#2nico

ok first off i am actually terrible at the timeline and half the time i just pretend it doesn’t exist because good fucking lord it is a hot mess. but no, we don’t have hard dates for the beginning of the usurper’s reign. what we know is:

the Usurper killed Emhyr’s father when Emhyr was 13

Emhyr rescued Pavetta’s dad Roegner of Ebbing in 1237

Emhyr reclaimed his throne in 1257

so at minimum, the usurper ruled for 20 years (1237-1257); more realistically we give Emhyr 3-5 years before that to stop being a scrawny hedgehog baby before he rescues Roegner. the longer you let him age up before Roegner the creepier the Pavetta & Ciri age gaps are and the more entrenched the Usurper is by the time Emhyr returns to Nilfgaard, which may or may not be relevant.

question about cat school: lynxes versus non-s p r e d padbeans of other larger cats. *thrusts microphone* your take

also the little ear tufts. science has yet to explain the little ear tufts. irrelevant to the witcher, but, YOUR TAKE,

THE LYNX EAR TUFTS ARE EXCELLENT. They might help with hearing, but tbh I’m guessing that they’re to facilitate communication? Ear-based social signals are much clearer with ear tufts pointing the way. 

So I feel like the Cat School might have tried for the ear tufts because “better hearing!” but what they mostly got was Witchers who could display and read each other’s emotions really easily. Cat Witchers keep their ears clipped, maybe, so they can keep their Stony Witcher Face appearance up, and it’s a sign of real trust when Aiden lets his tufts grow out for Lambert to see. 

I’m torn between whether Cat School would turn their nose up at winter foot modifications like, “We’re not going to do what those WOLVES are doing! Our feet will be optimized for CLIMBING! We will have PEAK TOE GRIP STRENGTH” 

I feel no remorse for what I've done. :) You are WELCOME.

I'm really getting into the "terrible, inaccurate porn as a Wolf witcher meme/rite of passage" bit now. Mostly because I did actually work as a proof-reader/line editor for a romance imprint for a year or two, so, THE THINGS I HAVE SEEN.

Man I’m coming up sort of blank on the really dumb shit, it’s a hot minute since I bothered reading any romance that wasn’t actually good. I should go look up the Crucifix Nail Nipples post. I tried for a moment to write some bad purple prose but couldn’t get into it. 

s-leary replied to your post “more brainstorming about Geralt’s Formative Porn Experiences”

Oh yes, that’s an outtake that needs to happen.

You know, knowing me, there’s a good chance it’ll wind up actually in the main text of the story, so. 

2nico replied to your post “oh apparently i can reply to replies again”

love it. fund it. prostitutes like "why do so many witchers have That Specific Request and why are they always the wolf ones" that's one thing it's a pity the ubiquity of internet porn for the youth has extinguished. formative porn and the odder benign fetishes people developed

something like shamefacedly tame like blindfolds or something bc it featured

oh man yeah, I’m old enough that I grew up in the era of non-ubiquitous porn and I definitely remember a few of the earlier Erotic things I encountered, most of which I just didn’t get but a few of which got weird little hooks into me and Yeah I probably don’t want to admit the things I like weirdly find arousing/disturbing now that most people wouldn’t particularly notice.

I don’t know how different it is now, when basically anybody can get hot and cold running porn to their specifications-- I mean, how do you come up with the specifications when you don’t know what you like yet??? I bet you still wind up with bizarre fetishes based weirdly on what you encountered first, even with the deluge kids have got to deal with now.  Just, as with most things, in the old days of more limited media, probably there were more frequent examples of people seizing on one particular pop culture thing that slipped through and caught a lot of young minds at formative moments, whereas now it’s all a lot more fragmented. IDK if that’s true though. 

mikkeneko replied to your post “oh apparently i can reply to replies again”

my vote on the dryads one is that the older witchers pass it on to the younger ones once they have actually Met dryads and can't read it again. but now geralt is stuck with it, because ciri's already met dryads

Oh there’d probably be a side note of “gosh mister are dryads really like this” and the older witchers laughing up their sleeves and saying more or less “fuck around and find out” and probably once a generation or so the dryads have to deal with an unusually gullible young Witcher who is possibly more wide-eyed than the situation warrants.

mikkeneko replied to your post “more brainstorming about Geralt’s Formative Porn Experiences”

I second the vote for an entire afternoon being spent jaskier and/or yennefer going over geralt's bookshelf and Learning Things about their boyfriend (maybe something is going on at the keep that they have to stay out of the way of?)

