#witcher or witch or elf he doesn't give a fuck

[notemily]

The Witcher, episode two:

So we start with a girl with purple eyes. (Hey, wasn't there going to be a Tortall series? Whatever happened to that?) She's got a hunch back and a facial deformity, and is being tormented by two youngish people, when she portals away to a tower. The dude there calls her a "virgin" and she smacks him, but I think he was referring to her not having done a portal before, not her sexual status? Not sure.

Anyway he says that "she" will be coming after the girl, now that she's made a portal, so he makes her an untraceable one to take her home. But he doesn't get her name.

At home things don't go well. Her father sells her to a witch (the "she" from the tower or someone else?) for "four marks," and when her mother protests, her father is like "that's no daughter of mine!" I don't know if this is regular prejudice against disabled people or if something else is happening. Anyway the witch locks the girl in a room with a mirror, which she smashes, muttering "four marks."

Meanwhile, Princess Cirilla darkens her hair with mud so she will be harder to find. She's about to just eat some berries when someone stops her. Girl you don't just go eating any old berry! The guy agrees with me, pantomiming that she will die if she eats them. He is dark skinned and wearing a weird hat. He doesn't talk. Cirilla tries to get conversation out of him, but he is silent.

Cirilla says the man she's running from has a big bird on his head. It's getting cold in the woods. She gives the dude one of her gloves. Now they each have one glove. She calls him "Rat Boy," but he disappears as soon as they find civilization.

Hey, Jaskier singing a song! I know him. Well, I know he's a thing. He has a good singing voice. He's singing about abortion, lol. They throw things at him. Hard crowd.

Jaskier's first words to Geralt are "I love the way you just sit in the corner and brood." Yes. Good. Jaskier outs him as the Witcher to everyone, which gets him a job offer. He accepts.

Jaskier follows Geralt, wanting to write songs about him, but Geralt rejects him with a punch to the, uh, middle to lower region.

"Do you know how many people wouldn't blink if you died?" says the witch in the teal outfit to the farm girl. She is... running a witch school? Is that's what's happening here? All the girls are in teal now, and they have desks of a sort. All of them have done one act of magic, which the witch describes as being "conduits for chaos," and she says real magic is "organizing chaos." But to organize it they will need balance and control.

They each get a rock and a flower, and they're supposed to use the life force of the flower to lift the rock. Of course the witch lets one of the girls demonstrate the life force thing by withering one of her hands first. Rude.

Farm girl tries to eat the flower to get more magic, like she saw Istredd do earlier. Teal Witch says "sometimes a flower is just a flower, and the best thing it can do for us is to die." Farm girl thinks she's talking about her, I think. She goes to find Istredd, and tells him her name is Yennefer.

Meanwhile Princess finds a group of refugees from her city. A boy talks to her and he's wearing a necklace of elf ears. Well, that's gruesome. He killed all of them apparently. An elf once killed his brother.

Everyone hates the queen and says she should rot in hell.

They give Princess new shoes, from a little man who is with them. "Don't worry, he's one of the clean ones." Uh. Rude?

"There I go again, just delivering exposition." I like Jaskier.

"Sometimes there's monsters, sometimes there's money. Rarely both."

Geralt finds the devil, asks "did your mother fuck a goat?" The devil comes back with "did your mother fuck a snowman?" Lol.

Meanwhile Yennefer is not doing well. She wants to be good at something. She is afraid no one will ever love her. She tries mind reading with Istredd. It works. He likes her.

There's a storm. The girls are having some kind of trial. Catch lightning in a bottle. The witch still calls Yennefer "piglet."

The first girl tries to catch it and fails. The second succeeds, but then the bottle explodes. Yennefer tries but is knocked backwards by the lightning.

"Sabrina, show these girls how it's done." Sabrina is successful. Yennefer, angry, lashes out with the lightning. The witch redirects it. She tells Yennefer that they must not be ruled by their emotions, or people will turn on magic users. She's like "do you actually have what it takes?" Dude, you bought her and brought her here.

"My father. My real father. He was half elf."

Oh shit!!!! Both Yennefer and Istredd are being controlled by magic users more powerful than they are. I wonder if they're working together. The witch and the wizard. Is this normal for them? To use their apprentices this way? To try and get information?

Yennefer waits for the knock on the door but it does not come. She makes a portal to see for herself.

Okay... No, this is very disturbing to me. Some of the girls got turned into eels to be conduits for magic... Without their consent? And we're supposed to just be fine with this, because Yennefer gets to continue learning and become a witch? That's fucked up.

