clach na ben (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
clachnaben) wrote2021-02-09 04:29 pm
clachnaben) wrote2021-02-09 04:29 pm
Entry tags:
Ghost and the Garden outtakes & thoughts
I was originally going to do another "talk to the voice recorder in my phone until I feel like stopping" commentary thing for the ghost and the garden, but then I realised I had way too many thoughts for audio (no one wants to listen to TWO HOURS of me rambling my way through the witcher canon) and also I wanted to include the outtakes that I eventually cut from the final text, but stil enjoyed writing and want to see the light of day.
There were a lot of initial inspirations for the idea. I wanted to write something in the witcher game canon, because I've been playing it non-stop for months now and enjoying the heck out of it. I wanted to write Geralt/Emhyr (tbh at the point I started writing, I hadn't met any of the other likely NPCs, like Roche or Crach, and was still fucking around in Velen) and I wanted to write something that felt as plotty and weighty as the game itself. (just without the misogyny - the witcher 3 and sexism is another dreamwidth post altogether).
I also wanted to write about Pavetta - Ciri's mother. So much of the central plot of the witcher hinges on Ciri's inheritance, that she has Elder Blood that she's inherited from her mother, and the specific confluenced of her inheritance from Emhyr & Pavetta has made her extremely powerful and fated to save the universe. And the witcher does a lot about her relationship with Emhyr, her blood father, and Geralt & Yennefer, her adoptive parents, but Pavetta is basically a non-entity. She's dead when all the major action happens, killed in accident the second she's not narratively useful anymore, and, unlike every other accidental death in the witcher universe, it is actually an accident.
She barely gets any mention in the witcher 3, despite Emhyr's obsession with recovering Ciri, and, according to the wikis, the books include the idea that Emhyr feels and felt nothing towards her. She's the mother of his heir, the reason the hedgehog knight curse was lifted, but he doesn't care about her at all? Which pissed me off, because it doesn't make sense in the story but it also doesn't make narrative sense.
One of the big themes of the witcher universe is that it isn't destiny that binds people, but actually their love for each other. Geralt is bound to Ciri (and, through a different device, Yennefer) but the reason he helps them, the reason he loves them and risks everything to be with them and support them, is because they have a genuine connection, it is love that actually binds them together. Even when Geralt resists his "destiny" he can't prevent the real father-daughter bond he forms with Ciri, and Ciri faces her destiny vs the white frost not because she has to but because she belives in saving the world. The whole theme is that human connection trascends destiny!! (So I changed the "Emhyr feels nothing for Pavetta" nonsense)
Which is why it makes no sense that Pavetta is just this useful magical womb and then dead. Obviously, this wasn't a story from Pavetta's POV or anything, but my intention was that it would be about Pavetta - about the gap, this lacuna, that she represents in the story. What is the impact of losing Pavetta on Emhyr, just in his moment of triumph? What's the impact of her potential ghost appearing? How does Emhyr think and talk about Pavetta? I didn't necessarily spell it out in the story, or have Emhyr say it directly, but I wanted it to be implied that at least part of the reason why Emhyr is so committed to the idea of Ciri as his heir, and the reason he's had no other children, is because of the impact of Pavetta's sudden death.
I also wanted the story to feel a bit like a video game quest, and I'm really proud of how it came out. All my hours of quest solving paying off! Witcher quests have a lot of diversity, and obviously there are a lot of elements they mix and match to make gameplay engaging, but there's usually a Talk To Witnesses part, a Use Your Witcher Senses part, a Battle These Pointless Enemies part, and the all-important Follow These NPCs part. Following NPCs is definitely the most boring bit, but at least it's not more cut scenes. I liked using those elements to build the story, and give a structure in which to slot in Geralt and Emhyr's interactions. There's also a bunch of game easter eggs/things I thought were funny because they're based on game mechanics. Mererid being slow, wraiths being annoying to fight, not being able to jump or fight indoors (the not fighting indoors thing is so annoying. Why are fist fights harder than any monster battle??).
