dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with meta

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limerental:

This!

The Yen that chooses to fight at Sodden is already well on her way to being someone who could effectively mother/mentor a traumatized child. She’s given up on pursuing her own interests and willing to sacrifice herself.

We don’t know yet what she will be like on the show post-Sodden, but she’s not going to have the same motivations. It would make no sense for her to snap right back to being someone blindly trying to restore her womb.

witchertrashbag:

I deeply agree that the Yennefer of episode 6 should not help raise a child. She says she wants a child because she wants to be important to someone, and that’s extremely unhealthy.

I will say, as I wade into the middle of this river, that my reading of the last two episodes is that Yennefer’s conversation with Geralt is the start of a huge turning point for Yennefer. I think she has never considered the underlying emotional need she has before she says “I want to be important to someone.”

The very next episode, she rushes to the side of someone she felt important to: Istredd. She doesn’t talk about any plan for a child. Instead, she pitches him his old idea for their lives together, and is rejected. Because she’s still the same person who just said boring isn’t better.

Yennefer then goes with Vilgefortz to Aretuza, the place of her own upbringing, visits her old room, and decides to show the girls there the “truth” about the place. She’s driven by anger and pain and wants to save them from making the highly manipulated choices she made.

She does some bad parenting. And her own problematic mother-figure calls her out on it. And I think neither of them is exactly right.

In the finale, Yennefer goes with Tissaia and the group she feels used her and manipulated her to help a greater good. She talks to Tissaia about how she’s ready to die. And in this moment, I believe she really has given up hope of finding a way to have a child. She says there is nothing more for her in this world.

Tissaia tells her she has so much more to give. That there are more ways than a child to have a legacy.

And in the battle of sodden, she watches her fellow sorceresses and does her best to protect them. She watches many of them die. She channels a wildfire through herself to destroy an army. Her legacy.

I’m typing all this on my phone because I think a character who gives up her ability to have a child for power, and then (in every version of that character) regrets that, has to go through an arc— she had to want a child, then realize she actually wants a legacy, a family, to feel complete, to begin to realize what a child means— BEFORE she can come into contact with Ciri.

Those last two episodes and the massive, life-changing journey she goes on is crucial.

And also: she’s not gonna be good at it right away. Few people are. But she has that growth behind her. At least, that’s what I saw.

lemondropsssss:

i mean i guess i’m saying that any kind of mother or mentor relationship between show yenn and ciri seems like it would be wildly unhealthy? yenn should be nowhere near a deeply traumatized child? she is completely unfit to raise or mentor anyone? like her obsession with having bio children is borderline disgusting and super far past borderline abilitst? like she thinks she needs a child to feel complete and if we know anything about those kinds of relationships we know they’re deeply unhealthy for both parties involved?

i mean my dislike of yenn is based on the blatant abilism of the her character arc. i get that’s not how it is in the books or games, but not all of us have access to that information and have to base our opinions just on the information given to us by show runners. and yenn from the show should not be in any kind of relationship with a deeply traumatized thirteen year old girl

limerental:

Consider: Ciri and Yen have not even… met yet… on the show? How could you say anything about where they’re headed with their relationship?

Also I don’t care about what is healthy or unhealthy, especially in a developing relationship. There’s still time to work through that and the show is obviously setting up some character development that hopefully will play out more next season. I mean, in the show we already saw Yen go from a naive and hesitant child to a seemingly self-absorbed, unrepentant woman seeking what she wants at any cost to someone who would lay down her life for a cause she has said she doesn’t even care about. That’s show Yen’s characterization and you’re welcome to dislike it but I don’t think it’s warranted based on what actually happens in the show and what is likely to happen next season.

lemondropsssss:

everything i like about yenn comes from the books games or fic from people who’ve played the games or read the books

show yenn’s characterization just makes me feel gross inside, and i really don’t like where they’re heading with ciri and yenn’s relationship like i can’t see a way that won’t be deeply unhealthy for both of them

whereskansas:

….well THAT sure as fuck wasn’t made clear in the show.

