#binary bard would fall under that category

[planet-poptropica]

⋆ So....I was scrolling through Instagram the other day and I saw one those fav character charts, and I thought it would be fun to make my own! ⋆

⋆ Poptropica mutuals, tell me about your favs, not just your main favs, your side favs! I will include the transparent version below, and my explanation to my choices down below if you are interested! I'm interested to see your choices. ⋆

⋆ Tada! Have fun! ⋆

⋆ Now, an explanation to my choices: ⋆

⋆ Your Favorite: Director D ⋆

I think it's no surprise to ANYONE that knows me that Director D has always been my favorite, since day 1. There was a moment where he was almost replaced by Binary Bard, but he is a close second. Director D is my favorite because he is associated to my nostalgia of a time when I was obsessed with being a spy or ninja when I was a kid. (Spy kids may have played a BIG role in that.) Playing as an agent in that island was so exciting for me, but I do remember having trouble with certain parts like the decoder. (In hindsight I probably would be horrible spy XD.) Now that I'm older, his island is still one of my favs for that reason, but it's not my number one. I wish we could have gotten a bit more backstory for him, but, what can you do. (But create a backstory for him and I have.)

⋆ You Relate To: Black Widow ⋆

Black widow is a character I don't really talk about or draw like....ever, which is crazy because she's probably the character I relate to the most, just like many other artist do too I'm sure. I relate to her in the way of being jealous of other people's art success, and the constantly comparing yourself to others. They say you are your worst critic after all. I don't so much anymore. I'm actually proud of where I am in my art journey, but I used to do that a lot when I was younger, especially when I just started doing digital art.

You won't catch me stealing or ruining other people's art though... girl what-

⋆ Your Favorite Design: Ringmaster Raven ⋆

Look at him, 'nuff said. His design is amazing. I love the color palette, the mask used to cover his true look, the raven theme with the wings and mask, the hat with eyes, everything. His design is the best because it matches with the overall theme of the island, it being a MONSTER CARNIVAL, and he is the Ringmaster. I remember how hipped I was when his island trailer released. One of the best islands for sure.

⋆ Is Underrated: Count Bram⋆

Yeah, remember when I was constantly drawing him for a short period of time? It's for a reason. I love my vampire peepaw who's confused about everything. I'm curious, do people consider him a villain? I kind of don't for the reason that he kidnapped Katya because he thought she was Anabelle, and once he was cured and was bought back to reality, he apologized for it because he didn't know. You want to talk about villain? Christopher is the real villain, you can't change my mind. Anyway, I was looking at the old art I drew of him, and he looked familiar to me. Then it all came together. You know who he reminds of? Exactly? Simon Petrikov, you know, Ice King from Adventure Time? Not only do they have the same hair style and would have the same personality, but they were both humans at some point with a partner, and once they became what they became, all they thought about was their partner, aka Anabelle and Betty.

Poof, mind blown. Vampire peepaw deserves more love.

⋆ You'd get along with IRL: Amelia ⋆

Amelia is another character I don't really talk about or draw, mainly because I associate her with the new era of Poptropica. But, I don't think that's fair. Amelia is actually a very sweet character that I think little me would have appreciated if she came to the game sooner. I would probably get along with her really well, considering how silly, and nice she is. Not to mention, her love for cute stuff. Imagine her unicorn bedroom but replaced with bunnies. That's my room right now. I think that even traveling with her would be really fun. She would have gotten under the "you relate to" category too but I didn't want Amelia on here twice. XD

⋆ And finally...Your Favorite Side Character: Dr. Spyglass ⋆

I... do not know how to explain this one. Dr. Spyglass only gets a few words of dialog, and we know nothing about him in canon, besides him working for HQ, and being an eye doctor. I won't lie, I actually had a crush on this guy years ago, hence why I shipped him with Muddy. (I cringe at that ship now. XD) Probably because...he looks like Director D...with a lab coat. >_> Look at both of them and TELL ME they are not related, I dare you. My version of them are. I love the idea of this silly scientist being hired by his brother after failing the entry agent exam, not because he pitted him, but because he understood how incredibly smart he was and is. Constantly being compared to his brother and what he could have been. So, you can say I like MY version of him... a lot.

I should dedicate a post to him some day, eh?