I wrote the whole story faster than I've written anything before, it was just flowing out of me at 1-2 thousand words a day, when my normal pace is maybe 500. I think I had a really clear conception of the dialogue between characters in my head - most of the story is Geralt & Emhyr's dialogue. I knew what I wanted them to talk about, and how this would slowly unveil parts of each other. Obviously, as Geralt's the POV character, I think it can easily feel that it's mostly Emhyr being revealed to Geralt, but I think I also wanted it to be Geralt revealing parts of himself to Emhyr. In a way, they're both mysteries to each other, and Emhyr, in the story, is affected by his distance from Ciri, by his status as a mortal man in a realm of long-lived mages and mutants, by his grieving for Pavetta and the emotional and mental power of his past mistakes.
I also thought a lot about things in the Witcher universe that I didn't enjoy, or, to put it more bluntly, misogyny that I think actually limits the universe's impact. The strict gender roles, and the fact the game keeps inserting random Aw Shucks Sexism moments into the cutscenes, really undercuts the universe's richness and in fact actively undermines its own worldbuilding. There doesn't appear to be any actual in-universe reason why there are no female witchers (aside from Ciri, sort of), only the assumption of strict gender roles that is mapped onto this fantasy universe. And, in fact, Ciri's open identification with the term "witcher" implies that female witchers are possible but are never mentioned or have never existed. I guess it's a little more explicit in Polish, since it has gramatical gender and wiedźmin is male, but in English witcher only implies that it's the opposite of witch and English doesn't have gendered noun pairs the same way other languages do. Which is part of the reason I included the segment where Geralt talks about female witchers. I also thought it was a good character moment - Emhyr asking the question is a way of demonstrating that he can surprise Geralt and that he has an idiosyncratic way of thinking. He asks unexpected questions, and it establishes that he's not shy about being direct. It was really fun to write two characters who aren't shy or reserved whatsoever. Neither Geralt nor Emhyr hold things back, they both say what they want. It comes from two different directions. Geralt doesn't care about the consequences, and is confident in his ability to figure his way out of any consequences, either through strength of arms or magic or whatever. Geralt doesn't care what others think of him. Emhyr does care, in a certain way, but is supremely confident, massively powerful, and always thinking about what he says, so that it has maximum effect. That was definitely a super fun part of the writing, that neither of them are pining or worrying or anything, they're just both super competent and confident in their own way.
I also loved writing the "sleepover"/Alisa of Reszel story scene. I had it in my head right from the beginning because I wanted this moment of Geralt opening up and sharing with Emhyr. Obstentially, he's sharing part of his relationship with Ciri - the stories that he used to tell Ciri when she was little - but I think it's also sharing a part of his own upbringing. Geralt does have a strong connection to his witcher family, and, despite his mixed feelings about the process of creating witchers, does have good memories about being a boy and the culture of witchers. So, sharing a story like this is also him sharing some of himself with Emhyr, the same way that Geralt didn't know what to do with Ciri so he shared witcher-ness with her.
The story is an adapted version of a story from The Lore of Scotland by Kingshill and Westwood, which is a book I own and absolutely love. It's basically a compendium of local folklore and stories compiled by location, with some inserts on specific themes. One of the themes is obviously water-horses and kelpies, and the book has a lot of the different variations of water-horse and kelpie stories. I picked the one I did because I thought I could adapt it to the witcher universe the best - the lake gave the potential for some witcher quest style exploration especially. In the fic, it takes place in "the village of Barra" but the original story is from the island of Barra, in the Outer Hebrides. Most of the elements are the same - a young woman was being wooed by a man, she notices he had pond weed for hair when he lays his head in her lap so she cuts part of her skirt away to run home. He comes back a few days later and kidnaps her, and later he family find some of her internal organs by the lake. The "finding internal organs" part is a consistent element to kelpie stories. Apparently they didn't eat liver/lungs/internal organs? Anyway, that's how you know it's folklore, when it's horribly grisly. I didn't even have to add in any bloody bits for the witcher universe! The bits I did add are about Alisa's contract, her fighting the water-horse, her looting the bodies, which is all just lifted from witcher contract quests. I realised later I done goofed with the "Fisherman's Friend" potion which I made up because I actually hadn't found the Killer Whale potion recipe in game. (Killer Whale actually does let you breathe longer under water). Oh well, Fisherman's Friend ~~sounds better, and maybe Alisa just has different potions, since she's supposed to be a historical witcher. I also took some liberties with having Alisa fight under water, but that's mostly me sublimating my frustration about not being able to fight underwater in the games. Why can I fire my crosbow but not use any of my magic signs or sword!! Another inexplicable game mechanic.
