a little witcher meta: Geralt’s terrible decisi

[dragonlady7]

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I was writing this in responses to various comments on my fic and I thought I’d expand it slightly here into a little meta on the character of Geralt of Rivia:

The only way i can make Geralt hang together as a coherent character who isn’t just a complete idiot is to make him wildly out of touch with his own emotions and operating most of the time on snap judgements and instinct, which isn’t too far-fetched– it makes a lot of his extremely unwise decisions make some modicum of sense, especially the ones that seem to contradict his moral code. He means well, but he’s learned that he never has time to contemplate any one thing too deeply, he’s got to go on instinct, and so he does wildly stupid things like oh, bind himself to a woman he’s just met with a wish on a djinn, and push away his only remaining friend as cruelly as he can manage, because he’s got no real connection to his own emotions and panics all the fucking time instead of working it out. It only makes sense; he’s basically never had a healthy relationship with any person in his whole life. Even his relationship to his horse is weird and unhealthy because when she dies he replaces her with a lookalike with the same name, over and over. That’s so fucked-up. That’s a guy who has no idea what he’s feeling and can’t reason through it. But he’s not stupid. So. I’m leaning into that.

The above is just a copy-paste of a comment response I made, wherein I was trying to be succinct, but I’m going to expand just a little bit– doesn’t it make some sense? 

It’s a deeply traumatized way of seeing the world, for one. Most of his working life has been spent having antagonistic relationships with people he’s physically endangering himself to save. He has a wide altruistic streak, but every time he extends himself for someone’s benefit, he is punished for it. 

This is common enough among Witchers that they have a code about not involving themselves– for good reasons. Elsewhere in canon (none acknowledged within Netflix, but like, if you try to look up things that are mentioned in the Netflix adaptation, you find these stories) there are descriptions of Witcher schools being destroyed by humans intimidated by the potential threat of such powerful beings organizing (including Geralt’s own school, the Wolf School at Kaer Morhen, where the teachers and children were slaughtered while Geralt was away on the Path, and he came home to a ruin and piles of dead children whose bones are still in the fucking moat as a kind of monument), but it holds true for individual Witchers as well as groups of them. Involvement in politics, involvement in human affairs, all carry a heavy risk of retaliation. But it’s to the point that he hesitates to even involve himself in conversations, because people will become threatened by him and do him violence. This is not theoretical, this is shown to the audience. 

So he has been taught, both by his teachers and by his by-now long experience in the world, that you have to shield yourself because everything will turn to violence at any moment. Is it a wonder, then, that his entire personality is basically one giant coping structure of hypervigilance, and so his decision-making skills are perhaps massively skewed in favor of snap judgements with absolutely zero reasoning behind them? That’s what keeps him alive, after all, and he’s not even wrong to feel that way. 

It just means he does some really fucking stupid shit on a fairly regular basis. 

Comments

[bookscorpion]

I like this a lot and it makes sense. It also plays into the whole 'Witchers have no emotions' thing that is so OBVIOUSLY not true but gets repeated again and again. I headcanon about this that this is something the Witcher schools held up as true because it was easier than teaching the kids they turned into witchers to deal with all the trauma that gets inflicted upon them by the Trials and later just by being a witcher. Most of them die anyway and a lot of witchers die in their first years on the Path, so no sense in wasting time on feelings.

So small wonder that none of them have good coping skills when it comes to emotions. Or anything else.

I also think that the emotions thing is something that gets repeated by normal folk because it makes it easier to hate witchers and to treat them as useful freaks but nothing more. And it was probably easier for the older witchers to keep denying it so they didn't have to confront their own emotions or those of the witchers they created.

I tend to headcanon Geralt as being able to interact with people just fine and seeking out connections because he is starved for affection and just not get treated as a freak once in a while. He's fine doing that in the game, although deadpan is still his favourite mode of interaction. But it starts to collapse the moment the emotions become overwhelmingly strong and he panics and fucks up because he has no idea how to handle this. And neither has Yen - coming from the game, I see them as truly caring about each other but neither of them has any idea how to be in a healthy relationship. And the Wish does not help at all.

[dragonlady7]

I do think Geralt is absolutely starved for companionship-- I mean, the first thing we see him do in the Netflix series is just letting this absolute bloodthirsty weirdo of a little girl glom onto him, and he makes no real effort to push her away at all; he clearly thinks she's amusing and enjoys her company, and at the end is devastated when she tells him to leave. After knowing her for a matter of hours at most!

He's not naturally introverted at all, he's horribly lonely. Which is probably partly why he comes up with the Wish, too-- he wants to be helpful and is generally trying to do the right thing but he's so desperately lonely it makes him do precisely the Wrong thing.

[bookscorpion]

Geralt, I think, does a lot of things out of a desire to please and out of loneliness. He can take people hating him and fearing him because he's a witcher, but it weighs on him. And when he gets to know people better, the loneliness tears at him and makes him vulnerable.