#kakos kaischros babey!!

[aeide-thea]

watched witcher 3x03 and it really is just like. this show continues to lurch wildly from scene to unconnected scene. which could work if they were written and costumed and acted well enough that each vignette was compelling in its own right, so that you wanted to keep watching even though nothing quite hangs together or makes sense yet? but they really. aren't.

and they keep introducing all these bit characters, i guess in an attempt to convey that geralt has History and Connections, but it's just feeling to me like, why are we foregrounding all these interactions that should have been background. did i really need to learn all these names.

also i continue to feel like ciri is just. too old. like fundamentally you can't take the naïveté and petulance of a child, or teenager at most, and paste them unaltered onto a twenty-something and expect to garner the same level of sympathy for her! also like. minor point but if they're on the run would she really be religiously applying her clumpy little maybelline every morning. she looks more overtly made up than most of the adult characters on the show, and like, i know we're in fantasyland and not any actual specific historical time period but it does feel distractingly anachronistic to me nonetheless.

also like. you're really asking me to believe that surly taciturn traumatized geralt would open up to this random 'friend of his mother's' about his childhood. like. i get that, again, we're attempting to establish that Geralt Has History, but like. you can't just have him infodump without any consideration of what he's like or who he's talking to??? like—i understand that we basically gave up on any notion of consistent characterization for him, or even a clear throughline to an evolving characterization, after s1, but. why is he opening up to this random druidess as if she were yennefer. what is happening.

like do i want to see jaskier's big gay romance (which based on radovid's beleaguered-weasel characterization so far i cannot imagine doing anything but going up in flames in the back half of the season??? like, clearly radovid is going to fuck them over the second he's caught in a political bind, the only question imo is whether jaskier also fucks them over)? yes. but is the rest of this worth sitting through? extremely debatable.

did love vespula's dress, ditto jaskier's costuming. also yennefer's struggle to balance who she knows how to be in an aretuzan context vs who she wants to be for ciri (and for herself?) was compelling (although, again, i'm really struggling to buy the idea of her as mother to ciri when the two actresses have, like, a seven-year age difference. like i get that it's found family and not literal but. it just doesn't ring true, i'm sorry). but on the whole this really was just. a jumble.

also emhyr is just not icily intimidating enough. like he's supposed to be this always-five-steps-ahead omnipotent manipulator or whatever, as i understand it, but even setting other versions of canon aside, this version of the story needs him to be that! and instead he's like. a potatoface in a molded plastic breastplate. action figure villain.

also okay this really is the last thing but. what is up with all this 'the evil mages all have their faces grotesquely burnt off' shit. can we not do better by real live people with facial differences than that.

[aeide-thea]

[ID: Wikipedia screenshot that reads:

The wisdom of repugnance or "appeal to disgust", also known informally as the yuck factor, is the belief that an intuitive (or "deep-seated") negative response to some thing, idea, or practice should be interpreted as evidence for the intrinsically harmful or evil character of that thing. Furthermore, it refers to the notion that wisdom may manifest itself in feelings of disgust towards anything which lacks goodness or wisdom, though the feelings or the reasoning of such 'wisdom' may not be immediately explicable through reason.

/end ID]

Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.