I’ve never understood why witchers are vilified, given that they help the common folk deal with monsters that I’d probably piss myself standing face-to-face with. Who wants to duke it out with a walking carcass like the rotfiend or try to salvage what decency is left in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the b𝐆labbering🧔 foetus that is a botchling? Witchers do the dirty work, but they’re not exactly popular. The latest prequel film on Netflix, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nightmare of the Wolf, does a perfect job of showing us why.
Witchers are nomadic. They wander from town to town to take contracts and help local people deal with whatever monster is pl꧒aguing their village. Often, they’ll even be called in by nobles and royalty to deal with especially irksome problems and curses. The issue is that they’re often met with spitting, booing, and general outcry from the locals, the guards, and even members of nobility that vehemently object to hiring mutants to solve their problems.
You come across it time and time again whether you’re watching the show, playing the games, or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:reading the books. Sure, there are trickles of explanations throughout, but it’s not quite as blatant as in this new prequel film. That’s because Nightmare of the Wolf is about the tipping point where humanity declares enough is enough and launches a war against witchers by sacking 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kaer Morhen. There’s no real villain to the story. It’s about terrible people confronting terrible people, lending itself to the bleak dark fantasy motif that the series🅠 revels in. Yet, while it s😼hows us the corruption rooted in humanity’s core that we know all too well of in the real world, it also highlights the issue with the witchers.
Coin is paramount to whether a witcher will bother helping. It’s not altruism, it’s their job. Potions, ingredients, oils, nights at the tavern, and the upkeep for Kaer Morhen aren’t cheap. Putting coin first was always something I understood, but Nightmare of the Wolf takes it a step further. It’s not just coin that matters. Ironically, it’s about cultivating a reputation. Ignoring people who can’t ‘fess up is the alleged right move because helping them out would be “bad f🐬or business.” Meanwhile, associating with elves often drives away human customers and royalty, lending itself to the very reason that the witchers don’t get involved with politics. That means that if a witcher finds an elf being discriminated against or even harassed, most will turn the other way because intervening could drive off potential future customers. It’s a grim commentary on capitalism, bringing to light the problem with putting money over life. Wanting coin isn’t necessarily a bad thing - the witchers do have to get by, somehow - but putting coin above everything is where witchers ♒damage their reputations.
In Nightmare of the Wolf, they go a step further. Witchers begin to literally create monsters. They begin to manufacture 168澳洲幸运ꦺꦓ5开奖网:the problem that they are hired to solve. It’s akin to a firefighter committingꦕ arson so that they can do their job, putting lives in danger unnecessarily, and it undermines the whole creed of the witchers - protecting humanity from those that bled in due to the incursions. The hunger for coin is what makes the witchers a corrupt organization. For many, it becomes the driving goal. While that’s apparent in the games, it never gets the attention it doꦐes here.
Being a witcher isn’t about the noble cause of protecting humanity anymore. It’s about ma🥃king a quick buck. Vesemir and Geralt aren’t innocent to this, either. The two have often gone above and beyond compared to their kin, but they still fall prey to the trappings of their brothers in arms because it is a deep-seated issue that stems from the manner in which witchers operate. Them homegrowing monsters like Dr Carl Hill in Re-Animator is an inevitability with their greed. The solution is a tough one to work out because witchers are so vilified that trying to undo the damage to their reputation would be nigh impossible, but humanity probably couldn’t handle what they do.
That’s because witchers aren’t bog-standard soldiers. They’re raised from childhood to be monster slayers while also being modified to become superhuman. To qualify, 𓂃they undergo trials. They have to adapt to new diets, undergo intense physical training, and embark on a pilgrimage outside Kaer Morhen that is plagued with monsters and tasks too demanding for a child. I could barely climb a tree as a kid, let alone swim across a lake and take on drowners. This new prequel shows the trials without sugarcoating their cruel reality, and depicting them visually does a lot more to dissuade any love fꦜor the witchers than talking about them ever did. Naive kids are thrown into the thick of it and left to die. Helpless, alone, often orphaned, their flame is snuffed out as coldly as it can be. Some don’t even have a choice.
When a witcher wraps up their contract, they can enact the Law of Surprises. We see this pulled off by Geralt in the Netflix series. What it means is that when the paying customer eventually has a child, it's the property of the witchers. It’s one thing to let kids find a way to make something of their lives, it’s another to conscript infants into such a gruelling order. The stigma of being inhumane and disconnected from empathy certainly has more weight when you factor in how callously the witchers handle kids. But, ultimately, the witchers know that they are monsters. There’s a potent line from the film, one that stuck with me long after I’d turned it off. It arouses the debate of necessary evil, whether the ends justify the means: “The only thing keeping men from hunting us are the scarier beasts we keep away.”
