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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.
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.
