you know what i DO want to talk about? that scene on top of the truck where nona’s arguing w varun, and varun asks “do you love?” and nona says, “yes - no yes. i don’t know what it means. i say it, but i dont know what it means. did i ever know what it meant?” which is truly heartbreaking to hear from a character who’s spent the entire book up until now loving most everything she lays her eyes on with nearly reckless abandon.
and fifty pages later - after paul’s birth (pyrrha saying, “it’s not love, what you’re about to do. it’s a mistake.” being almost immediately replied to with, “the perfect friendship, the perfect love.”/”life is too short, and love is too long.”), and kiriona’s interrogation (”okay. different question -- do you love her?”), a near constant barrage of “what does love really mean?” and “what is love?” and “what would love make you do?” “what lengths would you go to for love?” when she’s already struggling with the idea of knowing if she’s felt love at all - she very nearly gives in to that despair, the lack of certainty that she knows what her feelings mean and that she’s allowed to feel them. she’s mourning, and she’s not able to reach pyrrha through her grief, and everyone else she’s with is more broken than she’s ever seen them before. but then paul reminds her of noodle. and nona, in a moment of lurching panic, decides to live, if only just to save noodle.
to me, that’s a devastating moment of raw, human love. it’s like that moment in alien (1979) where ripley’s about to abandon ship, and then goes back when she realises jones (the ship cat) is still on board. nona was ready to let them all die, hopless and lost and sad, every one of them-- but noodle, a sweet yet unimportant pet, is what brings her back.
and i think that’s what make’s paul’s statement of, “it’s done, it’s finished. you can’t take loved away.” hit as hard as it does. she’s just had this crisis of faith in her own personal belief system of loving-things-for-the-sake-of-loving-them, only to have it reaffirmed, and is now facing the abyss of personhood, facing returning to a self who was hurt and was deeply angry, going so far as to say, “i’ll be different...and palamedes -- i won’t love him...i won’t love anything, i won’t know how.”
paul says, “don’t worry,” (even though she just explained why she was worried), “we loved you too,” because maybe nona’s right and she won’t know how to love anymore, but she needs to know that she did. she did love, and she was loved, and there was never a doubt in anyone elses mind that she loved them fully and completely and genuinely. maybe she thought she was faking it, maybe she thought she was just making it up, but it was real, and now it’s done, and no one can take it away. no one.
3K notes
·
View notes
I have a lot of complicated feelings when it comes to what Neflix has done with the Witcher, but my probably least favourite is the line of argumentation that originated during shitstorms related to the first and second season that I was unlucky to witness.
It boils down to "Netflix's reinterpretation and vision is valid, because the Witcher books are not written to be slavic. The overwhelming Slavic aestetic is CDPR's interpretation, and the setting in the original books is universally European, as there are references to Arthurian mythos and celtic languages"
And I'm not sure where this argument originated and whether it's parroting Sapkowski's own words or a common stance of people who haven't considered the underlying themes of the books series.
Because while it's true that there are a lot of western european influences in the Witcher, it's still Central/Eastern European to the bone, and at its core, the lack of understanding of this topic is what makes the Netflix series inauthentic in my eyes.
The slavicness of the Witcher goes deeper than the aestetics, mannerisms, vodka and sour cucumbers. Deeper than Zoltan wrapping his sword with leopard pelt, like he was a hussar. Deeper than the Redanian queen Hedvig and her white eagle on the red field.
What Witcher is actually about? It's a story about destiny, sure. It's a sword-and-sorcery style, antiheroic deconstruction of a fairy tale, too, and it's a weird mix of many culture's influences.
But it's also a story about mundane evil and mundane good. If You think about most dark, gritty problems the world of Witcher faces, it's xenophobia and discrimination, insularism and superstition. Deep-seated fear of the unknown, the powerlessness of common people in the face of danger, war, poverty and hunger. It's what makes people spit over their left shoulder when they see a witcher, it's what makes them distrust their neighbor, clinging to anything they deem safe and known. It's their misfortune and pent-up anger that make them seek scapegoats and be mindlessly, mundanely cruel to the ones weaker than themselves.
