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bardcore-jaskier · 1 year

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♡ Elder blood Jaskier headcanon ♡

(Edited post)

I actually had this headcanon for a while now, probably started tossing ideas around in my head a few days after I watched Blood Origin. Here is a special thank you to @melinoiaagesander for reminding me about it and inspiring me to do something about it as well. Seeing as I tend to be a very lazy person (executive dysfunction go brrr), I will not be writing a fanfiction unless the mood strikes and if that happens, I shall gladly fall victim to hyperfixation and shit out a 50 000 word masterpiece with very bad grammar. And no, if I do write it, I will not fix the grammar mistakes unless rereading it brings forth the fattest, most scrumptiously painful dose of cringe in my life.

So OK, here we go....

I think it is common knowledge (despite the few times I've seen posts from confused Witcher fans right after the mini series aired), that Ithlinne's prophecy was about Ciri, the Lion Cub of Cintra and the descendent of Elie & Fjall. However, thanks to a brief lapse in judgement on the production team's part, either because of the way it was shot and edited or the because of the way it was written, when Seanchaí recited the prophecy:

"The Lark's seed shall carry forth the first note of a song that ends all time, and one of her blood shall sing the last"

It came across as delightfully misleading to many of us, even if most of us quickly understood to whom Seanchaí was actually referring to. Still, my bleeding Jaskier stan heart has never felt more glee at the prospect of getting another little Netflix "oopsie" to play with! (The other one being that they forgot to age Jaskier in season 1 and then decided to not even bother for season 2)

Which is why I took my ritalin, rubbed my clammy, cold little fingers together like a cartoon villain and dug deep into the lore, to find a way to spin an intricate web of realistic and clever facts that would serve as my personal foundation for this exciting headcanon! Jaskier is another descendent of the Lark and her Witcher, he has elder blood coursing through his veins and is distantly related to Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon!

(If Netflix weren't a bunch of pussies and if a disgusting majority of the Witcher fandom weren't a bunch of gatekeeping, racist and homophobic Plot-Guardians, this could have been the coolest curveball ever! The adorable, frilly and fragile bumbling human of a bard, going from side-character to focal point.)

Let's lay down the groundwork:

(I AM SO GIDDY AAAAAHHH, somebody catch me, I think I'm gonna faint!!)

- While Witchers as we know them are sterile, Fjall is clearly not. Because his mutation process wasn't designed by a group of mages who spent a long time on optimizing the serum to better serve it's purpose. Fjall was an experimental prototype, created from desperation and a few rush-job elixirs, so his precious elf balls weren't tampered with.

- Elie and Fjall made love after Fjall's transformation, bringing the first child of elder blood into existence. Which happened ca 1200 years before the canon era that the main Witcher series is set in, meaning that Ciri has a shit ton of ancestors that predate her entire canonical family tree, all going unaccounted for.

- Jaskier, as we can obviously see, has visually not aged a single day since meeting Geralt in Posada at age 18-19 (don't quote me on this, finding a reliable info source is a nightmare). He traveled with Geralt on and off for approximately 20ish years, making him at least 40 in the Rare Species episode and at least a little bit over 40 in the Family episode of season 2. That alone has inspired hundreds if not thousands of headcanons about Jaskier not being entirely human, one of which is: Jaskier is part elf.

- And OH BOY, isn't that neat?!?!?! I mean, we see a talented young bard, whom everyone assumes to be human, whom Blood Origin's ending accidentally implied to be a descendent of another bard, an elven bard who lived 1200 years ago and had a child with an elven Witcher. That should be enough metaphorical fapping material for my brain, shouldn't it?

Not so fast....

What if instead of imagining that some long fossil type beat long dead ancestor, lost to history, somehow ended up siring a child into a family of Keracki Nobles (Lettenhove doesn't seem to appear on any map of the continent I could find, but several sources claim that it is a small Viscouncy located in Kerack).....I could instead put in some effort and figure out how to make things more interesting, how to make Jaskier's elder blood ancestor actually traceable and as an awesome bonus, make Jaskier's and Ciri's relation a little closer. Not by a lot, obviously, it wouldn't make sense, but just enough for a new dynamic for fanfiction writers to explore. Personally, the idea of it has the potential to heal my poor broken heart, I adore Jaskier so much, but the way the main 3 characters of the series have treated him until Yennefer finally grew a braincell makes me sad.

Geralt's shitty apology aside, Lambert's cranky "No" aside (yk what I'm talking about), Yarpen Zigrin's unfriendliness aside, I DID NOT enjoy the scenes in which Ciri interacted with Jaskier. This headcanon though? Oh man, if I only had enough juice in me to write something for AO3, spin some epic ass Jaskier-centric tale, sprinkle in some geraskier/yennskier/lambskier and tag it with fix-it? I would!

