The Ballad of Geralt the Fanboy: A Look at the critical reception of the Witcher Games (Patreon)

Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher Saga, released through the 80s and 90s became hugely popular as books in Poland and Eastern Europe, and CD Projekt, a polish game publisher and distributor looking to get into the development industry made the books popular worldwide with their development wing CD Projekt Red creating internationally bestselling games based on them.

CD Projekt Red after a couple of iterations truly achieved their ambitious vision when they adapted The Witcher Saga into a game that would be recognised as not only a hit, but a worldwide instant classic. That game, of course, is Gwent.

Gwent is a tactical card-based tabletop game where you play cards based on characters from The Witcher Saga along with some general effect cards to try to outmatch your opponent’s military might across three rounds. This deceptively simple base mechanic gives way to spy cards, monster effects, and a complex meta-game that all-in-all is just addictive.

Between Gwent matches you play as Geralt of Rivia, the titular witcher from the books, riding between different locations to track down gwent players, beat them, and win new cards.

However - and not all Gwent players know this - if you really take your time in between Gwent matches, really stop and smell the roses, CD Projekt Red have added an entire extra story, a sort of fanfiction based on the original books.

This extra content, known popularly as “Witcher 3: the Wild Hunt” is, in my opinion, a masterpiece, or at the very least their magnum opus.

Today what I want us to look at is the story of the Witcher franchise, from books to games, leading up to Witcher 3 and then on, to where the franchise and fandom is today. 

The Witcher franchise is one more than usually affected by its fans. Not only have more people played the games than read the original books, but the books were actually translated into other languages for worldwide release only after the success of the first game, so if you've read the books in for example, English you actually have CD Projekt Red to thank. Thanks CD Projekt Red, you started the interminable discourse about what Jaskier's correct name is.

Not only that but the team who work at CD Projekt Red are clearly huge fans of the franchise. In the documentary about the making of Witcher 1, Ryszard Chojnowski, the creative lead, shows off his copy of the magazine where Geralt of Rivia first appeared on the printed page, signed by Andrzej Sapkowski, that he’s kept for 30 years. He’s just delighted to show it. He recounts the story of the harsh winter January of ‘87, reading this magazine by candlelight with the heavy snow outside. It’s lovely!

It seems like they wanted to make a Witcher story from very early on - even trying to figure out how they could use a different intellectual property to get as close as possible when the license wasn’t originally available. They’ve emphasised a couple of times that they have only two worlds they want to make games set in, Witcher and Cyberpunk.

So it’s fair to say that everything done here was done with a lot of love, even if CD Projekt Red’s management seem like a bunch of soulless ghouls.

One of the main things to love about the books in the first place, one of the things I love, is their forceful and pointed progressive politics. Which is why it's… disappointing that today much of the fandom ranges from enlightened centrists all the open white nationalism. Which means it's time for me to tell you all you're wrong about art again. Yay. 

So this is the story of a franchise, from books to games to international success. It's also the story of a fandom - the story of some people who loved these stories so much they made their own. And it's also the story of my personal quest to find a single other person who understands The Witcher. Everyone was wrong, I am very smart.

The Ballad of Geralt the Fanboy 

If we want to understand this masterpiece though, first we need to go back. Way, way back. Beyond Witcher 3, Witcher 2, back beyond even Witcher 1. Back to 1997, to the original Witcher game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7wE7ixrhV8&feature=emb_title 

Metropolis Software’s Witcher only ever got as far as a one-level playable demo, with Geralt plodding around wearing an inexplicable and inexcusable purple costume, and CD Projekt Red would acquire Metropolis before any more progress would be made on the game. According to wikipedia: “Between [working on other projects], difficulties with the game, and TopWare's concern that the Slavic nature of the source material may not have international appeal, the project was shelved.”

Oh yes, the slavic nature. Now I see.

The Metropolis attempt at a Witcher game was a full decade after the first appearance of Geralt of Rivia in literature, and it would be another full decade before CD Projekt Red would release The Witcher.