There are of course evil wizards, complicated conspiracies and crowned heads, yes. But much of the destruction and depravity is rooted in everyday mundane cycle of violence and misery. The worst monsters in the series are not those killed with a silver sword, but with steel.
it's hard to explain but it's the same sort of motiveless, mundane evil that still persist in our poorer regions, born out of generations-long poverty and misery. The behaviour of peasants in Witcher, and the distrust towards authority including kings and monarchs didn't come from nowhere.
On the other hand, among those same, desperately poor people, there is always someone who will share their meal with a traveller, who will risk their safety pulling a wounded stranger off the road into safety. Inconditional kindness among inconditional hate. Most of Geralt's friends try to be decent people in the horrible world. This sort of contrasting mentalities in the recently war-ridden world is intimately familiar to Eastern and Cetral Europe.
But it doesn't end here. Nilfgaard is also a uniquely Central/Eastern European threat. It's a combination of the Third Reich in its aestetics and its sense of superiority and the Stalinist USSR with its personality cult, vast territory and huge army, and as such it's instantly recognisable by anybody whose country was unlucky enough to be caught in-between those two forces. Nilfgaard implements total war and looks upon the northerners with contempt, conscripts the conquered people forcibly, denying them the right of their own identity. It may seem familiar and relevant to many opressed people, but it's in its essence the processing of the trauma of the WW2 and subsequent occupation.
My favourite case are the nonhumans, because their treatment is in a sense a reminder of our worst traits and the worst sins in our history - the regional antisemitism and/or xenophobia, violence, local pogroms. But at the very same time, the dilemma of Scoia'Tael, their impossible choice between maintaining their identity, a small semblance of freedom and their survival, them hiding in the forests, even the fact that they are generally deemed bandits, it all touches the very traumatic parts of specifically Polish history, such as January Uprising, Warsaw Uprising, Ghetto Uprising, the underground resistance in WW2 and the subsequent complicated problem of the Cursed Soldiers all at once. They are the 'other' to the general population, but their underlying struggle is also intimately known to us.
The slavic monsters are an aestetic choice, yes, but I think they are also a reflection of our local, private sins. These are our own, insular boogeymen, fears made flesh. They reproduce due to horrors of the war or they are an unprovoked misfortune that descends from nowhere and whose appearance amplifies the local injustices.
I'm not talking about many, many tiny references that exist in the books, these are just the most blatant examples that come to mind. Anyway, the thing is, whether Sapkowski has intended it or not, Witcher is slavic and it's Polish because it contains social commentary. Many aspects of its worldbuilding reflect our traumas and our national sins. It's not exclusively Polish in its influences and philosophical motifs of course, but it's obvious it doesn't exist in a vacuum.
And it seems to me that the inherently Eastern European aspects of Witcher are what was immediately rewritten in the series. It seems to me that the subtler underlying conflicts were reshaped to be centered around servitude, class and gender disparity, and Nilfgaard is more of a fanatic terrorist state than an imposing, totalitarian empire. A lot of complexity seems to be abandoned in lieu of usual high-fantasy wordbuilding. It's especially weird to me because it was completely unnecessary. The Witcher books didn't need to be adjusted to speak about relevant problems - they already did it!
The problem of acceptance and discrimination is a very prevalent theme throughout the story! They are many strong female characters too, and they are well written. Honestly I don't know if I should find it insulting towards their viewers that they thought it won't be understood as it was and has to be somehow reshaped to fit the american perpective, because the current problems are very much discussed in there and Sapkowski is not subtle in showing that genocide and discrimination is evil. Heck, anyone who has read the ending knows how tragic it makes the whole story.
It also seems quite disrespectful, because they've basically taken a well-established piece of our domestic literature and popular culture and decided that the social commentary in it is not relevant. It is as if all it referenced was just not important enough and they decided to use it as an opportunity to talk about the problems they consider important.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not forcing anyone to write about Central European problems and traumas, I'm just confused that they've taken the piece of art already containing such a perspective on the popular and relevant problem and they just... disregarded it, because it wasn't their exact perspective on said problem.
And I think this homogenisation, maybe even from a certain point of view you could say it's worldview sanitisation is a problem, because it's really ironic, isn't it? To talk about inclusivity in a story which among other problems is about being different, and in the same time to get rid of motifs, themes and references because they are foreign? Because if something presents a different perspective it suddenly is less desirable?