I remain obsessed with the side female witchers I invented in my head for this story, and desperately want a whole series of short stories of Alisa solving contracts even though I made her up. I love the witcher characters we meet in the games (even Letho, despite his quest being annoying) and would love more like "witcher history" stuff.
One of my betas described the story as "romantic but unsentimental" (I had some really great betas) which was really what I wanted to go for. Emhyr and Geralt are romancing each other, in their own ways, but they're not sentimental about the process, as a consequences of their characters. That really played into how I wrote the sex scenes, as people who like each other and enjoy fucking, but who aren't necessarily sentimental about each other. I loved writing the dialogue both during and in between sex - they like talking to each other! Emhyr is interested in Geralt's opinion! Geralt tells Emhyr his honest opinion! I always hate sex scenes that don't include dialogue, or like, chatting in between sex, since I think it makes sex seem really weird and seperate to who someone is as a person. So they talk! They chat about old loves and mistakes and Temerian politics! I also liked including Emhyr thinking about his future, what he's gonna do as a retired man. Man needs to get a hobby.
There were a good handful of dialogue moments I ended up cutting out, because they didn't make sense or I didn't have a good scene to put them in. Some of it's about how Geralt thinks about ghosts/wraiths. The witcher universe is not at all consistent about what's a ghost/what's a wraith/are they the same things/how do spirits even work but I do think a man who's spent most of his life fighting wraiths because of human cruelty would have some strong opinions on them, the same way he had strong opinions about corpse disposal because of ghouls.
I desperately need to reply to comments on the fic, because I got some lovely comments, but if people want more director's cut/commentary things, or want to ask questions, I'll happily answer them in comments here!
Outtakes
He hated wraiths. Fighting them mostly involved standing in one place and waiting for them to materialise, which was both boring and frustrating, and when they did get you, their claws were vicious.
Ghouls and drowners and even water hags were stupid and ugly as sin, but they were mostly motivated by hunger. Wraiths were different. They didn't need to eat to live, or fight out of survival. They were just vessels of hatred and gasping greed, and they killed because they were manifestations of the cruelty of the living.
&&&
"You could have stayed in Cintra," Geralt said. Emhyr shook his head.
"It would have been a kind of death," he said firmly. He hadn't taken any time to think about his answer, it had clearly come to him immediately. Or maybe it was an answer he had thought of before. "I had held onto myself, as a drowning man clings to a spar of wood in a rough sea. I was Emhyr var Emreis, and remembering that was all that held me to the world of humanity through my curse. It was the horizon point I fixed myself to. If I had stayed in Cintra, I would have needed to release my hold on that name, on all that came with the inheritance of my blood. Emhyr var Emreis would have died, and Duny, the Urcheon of Erlenwald, would have lived instead."
Geralt shrugged. "Would that have been so bad?" he asked. Emhyr looked at him, his eyes piercing and insightful.
"Perhaps not," he said. "But it would have been the choice of a different man."
&&&
"You really want Ciri to marry him?" Geralt asked. Emhyr didn't shrug, but he did make a thoughtful face.
"She is not in a position where she must be married," he said. "It would be wise of her to at least consider a wise match, to cement her position. But Morvran would be a strong ally as friend or husband. I have not invested in him idly."
"Right. Giving him the Tretogor command," Geralt said, raising his drink. Emhyr looked up briefly from his work.
"Morvran will establish his position by cementing our final dominion of the North. He shall be my left hand, as Cirill will be my right," he said. Geralt raised an eyebrow.
"What does that make me?" he asked. "A foot?"
