dragonlady7

true, and it's what i like most about the canon

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stele3 https://stele3.tumblr.com/post/672424983120805888/stele3-lets-talk-about-ciri-and-geralt-ciris :

stele3 https://stele3.tumblr.com/post/672422617394888704/lets-talk-about-ciri-and-geralt-ciris-father :

Let’s talk about Ciri and Geralt.

Ciri’s father claimed her mother as a Child of Surprise. Pavetta was 15 when “Duny” returned to claim her; I don’t know how much of Emhyr’s love for her was genuine or if he orchestrated the whole thing in order to have some claim to the throne of Cintra and thus support for his efforts to retake Nilfgaard. I’m not sure he genuinely just happened to save the life of King Roegner and genuinely just happened to fall in love with the Princess of Cintra because something something Destiny something something, or if Emhyr was playing a very, very long game. I haven’t read that far in the books and the games take place long after all of these events.

Anyway.

Ciri grew up hearing about how her father claimed her mother as a Child of Surprise and married her/got her pregnant at the tender age of 15. It’s not clear how old “Duny” is supposed to be, but he’s at minimum 30 years old when this happens. Possibly quite a bit older. Now, Ciri’s obviously got an idealized picture of her parents, judging from the vision the Deathless Mother fed her in the season finale. So I can’t help wondering if she expected Geralt to show up, a knight in shining armor, to sweep her away in some kind of romantic embrace. If she was expecting to be claimed as a similar child bride–if she was afraid of it, or hoped for it. The most recent precedent for someone claiming a Child of Surprise was her fucking parents, of course the possibility had to have occurred to her.

And then when she finds him, he’s a dirty, injured, tired guy in the woods who smells like horse. And she runs straight into his arms with nothing but relief.

MEANWHILE. Geralt.

Book!Geralt is a sarcastic shit who hides a deeply wounded heart; I haven’t read too much of the books but he comes across as clever and sensitive. Not delicate by any stretch but obviously hiding how much he feels. Game!Geralt is tougher but broken in entirely different ways, particularly by having his choices taken away from him, sexually. I’d strongly argue that what game!Triss does to him in Witcher 2 is outright rape, though I strongly doubt the game developers saw anything but the opportunity for straight male wish fulfillment–a chick wants to bang him so bad she lies to him and steals him from the other chick! Never mind that one of them took advantage of his amnesia and lied to him for a long period of time and the other one walks all over him. (I have some serious issues with game!Yennefer, too.)

Thus far it seems like Henry Cavill is threading the needle between those two characterizations. But both the Geralts have in common a tendency towards hypersexuality. Again, this is largely due to the creators of both the books and games being mostly dudes who liked their fantasy wish fulfillment character to bang all the chicks and didn’t think too much about the psychology of a character who was abandoned as a child, brutally experimented on, had his body drastically altered in ways beyond his control, and then sent out into a world that almost universally reviles him.

Having that character constantly banging anyone* who shows any sexual interest in him does not say the thing that they think it says. Instead it creates a character who has never had physical autonomy, who exists in this body that is barely his, and has never experienced love that wasn’t tempered by abandonment or brutal abuse, and who constantly fucks because he has no good boundaries and this is the only way he knows how to experience physical contact in a way that isn’t painful.

(any *woman, obviously, because straight male power fantasy)

And then that hypersexual character with little sense of physical autonomy and no healthy familial connections gets a Child of Surprise, whose parents were in a similar situation and wound up together, sexually and romantically.

And he goes NOPE. This is my daughter now.

IDK, it’s just fascinating to me. They were absolutely set up by the narrative and characterization to be sexual and/or romantic at one another and instead they wound up as father and daughter.

i found this in my drafts from ages ago and it’s lovely to revisit why i was even interested in this canon in the first place. (Your picture was not posted)