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abeautifulblog · 9 months

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Thoughts on the Radovid romance

A couple people have asked about the Radovid/Jaskier relationship, and I thought it was... fine? As fine as anything in this show gets?

I wasn't expecting it to dethrone Geralt/Jaskier, because 20+ years of Jaskier building his life and legacy around Geralt is a lot more compelling than Some Twink He Met Yesterday, but I did go into it with a genuinely open mind. Everyone on tumblr was gushing over their chemistry, and I was like, Yea I'd believe it, given that this is Joey Batey we're talking about. So I was expecting to enjoy it the way I'd enjoyed the Yennskier content in S2, the rare treat of two characters having a real emotional connection.

And then I watched it, and it wasn't bad, but the relationship was a lot more disjointed (and their "chemistry" a lot less compelling) than tumblr had led me to believe. (Lol, mea culpa, I should have known better than to take tumblr's word for it.) Also it’s unclear whether it’s supposed to be a cute romance, or whether it’s two people using each other for their own ends?

But it did brush up against some interesting thoughts I'd had before about Jaskier and his patrons, and got me to thinking about consent and power dynamics again, because I am THEE MOST predictable little beastie in fandom. 🤣

First off, I'm not sure what we're supposed to make of Radovid. Obviously he's ~hiding his true self~ in some way, but I can't tell if we're meant to take at face value the side of himself he shows Jaskier -- that he's more intelligent than he's been letting on, and is actually deeply lonely in the empty-headed partyboy role he's been playing, desperate for genuine connection and for someone to truly see him for who he is -- or whether that is yet more deception, and this is all part of some big ambitious scheme that he'll whip out in a mustache-twirling villain reveal. There are elements that make me think it's the latter, but Hugh Skinner's acting is also just weird (and why are his eyes so wet o_o), and I can't tell whether that's supposed to be deliberate foreshadowing, or if, once again, the people making the show are just clueless about how their creative choices are coming off.

(I assume this will get answered at some point, possibly already has in part 2, but I haven't watched that yet.)

Honestly, the part that caught my interest the most was when Jaskier showed up at Radovid's salon wanting to talk about new intel he had on Rience, and Radovid was blithely uninterested, just wanted Jaskier to sing for them -- and then proceeded to casually, completely disregard Jaskier's No.

gremble: Oho? 👀

That's a red flag! 😊 Jaskier tried to set a boundary, and Radovid brushed right past it. And in any competently-executed piece of media, I would expect that to be deliberately signaling something. It doesn't necessarily mean that Radovid is evil -- could just mean he's a crown prince who doesn't have much experience with people telling him No -- but seeing him blithely override Jaskier's wishes in a low-stakes situation sets a bad precedent, and foreshadows how he might behave later, when the stakes might well be higher.

...Except that this production team is so HILARIOUSLY bad at writing healthy relationships -- for three seasons they've been feeding us the most toxic slop imaginable and telling us that's what love looks like -- that I have no idea whether that was on purpose or not. 😂😂😂

The Radovid storyline does touch on some concepts that I've long found fascinating, about Jaskier's system of patronage and how he trades on his sexuality. How his work is canonically sex work, or at least sex-work adjacent (that's made explicit when he talks about the Countess de Stael, that they were involved sexually while she was supporting him financially), and the balancing act of keeping his patrons happy when they are always, always going to be second in his affections to Geralt -- and how they probably wouldn't be too happy to learn that.

Because for all that S3 tells us Jaskier is developing a crush on Radovid, Joey Batey's acting says something very different. He did not come off as a man in love, to me -- he came off as someone who's acutely aware that when the crown prince of Redania rolls up and tells you he's your biggest fan, you fucking smile for him.

(Why yes, Moulin Rouge is my all-time favorite movie, why do you ask? 🤣)

Jaskier's interactions with Radovid feel very... 'calculated' isn't quite the word for it, but Jaskier is conscious of the power differentials there, and always carefully choosing what he does and says in light of what he knows Radovid wants from him. He's conscious of having to keep Radovid happy, yes but he's also conscious of what he stands to gain from having a crown prince clamoring to win his affections, and what he could leverage out of that. (Like, say, having the entire Redanian army to protect his little found family.)