Can I take a moment to thank everyone who has access to the books for giving the rest of us these explanations? Because this information radically changes Yenn on MULTIPLE levels

Like

Take an abused child with zero agency and zero expectations of ever having a moment of happiness and acceptance, show her how powerful she can be, how she can wrest that agency back, and offer her a “choice” between extreme power and absolute uncertainty of ever having a happy marriage and children? Knowing that if she does choose that, she very much will return to that life of zero agency where she is wholly dependent on the kindness of others to live?

That’s the opposite of a choice, that’s just survival.

limerental:

yennehfer

This is the quote from Blood of Elves from Tissaia that I am referencing (pulled from the wiki and the quote itself is longer but am at work so cannot take picture of the book)

limerental:

I see a lot of “yennefer made a choice and chose being transformed over having kids, then regretted her choice” and I think that… honestly really overestimates the amount of agency she had (or felt that she had)

At least according to the books, mages from Aretuza (where ugly/flawed girls go) must be transformed to hold court positions and all mages in general are forcibly sterilized. Taken in as young, gifted children, manipulated by their elders, taught that they have to do magic this way or risk going insane and/or being hunted down for being a rogue mage.

So… yes, she had a choice. In a sense. Making the choice that would allow her more (perceived) freedom serving a court and then realizing that that’s not how it actually worked makes it understandable to feel regret.

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the-story-is-this:

bomberqueen17:

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.

ok but also, and I don’t know if you’ve read the books or if that terrifying children’s-bones-moat was in the video games as well/instead, but I’ve started going through the books and. you know how witchers supposedly don’t have emotions? like how they spread that rumor around? obviously that is patently untrue if we watch even like half of the first episode. BUT - Geralt actually believes it?? He thinks he has no emotions.

There’s this one short story in Sword of Destiny that I just finished called A Shard of Ice, where Geralt is competing with Istredd for Yennefer’s attention, and Istredd is talking about how any emotions Geralt feels are…fake? like shadows of actual emotions, or something? And then he goes back and talks to Yennefer about it and she’s like “no I’m pretty sure you actually do have emotions Geralt” and he’s like “nah I can’t because I’m a mutant, everyone knows that.”

Here, some quotes.

Istredd talking to Geralt:

Yennefer and Geralt talking:

So. Yeah. He’s so emotionally constipated he thinks he’s incapable of that shit. Every dumb emotional rash decision he ever makes, he thinks he’s doing because…it’s logical, or because it’s Morally Right, or something. 🤯

and. I just wanna hug him and be like “baby everyone who ever raised you and everyone you’ve ever loved did you real dirty” but he’s probably be like “nobody has ever loved me and also I totally don’t care, what do you mean I’m crying? these are witcher allergies and yes that’s totally a thing. shut up stop looking at me.”

*crying emoji fifteen times* IT GOT WORSE

Thank you for sources, this is amazing/awful.

I sort of felt that must be the case, but I wasn’t quite ready to commit to it. *sobbing*

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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.

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kryptaria:

thesaltofcarthage:

forineffablereasons:

forineffablereasons:

crowley saves aziraphale from a prison and from a church and if that isn’t a fucking queer mood

hang on i gotta expand on this because i can’t stop thinking about it:

the prison scene is the only scene where crowley suggests aziraphale change something about himself - his appearance, his clothes, his presentation - and it’s for his own safety. it’s so that he can exist safely out in the world, where it might be punishable to be who aziraphale is - not an aristo, but flamboyant, in his way. this is essentially about staying closeted for personal safety. it’s okay!! you don’t owe anyone your coming out, for any reason but especially where personal safety is concerned. this relates back to aziraphale’s relationship with the homophobic-coded heaven, and aziraphale’s struggle to come to terms with his own thoughts and feelings as they are contrary to heaven’s “the way you should think and feel” codes. crowley understands what it is that aziraphale has to lose - he’s shown repeatedly regretting and struggling with his own fall, and only comes to terms with it in the last few moments of the apocalypse. crowley’s patience for aziraphale throughout the show is based in this: he gets it. he understands what it is to be cast out. he understands what aziraphale is going through whenever aziraphale goes against heaven.