There are greater and lesser things in the games that differ from the books, but I need to dispel the notion head-on that differing from source material is in any way inherently bad. For one thing, the story of the games is set after the books anyway, so it isn’t a straight adaptation, but even then there are things that contradict canon. Geralt dies at the end of the books but he’s alive again for the games, so um, ding. Gottem. Sinned. Wrong. Incorrect. Geralt of Rivia, ex-machina.

It’s unclear how much effect licensing disputes and also the original Metropolis Software Witcher game had on the development of what would become The Witcher. Metropolis had produced a lovecraftian adventure game previously and the elder god Dagon from the Cthulhu mythos actually shows up in The Witcher. Thankfully though, Geralt’s purple jerkin was sent back to hell where it belongs.

One important thing to know here is that Ciri and Yennefer are excluded entirely from the first two games. It seems obvious enough that Geralt's amnesia was a handy way for CD Projekt Red to introduce the lore of the world to players who hadn't necessarily read the books, and at one point they were considering making a witcher-esque story using a different intellectual property, so it’s clear that some things are mimics of things from the books - for example, Triss is more or less Yennefer, The Professor is an actual book character but he dies in the same scene he’s introduced, and Azar Javed is dollar store Vilgefortz. Alvin is clearly a version of Ciri. Additionally, folks at CDPR have said they felt like Yennefer and Ciri were characters who needed more time and care to introduce to the story properly.

That isn’t all, though - at some point the story they wanted to tell using Alvin couldn’t necessarily work for Ciri. Alvin becomes the overarching antagonist of the first game, which certainly would have been a very striking decision to make with Ciri, but it also wouldn’t have really worked for her character.

The plot and ideological structure of Witcher 1 are really interesting DO NOT PLAY WITCHER 1 and I’m glad I got to see what they had to say DON’T PLAY IT and I agree with what they’ve said, but unfortunately the whole game just reeks of “this is our first game, we’ve never made a game before” and the entire final act ideological conflict is delivered through dialogue as the bad guy stands there and says “genocide is good” and Geralt stands there and says “no. Genocide is bad”.

This shows the early seeds of something we’ll see more as we progress. Geralt is simply used to express the correct position. In Witcher 1 as opposed to later games he can be wrong, because if you as the player make Geralt side with the Order of the Flaming Rose over the Scoia’tael, even if you’re fine with their racism you’ll later find out they’re behind the attack on Kaer Morhen and Geralt will come around to seeing The Order as the bad guys, and by the final act he’ll have the simple correct position: genocide is, in fact, bad.

Choice in Witcher 1 is an interesting topic. There’s an underlying assumption that the genocide of nonhumans is bad, that the scoia’tael are freedom fighters, and that really you will probably be sympathetic to their cause. This makes sense because in the books Geralt dies in a pogrom defending nonhumans - it would be really fucking weird to just turn that around completely.

The Order are so patently just the fantasy Klan that siding with them would just make no sense if it weren’t for Siegfried. This Niles-Crane-looking-ghoul is set up as your point of contact who is extremely friendly and helpful towards Geralt, to the point that it just screams at the player “we needed a reason for anyone to pick The Order”. And then, of course, if you pick them, you were wrong anyway. This makes the experience of picking The Order over the Scoia’tael more like a tour through what’s going on in their political organisation instead of you getting to actually ideologically side with racism and genocide. Caesar’s Legion, it sure ain’t.

Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is the game most intrinsically wedded to being part of the trilogy. Witcher 1 despite its cliffhanger ending, works pretty well if it’s taken as a standalone. Witcher 3 is surprisingly good at being playable to first-time fans. In fact, of the 50 million copies of witcher games sold, The Wild Hunt  is over half of them.

Witcher 2 is a huge step up in terms of gameplay, combat, level design, dialogue, pacing, aestheticism and just general player experience from The Witcher. It was built on a brand new engine specially created for it, and it has - mmmmtechnically - 16 different endings aaaaand yet it does feel, to play, a lot like a dress rehearsal for Witcher 3. 