I may just cram them in there for a bit. If I had a scene that long they’d definitely eventually wind up with Lambert coming in and breaking the news to them that the one where the hooker pisses on the guy was definitely not Geralt’s so stop freaking out, because he’s feeling charitable and they’ve been quietly horrified for a good ten minutes or so while he was eavesdropping. (Like, no shade, random readers, if watersports is your thing but like, I was just picking something, here, it’s nothing personal.)

This, to call back to @2nico up there, would also be the part where Lambert, because he has never really spared himself from his own horrifying honesty, would point out to them that it was a running gag among brothels that when they saw the Wolf medallion they just got out the blindfolds or whatever because all the Wolf trainees totally read the same bodice-ripper, and Jaskier’s like making light of it and Lambert’s like I’m not fucking around though if you have a blindfold I’m yours for cheap, don’t even tease.

(Hm maybe not a blindfold but definitely something super vanilla but slightly odd. Definitely softcore as fuck. Like, fuzzy handcuffs or feather dusters kind of shit. It’s not Geralt’s praise kink, he came by that honestly all by himself.) 

and later they’re like oh ha ha Geralt, Lambert was trying to get us to believe that all Wolf Witchers have a kink for fuzzy handcuffs and his attention snaps up and his pupils dilate and he’s like uhh no that’s, that’d be, that’d be really silly, I would never-- uh-- why, do you, uh, do you have those?

nogling replied to your post “squid on the mantelpiece”

I see your ridiculously overwrought tenderness between the Hero and the damsel, and raise you the idea of a genre of Ye Olde Trashy Romance dedicated to Witchers and their terrible, brutal lusts (and secret hearts of gold) a la Every Terrible Viking Romance Ever. The most read steamy bit is the one where the damsel/lordling/battle bro has realized mid-coitus that they are madly in love with this (brutish, misunderstood) Witcher.

Oh man. IDK. I love this idea but I also sort of can’t buy that anyone would really write a trashy romance novel with a sympathetic portrayal of a Witcher in it. Have you read the Murderbot books? I feel like it’s kind of like how there’s never any media where SecUnits are anything like accurately or sympathetically portrayed, and like, Murderbot and ART have an ongoing thing where ART loves watching serials about things that are similar to its life as a spacegoing ship (but not too realistic-- wildly fantastic is best) and Murderbot would rather not watch anything containing any kind of portrayal of anything that’s germane to its life experiences because it’s never handled with any kind of nuance and nobody’s got good fantasies about that shit.  I suppose, though, there’d be cause for a Witcher to get romanticized a time or two, they do get around and sometimes kind of get to be heroes and over [edited to add] oh I forgot to finish this sentence. Well. Like. I suppose over time somebody’d have a sympathetic enough regime that there’d be a Witcher romance novel or two. I wonder, maybe they’re tropes in other kinds of romances. Never very accurate but possibly entertaining, you may be onto something here. 

 2nico replied to your post“ more brainstorming about Geralt’s Formative Porn Experiences”

also i'm now into the general idea that kaer morhen had one terrible bodice-ripper harlequin witcher novel that was totally niche in the real world but absolutely became its own in-house meme amongst generations of witchers because they found it hilarious like. references to lines and scenes and stuff will send a whole group of witchers howling in laughter with no context for an outsider. like its own diction-level in house meme and shit

"geralt why did you wrestle lambert for calling you "such a lady du astre" geralt: you... wouldn't understand

it's "the room" for witchers basically

picture a hall full of witchers and one bystander. they're all chilling. dead silence. suddenly from the back a single voice rises and says, with great solemnity, "but why a *horse*?" the uproarious laughter shakes the windows. the bystander is at sea.