There was a lot of talking about the showrunners travelling to Poland to understand the Witcher's slavic spirit and how to convey it. I don't think they really meant it beyond the most superficial, paper-thin facade.
156 notes
·
View notes
Jazz's little. Her parents are super cool. They're ghost hunters! It sounds like something from a movie about future and scientists and supernatural beings and cool-looking tech. They have cool-looking tech at home. It's even cooler than tech in the movies.
Jazz also has a little brother. He's stupid but he's hers, and she will protect him from anything. Her brother is very small, he needs someone to protect him and teach him about the world.
She knows about the world. She understands their parents much better than him, and she can tell her brother when they shouldn't be distracted. She knows when they're upset and irritable, and she knows when they're too excited and being near them is dangerous because of all the inventions.
Jazz does a very good job keeping her little brother safe.
---
Jazz goes to school. Her teachers say that she's very smart, the best student in class, and very mature. Her parents are proud of her - when she manages to distract them from ghosts. Her brother is still kinda stupid and doesn't know how to properly fight food, but she's always there to protect him, because that's what older sisters do.
Her classmates seem to think that she's weird though. Some of them say mean things and call her a teacher's pet and a show-off. Jazz isn't sure why they think so because she's always trying to be friendly but maybe she's doing something wrong. She goes to the school library and finds a book about people and their communication.
It's a very interesting book.
---
Jazz is almost a teen. She's gotten better at communicating with people. The school library ran out of psychology books, and Jazz now has to go to the city library but that's fine. Human brain fascinates her.
She's been feeling like something is wrong about her though. She even thought that she was going crazy for a little bit. That probably wasn't true because she didn't match any symptoms but she was still worried.
Someone told her that being so good at lying and faking face expressions is not okay. That's probably not true, Jazz is pretty sure almost everyone can do that. Or maybe she's just being a prodigy again. It's a very good thing to be able to do after all. She can hide her emotions from her family when she's feeling sad. She wouldn't want to worry them, would she?
She'll have to research it.
---
Jazz is a teen. She now knows that her parents aren't actually that good. It's something that was really hard to accept but it did explain everything. Her parents are kinda bad at being parents, and they also don't really listen when she tries to explain it to them.
It's okay. She's almost an adult and Danny has her. She can take care of herself and her brother.
She learns everything she can about being a parent and a therapist and tries to use her knowledge. It's hard, but she's a Fenton, which means that she's very smart and determined. She pushes through, and trains on her classmates and herself.
In the evening she writes about her feelings in a journal. It's very important to be aware of her feelings because that's the first step to dealing with them.
She's experiencing sadness. And anger, actually, even though she doesn't like to admit that.
She writes "this family is a fucking mess" in her journal and then covers the paper with ink until the sentence is absolutely unreadable.
---
Jazz is sixteen, and her stupid parents opened the stupid portal, which means that they're even worse than usual. It's pretty much okay when they're just stuck in their stupid lab, making some stupid weapons. It's not that okay when they're out of the stupid lab, because they get their stupid inventions all over the stupid house, and stupid food comes to life, and she has to protect Danny from both their stupid weapons and stupid hotdogs, and oh god everything is so stupid.
She's experiencing anger.
She's also acting perfectly calm and almost cheerfully.
Jazz hates how perfect her fake smile is in the mirror.
---
Jazz is seventeen. She wants to put her headphones on and listen to some loud music. Jazz can't do that, because she gets anxious if she can't hear what's happening around her. She needs to be fully aware of her surroundings because she needs to be able to protect herself and her brother if weapons against ghosts become weapons against children again.
She thinks that it's not okay.
The house smells of ectoplasm, so she'll be extra careful when opening the fridge.
She thinks that she shouldn't know how ectoplasm smells.
Jazz should probably also warn Danny: her little brother's gotten better at fighting food but doesn't notice the smell of ectoplasm. Funny, considering his ghost sense.
Funny, considering that her brother is a half-ghost.
That her brother died.
That she failed at protecting him after all.
Jazz stops breathing to prevent herself from crying, and doesn't need oxygen for a few minutes too long.
Maybe she failed at protecting herself too.
---
Jazz is turning eighteen next month. Her parents are all of a sudden more attentive and caring, as if that can change their almost-absence during her whole life. She doesn't like their attention because she doesn't know how to deal with it. She doesn't even really think of them as parents anymore.