Geralt is falsely accused of murdering King Foltest because the guards and Foltest’s kids - Anaïs and Boussy - think that Geralt trying to save Foltest is Geralt assassinating him. Geralt has to clear his name and also find the assassin Letho after Letho kidnaps Triss Merigold, with whom you may or may not have a budding romance. Throughout this you can align Geralt politically with Vernon Roche, commander in the Temerian army, or Iorveth, a Scoia’Tael leader.

This setup right off the bat is different to Witcher 1. Your two sides aren’t raging racist religious zealots versus noble freedom fighters. Roche hates the Scoia’tael for attacking civilians. The Scoia’tael hate Roche for being part of the state that oppresses nonhumans. They’re fighting an asymmetrical war and using what methods they can do hurt the state, but the game frames things a lot more… centristy than it did in Witcher 1. Instead of trying to give you a racist friend they’ve given the obvious underdog victim side moral flaws - in other words, Iorveth is a bit of a dickhead.

In the Iorveth path, with the help of Philipa Eilhart, magic lesbian laser owl, you investigate a plot to kill Saskia, the would-be queen of Upper Aedirn. Saskia is secretly a dragon in human form, and depending on your choices throughout the game you can choose to support her to become the queen if you like, which would establish a state in which nonhumans are protected, although she still won’t work with Iorveth or the Scoia’Tael because they’re dangerous terrorists. Equality should be reached through peaceful methods, like war.

Ideologically it’s a really bizarre thing to say this type of war is the wrong way to fight against genocide and this type of war is the right way. It runs pretty close to “don’t protest police murders just vote Biden” kind of logic, except it’s weirder because it’s… a kingdom. You don’t get a vote. And it’s a war, none of this is voluntary. None of this to say that killing unsuspecting civilians is a good thing to do, but if you don’t just luckily happen to have a candidate to rally around who is promising to establish a safe region for nonhumans, what are you supposed to do? Just get genocided I guess.

The games were a huge success for the franchise in general. The books weren’t available in many languages until the success of the games, which makes the relationship between CDPR and Sapkowski quite interesting. It seems like Andrzej Sapkowksi and CD Projekt had a pretty serious beef at one point, but it was to do with their licensing agreement - it doesn’t seem like Sapkowski is unhappy with the artistic or political direction of the games.

There’s no reason to suspect he has a problem with the centristy flavour of the games or them treating the freedom fighters as terrorists, but there’s also no reason to suspect famous grumpy curmudgeon Andrzej Sapkowski has played the games, or even knows the plots, or even slightly cares.

Which brings us to Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. Witcher 3 is fucking huge.

Wild Hunt has 16 DLCs. 14 of them are adding content into an already enormous, complex, fantastic game, and 2 of them Blood & Wine and Hearts of Stone are adding on huge additional stories which are practically whole witcher games themselves. Because of how huge it is and also because of how long CDPR were building up to it, I’m inevitably going to spend a lot more time talking about it than the other two, and I just wanted to be clear that the game content itself is largely the cause of this (I also despise Witcher 1) and it’s also partly because Witcher 3 is so well refined compared to the others. It feels like the final attempt, the finished product. A lot of the same themes and ideas recur throughout but they really stick the landing with Witcher 3.

The Wild Hunt is about Geralt, finally having gotten his memories back, looking for Yennefer and Ciri, and hopefully making so Ciri can stop the end of the world, if you like. But, it’s also, as I say, absolutely fucking enormous. It’s about a lot of different things, because there’s so much to do. There’s Gwent of course, there’s monster hunting, side quests, politics, great characters, and rather than its messaging sitting with big, weighty choices like you often expect in open world RPGs, or just beating you over the head with a final act speech, the ideas about the world of the game come across in smaller story beats that aren’t very important to Geralt’s journey but also can’t be missed, or misconstrued too easily.

Witcher 2 was quite annoying with the way it implemented choices subverting what choices you make and giving you unexpected outcomes. For example Stennis is a little shitheel and when you get the opportunity to kill him, I think you absolutely should, but if he lives the game tells you he’ll go on to be a great king who’s nice to everyone. This feels like edgy narrative design, but the result is surely that choices mean nothing and the player feels like picking a side is always foolish. Not exactly what you’d hope for from a Witcher game. And meanwhile, Witcher 1 just smacks you over the head with all its theme and meaning by just telling you in a big speech, like Atlas Shrugged.

