Overall, I probably spent about around 75 hours of the last few weeks playing both The Witcher and The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings, a couple of role-playing games. They pride themselves on being a fresh, darker alternative to other fantasy RPGs - the Dungeons and Dragons spinoffs, Bioware’s Dragon Age series, and so on - and are based on a series of short stories and novels by Andrzej Sapkowski.
There are some wonderful things about these games. The choices you make are never explicitly moral - often, there’s a determined trajectory of events (progression to an all-out civil war, the death of at least one repugnant character), and all the player can do is influence the details. I liked this part of the gameplay - all too often, games like this put you in the shoes of a hero, and while that’s immensely gratifying it’s also narratively redundant when it’s done so often.
Geralt is, at his core, a non-interventionist who finds himself roped into grand political conspiracies largely by accident, and playing as this sort of character makes a change from playing yet another character who might as well be nicknamed the Chosen One.
Having said all that, the way these games deal with women is awkward at best, and downright awful at worst.
I feel like this issue requires some nuance, and the involvement of another dark fantasy series - specifically, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which bears some cosmetic resemblance to the world of The Witcher, even if its narrative details are very different. In both series, there’s an attitude towards women that is kind of repugnant. The TV adaptation of Martin’s series has come to rely on the threat of sexual assault as window dressing, almost - even in the books, there are plenty of characters (referred to as “rapers”, because the word “rapist” too closely focuses on the confirmed act, I guess) who solely exist to pose a threat to women.
There is an argument here, and it’s that Sapkowski and Martin’s worlds are intended as a dramatic spinning-off from recorded history, where - surprise, surprise - women have never really been afforded much respect. There’s certainly fuel for that argument - King’s Landing in A Song of Ice and Fire and the Northern kingdoms in The Witcher are a good stand-in for feudal empire, and both Essos in ASOIAF and places like Zerrikania in The Witcher are decent parallels to a vaguely threatening African or Middle Eastern proxy. Problems arise when you read these parallels too closely, but there’s enough to suggest that the societal issues presented in these worlds are intended to reflect our own history, rather than just invent new conflicts.
Further complicating matters is the fact that series like this tend to have compelling female characters in amongst the swathes of irrelevant, often scantily-clad ones. Martin has Daenerys Targaryen, and Arya Stark, and Cersei Lannister; The Witcher has the sorceresses Philippa Eilhart and Triss Merigold, and the fearsome queen/dragon Saskia. Each one of these is affected by the misogynistic culture they live in, but never quite charismatically suppressed - they have the freedom to develop into characters despite the world around them.
I question the strength of the reasoning that sexism in dark fantasy is a reflection of the history it parallels. First and foremost, there seems to be a little authorial glee in misogyny - there’s a sequence early on in The Witcher 2 that presents a trio of rapists as comic characters, and it’s revolting to play through.
There’s also the fact that Geralt has the unique video game opportunity to insert his penis into a number of the female characters, including a vast array of sex workers, who are often rendered with uncannily similar faces and identical animations. While some of these women will have a character roughly outlined, a good proportion are little more than crudely-textured breasts and a few awkward-sounding moans. Likewise, in the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones, naked women are often thrown into a scene to titillate the viewer, to the point where nudity in HBO shows has become the subject of parody.
When there’s this much capitulation to the world being presented - when the everyday men on the street are rendered with complex identities and the women have a tendency to spout vaguely flirtatious nonsense and nothing else - it lends credence to the idea that the sexism is there because it’s easy for the author to write, rather than existing as a serious comment on our own history. There are points where this assertion becomes tenuous - especially when female characters become the subject of non-sexual admiration, or have agency that doesn’t depend on the efforts of a related male character - but it’s strong enough to merit consideration.
At times, it’s as if dark fantasy writers like Martin and Sapkowski are taking their idea of darkness from stand-up comedy open mic nights, where the idea of taking no prisoners often ends up translating to punching down as often and as hard as possible. There’s a casualness and an incredible frequency to the way that awful people are granted a voice in this sort of media that suggests the authors are doing so more to inject some idea of societal colour. The presence of misogyny becomes just another brushstroke, rather than a thought-out facet.
There is going to be a third Witcher game. A little while back, the design document was leaked, along with this prompt:
We talk to Keira Metz and she gives us a task: remove the curse from the tower in the swamps. (Boob physics eye candy, appropriately prepared dialogue).
When I see stuff like this, I feel exasperated rather than outraged, but above all it confirms my suspicions - in worlds like this, titillation is as much a part of narrative intention as it is about the fantasy society itself.