Casual Shinji said:
Adam Jensen said:
All those elaborate explanations as to why people don't like witchers. It's quite simple. They're social outcasts who keep to themselves, they're weird and they ask for money to kill monsters that just ate your loved ones.(...)
That doesn't explain all those regular mooks wanting to pick a fight with you though, knowing full well what you are. I'm beginning to notice that a lot of quest based fights with soldiers or bandits starts with them bolstering how there's only one of you and a larger amount of them. If Witchers are this infamous and thought of as monsters, don't these guys know I have skirmishes like this for breakfast? You'd think they wouldn't wanna fuck with me on general principal. I don't know, it is the Middle Ages -- maybe these people really are
that stupid.
Let's say that times have changed a bit.
- humans established themselves well enough to fend off majority of monsters, with species that are drawing too much attention frequently going extinct;
- with that in mind, witchers are becoming obsolete and unnecessary;
- furthermore, it's hard to tell anyone has capability to create new witchers, it's certainly impossible for Kaer Morhen group;
- everything mentioned above means it's harder and harder to actually meet a witcher; you get a bunch of folk tales and Dandelion's drivel as your source material - so no wonder various mooks have a difficult time believing every over-the-top nonsense and rather go "lol, I can take him easy";
The above can change due to:
- war, which inevitably causes a spike in corpse-eater population; law enforcement wanes, military is busy elsewhere, so villages are left to fend for themselves, which emboldens various creatures even further; witchers are in demand, at least for a while - and various morons get their chance to earn a Darwin Prize;
- a significant event, the one people are gossiping about for years; think "Butcher of Blaviken" and what impact it has due to being related to a scary public spectacle, not some 1vs1 monster fight in a cave no one even heard about; obviously, it wanes with the distance as information is using Medieval Crawling Technique to travel;
Unrelated:
- we have no idea Geralt is "the only witcher to care about sex"; if anything, it's understood that witchers are made a bit more interesting in that department exactly because what their mutation causes (not just "no STD, no kids, no problem); what we do have is a lot of stories about Geralt with other witchers remaining relatively anonymous, perhaps because they didn't get their own Dandelion;
- overall quality of AS books does go down, though I won't speak for western translations; short stories are great, Blood of the Elves and Time of Disdain managed to keep me interested with intrigue, politics and certain twists, but, in retrospect, everything later felt like worth reading only because I already had an investment and a diminishing hope resolution wouldn't look like some washed-out arthurian reference; so much for that I guess; I agree preaching and amateurish social commentary gets more and more cringeworthy - which is yet another proof that you can be a good storyteller, a wordsmith and a joker without having anything worthwhile to say on your own; sadly, AS tries so hard... :/