Geralt, I’m Tired
On the Witcher 3, Bleakness, and Exhaustion
Trigger Warnings for suicide, child, animal and sexual abuse.
We haven’t been together too long. Though I had my reservations at first about your character, I’ve grown to appreciate your humour and tolerate your banal neutrality. However, this letter isn’t about you. It’s about me.
Geralt, in our travels together, the world has been bleak. Bodies hang from trees, peasants openly weep at the loss of their homes, and men make the most dreadful and sickly of sounds. We’ve ridden across battlefields riddled with corpses and corpse eaters and, at one point, even protected the men, women and children told to rifle among them for valuables. This darkness is befitting such a war torn setting, settling in with the times. However, it’s tiresome. I see these bodies hanging in trees and imagine those who look like me among them. After all, here it’s been but 100 years since whites have “stopped” hanging the darker skinned. It’s distressing to watch them sway there, limp and lifeless, and to encounter so many posted alongside roads. On darker days I see me among the strange fruit and I have to take a moment to settle myself. It makes one wonder how many of these dead took their own lives rather than having their livelihoods taken from them. It’s horrific to think about, yet I do. I make no task of it and I still do. When faced with so many horrid answers, one must consider who posed the question. But the dead are not the only ones who bother me. The living are just as frightful and pitiful. And often times, more horrendous.
One thing I fully understand, is your treatment. In some cases, the discrimination very much mirrors that of our own. The discrimination of gender and race, of rich and poor, of gifted and not. The way you are both seeked out and denied humanity. However, despite the intensity of your treatment at times, there are tangible benefits to who you are. You are ostracized for being special, and in a way, better. You are still offered opportunities of employment because of this. You are needed and in some cases, wanted. Though a nonhuman is one to be scowled at, they are also the ones to be paid for the work no one else can or will do. In my world however, regardless of need or want, we are mistreated and unwanted by many. The we refer to the mentally and physically unwell, the poor, the uneducated, and to a greater extent, the darker. Others besides me have spoken about the paleness of your world, so I will not rewrite their words. But seeing the injustice and mistreatment you face brings no anger or sympathy, only empathy and exhaustion. I know how you feel and why you are treated this way.
If all this seems little more than “think of the children” rhetoric, I do think of them. Something I hold personal, is the treatment of children in your world. Though they are perhaps “justified” within context, I can’t help but get a knot in my belly each time I see a child abandoned by unloving parents. In Valen, we stumbled upon a house being set upon by a wild dog. As is the nature of things, you killed it, hoping to receive some recompense for your efforts. However, you were greeted by a home full of hungry children, abandoned by their village in an effort to avoid starvation. Dire circumstances call for dire measures I suppose. At my urging, you gave them some of your food, with a softness in your eyes I’d not come to expect from you. However, once we turned to leave, I noticed that children had gutted the dog and were now roasting it over a fire! I stepped away, horrified at the sight! I absolutely understood why, but it was just too much to see, too much to understand.
Geralt, though I am no stranger to word and the action of rape, it’s uncomfortable to hear it so often and so casually throughout our time. It’s a grating word, and despite the precedence it takes in our lives, I’d prefer if it were treated with more respect. During gwent, one of the cards, the Redanian Foot Soldier if I’m not mistaken, has the text of “I’ve bled for Redania! I’ve killed for Redania!… Dammit! I’ve even raped for Redania!” and one must wonder, was that even necessary? It’s a mere card game and sexual assault is referred to for what reason? These cards have no character, no lives beyond being played in a game, so why so gauchely casualize rape? I understand that the setting, poorly mind you, uses sexual assault as a means to explain the power dynamic between genders and to contextualize the setting and characters, but must it extend to every single facet of the world? Must I be faced at every turn by not only the prevalence of rape in society, but also it’s belittlement? Perhaps this disgust I feel is intentioned, but I can’t bring myself to believe it’s more than grotesque set dressing, as this all is.
It’s so painful to no longer ask why; I already know. And because I know, I cannot be angry. For what am I angry? That there is nigh unaffectable injustice in your world, same as mine? Same as I can shed no tears. But Geralt, I am tired. I am tired of mournful worlds, of bleak landscapes, shattered people. I am tired of the trivialization of sexual abuse, the circumstances of child abuse and its proliferation, the mistreatment of the poor, of the dead swinging in trees like those before me have. I can obviously ask for less of it, but if it is begrudgingly justified, what reasons do I have beyond my own? It’s character, it’s worldbuilding, it’s by design. There are problems here and there, but many are intended. It’s not that easy to brush away in either of our worlds.
I will still travel with you Geralt, of my own volition and pride. But it will be with bags under eyes, heaviness in my hands, and pain in my heart.
Geralt, I’m tired.
