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geralt says fuck cops
May. 29th, 2020 08:27 pmvia https://ift.tt/2XAGBcE
so we resume our tale on the streets of Novigrad, with Aiden’s murderers punished and Lambert off to parts unknown. (The post title begs the question: are the witch hunters really cops? I say so and I say fuck ‘em.)
We went to the Rosemary and Thyme, which is a brothel that Dandelion recently inherited. Once there, we immediately were confronted with a dwarf named Zoltan flinging some ne’er-do-wells out a door. Apparently Geralt knows Zoltan, as he seemed delighted to see him. Zoltan was in return delighted to see Geralt, because he had time to utter a happy greeting and cordially invite Geralt to help him in a fistfight. A mob came through the door, and we immediately had to leap into the fray.
We died, of course, because that’s a thing that happens to Geralt distressingly often in Death March mode: he gets literally killed in fistfights. Argh.
So, behind the cut is more about this sort of gross quest which treads that fine line that Witcher 3 is so good at– This Is A Little Bit Gross And Has A Slightly Misogynist Premise, But Geralt Himself Is Largely Not Gross And Mostly Manages To Be Respectful About It (mostly?), So Enjoy That Entirely Unnecessary Mindfuck.
“Wait,” I said, “can you use a blackjack in a fistfight???” “Maybe we shouldn’t have been declining to loot those all along,” DF said.
So we reloaded, and this time survived, largely because Zoltan did most of the fighting.
(As an aside, apparently Zoltan bears a truly uncanny resemblance to a coworker of DF’s, who is a very short, stocky, gay biker with a mohawk. So every goddamn scene he’d be like “Jack, it’s super weird to see you here.”)
To regen health, you consume food. Various loot lately has been booze so DF figured why the fuck not and downed a bottle of wine. So we had to search the Rosemary and Thyme while drunk, which in Geralt’s case means sort of tunnel-visioned and unsteady. Kind of hilarious, no other consequences, the effects lasted a couple of minutes and the health regen actually worked, so whatever.
So it’s Dandelion’s brothel, but he’s gone missing. To find him, Zoltan and Geralt find his dayplanner and find his list of recent meetings, every one of which is a woman (with one semi-exception, tw for weird treatment of a gender-non-conforming person– I say weird because it’s… just sort of weird and clumsy and you don’t have any really respectful dialogue options but it’s not like, actively… mean? I don’t know, brace yourselves my friends; also brace yourselves because the entire quest is that Dandelion Lies To His Trollops, And That’s Kinda Funny, which is not exactly not-gross. At least Geralt is reasonably gentle about it with most of them, and is clearly disgusted by his bro’s behavior, not that he’s not enabling him…). So Zoltan tears the page in half and says “Geralt you take this half, I’ll take that.” And off we went.
(Well, we searched the place first, and found nothing interesting, so whatever.)
Apparently there’s only one woman who isn’t a dead end, and I was spoilered for which one, and offered the spoiler to DF, but he declined– the first one was like, right there, so why not, let’s go. Annnnnd it turns out you get MASSIVE XP just for talking to each woman, so that’s worth doing.
The first one was a laundress, and Geralt saves her nobly from Whoreson Jr’s men shaking her down for protection money– by dismembering them into bloody bits all over her washing. She’s not that excited about this, and Geralt is sarcastic; he seems to have no appreciation for the finer points of laundry.
The next one is… oh. The weird one. It’s a man, or well a male elf, who runs a tailor’s shop, and when Geralt is confused because he expected a woman, the man leaves the room and comes back dressed as a woman (like, dress, makeup, but still the same hair), and Geralt is visibly discomfited and most of the dialogue options seem to be him being like “ew weird”, but DF, to his credit, was like, “I’m not fucking asking him why he’s fucking dressed like that, that’s a gross way of phrasing it, no thank you” so we muddled through as best we could with the other bits of the dialogue tree. The man (I think it’s meant to be clear that he still uses male pronouns?) makes it clear that he and Dandelion never had a sexual relationship and in fact he is completely and explicitly disinterested in pursuing men, and that’s fine, and DF was like ugh why did they have to make this weird. Like… I could see that maybe they assume their target audience would be weirded out but like, it wouldn’t have taken much to make it not weird, it doesn’t have to be like, perfect– just, like, it doesn’t work as a joke (was it supposed to be funny??) and it doesn’t work seriously so what is it doing here; it would have been enormously improved by like, the tiniest bit of uhhh maybe a sensitivity reader or something. I don’t know what they were going for. Anyway… We got the info we were supposed to get, got the XP, and bought some stuff from the tailor shop that had some yellow exclamation points next to it. (Masquerade masks. why not.)
