Love my non-political fantasy series that heavily features racism, colonialism, the consequences those things have for the colonised, and their armed resistance to colonisation.
didn't Geralt literally die defending people during a pogrom in the books?
Funny how different "non-political" fantasy art is from someone who was raised with the Soviet education system and got said art published under the Soviet Union compared to "non-political" fantasy art from libs raised in a white-supremacist settler-colonialist state.
This just made me realize I never bothered to learn which parts of the Soviet bloc were actually part of the USSR proper and which were merely Socialist states allied with it.
Although I stand by the broader point contrasting The Witcher with the fantasy literature that was being written in the US and western Europe at the same time, since this was contemporaneous with a bunch of uncritical monarchist-wank and race realism as well as stuff like what would be published in Heavy Metal which was chauvinist and borderline pornographic (and still, somehow, less sexist and chauvinist than the liberal mainstream pop culture of the 80s).
i feel like a lot of the time "my art is non-political" is just to get people to stop being annoying. this guy might genuinely not see politics in this, but also might just be sick of people asking about a specific allegory
you get to help kill a racist fascist prick monarch in the game. Not political.
i used to visit r/witcher3 when I played this game last time in 2018 and so many losers on there were saying Geralt should stay "neutral" and not interfere in politics.
The games seem to subvert the author then, because Geralt is constantly mentioning he wants to stay completely neutral, but still ends up on one side or another anyway. I'm pretty sure there's even a plot point in Witcher 2 where trying to remain neutral implicitly makes you support the human colonizers against a village of elves.
If I remember correctly it is thought that humans are from an entirely different dimension and were brought along with the monsters during the conjunction
Sapkowski is a troll who lies in interviews, and has never given a straight answer about where his politics lie. In the Hussite Trillogy, the main character literally says in the 2nd book that he's joining the hussites to establish "Communism" by name which is pretty impressive considering it's 1426.
I think in the first season of the Netflix show there's literally a scene where an Elf King asks him rhetorically what his people should do because they're dispossessed and hunted and Witcherman more or less said "IDK go somewhere else I guess"
That scene is much weirder in the books, a lot of supernatural shit goes on I think? Like a nature deity and stuff?
More the opposite, in the books he always sides with the oppressed groups