[words-writ-in-starlight]

🍪 take a cookie because you deserve it :),, also please tell me about geralt and yennifer and also is the witcher easy to watch without knowing much about the source material ???

I watched three episodes of Witcher with zero context whatsoever, understood everything, enjoyed it hugely, read about 200K of fic, watched three more episodes, read the first book in the series, and finished the show.  As long as you are prepared for the fact that, A, the timelines of the three main characters converge, they are not concurrent, and, B, it’s not Game of Thrones and it’s not trying to be Game of Thrones, you will be ABSOLUTELY fine.

(Do critics just…not use critical thinking skills?  Half of everyone I’ve talked to said that this show was impossible to follow.  It is not impossible to follow.  Yennefer and Geralt are just really old.  Also, everyone and their cousin is like “well it’s not GoT” yeah???? Obviously????  “This isn’t chili” “No, it’s chicken pot pie” “I wanted chili” “Then go have some chili I guess???  This is chicken pot pie.  Still a food, just not that food.”  It’s not Game of Thrones.  If you want Game of Thrones, go watch that instead, or read the books, or maybe watch some Avatar and calm down.  Stop crucifying every fantasy product for not being Game of Thrones II.)

TL;DR: Yeah dude you’ll be totally fine, watch this show.  And then if you don’t mind spoilers for the rest of the (book and game) series, read Astolat’s Witcher fic.

ANYWAY

Geralt and Yennefer.  This got…very long.

Here’s the fairly unique emotion I’m feeling about this relationship: I think it’s absolutely in-character and believable, I’m completely convinced that Geralt and Yennefer would end up together, and I am equally convinced that their relationship has a pretty hard expiration date on it.  I’m not sure I’ve ever actually been interested in a relationship dynamic that I took one look at and went “oh, wow, this is going to break down hard the second your need to help people even when they hate you and her need to get revenge on people who hate her are in conflict.”  That’s very novel for me, because normally I like endgame relationships.  I find breakup drama exhausting.  I have dumped two people ever and both times I was very nice for ten minutes and then very short-tempered for the rest of the conversation.

But I’m really invested in the breakdown here.  And I’m really invested in how completely inevitable the relationship is, despite what I consider to be the equally inevitable calamitous breakup.

The thing is, Geralt has lived his entire life as a witcher, which means that the world is divided into two groups for him: people who are dependent on him as a witcher, and people who hate and fear him as a witcher.  (There are also Other Witchers, but with so few of them left that they fall pretty heavily into the ‘people who depend on him’ category.)  There is a not-inconsiderable amount of overlap in that Venn diagram, but that’s pretty much how it is on this bitch of a Continent.  The people who Geralt is drawn to, in whatever context, tend to be the rare handful who fall outside that binary metric in some way.

Renfri could use help from him, but she’s more than able to handle herself.  In fact, when the chips are down, her final gamble is to just remove him from the field of play, and try to resolve the situation alone.

Triss needs him in a professional capacity, but she brings just as much to the table as he does, both in terms of political knowledge about the striga situation and in terms of dragging his battered ass out of the castle before he can quietly bleed out.  She’s not looking for a rescuer, she’s looking for a tank to complement her glass cannon.

Jaskier needs Geralt to save him (in the show)…but only because he was usually the one to get them into trouble in the first place.  And he sticks around once he’s been saved, once he isn’t depending on Geralt to get him out alive anymore.

Even Ciri, who is absolutely dependent on him in a very literal and legal sense, is distinctly different from the general populace, who need a witcher to pull them out of trouble.  She’s one of probably very few people who’s ever been dependent on Geralt as a person, rather than a hired killer.  Sure, it’s helpful that he can kill anyone who looks crooked at her, but she also needs to eat, and to learn to use a sword, and to be trained in things like magic and languages, and all the things that a kid needs from a parent.  That’s radically different from Geralt’s experience of being depended on as a witcher.

But Yennefer…Yennefer doesn’t need Geralt.  She’s not dependent on Geralt.  She’s not afraid of Geralt in any way, let alone just because he’s a witcher–in fact, she barely seems to notice that he’s a witcher, except in the way that it makes them alike.  Geralt’s taste in partners is obviously “people who are not afraid of him” with very few other requirements, and Yennefer is a powerful mage, someone who would be able to take down a witcher without difficulty.  She’s also well-educated, very clever, and completely fearless about the world in general.  That’s everything Geralt finds compelling, all with the added bonus of an extremely pretty face.  It makes complete narrative sense that Geralt is in love with her.