This boosted us to level 14 and DF realized he had, like, a pile of Experience Points to distribute. (There’s a mechanism in the game where you get, like, a point per level plus a point every so often from something else, and you can take those points and distribute them into a Skill Tree thing that makes you better at fighting, Signs, recovery, things like that. So your Signs can individually get more powerful as you gain points. You need to level up Axii in order to access certain dialogue tree options, for example (only in a few quests but still, they exist); you can also put points into your strong attacks to make them stronger. Things like that.) “Level up Quen so it’s worth using,” I said. “What’s with you and Quen?!” DF said. “I don’t like it when Geralt gets hit,” I confessed. He laughed, and gave Geralt the ability to regenerate health off of adrenaline points instead, so (hopefully) he’s much more difficult to kill. We’ll see which of us was right, soon enough, most likely.
We were beset by witch hunters at this point. Not because Geralt has been killing cops and murdering his way through the city– no, but because on our first day in Novigrod which in game-time is like a month ago now, we got harangued by a priest of the Eternal Fire and verbally humiliated him in front of a crowd of people. The witch hunters tell Geralt he’s under arrest and he should hand over his swords. Geralt’s dialogue options are “give me a receipt for them” or “over my dead body” and we dithered for a moment, but I was like “we’ve killed so many cops, what’s two more?” and DF was like “Fair” so we opted to fight.
Turns out we slaughtered them, consequence-free, and went off into the night two chicken sandwiches richer for the experience. (Why does every single thug have a lunch entree. It’s so odd.) In the midst of the fight an unrelated NPC glitched straight through the combat and unconcernedly kept walking, as Geralt rained down a hail of sword blows directly through his body onto one of the witch hunters. It was… interesting.
It just sort of makes me remember… I think circa 1998… I had mono and was in Norway over Christmas break and my cousin would play Grand Theft Auto on the computer and I did not have the energy do to anything but sit there and watch him and part of the game mechanism was that as you committed crimes you’d get more and more cops following you around with sirens on and you’d eventually have to do something to clear them off your trail but if you didn’t you could wind up leading this like, high-speed parade of you plus a hundred cop cars around the city. I’m just envisioning that happening in Novigrod with Geralt, where he’s just wandering around and there’s like, a hundred guards after him, and he’s just going about his business and trying to stay ahead of them like a demented game of Snake.
Anyway, that doesn’t happen in Witcher 3, as far as I can tell, but the mental image is amusing.
Immediately after the encounter with the witch hunters, we walked down an alley and Geralt automatically got into a fight to the death with some thugs who their over-the-head title text informed us were Whoreson Jr’s men. I guess we’re at war with Whoreson Jr., so that’s cool, there was basically no volition in this but I don’t imagine we’re going to wish we were friends with him instead. So Geralt hacked his way through the next pile of thugs– like, there was no volition here, he just got within proximity of them and just– threw hands– we were like okay i guess this is how this works. Amusingly, every thug had a lunch entree except one, who was a man wearing only braies but his loot was a shirt. WTF.
Anyway we show up at the next place and it’s 2 am and raining, and this noblewoman just happens to be stepping out onto her porch, dressed in the weirdest fucking dress we’ve seen so far this series– it looks like a normal dress suspended from a bright red bra, for no reason– but who knows.
So the noblewoman, whose name I forget, is accompanied by Morvran Voorhis, a Nilfaardian nobleman who I know from Astolat’s fanfic. He is slightly off-putting at first but winds up to be wholesomely obsessed with horses and refreshingly straightforward about it? So we go to the races with him and wind up riding a horse in a race and– well, DF got stuck in a fence ten feet shy of the finish line, lost, and rage-reloaded the game from the last save point because that was so annoying, but that means that I know whether geralt wins or loses the race everyone is super nice about it for once.
Anyway on the reload Geralt ran out of horse juice but still managed to win the race. After that, we got to talk to Molly, who Dandelion had clearly been stringing along. She was also none too bright, but innocently told us all about Dandelion’s sister. Geralt gamely tried to go along with Dandelion’s lies, I think partly to be a good bro but also, I felt, because it would have bee sort of cruel to disillusion the poor woman, but eventually even still he had to be like… girl he doesn’t have a sister and I need to know who that woman actually was.