&&&
"Hmm," Geralt said. "Radovid knew how to fight a war, but he was crazier than a bag of cats."
"Quite," Emhyr said, with a thin smile.
There were a lot of initial inspirations for the idea. I wanted to write something in the witcher game canon, because I've been playing it non-stop for months now and enjoying the heck out of it. I wanted to write Geralt/Emhyr (tbh at the point I started writing, I hadn't met any of the other likely NPCs, like Roche or Crach, and was still fucking around in Velen) and I wanted to write something that felt as plotty and weighty as the game itself. (just without the misogyny - the witcher 3 and sexism is another dreamwidth post altogether).
I also wanted to write about Pavetta - Ciri's mother. So much of the central plot of the witcher hinges on Ciri's inheritance, that she has Elder Blood that she's inherited from her mother, and the specific confluenced of her inheritance from Emhyr & Pavetta has made her extremely powerful and fated to save the universe. And the witcher does a lot about her relationship with Emhyr, her blood father, and Geralt & Yennefer, her adoptive parents, but Pavetta is basically a non-entity. She's dead when all the major action happens, killed in accident the second she's not narratively useful anymore, and, unlike every other accidental death in the witcher universe, it is actually an accident.
She barely gets any mention in the witcher 3, despite Emhyr's obsession with recovering Ciri, and, according to the wikis, the books include the idea that Emhyr feels and felt nothing towards her. She's the mother of his heir, the reason the hedgehog knight curse was lifted, but he doesn't care about her at all? Which pissed me off, because it doesn't make sense in the story but it also doesn't make narrative sense.
One of the big themes of the witcher universe is that it isn't destiny that binds people, but actually their love for each other. Geralt is bound to Ciri (and, through a different device, Yennefer) but the reason he helps them, the reason he loves them and risks everything to be with them and support them, is because they have a genuine connection, it is love that actually binds them together. Even when Geralt resists his "destiny" he can't prevent the real father-daughter bond he forms with Ciri, and Ciri faces her destiny vs the white frost not because she has to but because she belives in saving the world. The whole theme is that human connection trascends destiny!! (So I changed the "Emhyr feels nothing for Pavetta" nonsense)
Which is why it makes no sense that Pavetta is just this useful magical womb and then dead. Obviously, this wasn't a story from Pavetta's POV or anything, but my intention was that it would be about Pavetta - about the gap, this lacuna, that she represents in the story. What is the impact of losing Pavetta on Emhyr, just in his moment of triumph? What's the impact of her potential ghost appearing? How does Emhyr think and talk about Pavetta? I didn't necessarily spell it out in the story, or have Emhyr say it directly, but I wanted it to be implied that at least part of the reason why Emhyr is so committed to the idea of Ciri as his heir, and the reason he's had no other children, is because of the impact of Pavetta's sudden death.
I also wanted the story to feel a bit like a video game quest, and I'm really proud of how it came out. All my hours of quest solving paying off! Witcher quests have a lot of diversity, and obviously there are a lot of elements they mix and match to make gameplay engaging, but there's usually a Talk To Witnesses part, a Use Your Witcher Senses part, a Battle These Pointless Enemies part, and the all-important Follow These NPCs part. Following NPCs is definitely the most boring bit, but at least it's not more cut scenes. I liked using those elements to build the story, and give a structure in which to slot in Geralt and Emhyr's interactions. There's also a bunch of game easter eggs/things I thought were funny because they're based on game mechanics. Mererid being slow, wraiths being annoying to fight, not being able to jump or fight indoors (the not fighting indoors thing is so annoying. Why are fist fights harder than any monster battle??).
I wrote the whole story faster than I've written anything before, it was just flowing out of me at 1-2 thousand words a day, when my normal pace is maybe 500. I think I had a really clear conception of the dialogue between characters in my head - most of the story is Geralt & Emhyr's dialogue. I knew what I wanted them to talk about, and how this would slowly unveil parts of each other. Obviously, as Geralt's the POV character, I think it can easily feel that it's mostly Emhyr being revealed to Geralt, but I think I also wanted it to be Geralt revealing parts of himself to Emhyr. In a way, they're both mysteries to each other, and Emhyr, in the story, is affected by his distance from Ciri, by his status as a mortal man in a realm of long-lived mages and mutants, by his grieving for Pavetta and the emotional and mental power of his past mistakes.
