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https://ift.tt/2v8WIEgbrotherhoodoftheslice replied to your post “next installment: Innermost Depths”
He can probably see outside of the infrared spectrum! Do Witchers navigate by electrosensitivity like migratory birds?? Perhaps they definitely all have PTSD, and find frightening coping mechanisms and/or symptoms so regular as to be brushed off as normal, all of which Ciri and Jaskier would find HORRIFYING. (Screams in the night? Geralt just rolls over.)
oh my god he probably CAN.
oh my god.
I was kind of already thinking on this wavelength a little because I’ve spent the last couple of years (yes really) slowly reading Martha Wells’ The Books Of The Raksura series out loud to my little niece, repeatedly (and I had to censor a lot more of it on the first readthrough when she was three than I do now that she’s six, because it is Very Much not a book for kids except whomst among us would not love such a book) and there are no human characters in that whole series, and the main character is a shapeshifter, who has one form that’s sort of humanoid (”a soft-skinned groundling,” as he thinks of himself) and the other form that’s kind of a flying dragon thing with scales and claws and such. And so this POV character has an incredibly acute sense of smell that he uses constantly to interact with his surroundings, much sharper distance vision than most of the other “groundling” species he interacts with (although his vision is pretty biased toward moving things and he can’t find nearby stationary objects for shit), and he’s got sensory spines on the back of his neck in the winged form that he somehow can still access in his groundling form, so he always knows if there’s air moving behind him, and an innate awareness of the planet’s magnetic field and the position of the sun in the sky so he always knows which way he’s oriented and what time it is. Anyway– it’s all so normalized in the narrative that you don’t think about it much, but the author’s Patreon has a snippet that’s from another groundling character he was living with in semi-hiding, not letting on that he had another form, and like the first line is that she absolutely knows he’s something else because of all these weird little uncanny things about him. He thinks he fits in and she’s immediately like no doubt this guy’s some kind of monster buuuuut he’s nice and he does the dishes so I’m just gonna chill.
(If you’re not familiar with the series I recommend it wholeheartedly because the protagonist is a traumatized lost orphan who’s spent his whole life thinking he’s a freak and now that he’s actually found other people like him he has no idea how to fit in, it is so fucking juicy, there are five books of this and he grows throughout but there’s a fantastic whole bit in the third book where he thinks everyone has betrayed him and it’s so angsty, yes this is the author of Murderbot by the way and she has a Type and it is also my Type so thanks)
(ah another wonderful ongoing bit of POV fuckery in it is that you get his POV pretty close mostly and he’s like I’m an unlovable monster no one has ever loved me and then you get backstory and it’s all these people who are like oh no doubt that kid was weird but we liked him, we don’t know why he freaked out and ran off when we were politely like “hey guy you have some sort of deal going on?”– like, over and over, so that’s fantastically juicy and also applicable here, I think, to our Witcher, who yes gets rocks thrown at him but probably by now is so oversensitive about it that people blink twice at him because the wind was in their eyes and he’s like they hate me, because of what I am, and I must leave instantly forever– and like, in both cases, totally justified by past traumas, but not super helpful in the moment.)
But anyway. Yes, Witchers are subtly inhuman and that’s gotta freak people out, and I think there’s a lot of juicy material just in him firstly learning as a young Witcher not to show that he can do these inhuman things because it freaks people out, and then learning in the present day that they don’t really freak Jaskier out and he can maybe sort of sometimes be himself.
I can’t really envision what you mean about the PTSD coping mechanisms though– I figure the hypervigilance is a given but it also probably takes literal years for him to really sleep deeply in Jaskier’s presence. (I’d say he never did with Yen but it’s hard to say, the djinn thing might affect his judgement considerably.)
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