And the power imbalance isn't entirely one-directional either. Radovid wants Jaskier's affections, something that can't be bought or coerced, and wants his specifically, which means Jaskier has all the power to give or withhold it... while also being aware that toying with a prince's affections is a dangerous game.

........Or maybe I entirely misread that, and Jaskier's feelings for Radovid are meant to be genuine, and the whole thing was supposed to be a cute little romance. The way that Joey & the production team have talked about that relationship makes it sound like that's what they were going for, but what's onscreen is very ambiguous.

It will surprise no one to learn that I think the more interesting option would be the one that complicates Jaskier’s motives. That even if he likes Radovid well enough, he's still deliberately leveraging Radovid's crush on him to get help for Geralt -- and that if he oversteps, he's risking the wrath of a very powerful man. (And that as the perceived rival, Geralt could wind up as the target of Radovid’s retribution.)

Anyway, it's a fascinating situation, and almost identical to a fic premise I've been tossing around for years. It's never quite coalesced enough to get written, but it does compel me.

(Alternately, if you wanted Radovid to be noble and tragic, @coffee-mage-sans-caffeine suggested a situation in which Radovid and Geralt are in peril together, one of them is not going to make it out of this, and Radovid sacrifices himself so Geralt lives -- because he knows which of them Jaskier loves more.)

#witcher shit #radskier #witcher meta #twn season 3

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abeautifulblog · 10 months

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Actually, let's talk about the Baba Yaga storyline

...And how much I fucking loathed it.

(A discussion of tropes, narrative choices, and how goddamn dirty The Witcher Netflix did Yennefer in S2.)

So this subplot is actually a pretty tidy object lesson in literary tropes, and why writers need to understand how tropes work in order to utilize them effectively. The trope at play here is the "Faustian bargain" or "deal with the devil," in which a character barters with a powerful supernatural creature of dubious moral alignment in order to gain something they desire (often something self-serving like wealth or power), at a price that's almost never worth it.

...It is pretty much a given that you will not be getting the better end of the deal, as it’s written. But there are a number of different ways to play this trope, and they each say something different about the kind of character who would take that bargain:

1) If you don't realize this is a trap -- if that sounded like a Pretty Sweet Deal! 😀 -- then you're either very naive or very dumb.

2) If you know it's a trap, but expect to get your prize and then weasel out of it with your soul intact anyway, because you think you're cleverer than this eldritch creature you're dealing with -- then you are very cocky, and probably wrong, because modern narratives don't tend to reward hubris.

3) If you know it's a trap, but you think you can get what you want without consequences to you, because you can pay the price with someone else's life or soul -- then you are evil. (And probably also wrong, because it's rare in fiction that you can commit an evil like that without doing some sort of spiritual damage to your own soul.)

4) And lastly, if you know it's a trap, but you are in such desperate, dire straits that even this self-evidently bad bargain looks like your best option -- then it might still be a mistake, but it's the one that audiences are most likely to forgive you for, or at least find understandable.

I don't make the rules. Those are just the audience reactions you can expect from playing the trope in those particular ways -- and if you want a different audience reaction (say, you want forgiveness for character who tried to sacrifice someone else), then you have to put in some extra work to make that happen, mitigating circumstances, etc (say, that the character genuinely believes it's the only way to save a greater number of lives).

So how did TWN play Yennefer's Faustian bargain with Baba Yaga?

E2 - Yen and Francesca and Fringilla meet Baba Yaga in her spirit realm or whatever, and she dangles their Heart's Desire, For A Price in front of them. Yennefer doesn’t ask for her magic, because at that point she doesn’t realize she’s lost it.

E3 through E5 - Yennefer tries without success to get her magic to work again. I don't recall any mention of Baba Yaga during that time -- it doesn't even occur to Yennefer as a means of getting it back.

E5 - Yennefer and Jaskier are being pursued by hooligans or something, and even though Yen has ducked into a brothel to hide and is nominally safe, that's when she decides to contact Baba Yaga for help. She gets whisked off to the spirit realm again, and agrees to give Baba Yaga a particular kid in exchange for getting her powers back.

She agrees to this deal knowing that she'll be sacrificing someone's child to this creature.

(And, critically, a point I’ll come back to later: she hasn't signed anything yet. She doesn't get her powers back here. That's the reward being promised for after she feeds a kid to a demon.)

