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A Very Witcher Clip Show (Witcher: The Last Wish Part 1)
6 Plays4 months ago
It's time for Witcher: The Last Wish! In this episode we cover the first three short stories in The Last Wish. Also holy heck it's our 200th episode!
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Book SynopsisGeralt is a Witcher, a man whose magic powers, enhanced by long training and a mysterious elixir, have made him a brilliant fighter and a merciless hunter. Yet he is no ordinary killer. His sole purpose: to destroy the monsters that plague the world.
But not everything monstrous-looking is evil and not everything fair is good . . . and in every fairy tale there is a grain of truth.
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Right.
00:00:02
Speaker
Why not?
00:00:02
Speaker
Actually, I might I might I might have to look into that.
00:00:05
Speaker
I might not actually pay my taxes like everybody else.
00:00:07
Speaker
I have to talk to my accountant.
00:00:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:10
Speaker
You know who does pay their taxes like everyone else?
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:15
Speaker
Hey there everybody, welcome back to Pixel It.
00:00:16
Speaker
My name is Kevin, with me as always is Phil on today's show.
00:00:19
Speaker
We're starting The Witcher.
00:00:22
Speaker
We're doing The Last Wish by Andrei Schapowski.
00:00:29
Speaker
I think that's how you say his name.
00:00:30
Speaker
Schapowski, something like that, yeah.
00:00:34
Speaker
But yeah, so we're getting into that.
00:00:38
Speaker
But before we do, there's a wonderful website I want to tell you about.
00:00:41
Speaker
It's called patreon.com slash pixelippod.
00:00:44
Speaker
If you go there, you can follow us for free on Patreon, or you can give us a dollar a month or $5 a month or $10 a month.
00:00:51
Speaker
$5 gets you the ad-free episodes and bonus episodes that we post on Patreon, and $10 gets your name shouted out at the beginning of every episode.
00:00:59
Speaker
And to that end, I want to thank Jesus Loves You, Kyle Seaman, Ruthless Mutter, Middle of Things, Sigma Sound, Chut Beats, Demothic, and Friendly Friend, thank you for being
The Witcher Series Expansion
00:01:10
Speaker
a friend.
00:01:10
Speaker
So The Witcher,
00:01:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:13
Speaker
Last wish.
00:01:15
Speaker
So for those of you who are riding along for the first time or not the first time, we usually start out with talking about the game.
00:01:28
Speaker
But this is a backwards thing because the books.
00:01:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:33
Speaker
That's right.
00:01:34
Speaker
That's right.
00:01:36
Speaker
And we've done this before, haven't we?
00:01:38
Speaker
We've done it once before, sort of with Disco Elysium, where we did Sacred and Terrible Air, fantastic book.
00:01:50
Speaker
I might add.
00:01:51
Speaker
Yes.
00:01:53
Speaker
The Sacred and Terrible Air, which is came out way, I don't know, six years before Disco Elysium was a thing.
00:02:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:01
Speaker
Set in the same world.
00:02:03
Speaker
But yeah.
00:02:04
Speaker
So first, OK, the video games for The Witcher, since that's the touch point for everything here.
00:02:11
Speaker
Right.
00:02:13
Speaker
They're made by CD Projekt Red.
00:02:15
Speaker
First one comes out in 2007.
00:02:18
Speaker
And the weird thing about the games is that they are actually a considered a continuation of the book series.
00:02:29
Speaker
There's the last canon book is The Lady in the Lake.
00:02:37
Speaker
And that is told a lot from Ciri's point of view, from what I understand.
00:02:42
Speaker
And then it has an ending and it's...
00:02:47
Speaker
It seems like it's the end of the series.
00:02:51
Speaker
He has written a few more books since then that are either prequels or side stories that take place during the main series.
00:03:00
Speaker
But then CD Projekt Red, huge fans of The Witcher series, decide to...
00:03:06
Speaker
Basically pick up the story of Geralt with The Witcher in 2007 and just continue things from there.
00:03:18
Speaker
And it's the first Witcher game is, from what I understand, is stunningly average.
00:03:27
Speaker
Right.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:28
Speaker
That's the gist.
00:03:29
Speaker
You're like, okay, it came, it happened, and we moved on.
00:03:32
Speaker
It came, it happened, and we moved on.
00:03:34
Speaker
And then there was a second Witcher game, which came and happened, and we moved on.
00:03:40
Speaker
And then The Witcher 3 became the thing.
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:49
Speaker
Witcher, the Witcher three, also which known as the Witcher three wild hunt releases in 2015.
00:03:57
Speaker
And it is a lot of people put it on their best games of all time, you know, list.
00:04:07
Speaker
It did very well.
00:04:08
Speaker
It did.
00:04:09
Speaker
It did very well.
00:04:10
Speaker
2015.
00:04:10
Speaker
Yes, it did come out 2015.
00:04:13
Speaker
Double checking.
00:04:15
Speaker
So, yeah, this is a book series that spawned an entire little empire of video games.
