Is it me or are we getting a lot of 'Blog' like topic starters lately? Not complaining but it's starting to get noticeable. Anyway, I don't agree that the Witcher seems sexist and so rebuttals ahoy!
The Almighty Aardvark said:
First off, this game is blatantly one sided in its sex appeal, and it's shown off quite frequently. Out of the three main female characters I've seen so far, two of them were introduced totally naked, and one of them is your daughter figure. From what I know of Triss, I wouldn't be at all surprised if she was introduced with a similar level of apparel. The degree to which everyone seems to fawn over Geralt, attractive stud that he is, is kind of remniscient of a harem anime.
Man, if I had an oren for every dude walking around in just their pants in Oxenfurt I could afford to buy a blindfold so I don't need to see the sea of sinewy Polish dockworkers ever again.
I'm assuming you're talking about Keira for the second one since we aren't introduced to Ciri naked. But as regards the sexy sorceresses, it's a little context sensitive. AND oddly enough, is part of the setting.
In the Witcher universe sorceresses are, traditionally, ugly girls who are taught magic and can then use it to smooth out the features they don't want. For example, Yennefer was a hunchback. It's also a pretty handy feature since, as you might have gleamed, they're quite politically active and it never hurts to be a stupidly attractive woman when you're manipulating people. As you will hopefully discover, even one of the smartest men in the political landscape of the kingdoms got completely taken for a ride by one sorceress in the second game and is still very bitter about it. As regards the Geralt being attractive thing... barring
two, one (gotta be honest, it really does just feel like one sometimes) example they're doing it to manipulate him. Because Geralt is many things but one thing he is not is good with women.
Speaking of Geralt being an attractive stud, this is not chiefly because he is particularly attractive, but because just about every other male NPC in the world is incredibly ugly. You see this kind of trope very often in games, movies, etc... where the world is full of drop dead gorgeous female NPCs, and fuck ugly male NPCs. Except for the player character of course, because the player doesn't want their avatar to be ugly, they just don't have any interest in the other male NPC's attractiveness because the player is quite evidently assumed to be a guy.
Peasants gonna peasant. There are good looking people in the world just not many humans among them, NPCs in particular do not have a good run of handsome or beautiful faces, quite equal opportunity hideousness.
Which leads me to the Bloody Baron questline. Now don't get me wrong, I think this questline overall very good, and I love just how personal it is, as well as how they didn't straight up paint the Baron as an inhuman monster. From here, it's worth noting that there's spoilers for the Bloody Baron questline. It made me kind of uncomfortable watching the Bloody Baron's questline, I liked that they made him human, but they kept toeing the line between making him understandable and human, to making him seem sympathetic and justified. Now that I've almost finished the quest, I have a better idea of where it stands, and as things look, it's kind of shitty.
Now, I'm trying to abstain from personal takes on this, but I'm confused how you can like how they try and humanise him but then object that it makes him look sympathetic (though notably, I and many other players would never say he's shown as being
justified), is that not what makes this questline so interesting? That the Baron has a complete and rounded character who is very much reprehensible but at the same time you understand why he does what he does?
To start off with, the Baron requests that you find his missing wife and daughter. You don't have much detail to start off with, but he appears to just be a doting father and husband. As the quest unfolds, however, you see that this is a facade, and that his wife and daughter ran away because he regularly beat his wife. To the point that she apparently miscarried the child. As even more unfolds, it turns out that the child was not miscarried from the beatings, but from a deal she made with the Crones because she couldn't stand the thought of giving birth to child of this husband who she didn't love and beat her.
Important to mention, the Baron IS a doting father. He quite legitimately loves Tamara and she doesn't mention him striking her while listing in detail his other faults (Tamara is kind of important to understanding the Bloody Baron a little more since she offers another perspective on things)
Where this turns south for me, is the conversation you have with the Baron after you find out Anna's (The wife's) fate. The Baron explains that he's not the only guilty party here, and elaborates more on the story. When they first wed, the Baron was a soldier, they were in love to start off with, but then he spent all his time in battle, in campaigns. During that time, Anna fell out of love with him, and cheated on him with another man. When he returned, she declared that she was in love with this new man, and that she was going to take their daughter and go live with him. The Baron was furious, and drunk, so he killed the man his wife loved, tore him to pieces and fed it to his dogs. Anna became upset, and tried to kill him with a knife, the Baron then hit her, because it was the only way to calm her. Over the remaining years of their marriage she would keep trying to kill him, kill herself, or goad him into violence, after which he'd continue to beat her until she stopped.