E6 - Yennefer actually meets Ciri, but, notably, does not immediately swear off the plan. She's just kinda ~conflicted~ about it now.

(This was also the episode where they started trying to have Yennefer and Ciri do their mother-daughter bonding, and Yennefer says all the right things, to be sure, but since we-the-audience know that she is at least still contemplating feeding Ciri to Baba Yaga, that, uhh, RINGS KINDA FUCKING FALSE.)

E7 - Ciri reads Yennefer's mind and finds out about the plan to feed her to a demon. (Or so wikipedia tells me, since I have literally no memory of how Yennefer's Baba Yaga related plans got outed.)

E8 - Baba Yaga gets loose, possesses Ciri. Lots of high-drama CG bullshit. Yennefer sacrifices herself to become the host to get Baba Yaga out of Ciri. More CG bullshit, Baba Yaga is vanquished and leaves, and when everyone comes out of their woowoo CG trance, Yennefer has her magic back. But after that BETRAYAL, Geralt can no longer trust her.

So, Yennefer losing her powers is actually a subplot I'm entirely onboard for. Whenever a character loses something that is a pillar of their identity, and now has to reckon with who they are without that -- THAT'S THE GOOD SHIT. That's grief. That's loss. That is scattering the pieces of their self and seeing what happens when they have to put themselves back together again. Muah. Delicious fucking food. Peak drama.

We know that Yennefer has been raised to define herself, and stake her entire self-worth, on her magic. It's what she gave up everything for, because they told her it would be worth it, and now she has nothing -- not the magic, not the things she sacrificed for it. Of course she's searching for a way to get it back -- her first reaction is going to be denial and bargaining, not acceptance.

And I can think of two different ways you could play that arc, both of which have the potential for good, meaty character development:

The first (and the one I would have preferred) would have been an arc in which Yennefer discovers who she is without her magic -- that she comes to realize there's more to her than her power, that she's not helpless, that her worth isn't tied to having magic. We get a glimpse of that in the scene where she rescues Jaskier from Rience (my favorite scene in the whole damn season 😁😁😁) using her wits instead of her magic, and that was genuinely REALLY COOL -- it's intensely gratifying to see a character being clever instead of just magically overclocked.

They could have carried that through into her meeting Ciri as well, and realizing that she has more to offer Ciri as a mother and a friend than as a mage, that her love and support is worth more than her utility to Ciri. Yennefer reaches an enlightened understanding where she might well still want her magic back, but she doesn't need it to define herself anymore.

(This shares a lot of beats with disability narratives, and I think the sensitive way to handle it would be to treat it as such.)

The other kind of story would be one in which the character has no interest in reaching that enlightened understanding -- Yennefer’s not coming to the "acceptance" stage of loss, because she refuses to accept it. She's searching relentlessly for a cure, chasing down every lead for someone who could fix this, every avenue that might get her what she wants. Then the question becomes, "How far would you go for this? How much are you willing to sacrifice?"

And the answer is everything....... until it's not. And that is the pivotal character-making moment in this kind of story -- when you find out where this character's line is, the line they won't cross even for the sake of the thing they want most in all the world. Where the devil could dangle that oh-so-tempting bargain before them, and they would still say No. No, the cost you're asking isn't worth it, even for this. Yennefer -- who has spent her whole life being coached to be selfish, and has wound up alone and alienated for it -- finally has people she loves enough that she would choose them over herself.

TWN kinda went the latter route, but they didn't fully commit to it -- both the plot beats and Yennefer's emotional arc are so muddled that it's not clear what they were trying to say, and both the dramatic impact and the message got completely lost.

Problem 1: Yennefer wasn’t proactive enough.

She's sad about losing her magic, but she's not shown DOING anything about it. This is what I kept yelling at the screen about in E3, when she's just drifting aimlessly around Aretuza in that fucking prom dress and being ~helplessly damseled~ by Stregobor. Send her to the goddamn library to do some research! Show her arguing theory with Tissaia, and refusing to believe that this can't be fixed! Show us HOW BADLY she wants it, and how hard she's willing to fight for it.

Hell, seed the future conflict with Baba Yaga: Yennefer finds an account of someone who acquired their power through a deal with a demon, and she takes is to Tissaia as proof-of-concept, and Tissaia is like, yeah you CAN, but you SHOULDN'T. (Hoe don't do it!) That both establishes it to the audience as a possibility, and preemptively raises the question of what extremes Yennefer will go to in pursuit of this goal.