So when we come to Witcher 3 we see the masterful combination, the true synthesis and somehow two wrongs do make a right. The way choices are structured alters the content you experience in a game, but in Witcher 3 the content you experience doesn’t shift to the degree where the messages of the game fundamentally change. 

As much as it pains me to say, something like Fallout: New Vegas has a pretty obvious problem - if you choose to play as the bad guys, the game doesn’t actually do anything to tell you that they’re wrong. The developers were just kind of trusting everyone to understand that fascism is bad. That means that if you play as the Legion, the text fundamentally says something different. This is probably a big part of why, by the numbers, Centrists love open world games and morality systems. 

On the other hand in Witcher 3 the messaging doesn’t change if you choose Triss or Yennefer, if you support Hjalmar or Cerys, if you help Ciri escape or turn her over to Emyr (although you’re simply being a dogshit Geralt if you do give her to Nilfgaard that’s basic facts). The messaging is in smaller parts of the story, not always on the main path but when you encounter it, it uncomplicatedly says one thing. Mislav the hunter who’s been exiled from his town for being gay is still sad and sympathetic no matter what choices you make, the sidequest with the racist serial killer who is targeting nonhumans is pretty unambiguous and doesn’t change no matter your decisions, and the unavoidable cutscene the first time you enter Novigrad where a doppler is burned at the stake while screaming “I just wanted to live like you” that’s um… yeah that one seems pretty straightforward.

So for the lads who see Witcher as a franchise that doesn’t go in for all that - who see Geralt as a detached rational apolitical smartboy, I have to solemnly inform you that Witcher is - to use the technical term - cucked as hell. It is an SJW extravaganza.

The Wild Hunt is for the most part an examination of toxic masculinity and fatherhood. Philipa Eilhart is a magic lesbian laser owl. Wild Hunt slips in a gay character and a trans character, and seemingly not for big publicity woke points - I barely see anyone acknowledge that they did this. It feels like they did it because they actually care.

And that's just the games, the books are cucked as fuck. 

For one thing, Sapkowski is a pro-choice king and he just can’t stop using his platform to talk about abortion. Right from book 2, Sword of Destiny, Geralt and Calanthe start likening Geralt’s responsibility to the right to choose, and Geralt says it’s a sacred right, and Calanthe says they won’t discuss it because it’s beyond debate. King shit right there.

And then, just in case you forgot about it he has Milva seek out an abortion when she gets pregnant.

And then, just in case you weren’t already vibing in abortion town he makes the final conflict of all the books be about forced-birth and bodily autonomy. Ciri has all these different factions trying to force her to have a baby. Her father Emyr, The Elves from another Dimension, Vilgefortz, The Lodge of Sorceresses, everybody wants her to have a baby and you as the reader simply have to accept the only thing that matters is that she doesn’t want to, and that’s all there is to say.

And then just in case you really needed reminding, when Sapkowski came back to write his prequel novel, Season of Storms, it literally opens, scene one, with this witch telling you that A-BORTION, capital A Abortion, the Big A, abortion is a good thing, and if that weren’t enough, the king she’s arguing with directly explains that he thinks abortion is bad because it challenges his hierarchical structure, explicitly telling us that anti-abortion arguments are there to uphold political hierarchies, and any moral reasoning is just a front used to fool people.

It probably goes without saying, if you’ve watched a second of the show, played a minute of the games, or read a page of the books that race and racism also matter in the world of The Witcher a lot too, but what’s really cool is the depth and complexity with which Sapkowski explores that. We’ll come back to that in a bit.

Sapkowski, funny as it may seem with how explicitly political his works are, actually says when pressed on the issue that he avoids politics. He says “politics is disgusting”, which is obviously a relatable sentiment for everyone. I just wanna grill for God’s sake.

