The Witcher! I guess I'm here now!

[sophia_sol]

sooooo a post on tumblr plus a friend's comment (thanks pilf!) convinced me to finally give watching The Witcher a try, despite having been previously sure that there was no way it was a show I'd be into.

WELL they were right and I was INVESTED and watched the entire show in just two days. (Look, I have two settings when it comes to tv watching: watch NONE of the tv, or watch ALL of the tv. Moderation? I don't know her.)

I gotta say that the way the show is structured makes it hard to follow what was going on, especially because I am faceblind and also have a bad memory. I basically gave up on trying to follow the more complicated stuff and just kept on top of the main characters' relationships with each other, for the most part. And I'm still not quite sure I've got all the timelines clear, made harder by the fact that NOBODY SEEMS TO AGE, even the characters who are presumably human. Oh well. I didn't need to follow everything to just enjoy all the wild things this show chose to do with itself. It's pretty wild!

I was pleasantly surprised at how much focus the show gives to the plotlines for Ciri and Yennefer, and honestly how little Jaskier shows up, given the fandom's focus on Geralt/Jaskier. And I was EXTREMELY INVESTED in those other plotlines! Oh my god, Yennefer's fucked up magic boarding school and her complicated relationship with the headmistress and with her friend who betrayed her! Ciri's deep love for her grandmother, who's also a woman who's screwed a lot of people over but who was a genuinely good grandma! Ciri and Dara's friendship across enemy lines that eventually gets pushed too far and Dara abandons her!

(It's too bad the magic boarding school was so involved with the politics I didn't follow, because I feel like that would have added more dimension to my appreciation of that plotline.)

I was also surprised at how taciturn Geralt WASN'T. Like, he feels free to just say whatever he feels like saying at any given moment, he just doesn't always feel like saying anything! I really enjoyed watching him just be terribly blunt at people, over and over again.

Anyway, as fun as the Geralt/Jaskier fic can be, having now watched the show I think my main interest is to read, like, basically ANYTHING BUT. Nothing wrong with shipping them, there just seems to me to be so much interesting fic that could be written about *gestures vaguely* everything else? And I want to read it all! But ugh searching through the maintags on ao3 for such a large fandom is super intimidating so idk how to find the Good Stuff. Any recs?? (I'd also take recs for particularly good Geralt/Jaskier ftr, I just want the other stuff more!)

Comments

[sylvaine]

*laughs* yeah, apparently the showrunners forgot to age the human characters. Which has led to a lot of fandom insistence that Jaskier is actually immortal and didn't realize it, which is a fun trope. *g*

I was involved in, uh, "plotting" the first fic in this series, so I'm biased, but I do genuinely enjoy it - it's polyamorous Jaskier/Geralt/Yennefer fluff and porn and feelings. No Ciri or any other canon character cameos.

[sophia_sol]

wait, they......they actually just FORGOT? That's hilarious! And yeah, before watching the show I'd seen and been mildly confused by the number of fics about Jaskier being in some way immortal, and it all makes much more sense now :P

unfortunately pwp is not my jam as fic genres go, so that series isn't for me, but thanks for the rec regardless! :)

[sylvaine]

They totally just forgot! xD Honestly this is my favourite fact about this show to date, it's so great.

That is so fair! Have you found any fics you've enjoyed since?

[sophia_sol]

okay that entire article is a delight, I especially love the notion of that extremely weird bonnet on Jaskier :D

I have found some witcher fics I've really enjoyed! So far I'm mostly enjoying them as like....their own thing separate from what I loved about the show, though, because I'm having trouble finding good fics that are about the things that particularly interested me in the show. Oh well. My fave fic I've read so far is the Meet Death Sitting series by bomberqueen17, it's really good!

[sylvaine]

I just want pictures of Joey wearing that thing to surface! :D

Ooooh, that one is on my to-read list, and your rec has just upped my interest in it. Thank you! :D Shame that people aren't writing the thing you wanted out of it, though.

[sophia_sol]

I think it's quite possible someone out there IS writing what I want to read, I just don't know how to find it! in such a popular fandom there's just so much fic to comb through, and I lost patience with trawling ao3. I guess part of the problem is that I'd be interested in particular varieties of gen, and that's harder to search for than shipfic -- and I can't just use the exclude feature on ao3 to cut out all the fics tagged with ships, because people often tag even gen-focused fic with any ships that show up in the fic

[sylvaine]

*sigh* yep, the age old problem of trying to find non-ship fic on AO3!

[sophia_sol]

Exactly, you get me!

[lokifan]

Oh my god, Yennefer's fucked up magic boarding school and her complicated relationship with the headmistress and with her friend who betrayed her! Ciri's deep love for her grandmother, who's also a woman who's screwed a lot of people over but who was a genuinely good grandma! Ciri and Dara's friendship across enemy lines that eventually gets pushed too far and Dara abandons her!

Omg, this sounds fantastic.

[sophia_sol]

It's so much fun and so interesting! I was riveted watching it