#the day i realized lauren hissrich was the same writer responsible for that terrible josh/donna arc at the end of tww i was just like. oh no

[aeide-thea]

very much the quick and shoddy version of this post bc i can't actually think or articulate anything today lmao (unfortunate since i'm meant to be ““writing”” an ““essay””)—

there's this analysis of the netflix witcher show going around that's like, ‘actually geraskier (or even any genuine positive feeling between the two characters) isn't supported by the text,’ which i should really reblog at some point so it's on my blog; and largely i agree with that analysis, probably, although there are a couple of moments (geralt's fond smile at the banquet, jaskier's explicit attempt to offer sympathy on the mountain) that i think are worth mentioning; but like, (a) isn't the entire fannish project one of reading affection into the interstices of often-mediocre, often-homophobic writing?

and (b) honestly what i actually think about the netflix relationship is that it's, uh, sibling-coded [can't believe i actually typed those words, also pls hold for my upcoming disquisition on how a sibling-esque dynamic between unrelated adults does not in fact render the notion of sexual contact between them inc*stuous, to be written when i can brain better], based on how geralt vocally puts jaskier down all the time but also repeatedly drops everything to help him?

really i feel like, fundamentally what's happening here (which i think the post in question pointed out) is that the show made jaskier pretty flamboyantly effeminate, because that's Fun, but then realized, wait, if we have our Straight Hero care too visibly about a sidekick this ~queer-coded~, he won't fit the gruff masc bill anymore, guess we gotta cut out anything too demonstrative! so instead we get this stripped-down version of the relationship where yeah, textually what's there isn't particularly affectionate, but also i do think we're meant to understand that this is a Sidekick Situation and read a certain degree of affection into it on that basis, because we know how tropes work. and it's fair not to be satisfied with that! but i think reading it straightforwardly as ‘they don't like or value each other’ is a failure to bring even the expected, mainstream understanding of subtext to the table, let alone a queer fannish one.

[in general i think there's a conversation to be had where like, l*uren h*ssrich is pretty solely interested in (a pretty simplistic kind of) feminism, and then knows she's meant to be interested in diversity, and so we get a real focus on the women in the show, and a bit of racebending, but those things seem to come at the cost of remembering that the men are also people, really—that speech where yennefer's all, ‘womanhood means you're just a vessel for people to take and take and take from, until finally you're empty and alone’ is absolutely wild to me given that it's also exactly geralt's story, like, @ ms. hissrich i promise you this is not an exclusively female experience! and honestly that could be a really interesting conversation, because i do think the way witchers are positioned outside society also effectively separates them from the societal gender binary—they aren't men as humans understand it, they're halfway to monsters, and better thinkers than i have produced a lot of theory on women-as-monsters, so. a pretty rich vein of complicated commonality we could be mining there! but god forbid we understand power dynamics as anything but a straightforward binary, lauren.]

anyway this ended up being not that short while still not actually presenting a coherent argument, sorry! i guess i just feel like, yeah, geraskier isn't in the text, but honestly, (a) in what world is ‘not in the text’ anything but an invitation to slash, and (b) what compelling interpersonal relationships are in the text? they didn't actually do a better job of setting up geralt/yennefer, which presumably they did actually want to establish—that relationship is like, (1) awkward meeting in which the eventual sex is framed as a quid pro quo, after which yennefer literally uses geralt to do her dirty work in honestly a more exploitative, less consensual way than anything people are contending jaskier's done; then (2) some intimate but kind of impersonal tenderness in their tent, like, they gaze at each other very sweetly but it feels a little unearned to me; and then finally (3) angry breakup. and it's just like, really, you want us to get invested in these two based on that cursory triptych?

but my point here isn't really to set this up as a competition between ships, which can perfectly well coexist; my point is that this text is asking us to read into most of the relationships it sketches out, and to ignore pedestalization and pressuring in most of them, such that saying ‘geralt and jaskier are (or could be) in love’ isn't much more baseless than saying geralt and yennefer are or could be. so ultimately, if we're demanding better from the text (where ‘better’ is defined as ‘more explicit relationship-building,’ which i think can be better but isn't always), i think we have to demand that across the board.