We didn’t really find out, but presumably we got all the info we needed, because the quest updated and gave us our XP. So… we made nice with Voorhis and traveled with him back to Novigrad because otherwise it was going to be rather a slog to the closest fast travel marker, and once there we decided to leave the last woman, Rose Var Attre, for the next day.
so we resume our tale on the streets of Novigrad, with Aiden’s murderers punished and Lambert off to parts unknown. (The post title begs the question: are the witch hunters really cops? I say so and I say fuck ‘em.)
We went to the Rosemary and Thyme, which is a brothel that Dandelion recently inherited. Once there, we immediately were confronted with a dwarf named Zoltan flinging some ne’er-do-wells out a door. Apparently Geralt knows Zoltan, as he seemed delighted to see him. Zoltan was in return delighted to see Geralt, because he had time to utter a happy greeting and cordially invite Geralt to help him in a fistfight. A mob came through the door, and we immediately had to leap into the fray.
We died, of course, because that’s a thing that happens to Geralt distressingly often in Death March mode: he gets literally killed in fistfights. Argh.
So, behind the cut is more about this sort of gross quest which treads that fine line that Witcher 3 is so good at– This Is A Little Bit Gross And Has A Slightly Misogynist Premise, But Geralt Himself Is Largely Not Gross And Mostly Manages To Be Respectful About It (mostly?), So Enjoy That Entirely Unnecessary Mindfuck.
“Wait,” I said, “can you use a blackjack in a fistfight???” “Maybe we shouldn’t have been declining to loot those all along,” DF said.
So we reloaded, and this time survived, largely because Zoltan did most of the fighting.
(As an aside, apparently Zoltan bears a truly uncanny resemblance to a coworker of DF’s, who is a very short, stocky, gay biker with a mohawk. So every goddamn scene he’d be like “Jack, it’s super weird to see you here.”)
To regen health, you consume food. Various loot lately has been booze so DF figured why the fuck not and downed a bottle of wine. So we had to search the Rosemary and Thyme while drunk, which in Geralt’s case means sort of tunnel-visioned and unsteady. Kind of hilarious, no other consequences, the effects lasted a couple of minutes and the health regen actually worked, so whatever.
So it’s Dandelion’s brothel, but he’s gone missing. To find him, Zoltan and Geralt find his dayplanner and find his list of recent meetings, every one of which is a woman (with one semi-exception, tw for weird treatment of a gender-non-conforming person– I say weird because it’s… just sort of weird and clumsy and you don’t have any really respectful dialogue options but it’s not like, actively… mean? I don’t know, brace yourselves my friends; also brace yourselves because the entire quest is that Dandelion Lies To His Trollops, And That’s Kinda Funny, which is not exactly not-gross. At least Geralt is reasonably gentle about it with most of them, and is clearly disgusted by his bro’s behavior, not that he’s not enabling him…). So Zoltan tears the page in half and says “Geralt you take this half, I’ll take that.” And off we went.
(Well, we searched the place first, and found nothing interesting, so whatever.)
Apparently there’s only one woman who isn’t a dead end, and I was spoilered for which one, and offered the spoiler to DF, but he declined– the first one was like, right there, so why not, let’s go. Annnnnd it turns out you get MASSIVE XP just for talking to each woman, so that’s worth doing.
The first one was a laundress, and Geralt saves her nobly from Whoreson Jr’s men shaking her down for protection money– by dismembering them into bloody bits all over her washing. She’s not that excited about this, and Geralt is sarcastic; he seems to have no appreciation for the finer points of laundry.
The next one is… oh. The weird one. It’s a man, or well a male elf, who runs a tailor’s shop, and when Geralt is confused because he expected a woman, the man leaves the room and comes back dressed as a woman (like, dress, makeup, but still the same hair), and Geralt is visibly discomfited and most of the dialogue options seem to be him being like “ew weird”, but DF, to his credit, was like, “I’m not fucking asking him why he’s fucking dressed like that, that’s a gross way of phrasing it, no thank you” so we muddled through as best we could with the other bits of the dialogue tree. The man (I think it’s meant to be clear that he still uses male pronouns?) makes it clear that he and Dandelion never had a sexual relationship and in fact he is completely and explicitly disinterested in pursuing men, and that’s fine, and DF was like ugh why did they have to make this weird. Like… I could see that maybe they assume their target audience would be weirded out but like, it wouldn’t have taken much to make it not weird, it doesn’t have to be like, perfect– just, like, it doesn’t work as a joke (was it supposed to be funny??) and it doesn’t work seriously so what is it doing here; it would have been enormously improved by like, the tiniest bit of uhhh maybe a sensitivity reader or something. I don’t know what they were going for. Anyway… We got the info we were supposed to get, got the XP, and bought some stuff from the tailor shop that had some yellow exclamation points next to it. (Masquerade masks. why not.)