Back to business, this is Ciri's family tree, it has the royal family of Cintra, girlboss Calanthe is there, Ciri's mom Pavetta is there, her sick son of a bitch father too. As you can see, besides the unknown descendents of Elie and Fjall, elder blood has deep roots and it can all be traced back to these folks: Lara Dorren aep Shiadhal & Cregennan of Lod, as well as Cerro of Redania & King Vridank of Redania....however those two are of no importance to this post.

Instead of trying to squeeze Jaskier into the equation by picking some rando as far back in time as possible, I stumbled across a treasure when trying to go from the bottom up. That treasure being another direct descendent of Lara Dorren as well as Elie and Fjall, his name was Crispin!

See him there? He happens to be Queen Calanthe's grandmother's twin brother! Although his name box is blue and not red, unlike King Goidemar of Temeria, the line that leads us to him is dark red, which means he is of elder blood and bears the activator gene as well, just like his sister. Now, if one needs a sex partner with the green latent gene in order to awaken the dormant powers in this blood line (which although watered down, still is incestuous), then I am not sure how Jaskier could inherit the same powers as Ciri. I myself prefer to headcanon that since Lettenhove is in Kerack, the small Viscouncy is located near the borders of Brokilon and therefore the Pankratz family could easily have a few drops of mixed blood with one of the Brokilon nymphs.

I am not much of a biologist (despite getting good grades in it back in high school), but it does make sense to me that being at least a little bit mixed with nymph DNA could theoretically aid in strengthening Jaskier's elder blood & activator genes. Sort of like how dog breeders play God to make a better specimen for many different purposes. In Jaskier's ancestry case, I like to think that one of his forefathers got seduced by a Rusalka, found out that she used him to get pregnant and then stole the child from her and raised the kid alone, in doing so, introducing nymph DNA into the Pankratz lineage.

Back to Crispin

Crispin aep Amavet, turned out to have a rather convenient backstory!

Apparently, his mother, Anna Kameny, was married to Count Roger Kameny and less than a year before her twins were born, she had an affair with Prince Amavet of Temeria (Queen Calanthe's great grandfather and Ciri's 4x great grandfather).

So with Crispin and his twin sister Muriel the Delightful, both being children of Prince Amavet, making them illegitimate to Count Roger Kameny, their mother Anna had to fight in court three times so that her kids could inherit Roger's estate. Muriel was content with that, she didn't care that her real father was a Prince and didn't push to be recognized as Amavet's daughter. Kameny wealth and her beauty combined, she didn't have trouble finding a husband and leading a happy life.

Crispin on the other hand, knowing that he is of royal blood, proud of his elven heritage, wanted that relation validated. So he started wearing the Kameny coat of arms, which he had custom made to hint at who his real father is by adding burgundy to the Temerian lilies. This caused a MAJOR scandal, turns out his little stunt was illegal and he got his ass arrested. He payed a fine and swore to never repeat that mistake, but what did he do instead????

Yeah, he fucking did it again, enraging enemies and his own mother as well, who fought so hard for his "legality" for the Count title. After that, Crispin, as a massive "Fuck you" to everyone, joined a gang of mercenaries and referred to himself as Crispin aep Amavet. Time went by, battles were fought and eventually he just disappeared off of the face of the earth. People assumed that he died and they were glad about it...ain't that convenient?

For the sake of this headcanon, I think Crispin could have easily just gone into hiding, wandering the continent under a fake name and impregnating some Pankratz de Lettenhove lady in the process. Could have just been a one night stand and nobody would know, nobody would know that Jaskier is related to the Cintran crown, to Ciri herself, to Lara Dorren and finally to another bard, so much like himself, Ellie the Lark.

I fucking LOVE this headcanon to bits and pieces! There is so much here that one can play with! Like Jaskier's meeting with Seanchaí somehow triggering the dormant powers within him and what those powers would look like, I don't think the first sign of it would be a deadly scream. I like to think that his newly awakened chaos would somehow tie into his singing, there is so much potential here, so many ideas to explore!

In canon, Ciri is destined to destroy humanity and return the elves back to power, but Jaskier has already beat her to it a little, kick-starting the process by smuggling elves to Xin'trea.

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

Sorry for editing this post 5 times, I was still working on it while waiting for AVATAR to start at the Cinema and accidentally published it in panic when the lights went out. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed it and I hope that this post can be of use to you if you decide to write a fanfic about/inspired by it! :3

(Please tag me if you do, I would love to read it! May your writing process be smooth, may your updates be frequent and may AO3 maintenance not impact your creativity!)

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

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