Problem 2: The stakes were never high enough

As I mentioned above, it's easier to get audience sympathy for a character who’s only making a devil's bargain because they're in extremis -- when something predatory has them over a barrel and is taking opportunistic advantage of the fact that they've got no other options. That hits a nerve with our sense of injustice -- we get angry when we see someone being taken advantage of like. It'll make us root for the character to find a way out of the deal somehow, because even though they agreed to it, we don’t feel that they should be held to that extortionate price.

But Yennefer is never quite desperate enough; the stakes are never quite high enough. She wants her magic back, but at no point does she need it. They never make her desperate enough to justify that bad bargain.

So raise those stakes.

Make it so that Yennefer is in desperate straits when she makes the bargain. She is in a situation that would have been trivial to escape if she'd had her magic, but now she is about to fucking DIE, and there's nothing she can do about it, and yeah, this sketchy creature that's been in her head trying to talk her into this bargain is obviously sketchy A-F, but she either takes its offer, or she dies in the next ten seconds. Them's her only two options.

Because without that level of desperation, her decision instead becomes premeditated, selfish, and stupid.

Problem 3: She needed to NOT knowingly make the evil choice.

Audiences will forgive a Faustian bargain made to save a child, but there's no way to sacrifice a child (or even seriously contemplate it) and come out of that looking good. 😬

The easiest way to fix that would have been for Yennefer to not know what the terms would be when she agreed to the bargain.

To be sure: handing a blank check to that kind of creature is a bad idea, but we've already established that Yennefer needs to be fuckin hard up when she takes that deal; she doesn't have time to negotiate or think it over, she barely has enough time to say yes.

TWN made a big mistake, imo, by not having Baba Yaga give Yennefer her powers back upfront in E5. They made an agreement, yeah, but it did not put Yennefer on the hook, in her debt. Yennefer could still have noped out at any time once she found out what the terms were, since Baba Yaga hadn't given her anything yet.

It would have been far better if Baba Yaga saved her first, restored her magic, and then presented her with the bill -- it becomes a hell of a lot harder for Yennefer to back out at that point.

(And also: get the goods upfront, because why the fuck would you trust that this sketchy creature has any intention of keeping their promise? Whoops, egg on your face, when it turns out you murdered a kid for nothing!)

Furthermore, raise the stakes on what happens if Yennefer doesn't hold up her end of the bargain: that if Yennefer doesn't deliver Ciri to Baba Yaga, then she gets eaten by the demon instead. It’s still evil to murder a child, obviously, but "their life vs my life" is a bit more of a dilemma than "their life vs my magic."

And after she meets Ciri, after Ciri becomes a real person to her rather than an abstraction, then she cannot continue to entertain the possibility of sacrificing her for another episode and a half. Full stop. Yennefer should have immediately started scrambling for "There has to be another way!" The fact that TWN-Yennefer is even still considering it after meeting Ciri says really, really shitty things about her.

(And when she does get caught out, she starts sobbing, I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT YOU WERE TO HIM!!, which is, lol holy shit, not the defense you think it is! "I totally would have sacrificed you without a qualm if you didn't happen to be my fuckboy ex's kid" ??? What? Not "because you matter to me"? Or "because I realized that what I was contemplating was FUCKING EVIL”?? And she tells Ciri that to her face?

Writers, did you stop to think about the implications of that line for one half of one hot second??)

Problem 4: Revealing Yennefer's betrayal ahead of time

By having Ciri and Geralt find out about her incipient betrayal before it happens, Yennefer never got to decide for herself that she wasn't going to go through with it. There needed to be no guilt trips or external peer pressure -- just that she herself thought this over, and decided on her own that Ciri was worth more than getting her magic back.

The fact that it wasn't her choice to come clean about that -- that the choice gets taken out of her hands before it reached the moment when she'd have decide one way or the other -- not only robbed us of what would have been a massively powerful, character-defining moment for her, but also means that we have no proof whether or not she would have done it, if left to her own devices.

Because let's be honest: Yennefer doesn't exactly have a track record of prioritizing other people above herself. Maybe she would have found her conscience in time -- or maybe she wouldn't. (She had, after all, already made this bargain knowing full well that it was going to involve sacrificing someone's kid.) It is by no means a given that she would have changed her mind.