There are things, like abortion that we could call social issues, if we wanted to define politics simply by who we vote for, but really those issues are still decided by politics. Politics is everything. It’s what you can say and how you can behave, and what the law is and how the system responds when you break it. There’s a rich world of political theory outside of voting for one party or another and frankly I think we just have to take it in stride that when Sapkowksi says “politics is disgusting” there is an inherent contradiction there.

In the first place, Geralt can even be read as a specific criticism of neoliberal centrism. This might seem kind of strange, because he’s a character in a fantasy medieval europe and in his world neoliberalism won’t be invented by shit-eating goblin Milton Friedman for at least 400 years - and in his world Milton Friedman probably is an actual goblin.

However one of the absolutely crucial features of neoliberalism is that ideologically it shifts all the responsibility onto the individual, and in doing so it is an ideology that pretends not to be an ideology. It simply tells us that we don’t live in a society, so there can’t be any politics to think about and so there must not be an ideology governing those politics. This, incidentally, is why folks act like neoliberalism is a floating signifier with no strict definition.

Sapkowski is using the medieval fantasy world to comment on this specific feature of our modern politics. The politics of who is in charge is so abstracted and meaningless to many people that they may as well be living under kings or emperors - this is part of what you see with the depictions of Nilfgaard in the books. Ordinary peasants are mostly unfussed about the invasion, as long as none of the fighting personally harms them. The political difference between being ruled by King Henselt or Emperor Emyr var Emreis isn’t all that significant to them. Politics is disgusting.

So how is Geralt a criticism of this? Well it goes back, as does everything, to Blaviken. Geralt is a cold, detached professional who stays out of things and doesn’t get involved, and then his apathy is shown to only protect the party who already has the most power, Stregobor. Evil is evil, maybe, but Geralt clearly helps the greater evil here.

It seems weird to have to say this but I’m really offering quite plain readings of the text here. These aren’t wild postmodern theories on the Witcher - it’s pretty much just what the series is plainly about. Alright let’s check in with the comments to see how it’s all going down

No that’s just fat.

And so ends the audience participation section of the show.

One crucial thing that the games actually do well is that in the games, politics is… kind of… disgusting. Exactly the same politics that Sapkowski finds to be disgusting and makes disgusting in his books. The politics of kings and queens and kingdoms and empires is actually pretty disgusting. 

But nonetheless I need to accept that part of the transition from the very progressive books to the state of the franchise today rests with the game devs. While the books are actively hostile to centrism, the games are a bit politically tamer, so: ding. Gottem. That’s another sin. Dial up the sin counter. Centrism cliche.

It’s not that bad, but it’s definitely present. To some degree it’s that system of open choice which attracts centrists in the first place, to another degree it’s the actual politics of CD Projekt Red and to yet another degree it’s a feature of the medium of video games inherently. When you play the games as Geralt of Rivia, muscle-punch-man video game protagonist, it’s hard to conceive that he’s wrong about things. So if a huge fanbase of gamers who see Geralt as a reflection of themselves go on from the games to read the books, where Geralt is supposed to learn and grow, where you’re fundamentally meant to understand that Geralt is wrong about stuff… I think you probably end up with a series that says nothing and has no politics.

It does baffle me though, the idea of these games having this fan-base that doesn’t engage with the politics. If you suck all the politics out of The Witcher, I don’t know what you even like about The Witcher.

Okay that’s not totally fair, but it cuts it down to almost nothing.

Like I like the Medieval setting, and I like that for Medieval fantasy it has refreshingly progressive politics. I like the characters, I like the world, I like the ways that Geralt’s work and status as a mutant show an intersection of class tension and bigotry, I like Sapkowski’s powerful desire to tell everyone how good abortion is, and I like the discussion of race and racism.

And if I’m really trying to be apolitical here, what’s left there? Characters, some lore, and I guess medieval fantasy aesthetics...

And you know who else loves Witcher for its medieval fantasy aesthetics?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qKebiRZYJY 

You thought we were done with the Himbo discourse, but here we are with Marcus the bodybuilding nazi who thinks the Witcher games and books are saying racism is good. This is a rare exception to the dumb but gentle and kindly himbo - a “himbad” if you will (see also: Paul Joseph Watson). This himbo wants to talk about The Jewish Question.

