Cliffs Notes: Witcher Two
Jun. 20th, 2021 05:27 ammaterials, i promise i worked hard researching this
via https://ift.tt/35CiLlc
for all of you lovely, brave folk who’ve said “oh i’ll read whatever you write” and who dove gamely into my sudden descent into Homoerotic Witcher 2 nonsense https://archiveofourown.org/works/32023453, and quite understandably reacted with “ok i’m on board with the homoeroticism but. who the fuck are these people”
I love you, you are so brave, you are the best. I am going to take care of you.
HERE https://kaer-cuan.tumblr.com/post/654367899702722560/witcher-2-ending-a-summary is the answer. But, if you need more detail, don’t worry. I’m here. Crucially, do not misunderstand me: canon “fell” down the stairs and i am the “grieving” widow with an inheritance here, who has just answered the door to you in one of those translucent robes with the marabou feathers, and that’s the frame from which I’m telling you this story; I’m really just here to suck out the juicy homoerotic bits. There’s a lot of dumb bullshit in canon.
(Full disclosure: I am sorry but I don’t enjoy the voice acting or animation of this game and so have interacted directly with it as little as possible. I clearly enjoy aspects of its story but the game itself not so much. If you love it, great! but this post isn’t for you anyway, so go enjoy whatever it is you enjoy and I’m not judging you, in fact you’re ultimately the reason I’m here at all. Unironically, ❤️.)
The rest of you, clicky the cut, I promise it won’t hurt much, and then you’ll Know. Well enough, anyway. Uh in case you didn’t catch on, this is all spoilers for Witcher 2.
W2 is from Geralt’s POV, and as the player you can have him ally with one of two choices, to give you two entirely separate paths through the game, with different outcomes.
In the prologue, you meet Vernon Roche, who is the head of Temeria’s Special Forces, the Blue Stripes, an elite military unit who execute the orders of King Foltest. Foltest is… an interesting fellow, whose policies include some… fairly… uh, nonhuman-unfriendly ones. You also meet Iorveth, commander of a band of nonhuman guerrillas, the Scoia’tael [Squirrels], who are waging asymmetric warfare against… well, among others, Foltest, who has done (or, more accurately, ordered Roche and others to do) some uhhh well let’s not sugarcoat this: genocides. (War crimes have been committed on both sides, to be somewhat fair; the Scoia’tael do some ill shit, and a lot of people die horribly, on both sides, for often no more than the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.) So, that’s your premise for this ship, incidentally– Sworn Enemies, Mutually War Criminals. (It’s alleged that the Blue Stripes were created expressly to oppose the Scoia’tael, for some extra juice here.)
Anyway, in a flashback in the prologue, Iorveth allies himself with a Mysterious Personage, who at the end of the prologue, assassinates Foltest. (Mysterious Personage has also, just previously, assassinated the king of Aedirn, Demavend, leaving Demavend’s somewhat-ineffectual son Stennis in charge and not doing a super great job at fending off the invasions of the opportunistic Kaedwen, to the north, whose king, Henselt, is, get this, also at risk of getting murdered by the same Mysterious Figure and indeed that’s a feature of your video game choices.)
Going forward, Geralt gets to pick whether to side with Roche or with Iorveth. If you side with Roche, you make a lowkey enemy of Iorveth, and a particular set of… sort of bad things happens. If you side with Iorveth, Roche is pissy with you but actually helps you out here and later when he shows up in W3 he’s slightly huffy with you but also remains a decent bro there, so it doesn’t actually matter, SO I’m going to just assume Iorveth’s path for all these next bits.
So, Iorveth’s Path: VERGEN is a city on the Pontar River at the border between Aedirn and Temeria and Kaedwen, and this wildly popular woman named Saskia the Dragonslayer has raised a peasant army to supplant the ineffectual Aedirnian regular army at repelling an invasion by the neighboring kingdom (Kaedwen) and wants, eventually, in return for her fighting, to establish a Free State there, and Iorveth is allied with her, and Geralt can choose to help her if he does Iorveth’s path, which is what I’m basing these stories on.
The super awesome twist with Saskia is that she is actually a polymorphed dragon herself, the daughter of Borch Three Jackdaws from the dragon hunt of book and Netflix, and it was Iorveth’s idea for her to style herself the Dragonslayer and take credit for her own other form’s disappearance. This is rad as FUCK and I do not know why you would pick Roche’s path when it means you don’t get to help her.