I also thought a lot about things in the Witcher universe that I didn't enjoy, or, to put it more bluntly, misogyny that I think actually limits the universe's impact. The strict gender roles, and the fact the game keeps inserting random Aw Shucks Sexism moments into the cutscenes, really undercuts the universe's richness and in fact actively undermines its own worldbuilding. There doesn't appear to be any actual in-universe reason why there are no female witchers (aside from Ciri, sort of), only the assumption of strict gender roles that is mapped onto this fantasy universe. And, in fact, Ciri's open identification with the term "witcher" implies that female witchers are possible but are never mentioned or have never existed. I guess it's a little more explicit in Polish, since it has gramatical gender and wiedźmin is male, but in English witcher only implies that it's the opposite of witch and English doesn't have gendered noun pairs the same way other languages do. Which is part of the reason I included the segment where Geralt talks about female witchers. I also thought it was a good character moment - Emhyr asking the question is a way of demonstrating that he can surprise Geralt and that he has an idiosyncratic way of thinking. He asks unexpected questions, and it establishes that he's not shy about being direct. It was really fun to write two characters who aren't shy or reserved whatsoever. Neither Geralt nor Emhyr hold things back, they both say what they want. It comes from two different directions. Geralt doesn't care about the consequences, and is confident in his ability to figure his way out of any consequences, either through strength of arms or magic or whatever. Geralt doesn't care what others think of him. Emhyr does care, in a certain way, but is supremely confident, massively powerful, and always thinking about what he says, so that it has maximum effect. That was definitely a super fun part of the writing, that neither of them are pining or worrying or anything, they're just both super competent and confident in their own way.
I also loved writing the "sleepover"/Alisa of Reszel story scene. I had it in my head right from the beginning because I wanted this moment of Geralt opening up and sharing with Emhyr. Obstentially, he's sharing part of his relationship with Ciri - the stories that he used to tell Ciri when she was little - but I think it's also sharing a part of his own upbringing. Geralt does have a strong connection to his witcher family, and, despite his mixed feelings about the process of creating witchers, does have good memories about being a boy and the culture of witchers. So, sharing a story like this is also him sharing some of himself with Emhyr, the same way that Geralt didn't know what to do with Ciri so he shared witcher-ness with her.
The story is an adapted version of a story from The Lore of Scotland by Kingshill and Westwood, which is a book I own and absolutely love. It's basically a compendium of local folklore and stories compiled by location, with some inserts on specific themes. One of the themes is obviously water-horses and kelpies, and the book has a lot of the different variations of water-horse and kelpie stories. I picked the one I did because I thought I could adapt it to the witcher universe the best - the lake gave the potential for some witcher quest style exploration especially. In the fic, it takes place in "the village of Barra" but the original story is from the island of Barra, in the Outer Hebrides. Most of the elements are the same - a young woman was being wooed by a man, she notices he had pond weed for hair when he lays his head in her lap so she cuts part of her skirt away to run home. He comes back a few days later and kidnaps her, and later he family find some of her internal organs by the lake. The "finding internal organs" part is a consistent element to kelpie stories. Apparently they didn't eat liver/lungs/internal organs? Anyway, that's how you know it's folklore, when it's horribly grisly. I didn't even have to add in any bloody bits for the witcher universe! The bits I did add are about Alisa's contract, her fighting the water-horse, her looting the bodies, which is all just lifted from witcher contract quests. I realised later I done goofed with the "Fisherman's Friend" potion which I made up because I actually hadn't found the Killer Whale potion recipe in game. (Killer Whale actually does let you breathe longer under water). Oh well, Fisherman's Friend ~~sounds better, and maybe Alisa just has different potions, since she's supposed to be a historical witcher. I also took some liberties with having Alisa fight under water, but that's mostly me sublimating my frustration about not being able to fight underwater in the games. Why can I fire my crosbow but not use any of my magic signs or sword!! Another inexplicable game mechanic.