Haven't played that bit in a while but from what I remember the beatings were usually that Anna knew exactly what to say to set him off and would do it because of the mental distress it would cause. But I'm glad you mention his backstory because it does actually illustrate why the Baron does what he does; he is a soldier. He has exactly one way to handle problems and like the old saying about hammers and nails, he couldn't handle Anna doing her best to harm him the only way she knew how. Plus, as you go on to point out-
First of all, Anna cheating on her husband was wrong, no question. So was her just taking their child and leaving. However, the Baron's response to dismember the man that she loves, feed him to dogs, and then expect his wife to then continue living with him happily? Holy fucking shit, that's just whole other level of wrong.
Indeed, this was a gross over-reaction, which the Baron himself acknowledges. Pretty fair to say booze was involved. But then the follow up question would be; what would have been the right response? Bear in mind, this guy has been fighting, killing and maraudering all for this woman he's loved, think of all the things he must have done in the wars, what would you expect him to do? I highly doubt his thought process was vicious murder -> everything good, it was just how he wanted to try and get back at Anna AND the guy who cuckolded him.
If the Baron was still portrayed as in the wrong after this, then that would have been fine, but the two dialogue choices were:
"Sounds like you two deserve each other"
And
"You're still in the wrong".
What happens if you choose the latter? The bit that Geralt decides to pick at for what makes him in the wrong is that "The Baron was in the wrong for being away from his wife, which led her to cheat on him". Uh... what? Out of everything that happened - having driven his wife to the point of suicide by slaughtering the man she loved in front of her, keeping her trapped in a relationship with a man who murdered someone he loved, and beating her regularly in fits of rage - the mistake he made was "Putting her in a position to cheat"? All this leads me to believe is that they wanted to have a dialogue choice besides "You were both in the wrong", and the closest they could figure out was "Uh, how about if he was somehow responsible for her cheating?". This is further reinforced by how Geralt is totally shut down if he says that. Showing that anything besides "You were both in the wrong" is the answer for people who clearly didn't think this situation through enough.
To be fair, Geralt's OWN relationships are gigantically fucked up, the very core of the current love triangle is the Triss/Yennefer issue and the complications of who's cheating on whom. A certain amount of this exchange could well be Geralt's own somewhat toxic past with relationships and zeroing on what is probably the minorest point. Also, how does saying they deserve each other exonerate him? It's just acknowledging that Anna was equally shitty. While it is the minorest point, it's possibly also the one defensible one given he acknowledges he over-reacted.
Frankly, the elaboration that the Bloody Baron gave make him seem a lot worse to me, as opposed to more sympathetic. And everything following it gives rise to this notion that cheating on your husband is pretty much equivalent to murdering your wife's lover in front of her, driving her to suicide, then beating her regularly over the years. Thus far, everything that I'm seeing is convincing me that they were going for a "Both people were at fault" situation.
Why is this sexist? The notion of years of spousal abused being even close to equivalent to cheating on your husband is incredibly dismissive of the severity of spousal abuse, and gives the suggestion that somehow she was asking for it by goading him, and cheating on him.
Are you forgetting that Anna sacrificed the life of a baby? Remember how the Bloody Baron looked when he had to name her? The Baron's claims that she abused him verbally and knew how to make him fly into a rage make a pretty solid argument that Anna was at least as at fault. If you want to chalk it blow for blow, Anna did a pretty solid job of fucking her husband up, too. I count one person dear to their spouse killed on each side, the question of whether mental or physical abuse hurts more and Anna has cheating under her belt too. Now, I wouldn't necessarily say it was equivalent but you can't deny Anna did some pretty shitty things to her husband. Bearing in mind he loved her; he may have been a TERRIBLE husband, but he did love her.
Just to end this off, I want to remind everyone again that I like this game, and moreover, there is a lot that I really like in the Bloody Baron arc. That being said, the way it handles a lot of things leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
There really is no GOOD way to address this. Philip and Anna Strenger are an absolutely awful pair of people. I think that CDProjekt RED were attempting to balance the books with how you perceive the couple. It'd be immensely easy to portray either Philip or Anna as the victim but having them BOTH be complete shitsacs to each other? Well, you feel they swung too far into the Baron's court. I can't say I agree but that's your take. I DEFINITELY wouldn't say that trying to show a violent husband as a human being makes the game sexist.
I would also add, you might want to get a bit further into the game before trying to examine the sexism of an entire game. You sound like you've very nearly gotten to the end of the first third of Act 1. So... you have a while left to go. You are, of course, still entitled to an opinion. But you may want to get a bit more information before you begin Chinese Room-ing it.