This boosted us to level 14 and DF realized he had, like, a pile of Experience Points to distribute. (There’s a mechanism in the game where you get, like, a point per level plus a point every so often from something else, and you can take those points and distribute them into a Skill Tree thing that makes you better at fighting, Signs, recovery, things like that. So your Signs can individually get more powerful as you gain points. You need to level up Axii in order to access certain dialogue tree options, for example (only in a few quests but still, they exist); you can also put points into your strong attacks to make them stronger. Things like that.) “Level up Quen so it’s worth using,” I said. “What’s with you and Quen?!” DF said. “I don’t like it when Geralt gets hit,” I confessed. He laughed, and gave Geralt the ability to regenerate health off of adrenaline points instead, so (hopefully) he’s much more difficult to kill. We’ll see which of us was right, soon enough, most likely.
We were beset by witch hunters at this point. Not because Geralt has been killing cops and murdering his way through the city– no, but because on our first day in Novigrod which in game-time is like a month ago now, we got harangued by a priest of the Eternal Fire and verbally humiliated him in front of a crowd of people. The witch hunters tell Geralt he’s under arrest and he should hand over his swords. Geralt’s dialogue options are “give me a receipt for them” or “over my dead body” and we dithered for a moment, but I was like “we’ve killed so many cops, what’s two more?” and DF was like “Fair” so we opted to fight.
Turns out we slaughtered them, consequence-free, and went off into the night two chicken sandwiches richer for the experience. (Why does every single thug have a lunch entree. It’s so odd.) In the midst of the fight an unrelated NPC glitched straight through the combat and unconcernedly kept walking, as Geralt rained down a hail of sword blows directly through his body onto one of the witch hunters. It was… interesting.
It just sort of makes me remember… I think circa 1998… I had mono and was in Norway over Christmas break and my cousin would play Grand Theft Auto on the computer and I did not have the energy do to anything but sit there and watch him and part of the game mechanism was that as you committed crimes you’d get more and more cops following you around with sirens on and you’d eventually have to do something to clear them off your trail but if you didn’t you could wind up leading this like, high-speed parade of you plus a hundred cop cars around the city. I’m just envisioning that happening in Novigrod with Geralt, where he’s just wandering around and there’s like, a hundred guards after him, and he’s just going about his business and trying to stay ahead of them like a demented game of Snake.
Anyway, that doesn’t happen in Witcher 3, as far as I can tell, but the mental image is amusing.
Immediately after the encounter with the witch hunters, we walked down an alley and Geralt automatically got into a fight to the death with some thugs who their over-the-head title text informed us were Whoreson Jr’s men. I guess we’re at war with Whoreson Jr., so that’s cool, there was basically no volition in this but I don’t imagine we’re going to wish we were friends with him instead. So Geralt hacked his way through the next pile of thugs– like, there was no volition here, he just got within proximity of them and just– threw hands– we were like okay i guess this is how this works. Amusingly, every thug had a lunch entree except one, who was a man wearing only braies but his loot was a shirt. WTF.
Anyway we show up at the next place and it’s 2 am and raining, and this noblewoman just happens to be stepping out onto her porch, dressed in the weirdest fucking dress we’ve seen so far this series– it looks like a normal dress suspended from a bright red bra, for no reason– but who knows.
So the noblewoman, whose name I forget, is accompanied by Morvran Voorhis, a Nilfaardian nobleman who I know from Astolat’s fanfic. He is slightly off-putting at first but winds up to be wholesomely obsessed with horses and refreshingly straightforward about it? So we go to the races with him and wind up riding a horse in a race and– well, DF got stuck in a fence ten feet shy of the finish line, lost, and rage-reloaded the game from the last save point because that was so annoying, but that means that I know whether geralt wins or loses the race everyone is super nice about it for once.
Anyway on the reload Geralt ran out of horse juice but still managed to win the race. After that, we got to talk to Molly, who Dandelion had clearly been stringing along. She was also none too bright, but innocently told us all about Dandelion’s sister. Geralt gamely tried to go along with Dandelion’s lies, I think partly to be a good bro but also, I felt, because it would have bee sort of cruel to disillusion the poor woman, but eventually even still he had to be like… girl he doesn’t have a sister and I need to know who that woman actually was.
We didn’t really find out, but presumably we got all the info we needed, because the quest updated and gave us our XP. So… we made nice with Voorhis and traveled with him back to Novigrad because otherwise it was going to be rather a slog to the closest fast travel marker, and once there we decided to leave the last woman, Rose Var Attre, for the next day.