She thinks of them as a threat.
Once she's eighteen, she's gonna try to move out, and she's going to take Danny with her because it's not safe to leave him here. Maybe after she gets a good job and saves some money, she'll even get into therapy.
Jazz thinks that she needs therapy.
She's been having Bad Thoughts lately, and she doesn't write them down in her journal. Jazz stopped writing anything in there ever since she found out that Danny is a ghost. She just couldn't risk anyone finding that journal.
Jazz isn't sure if she should call those Bad Thoughts intrusive. They scare her, and they're Bad, but it could be just her normal thought process.
It's still definitely not normal.
---
Jazz is eighteen. Her parents are very excited, whispering to each other about how they found a perfect present for her, some surprise that she's gonna love.
She doesn't care.
Her little brother is late from school, and it's weird, because he was also super excited about giving her his present.
She's worried.
Her parents brush off her concern, say that Danny probably just got distracted talking with his friends. They don't listen when she says that Danny wouldn't get distracted like that on her birthday because he's not them, he actually cares about her, he doesn't forget her birthdays, and something has to be wrong for him to be that late.
They don't listen to her at all.
She's angry.
Her parents are excited and talk loudly about how they wanted to find a perfect gift for their favourite daughter, and how they managed to do it because they love her so much. She hates when they're excited. It only leads to problems.
They bring her to the lab because of course they do, why would they make a gift that is normal and isn't kept in the lab, right? They usher her in, so obviously proud of themselves.
She hates them.
And she hates them much, much more the next second, because the gift is her little brother in his ghost form, strapped to a table, unconscious and injured, and the smell of ectoplasm is strong in the lab because of his green blood dripping on the floor.
There's a cold part of her that analyses her feelings and tells her what emotions she's experiencing, and that part is very aware of thick black smoke of wrath twirling and twisting under her skin. It's suffocating, and she stops breathing as it invisibly fills her lungs, scared of letting it out.
There's a perfectly fake part of her that keeps the smile on her face as her parents gush about how hard it was to catch the ecto-scum, and what they can do to it - together with Jazz because they wanted to share this with their amazing daughter.
Jazz is black smoke of rage under perfect glass of calmness when she grabs Fenton anti-creep stick. The smile she learned to fake under any circumstances doesn't falter when Jazz brings the baseball bat down on her father's head. It grows a little bit wider when she hits her mother, because Jazz learned to smile brighter when she's hurt or sad or scared or angry - experiencing any "bad" emotion actually.
Jazz is angry when she grabs her weapon.
Jazz is furious when she kills her parents.
Jazz is worried when she checks her brother's wounds.
Jazz feels nothing when she rigs the portal to blow, walks out of the house and presses the button.
She is her parents' genius daughter after all, and she did listen when they were telling her about their inventions. Maybe it would have taken longer to do, but she had Bad Thoughts, and they probably weren't just intrusive after all, because she did what they told her and made it very easy to make a bomb out of a portal. Just in case. Her parents were a threat, and Jazz was smart enough to prepare to dealing with threats, and she was smart enough to make it look like the threats dealt with themselves.
She really hoped she wouldn't have to use that button though.
---
Jazz is nineteen. Her sort-of-friends at uni offer to go to a restaurant, and she tells them that she doesn't celebrate her birthdays. There's a noise of all of them saying that maybe she should try, noise that she really should have expected, because humans are always so excited about any holidays, it's hard for them to understand that someone might not like them. It's not hard to stop that noise though. They shut up very quickly when Jazz says that she had "a very traumatic event" on her birthday.
Good. She doesn't like loud people.
Jazz goes home to her little brother. He's sad because his parents died in an awful explosion a year ago. He's still trying to smile because it's also her birthday, and Jazz is very happy that he's bad at faking a smile.
It means that he won't end up like her.
Jazz hugs her little brother, and he gives her a little present that she adores, and then they sit in silence and eat some takeout. It's very nice.
She never tells Danny that their parents died before the explosion, and that the explosion wasn't an accident, and that their ghosts did form after that because of all the ecto-contamination they had, but she made sure this wouldn't become a problem. She never tells him what she's done, because that would hurt her little brother, and she would never let anything hurt him.
Jazz will protect her little brother from anything.
41 notes
·
View notes