this leads us exactly into the church scene. although this is happening in a church, there’s nothing holy or sacred or divine going on. it’s just a bunch of nazis sitting on an altar plotting to rob and murder a queer person. there were certainly nazis up to that kind of business in the 1940s, and there are certainly nazis up to that same kind of business now today. this isn’t subtle!! this is right-wing religious fanatic fascism in a nutshell!! so then crowley shows up and importantly, crowley doesn’t actually save aziraphale. crowley gives aziraphale the opportunity to save them both. aziraphale has to save himself. aziraphale is the only one with the power to save himself, and in doing so, he saves them both.

this is the core of the whole show’s arc: aziraphale (the queer person), struggling to be what heaven (the traditional, homophobic family) wants him to be, even though he can see and feel that heaven is wrong. crowley (the out & cast out queer person), patiently standing by and helping aziraphale where he needs it, but ultimately leaving the decisions to aziraphale as to how or when to move forward, right up until crowley thinks they’ve run out of time and have to either run or be destroyed or separated; when he tries to force a decision on aziraphale, their relationship falls apart. it’s only restored when aziraphale finally, on his own, comes to terms with the idea that heaven’s way isn’t the way he wants to live. he doesn’t want to fight. he doesn’t believe in it. he believes in something else now, and he’s finally ready to make that choice. he ultimately turns heaven’s own logic in on itself to stop armageddon and uses love to help adam defeat the devil (aziraphale and crowley offering their love, their support, and their hands to adam, who in turn defeats the devil by denying him power where he has not done the same).

then at the bus stop, crowley offers aziraphale to stay at his place. aziraphale’s gut reaction is to fall back in heaven’s line, and crowley say, we have to choose our faces wisely. this isn’t about body swapping to save themselves!! this is about rewriting paris 1793! this is about choosing, finally, now that they are on their own side, now that they have chosen their own rules, to be who they really are. aziraphale has rejected heaven, but he needs that last little boost to reject heaven’s rules. rejecting heaven and rejecting a lifetime of ingrained habit and expectation are two different things. rejecting heaven and rejecting shame and fear are two different things. when crowley says, we have to choose our faces wisely, he is saying, we have to choose whether to hide, or whether to be who we are. and aziraphale gets on the bus with him, and sits next to him, and goes home with him. that’s aziraphale’s coming out. that’s aziraphale, quite quietly and quite bravely, finding the strength to be who he is - who heaven didn’t want him to be. to choose crowley over everything he has held onto that made him hesitate to choose crowley. to choose himself over everything other people told him to be.

and then aziraphale goes to hell for crowley and faces the fear he held onto for so long: what would happen if i fell? and here they are: weak, cowardly, pathetic. aziraphale is stronger than hell in every sense of the word. and at the same time, crowley goes back and faces the family who cast him out, the family he has wondered about for so long - did he really deserve it? and he finds after all this time that they are cruel, cold, unloving. he doesn’t want them. he has freedom: he has love.

it’s a fucking queer mood babey!

>>and then aziraphale goes to hell for crowley and faces the fear he held onto for so long: what would happen if i fell? and here they are: weak, cowardly, pathetic. aziraphale is stronger than hell in every sense of the word. and at the same time, crowley goes back and faces the family who cast him out, the family he has wondered about for so long - did he really deserve it? and he finds after all this time that they are cruel, cold, unloving. he doesn’t want them. he has freedom: he has love.

OH MY STARS AND GARTERS, THIS IS IT, THIS IS ABSOLUTELY IT, YOU ARE SO RIGHT, THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT

This is so brilliant, I suddenly find myself experiencing the one time in my life when this statement fits perfectly, so allow me a moment to savor it.

HOLY HELL.