I remain obsessed with the side female witchers I invented in my head for this story, and desperately want a whole series of short stories of Alisa solving contracts even though I made her up. I love the witcher characters we meet in the games (even Letho, despite his quest being annoying) and would love more like "witcher history" stuff.
One of my betas described the story as "romantic but unsentimental" (I had some really great betas) which was really what I wanted to go for. Emhyr and Geralt are romancing each other, in their own ways, but they're not sentimental about the process, as a consequences of their characters. That really played into how I wrote the sex scenes, as people who like each other and enjoy fucking, but who aren't necessarily sentimental about each other. I loved writing the dialogue both during and in between sex - they like talking to each other! Emhyr is interested in Geralt's opinion! Geralt tells Emhyr his honest opinion! I always hate sex scenes that don't include dialogue, or like, chatting in between sex, since I think it makes sex seem really weird and seperate to who someone is as a person. So they talk! They chat about old loves and mistakes and Temerian politics! I also liked including Emhyr thinking about his future, what he's gonna do as a retired man. Man needs to get a hobby.
There were a good handful of dialogue moments I ended up cutting out, because they didn't make sense or I didn't have a good scene to put them in. Some of it's about how Geralt thinks about ghosts/wraiths. The witcher universe is not at all consistent about what's a ghost/what's a wraith/are they the same things/how do spirits even work but I do think a man who's spent most of his life fighting wraiths because of human cruelty would have some strong opinions on them, the same way he had strong opinions about corpse disposal because of ghouls.
I desperately need to reply to comments on the fic, because I got some lovely comments, but if people want more director's cut/commentary things, or want to ask questions, I'll happily answer them in comments here!
Outtakes
He hated wraiths. Fighting them mostly involved standing in one place and waiting for them to materialise, which was both boring and frustrating, and when they did get you, their claws were vicious.
Ghouls and drowners and even water hags were stupid and ugly as sin, but they were mostly motivated by hunger. Wraiths were different. They didn't need to eat to live, or fight out of survival. They were just vessels of hatred and gasping greed, and they killed because they were manifestations of the cruelty of the living.
&&&
"You could have stayed in Cintra," Geralt said. Emhyr shook his head.
"It would have been a kind of death," he said firmly. He hadn't taken any time to think about his answer, it had clearly come to him immediately. Or maybe it was an answer he had thought of before. "I had held onto myself, as a drowning man clings to a spar of wood in a rough sea. I was Emhyr var Emreis, and remembering that was all that held me to the world of humanity through my curse. It was the horizon point I fixed myself to. If I had stayed in Cintra, I would have needed to release my hold on that name, on all that came with the inheritance of my blood. Emhyr var Emreis would have died, and Duny, the Urcheon of Erlenwald, would have lived instead."
Geralt shrugged. "Would that have been so bad?" he asked. Emhyr looked at him, his eyes piercing and insightful.
"Perhaps not," he said. "But it would have been the choice of a different man."
&&&
"You really want Ciri to marry him?" Geralt asked. Emhyr didn't shrug, but he did make a thoughtful face.
"She is not in a position where she must be married," he said. "It would be wise of her to at least consider a wise match, to cement her position. But Morvran would be a strong ally as friend or husband. I have not invested in him idly."
"Right. Giving him the Tretogor command," Geralt said, raising his drink. Emhyr looked up briefly from his work.
"Morvran will establish his position by cementing our final dominion of the North. He shall be my left hand, as Cirill will be my right," he said. Geralt raised an eyebrow.
"What does that make me?" he asked. "A foot?"
&&&
"Hmm," Geralt said. "Radovid knew how to fight a war, but he was crazier than a bag of cats."
"Quite," Emhyr said, with a thin smile.
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Also let me tell you again how much I love that story. "A foot" is a hilarious line and I'm glad to see it :D
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<3 <3 thank you for helping make it a better story! there's lots of things that changed because of your notes - I think the intro especially got a lot better, but it improved all over the place :D.
lol, I loved the foot line. Any opportunity to let Geralt be sarcastic!
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