for Geralt that destiny ties him to Ciri - usually through dreams of her in danger or peril - feels like an absentee father just knowing that really, the right thing to do is go and be there for his kid.

Geralt hasn’t had an easy or pleasant life - taken by Vesemir at a young age he was put through trials and painful transformations. Most of the other boys he knew going through the witcher training died and all that were left were the brutalised killing machines who had suffered like him. He has an idea of himself, at least at the start of the books, as someone who doesn’t care, and doesn’t get involved, but by the end Dandelion is openly begging him not to intervene in matters of injustice. That’s what happens at the end of the books even - while Geralt is sitting around discussing retiring as a Witcher, an angry crowd forms coming to lynch the dwarves in the town and Geralt intervenes in the pogrom but is ultimately killed.

Of course, Geralt is chronically wrong in his outlook, his philosophy, and even his image of himself, at the start of the books. So not only does he become someone who intervenes - he always was. He says that his first “monster” was a bandit who was threatening a family and moving to rape a young girl, and Geralt stepped in to stop him.

When Geralt muses at the end of the books on what Witchers are becoming he says that the balance of good and evil is no longer humans versus wild beasts, and it obviously brings to mind his famous quip - when people ask him if he really has two swords, a steel one for men and silver one for monsters he tells them “they’re both for monsters”.

Through Ciri’s arc her traditional witcher’s work monster slaying is few and far between and much much more of what she does is slaying the other kind of monsters, and she still gets called a Witcher. Maybe it’s deliberate that in The Wild Hunt she only has the one sword.

There are a lot of story moments you could happily call your favourite in The Witcher games. There are several moments where ya boi Zoltan shows up and tells you all the themes of the game, which I love just for their open cheesiness. When Geralt tries to persuade Triss to stay but then she goes, but not really, that got me big time. Speaking of that scene, Djikstra’s speech is great. Of course, who can forget magic lesbian laser owl, but the moment at the top of witcher mountain with Geralt and Lambert is so incredibly stunning.

Lambert and Geralt talk about the Witcher training, about being abducted by Vesemir to be turned into Witchers, and it really brings a particular theme into sharp focus. Throughout the books, the show, the games, people repeat this myth that Witcher’s don’t have feelings, but just looking at Geralt for a second you can see that he’s a deeply emotional person. If you haven’t realised it already, in this scene it comes together for you that the Witchers are the ones who spread this myth, and they spread it so that they have an excuse not to feel. The ordeal of the transformations is so awful and so painful that they need to pretend they can’t feel anything just to survive.

This is toxic masculinity.

By the end of The Wild Hunt with Vesemir gone and their ancient secrets forgotten, the remaining witchers decide to let the wolf school die with them, and the only witcher left is Ciri, the new kind of witcher. It feels all too clear that Geralt expecting to have a son through law of surprise but getting a daughter, though never quite directly addressed, is quite vital. All the witchers expect to have sons. They expect to take boys to be brutalised and trained and hardened and turned into cold, professional men who tell themselves they have no feelings. Having a girl was something Geralt was never ready for.

The witchers are going to stop this cycle of men abusing boys into becoming men. The game seems to be begging us to consider the question, what’s wrong with dads, and its answer is dads are boys, and boys have a pretty rough time of it.

The only witcher left is going to be someone who chose to be one, instead of being put through the ordeal that her predecessors went through simply to make her into the same kind of animal as them. 

The books and the games have a lot of intelligent, careful, interesting stuff to say about sex, gender, family, and relationships. I just wish they’d lean into their most sensitive and compassionate side, and stop being horny in a way that undercuts their own messages. There’s been a lot of controversy about CDProjekt’s upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077 in how it’s attempting to represent trans people. I think it’s a huge deal that we’re going to get a Triple A open world RPG where you can make your character trans, and I think it rules, and I also really wish they would talk to some trans people and sort out their awful embarrassing jank. I think some of the people at CD Projekt clearly care a lot, and on that ground I don’t want to just throw the baby out with the bathwater, but this is the curse of horny media - when you do it well it can be really good, but when you fuck up you really fuck up.

Next time, I want to talk about the development of the games more, dive into the plots of all three games in a little more detail, talk about some of the critical response and examince what being a fan of The Witcher means. 

Geralt will return in The Ballad of Geralt the Fanboy...