#yes i‘m aware i can still write aus with them but that’s not the point. this here is about canon (divergent) fics

[witchersgoldenbard]

season 2 ruined geraskier for me.

now, that's a pretty loaded statement, i know, but i just realised how i can explain that weird heavy feeling that's been weighing on my chest every time i think about geralt and jaskier since watching season 2. don't get me wrong, i still love my boys to death and i will continue to write stories with them, i still have so many ideas. but before that can happen, i need to ramble and vent a little bit.

during and after season 1, geraskier was my comfort ship. the grumpy one and the sunshine one, one with heavy trauma and the other with enough blank space to serve wonderfully as a projection screen. there was so much between them in little glances and touches and smiles, and also of course in the witcher source material. there was endless room for fluff and angst and hurt/comfort, and it was always so natural. the mountain break-up scene as classic fix-it point, cakes upon cakes only served to revolve around that. there was so much room for everything that could possibly come afterwards, it was beautiful. there was no doubt at all that geraskier would be a lasting ship, a big one, one of the biggest of tumblr.

and then? then season 2 happened. and i only just figured out what bothered me. there was no closure. for anyone. all that pain and trauma i mentioned, situations where both got hurt, and nobody got the chance to properly apologise, or demand an apology. they never, not once, got to talk it out. not even with glances and a fond but exasperated smile that would tell us everything could be okay. nothing. instead, what we got was geralt apologising to jaskier while sitting on a horse, not even properly looking at him, not even on eye level. that is horrible grounds for an apology. and jaskier? he brought back the most traumatising moniker of geralt's and made it famous again, called him "butcher" because he had a broken heart. all of that could possibly be excused but-- oh wait. there was none. no apology, nothing real on either part.

we were left like them: just hanging in the air, somehow, wrongfooted, hooked but unsatisfied. we were given scraps and pieces while they weren't given time to talk and heal.

and you know what that means? it means that it's us, the fanfic writers, who have to fix this all. we cannot possibly write post-season 2 fluff without going through the emotionally heavy and draining parts of reasoning and apologising and talking first. we cannot really write an au without first having to fix whatever the fuck season 2 did. it means that i, as a person who first and foremost used to write geraskier, now find yennskier more appealing simply because it isn't so draining. it means that i get weirdly sad and heavy every time i so much as think about geraskier, because, as a friend said: i hate that i have to write geraskier fluff either in modern au or during season 1.

it's no coincidence that most of the post-s2 geraskier tag is hundreds of versions of geralt apologising, or jaskier apologising (though the first one is far more prominent, and that's another thing i am very very tired of, because it's not just geralt who needs to apologise!). there's just so much trauma in these two that there'll be 200 fics set immediately after that final battle, and all of them will be different and have different angles, because there's still so much left for them to process, it almost makes me angry.

but i'm not angry. i'm just sad and exhausted and i miss my boys. and maybe that's just me, maybe other people don't have problems writing geraskier right now, but i am very drained that in order to make them happy, i have to make them heal first. because the professional writers who were supposed to do that, didn't. and now i can't have my comfort ship anymore, because everything is too heavy.

and that is how season two ruined geraskier for me.