Anyway, Rat Boy's real name is Dara, and he's an elf. Also the "toss a coin to your Witcher" song is damn catchy.

episode 1 - episode 2 - episode 3 - episode 4 - episode 5 - episode 6 - episode 7

#the witcher #witcher 1x02 #fantastic racism #by which I mean everyone hates elves #hey are the riyria books ever going to be a tv show #they'd make a good one i think

[notemily]

The Witcher episode 4:

People are calling Geralt the White Wolf and I'm wondering if anyone has written a Bucky Barnes Witcher AU yet

Jaskier thinks Geralt has a lovely bottom, is what I'm getting from this scene. Jaskier also thinks they are bestest friends, which Geralt denies.

"I need no one. And I want no one needing me." "And yet... Here we are." Yeah, I see why people ship this.

Jaskier wants him to come to a party. I don't know when in the timeline this is, because Mousesack is at the party, so this is before the fall of the place? (I'm so bad with names.) Maybe we will find out why Geralt is the princess's destiny and vice versa?

Geralt saves Jaskier from a tricksy situation by implying he's a eunuch.

Queen Calanthe is still alive at this point, and I don't think Ciri has been born yet. Every time they talk about "the Lioness" I just wonder why there's no Tortall series yet.

Meanwhile Ciri is hanging out with some dryads, who have saved Dara. Yay! I'm glad elf boy is not dead.

Jaskier is BEGGING Geralt not to embarrass him at this party lol, and Geralt wants to explain manticores to these fools but restrains himself.

Cici has to face some uncomfortable truths about her grandmother's genocide of elves.

I do like, though, about the grandmother - she does look much more comfortable in armor.

They humiliate and insult the guy from Nilfgaard. Dramatic irony is a bitch.

Yennefer has been cleaning up political messes for three decades now, which I'm assuming brings her contemporary with the "present" of the story. She is looking after a queen with a baby.

They are attacked by a dude with face tattoos and his weird insect like beast. Yennefer portals them to a desert, but the man and monster follow. They portal again and again, Yennefer trying to figure out how they're being tracked. Yennefer's charge is angry, calling her a useless witch. Dude, Yennefer keeps saving your life! Yennefer says fuck this, and leaves the queen behind to get murdered.

Back in the past, the warrior queen is not impressed with Jaskier's songs. She asks Geralt why there are so few Witchers left. He says it's no longer possible to create more of them. ???

A late suitor, a knight, comes to claim the princess's hand in marriage. He refuses to reveal his face, because he's been cursed to be a porcupine boy or something. The queen wants Geralt to kill the spiky knight, but he refuses, helping the guy instead. There's something called the Law of Surprise in play, and I have no idea what that means, but I like it.

"Please, I can give him a boy." Yennefer's queen offers her daughter in sacrifice, but gets killed. Yennefer shows up to save the baby, but the assassin throws a knife and the baby dies.

The Law of Surprise is apparently an ancient law. If you pay someone in Surprise, the payment is whatever you have but don't know you have?

"Is there not a man among you who does not cower before destiny?"

Geralt says destiny is bullshit, but a promise must be honored, for a commoner or a queen.

The queen whispers "here is your destiny" to the porcupine guy, and is about to stab him when the princess screams, throwing everyone around them back and the room into chaos. The princess chants a spell that levitates the pair into the air. Geralt takes one of his little bottles of strength potion or whatever. The princess looks at him and suddenly the spell breaks, and they collapse to the floor.

"Do you believe in destiny now?"

The princess has her grandmother's gift.

The queen gains a husband and a son in law in the same night. Nice. I get the idea that the husband is so the dude who was going to marry the princess doesn't get mad and attack them, because now she has the husband's forces too, but she seems pretty happy with the husband later, so I guess it worked out?

Ciri decides to forget who she was, but it does not work when she drinks from the dryad's waters.

The curse breaks when the princess marries the spiky boi, but he demands that Geralt take something from him in payment for his life. Geralt offers to be paid in the law of surprise, which is of course when we find out that the princess is pregnant.

Mousesack insists that Geralt should claim the child, or else "unleash true calamity" upon them all. He says he'll take that chance. I doubt it's Geralt's fault that the kingdom fell, what, fifteen years later? That's a pretty delayed calamity.

Anyway, we cut to nowish, when they find Calanthe's body, a dude eats a square of her skin, and somehow they use this to divine that Ciri is in the forest. They say they can't take it with an army, and seem disappointed.

Ciri drinks from a tree and wakes in a desert that looks like the Black Panther afterlife, where a tree talks to her. "What are you, child?" Well, she's the destined offspring of a princess with magic and a porcupine-cursed knight, so. Also, I have no idea what time is anymore.

episode 1 - episode 2 - episode 3 - episode 4 - episode 5 - episode 6 - episode 7

#the witcher #the witcher 1x04 #i need a timeline chart #i watched this while suffering a post-ketamine headache so if it's kind of disconnected that's why #but also WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE TIMELINE #this means that when renfri said the girl in the woods is your destiny THE PRINCESS HADN'T BEEN BORN YET??? #or are we seeing geralt's story out of order TOO??? #i am so confused