So what a powerful moment it would have been when Yennefer throws off those teachings that tied her worth to her utility -- when she proves that she’s come to care about other people, and puts their well-being above her own. Imagine the bomb drama if Yennefer had been the one to reveal the bargain to Ciri and Geralt, ideally at the moment when she also reveals that she's rejecting it and taking their side against Baba Yaga, even at the cost of her own life. The moment when her core of steel comes through, and she takes a stand and is willing to face the consequences of her mistake.

That would have been a fantastic climax for Yennefer's character arc in S2: when she decisively shows how much she's changed from the aloof and self-absorbed (and desperately unhappy) woman that she was in S1.

But that's not what TWN gave us. There's no big dramatic moment. I literally do not even remember her sacrifice in the final battle, even though I watched S2 twice, because it got lost amid the boring-and-confusing CGI fight scene that drags on forever. Everything is supposed to be big drama there, and so Yennefer’s sacrifice doesn’t stand out.

Moreover, it doesn’t even really feel like Yennefer's choice at that point -- more that she's belatedly trying to clean up her mess, after she's already missed her chance to trade Ciri for her magic. That makes it feel a hell of a lot less sincere, like too little too late. Of-fucking-course she's sorry for it, now, now that it didn't work and everyone's mad at her. Yeah I'm sure she does regret it, now. It's just that sorry rings pretty hollow at this point.

S2 didn't give her a chance make the right choice for herself -- and as a consequence, Geralt and Ciri will never, ever know for certain what she would have done if circumstances hadn’t intervened. And realistically, there's no way for them to trust her after this; she can’t retroactively prove that she wouldn’t have betrayed them in the end, which casts a doubt that would poison that relationship forever.

So.

Breaking down the story into granular detail like this makes it feel almost like nitpicking, but those small situational changes make a huge difference in what the narrative is telling you about the character, and what kind of person they are. And the audience doesn't need to understand the mechanisms operating behind all of this -- but the writers fucking do. That's their job. To know what the words they write are doing, and the TWN writers manifestly do not. The Baba Yaga storyline is the most egregious demonstration of that, in my opinion, but it's far from the only one.

Through their shoddy execution of a straightforward trope, they made a character we're supposed to love and root for -- whom we want the other characters in the show to love too -- make choices that were unforgivably, murderously, short-sighted and selfish. Which is pretty obviously not what they meant to say about Yennefer, and not how we as the audience were supposed to interpret her actions, but that’s what they wrote. Thanks, I hate it.

(And worse: half this shit isn't even in-character. Yennefer doesn't fucking waffle like that. She is decisive and proactive to a fault, but this season reduced her to such a passive character who just gets shuffled from setpiece to setpiece. I think she makes all of four proactive decisions in that season -- freeing Cahir, rescuing Jaskier, making the deal with Baba Yaga, and sacrificing herself for Ciri -- and half of them were dumb.

Ugh, it's such bullshit. Yennefer deserved better.)

To be honest, I don't think the season needed the Baba Yaga plot at all, done well or otherwise. It was a misbegotten attempt to pump up fake drama, one that showed a lack of confidence in the story they were telling and a lack of respect for the audience -- like they didn't expect us to care about the found-family story without some cheap ~betrayals~ to spice it up.

But all they succeeded in doing was permanently undermining Yennefer's relationship with Ciri and Geralt, the relationship that is supposed to be one of the bedrocks of the series. That’s a betrayal you can’t come back from (except by authorial fiat, because they're ~Destined~ and so they have to). That's a well that's been poisoned.

And lastly, it puts Yennefer on the defensive now in her interactions with Geralt. Despite the fact that he was the one who overrode her free will by tying them together with djinn, the season ends with her having to grovel for his forgiveness. Geralt is now the one with the moral high ground, the injured party who gets to dispense or withhold forgiveness as he sees fit, and he's not required to make any real acknowledgment, or apology, or amends for what he did to her.

THANKS, I HATE IT.

So yeah, there was a lot in S2 that was Some Fucking Bullshit, but that is my narrow-focus deep dive into my single least favorite of their bad-ideas-executed-badly.

#witcher shit #long meta #twn critical #twn season 2

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