(There is some complication where Philippa Eilhart fucking mind-controls Saskia after a poisoning plot, which is like, half the game, but only relevant here in the end because I, too, have availed myself of Phil in mysquare-jawed slightly constipated motherfucker whose king got killed out from under him and is left in W3 a patriot without a country: [image: image]
[image description: screenshot from Witcher 2, of Vernon Roche, who is a thin white man in a black folded fabric cap, leaning against a wood-paneled wall and glowering just to the left of the camera. And yeah his sword hilt has glitched through his arm because we love CDPR and their physics.]
And Iorveth is an overgrown theatre kid with a penchant for violence and drama in equal measures, far far too beautiful and arrogant for this world. [WEARING a GARLAND of BADGES he has LOOTED from the CORPSES of his SLAIN ENEMIES.] [image: image]
[image description: a promotional image from the Gwent game, of Iorveth napping in a tree, arms folded behind his head. He is an elf, one pointed ear visible, and is wearing a red headscarf covering the scarred right side of his face where an eye is missing, and is armored in leather and mail with a long-skirted green-quilted gambeson, a decorative blue sash around his waist, and a leather strap across his chest bedecked with enameled badges bearing the heraldic devices of several human kingdoms. He has a complicated bow and a quiver of arrows dangling from his belt, and looks peaceful. A red squirrel is climbing on the bole of the tree near his head.]
And Saskia is A MOTHERFUCKING DRAGON who looks like this in her human form how could you NOT. [I don’t like her dragon form, it’s… like… trying too hard to be unfuckable, and like, don’t challenge me like that I’m no amateur she is absolutely going to fuck in that form, but also, I’m mentally redesigning her to be less uhh early-2010s video game crusty.] [image: image]
[Image description: Gwent card art of Saskia, a blonde woman with a gold-and-red cord headband, standing dashingly on a rock in a heroic pose with flames behind her. She is wearing heavy silver-colored armor with large shoulder spauldrons and a red-and-gold brocade-looking bodice, and brandishing a large sword and a shield. She looks very stern but also looks about 22 and Video Game Hot, though not excessively so.]
Iorveth was supposed to be in W3 but got cut. Alas; he would have been fascinating. Roche is in W3 but is minor, and can either survive it or not based on your decisions.
(The Mysterious Personage who kills Demavend and Foltest is the Viper witcher Letho of Gulet, who you’ll probably encounter in various other places on your fandom journey, and he’s been paid by Nilfgaard to kill all these kings in exchange for a vague promise of getting to re-establish the School of the Viper, so do with that information what you will.)
Most importantly, in all of this:
if you help Roche, there’s a scene where he defeats Iorveth, but does not kill him, claiming that he hears foes approaching and there isn’t time (after having let Iorveth make an incredibly long melodramatic speech, as he lies there attracively posed with his back arched, bleeding, saying more or less that if he must die at least it’s a worthy opponent: Roche lets him go on for this whole time and then is like welp peace out and bails); if you help Iorveth, there is a scene in which he defeats Roche, and takes his special forces badge as a trophy, but refuses to kill him because he is the “last of a dying breed” and it wouldn’t be sportsmanlike. Yes! Yes! It is THAT HOMOEROTIC in the ACTUAL TEXT, so I am not making this up. They are sworn enemies obsessed with one another and by fanfiction law they must fuck so I am called upon by the ancestors’ spirits to make this happen.
I was going to include an appendix of sources but genuinely, you can just
poke around on the Internet if there’s a specific thing here that hooks
you. I linked in the story to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laurelnose
https://tmblr.co/mq54LIcK9Ujftei-4qS_V9A‘s github repository
https://laurelnose.github.io/ of the [WIP– partial] game transcript,
which is less painful than trying to scrub through playthrough vids on
YouTube. (Though if you watch only one, here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbP4M-C9RDc is both possible outcomes of
Roche and Iorveth’s Homoerotic Fight Scene. Which gives you a taste of
like. How hard you have to work to make this all hot. Listen I don’t like
the animation style.) If you’re interested you should totally look more up;
there’s a lot of great background character and setting stuff that wildly
enriches your fandom experience. But if you’re not, don’t feel bad if this
is all you know, because this is literally all I know and I’m pretty
confident I’ve got the gist enough for fic, baby, and that’s what’s
important. Now I’m gonna rub my gay little hands all over it and polish off
the weird eugenics shit and avoid the actual hate crime and go to town.
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