Marcus thinks The Witcher is a pro-segregation text, presenting pogroms and oppression and hate crimes as a natural consequence of multiculturalism, which is a pretty troubling misread of like, the entire whole thing of the whole series.

I don’t really care very much though, of course. Nazis gonna Nazi, to some degree, I’m not exactly shook that a far-right reactionary wants to project his gross politics all over this medieval fantasy story, because of course he does. 

What bothers me more is that other people discussing the Witcher franchise in a way that tries to ignore politics have a reading of The Witcher that doesn’t disagree with Marcus. 

I’m not saying they don’t disagree. I’m sure they do. They should. You really should disagree with Nazis, hot take. What I’m saying is that when you suck out the politics of a very political franchise you leave the door open to horrible ghouls like him. His interpretation is obviously gibberish, but depoliticising this series turns it into gibberish.

Again: If you suck all the politics out of The Witcher, I don’t know what you even like about The Witcher. And worse than that, someone else can inject completely wrongheaded politics into it if you do that because nobody will be challenging them.

Let’s go pick on someone - Joseph Anderson is a YouTuber - but don’t think too badly of him for it, y’know - he does long form video game content. Joseph is a good example for our purposes because he generally stays out of politics on his channel, he absolutely loves the Witcher, he’s made a 4 hour video about The Witcher and a 5 hour video about The Witcher 2, and where I’d be inclined to just say someone was sticking in their lane usually, when you’ve spent 9 hours talking about something it’s kinda weird not to touch on the central themes of the whole series. Like Joseph says at one point that “free will versus determinism is a theme” and like, no it isn’t? The conflict of free will and determinism is a plot device to examine the theme of how people become the kind of person society brands them as. Again, it’s a social critique, but if you take the politics out it’s just kind of… nothing…

More troubling though is that Joseph said after reading the books he came out of them “elf-racist”, racist against elves? I don’t know what to do with that exactly. 

It feels like the elf characters early on who are hostile because they are victims of genocide made him feel weirdly defensive?

I don’t know, it’s hard to say exactly what he thinks, but he does seem to believe the elves hating the humans is a good reason to hate the elves. He says dhoine is a slur against humans. I’m trying not to be mean but I have to pause and laugh at this one. Does Joseph think “elf” is a slur? Because dhoine is just the elvish word for human.

In the second video he just keeps cycling back to how much he hates elves and his contempt for Iorveth is just through the roof. He wasn’t kidding about the elf-racism. Joseph seems to think that the nonhumans who have integrated into human society are mostly fine, which in my opinion feels like it betrays a poor understanding of how racism works.

Nonhumans are called non-humans the same way people are grouped as people of colour in opposition to whiteness. It’s because in the real world we have a system of global white supremacy, and in this fantasy world they have a system of human supremacy. It’s a pretty direct allegory in that way.

Integrating into human society on human’s terms isn’t everything being mostly fine, it makes them second-class citizens and ultimately it reinforces human supremacy. As I said before the Scoia’tael, who Joseph has immense disdain for, are fighting an asymmetrical war - they’re fight back genocide and there aren’t many of them left. Their tactics mirror real-world guerilla fighters practicing asymmetrical warfare against the state. It seems a bit like he hasn’t understood the race issues at all when he basically advocates the “peaceful” option that conveniently subjugates the minorities, and condemns the violent option.

I’m pretty sure when he talks about what’s really wrong with the elves he’s referencing that the Aen Elle, the elves from another dimension, are colonialists and are one of the antagonistic factions trying to control Ciri at the end of the books, but all the way through the entire series the elves you meet - the Aen Seidhe - are the few survivors of genocide at the hands of the humans. Frankly, to consider the two groups as one group is weird. The Aen Elle and Aen Seidhe have had nothing to do with each other for thousands of years.