Since I don’t know what “the room” is, I also am at sea, but I love this concept. (Ohhhh the Tommy Wiseau joint. Yeah yeah, I’m vibing now.)

I mean, they’d have memes about all kinds of stuff, for sure. I had a coworker a while ago, who had this annoying verbal tic of prefacing almost every statement with a high, nasal “well,” before he proceeded to waste everyone’s time for like, an hour, with a long prevaricating thing that he refused to wrap up into any kind of conclusion. For ten years now, six since he left, I have been able to immediately make anything I say hilarious to my remaining coworker by waiting a beat after he speaks, and then saying “Well” in that exact tone of voice before I begin my reply. 

So there was definitely a Witcher instructor who would make this “harrumph”ing noise and occasionally Eskel will just make the noise and the others will have like, Pavlovian responses about it and it’s worn a little thin now but for a while there he could really get people going.

But yes. Definitely there is Some Awful Novel that literally everyone read. Probably it has some extremely improbable sex in it and the older ones would try to get the younger ones to believe sex really works that way, and part of the fascination was that there was something somehow still compelling in the dirty bits, somewhere, and yet, nobody was going to actually admit to actually getting off thinking about it because it’s so poorly written, and yeah-- but oh that book doesn’t live on Geralt’s bookshelf, it was kept in a particular spot somewhere semi-hidden, like in high school how out back near the cross-country trail there was this tree that they kept a bong in and it was a rite of passage to go out and use the bong (I stole that from a friend, I did not go to that school) (that tree is gone now because they tore out the cross-country trails to build a new parking lot) (listen I am in a fugue state from these cramps so this is the most coherent I can be)

@bomberqueen17 this is all good and fascinating but. one thing. vesemir's a witcher, he can make his own fire. He can at any time make his own fire.

LOL, this is a fair point, but I rebut:  if it’s cold and the fire goes out he’s still on his own to get his ass up and go fix it. I’ve heated with wood (and I have the scars and property damage to prove it) and it’s an entire pain in the ass. And I guess you can specify that Igni is like, super special fire magic and the instant you cast it you get a fire that’s just as built-up as you want and has a good solid bed of coals, but I doubt it, so he’s gonna need to spend a couple of hours getting the fire ready if he’s going to cook on it, and more if he’s going to attempt to use any kind of oven implement.

You could realistically say that by having fire magic he’s spared approximately one person’s worth of labor per day, so basically he’s the equivalent of a two-person household. And that’s still gonna be pretty miserable, in a pre-modern setting! You can get by like that but it’s not super nice. 

Most of the cooking, for example-- listen, this is hard enough in modern times, and I’ve got a fridge and an Instant Pot, and it’s still a struggle for me to make food in a quantity I can eat before it goes bad, that’s still enough at once to make the labor of making it worthwhile. How much worse when it’s all raw unprocessed ingredients you’ve got to process and then use right away!

that’s a good point. being to able to treat them tactically like he does witcher work and then recognizing the ability in himself might accidentally hijack him into learning mindfulness. completely unintentionally. that’s hilarious. ‘oh no in the end *i* ended up being better. what the fuck have i created. i hate this.’ lambert: *flips printing press* 

exactly!!! EXACTLY. 

Lambert, looking at the printing press he flipped over: ...If someone wrote to me about flipping over a printing press, then I would definitely say something sarcastic about their obvious anger issues. 

Jaskier secretly writes a “Dear Milly” column in...

idk about asking lambert what to DO, but telling him what you DID and how it all went to shit is probably a good way to get a five part breakdown of exactly how stupid it was and where it went wrong, followed by a new build on it and signed off with just like. “be better”

omg, cosigned. this is often how it goes down. 

ever since i've seen the new casting choices i've had the pet theory that one's chances of surviving the mutagens predicate on one's relative handsomeness. how else do we explain this new spate of Very Handsome witchers? this also aligns with geralt's enhanced mutagens, for is it not geralt of rivia who is the Handsomest Witcher of them all?