I occasionally scroll down on my browsers news feed. I probably shouldn’t, since almost all the news “curated” for me is sensational click-bait headlines with weak, ad-packed articles. Despite this, I mistakenly scrolled down this morning to find this headline:
The Witcher’s Joey Batey and Hugh Skinner discuss making Jaskier’s queer romance authentic
Ugggggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!
For those who (somehow) don’t know, The Witcher is a series of stories by Andrzej Sapkowski written in Poland in the 1990s that was later adapted into a very successful computer game series, and after that into a moderately successful (but now quickly declining) Netflix TV series. The books started being translated into English in 2007, around the same time that a Polish video game producer, CD Projekt Red, made the first of three video games.
The video games and books were wildly popular. The main character, Geralt of Rivia, is a witcher, a human mutated by different poisons and gene-altering drugs, to become an inhumanly deadly warrior, but with no emotions and a desire to stay neutral in most conflicts. Witchers were created to fight monsters that entered the world due to an event called the Conjunction of the Spheres, which is sort of like the Multiverse. The world of the Witcher features a variety of monsters, magic and warring kingdoms, all the things you would expect in a medieval fantasy world.
The Witcher is very different from other fantasy though. As he adventures in the world, Geralt discovers that many monsters are actually sentient and simply trying to live, while humans use the fact they are a monster to place bounties on their heads in order to steal their land and possessions. In many of his quests, Geralt sides with these beings, and when humans point out that he was created to fight monsters, Geralt asks who the real monsters are. This is captured in the video games, where you get to make choices about what quests to take and how to complete them. You can side with the humans, or side with the monsters, or choose a mix, and your ultimate outcome is based on your choices. In many cases, these outcomes are radically different. There is no “right” side…you can find fault in each faction, and even Geralt’s desire to stay neutral can become a fault all on its own.
The other big difference between The Witcher and other fantasy is that it is very adult. Geralt’s mutations render him sterile, so he sleeps around a lot. He has a competing love interest with two different sorceresses (Yennefer and Triss) in the books and the game, and the video games let you sleep with a variety of female characters. The books have plenty of gory fights, and the games don’t shy away from gore or nudity.
With a big following, intriguing characters, and different fantasy world, I was super excited when Henry Cavill was announced to star in the Netflix series. Cavill actually read the books and played the games. The dude is built like The Witcher, and in the first two seasons, he perfectly captured Geralt’s character. I immediately noticed that the writing was…lackluster. We weren’t getting the “choices” themes, we had a weird back story on Yennefer that wasn’t in the books and didn’t add much to the story, and the other supporting characters were twisted a bit out of context.
Which brings me to Jaskier, which is the Polish name for the character Julian Alfred Pankratz, who goes by the stage name Dandelion. In the books he is a sharp contrast to Geralt’s dower and moody behavior, often challenging the notion that Geralt can remain neutral in the middle of the conflict between the various nations. In the video games, he’s a skilled poet, avid business man and notorious womanizer, which gets him in trouble that occasionally requires Geralt to bail him out.
No where, ever, is it implied he is gay or bisexual. You might think that because he is a poet and a snappy dresser, but the books and games don’t ever imply it.
The Netflix series used him first as the butt of a lot of jokes. While he had some good moments (the Toss a Coin to your Witcher song being the best), he is too often a dumb, scared fop of a character. Then, since he’s a poet, and apparently its OK to paint a classist brush across all artistic people, the producer decides to explore his sexuality. Never mind that they are fighting the lore while doing this, that Henry Cavill quit over disagreements about the what the writers and producers were doing to the series, and attempts to add a prequel (The Witcher: Blood Origins) failed miserably. Nope, let’s make a bisexual character, that’ll make our series more popular!!
Funny enough, the world of the Witcher actually HAS a few homosexual and otherwise LGBTQ characters in it. Cirilla, one of the main characters in the book series, at one point has a homosexual tryst with the female leader of the Rats, a group of brigands that she joins after fleeing from the school of magic. Various factions, such as the all-female dryads and some sects of elves, are heavily implied to be homosexual. Most of the more powerful sorceresses have female lovers. The Dopplers, a race of shape-shifting creatures, are portrayed as enjoying the ability to explore both their masculine and feminine sides.
There is PLENTY of existing homosexual and erotic content in the novels and video games that a producer could bring into the Netflix series, and I doubt it would cause issues. Instead, they chose to dumb down an interesting character and shoe-horn him into a bisexual role he was never meant or written for, and to the surprise of nobody, caused serious angst.
Look, if you want gay characters, go write them in your novels. Do the proper character development and make them interesting. Not surprisingly, you might find that if you follow good writing practices and make your transgender warrior an interesting character that has to overcome issues, has flaws, and follows a story arc, people might actually want to read your writing, and if you want an example, look at Japanese anime. The laziness that modern producers have in simply taking good, existing characters and placing them on the LGBTQ spectrum exhausts audiences and reveals that these producers and writers have no real talent.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
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