I think Joseph thinks the elves are bad and worth being racist to because the elves from another planet, the Aen Elle, are evil in the end and they have a violent oppressive history, but to my mind the books build up a case very solidly, showing you that it’s systemic oppression, not a good side and a bad side, that really count. It’s who has the power to seriously do harm, and all the way through the books that’s humans, because like white people in the real world, they’ve made a racial hierarchy to put themselves at the top. Right at the end though, there’s the possibility of the Aen Elle taking over the world via Ciri, and that would also be bad, because anyone wanting to take over the world is bad. The hierarchy is the problem, is what my good dude Andrzej is trying to tell us, but this kind of analysis is social critique, and political power analysis, and so when you suck the politics out, what’s left? Dhoine is a slur, the elves are evil.

As a last point, Joseph says that the elves and the humans probably can’t live together because “they’ve hurt each other too much” and if anything here makes you think on my points, on how apolitical discussion sides with the worst possible politics, let it be this moment, where Joseph is unintentionally advocating for racial segregation.

It seems weird to dissect elf-racism like this right? It definitely feels silly. But I think there are a couple of ways to approach art. In one way, when the Witch is arguing with the King that abortion is good, that’s true in the Witcher world and true in ours. In the other way of approaching art, when abortion is argued to be a good thing in the story that has no relation to whether abortion is good in real life, and I think that way of approaching art is… bullshit.

There is a kind of content being made that largely just explains the plots of games in a lot of detail, with some insights and analysis sprinkled in. Of the creators who do this I think Joseph Anderson is one of the best. It’s evident that a lot of people are watching this content not because they’ve played a game and want to be included in the conversation about it, but because they haven’t played the game and don’t want to be excluded. It’s content to cure you of FOMO. I’ve watched Joseph Anderson’s videos this way - I’ve also watched them to help decide on a game I then streamed and wrote about, it can be really helpful for that.

Nothing against the content or the creators themselves but I think we should be mindful that this exists, that there are people watching this FOMO content so that they can be included in conversations about art without having to actually directly experience it themselves. The time investment of Joseph Anderson’s (currently) 9 hours of Witcher videos is actually really small compared to playing the games and reading the books.

We need to be mindful that there are people looking to this kind of content to simply give them a poor facsimile of experiencing the art for themselves, because of a pressure to be included in conversations, because people having discussions about things is an industry, platforms and individuals and businesses thrive off of discussion and that profit-driven model in turn has an effect on how we discuss art.

People are driven to discuss something the only experience of which they have is someone they trust telling them about it, and if that person gets it wrong, or doesn’t tackle the messaging of the piece, people are talking confidently about a piece of art as if it has no meaning at all, and then who’s there to correct them when someone claims that it actually supports a hateful, reactionary politics?

So even beside thinking that it’s kind of a shame Joseph loves the Witcher so much and seems to have come out of the books with exactly the wrong idea about it, I think it’s pretty irresponsible to all the people who engage with this content in this way, because they’ll take his word for it that this is what the franchise is about, and frankly, he’s wrong.

I wouldn’t be so hard on him about this if it weren’t that he has a huge platform to talk about this stuff, and this fandom is such a lightning rod for the exact kind of fascists who are currently ruining queer people’s lives in Poland. We should confront what the politics of art is, because when you don’t, the absolute worst people use that art to preach their politics instead.

Bare minimum Joseph, if you disagree with my analysis of the series, um, you're wrong, but it would be really impactful if you would share the link I’ve been sharing and fight for LGBT people in Poland. You have a much bigger platform than me and you can do a lot more good with it. But I hope that you’ll reconsider the stories in a different light.

Evil is evil Joseph. Sometimes there's less of it, sometimes there's more, but when you try not to choose, the greater evil wins.

You know what? I know there are people watching this series as FOMO-content too. I know that I have the privilege of writing about media for a living, so I can afford to spend my time playing three huge games, and watching a show and reading all these books, and so I know it’s a big time investment and at the very least some people are gonna be watching this series and using it to decide whether to read the books. So I hope you’ll join me next time as I tell you very directly what the books are about, what happens, what it means, and how we should understand Geralt of Rivia’s arc.

The Series will conclude in The Ballad of Geralt the Carelord