Incidentally I do not believe that Geralt wished for Yennefer to be in love with him, because it wouldn’t track with the rest of his character and would be a level of vulnerability he works hard to avoid.  I do believe that he might have said something rash like “I wish I wouldn’t lose her” and now they are here.  It’s important to think your wishes through when dealing with an angry wish-granting being.

On Yennefer’s end of things, she has only ever wanted two things: to be respected and to be wanted.  In any capacity that might be available to her.  I think this is really the major driving force of her desire to have children–she’s not overwhelmingly interested in children as a phenomenon, and I think that in another life she wouldn’t want them.  But she said it herself, she wants a child because she always wanted to be important to someone.  It’s not about the kid.  She’s obsessed with the idea that she will always be important to a child.  A child would be completely dependent on her, completely devoted to her, no matter what.

(Side note: this is a bad reason to have kids!  Geralt is right and she would be a bad mother.  She’s also obsessed with having kids because she can’t handle the revelation that she’s not happy with the deal she made, and she’s focused all that discontent into the literal, tangible loss of being able to carry a child.  But “Yennefer actually probably does not want a child and is rampantly projecting all her issues onto the most readily available problem she can find” is a separate post.  Probably the first pregnancy-centric plotline I’ve ever been able to handle without feeling violently dysphoric, though.)

The thing is, when she meets Geralt during the djinn fiasco, he needs her.  He’s dependent on her.  She’s important to him because of what she can do for him, which is how she’s set up her life.  When he comes back to save her, though, he’s not doing it for payment, or for a favor, or for any of the other clean, linear exchanges that Yennefer is used to.  He just…comes back.  For her.  Because she’s a person.

Yennerfer has never been important just as…a person, before.  She’s important as a mage, she’s important as a student, she’s important as a project or a protector.  But from the second Geralt comes back for her, she’s important to him as a person.  The fact that almost any person would be on the level of “important enough to save from a rampaging djinn and their own stupidity” to Geralt is completely superfluous to how hard that hits Yennefer.  Of course she’s in love with him.  Of course she keeps looking for him, keeps pouring on the charm whenever she’s with him–she wants him to keep wanting her.  Because that’s how she knows to make herself important to someone, is to make them want her.

(This is also where it gets interesting with Ciri, because…well, if Yennefer really just wanted kids, she could do worse than the news of the girl who’s Geralt’s daughter in the eyes of the law.  But she’s furious, because her views of family are intensely skewed and limited by her experiences.  Also a separate post that I will probably make after reading some more of the books.)

Regarding the inevitably dramatic breakdown of their relationship (beyond the falling out over the djinn thing, which, see above), I think they’re under the impression that if they do it right, they could stand the test of time.  They’re both extremely long-lived, so the test of time has the potential to be a while, but I frankly don’t think they’d make it outside of a conflict-heavy environment (like, say, a war).  When they have a mutual goal, or at least a mutual enemy, Geralt and Yennefer work together like a right and left hand.  When they do not, they fall apart something fierce, because they’re driven by intrinsically different motives.  Geralt, for all that he tries to be as cynical as possible, has been trained his entire life to protect people, and considers it a worthwhile goal in and of itself.  Yennefer, on the other hand, is as innately self-motivated as Geralt pretends to be, which means that she’s driven heavily by what feels best for her in the moment.  Sometimes that means healing a wounded bard and talking quietly with a witcher about their mutual scars!  Sometimes that means leaving a woman to die for calling her a worthless bitch!  This is a morally neutral statement that I’m making, there’s a generous and an ungenerous way to read Yen’s decisions, but I think we can agree that she’s not exactly following a rulebook here.  Yennefer has her goals and she’s going to achieve them, and fuck you for getting in her way.

Including Geralt.

I think that, virtually without question, Yennefer’s self-oriented hedonistic drive and Geralt’s protection-based code will clash, and their relationship will break down in spectacular fireworks.  Having to self-determine, during peace time, is practically guaranteed to bring those two motivating factors into conflict eventually.  Because during peace time, Geralt will be back to being the hated witcher and Yennefer won’t have a better enemy to focus on than the civilians he risks his life for on the regular.  And Geralt demonstrably does not respond well to that.