00:04:24
Speaker
Not to mention, there's the three video games that CD Projekt Red made, the three mainline ones.
00:04:29
Speaker
There's also a few spinoffs.
00:04:36
Speaker
There are expansion packs to The Witcher 3.
00:04:40
Speaker
There's going to be a fourth Witcher game with Siri as the protagonist.
Witcher Game Remake Speculation
00:04:47
Speaker
And they did announce a couple of years ago that they are remaking the first Witcher game.
00:04:54
Speaker
Oh, nice.
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:56
Speaker
Maybe people actually play it then.
00:04:58
Speaker
That's great.
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:59
Speaker
Maybe people actually play it then.
00:05:01
Speaker
That'd be nice.
00:05:03
Speaker
So yeah, that's the games.
00:05:07
Speaker
Phil, what do you know about our author here?
Andrzej Sapkowski's Influence
00:05:11
Speaker
Andrzej Sapkowski is a Polish fantasy writer.
00:05:16
Speaker
I've found a lot of he's often referred to as like the Polish Tolkien.
00:05:20
Speaker
Sure.
00:05:22
Speaker
Obviously his biggest work is the stories of the Witcher.
00:05:28
Speaker
by just writing short stories and that sort of thing and trying to get them published in his favorite magazine, which is called Fantastica, which is a Polish fantasy sci fi lit mag.
00:05:42
Speaker
And it was just it basically came down to he just he really liked this magazine.
00:05:46
Speaker
I think they were having a contest or something like that.
00:05:49
Speaker
And he literally wrote the very first short story we're going to talk about tonight, The Witcher, for this contest and took home third place.
00:05:58
Speaker
It that was the beginning of it.
00:06:01
Speaker
And from there, yeah, it got it.
00:06:03
Speaker
As Kevin said, it got adapted into these video games, got adapted to comic books, TV shows, a musical.
00:06:11
Speaker
They made a musical out of the goddamn thing.
00:06:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:06:15
Speaker
And it's and I think the thing that kind of permeates all of his writing, not just that he's best known for The Witcher, but what seems to have permeated all of his writing is this inspiration of Polish folklore and classic fairy tales and that sort of thing.
00:06:33
Speaker
And you do see a lot of you're going to see that when we through the first three short stories we talk about are like, oh, I know this one.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yeah, I know what you're talking.
00:06:45
Speaker
And even then, it's kind of fun because he'll talk about the monsters that he's hunting or that he's hunted before or whatever.
00:06:53
Speaker
And you look it up, you can Google it.
00:06:56
Speaker
And that's an actual Slavic or Polish or something like that, like folk creature that he's put his own spin on.
00:07:05
Speaker
So it's it's a lot of fun like that.
00:07:08
Speaker
He is a hell of a writer.
00:07:11
Speaker
It's a very
00:07:13
Speaker
I, I, I, I very much thought of, uh, Robert E. Howard's Conan and stuff like that.
00:07:21
Speaker
Uh, uh, that, uh, it's just, it's good, you know, boots on the ground, hard handed sword and sorcery shit.
00:07:28
Speaker
Right.
00:07:29
Speaker
And he's, and he's, he's, he's, he,
00:07:31
Speaker
he has a lot of fun with it clearly.
00:07:33
Speaker
Right.
00:07:33
Speaker
And I think that's really, really neat.
00:07:35
Speaker
He also is the author of something called the Hussite trilogy.
00:07:39
Speaker
I'm not as familiar with that.
00:07:41
Speaker
Basically, the Witcher is the only thing that has brought him any kind of international attention.
00:07:47
Speaker
But in Poland, he is big daddy fantasy writer.
00:07:52
Speaker
You know, he's, you know, George R. R. Martin over there.
00:07:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:57
Speaker
It's, you know, so over there, everyone knows who he is.
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah.
Sapkowski's Legal Dispute with CD Projekt Red
00:08:00
Speaker
In fact, interestingly enough, when the third Witcher game came out and it exploded, some people might remember this, Sapkowski actually sued CD Projekt Red for like millions of dollars claiming they owed him royalties.
00:08:18
Speaker
on the character and they correctly pointed out, we bought it from you for like a for like a flat fee.
00:08:24
Speaker
And that was back when it was, you know, the first which you get and it didn't do really very well.
00:08:28
Speaker
And and so he didn't think about it.
00:08:30
Speaker
And then, you know, suddenly it's making millions of dollars and he pops in and says, where's how can I wet my beak again?
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:38
Speaker
And it was kind of a controversial time.
00:08:39
Speaker
They ended up like, I want to say they we don't know how much they gave him, but like it was like a behind closed doors.
00:08:46
Speaker
Like, let's give him something just to make him happy.
00:08:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:50
Speaker
I know the author of what is it?
00:08:53
Speaker
Metro 23, whatever it is.
00:08:56
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:08:58
Speaker
who is another author who was transformed into a video game.
00:09:02
Speaker
Another Eastern European author whose works have became, you know, a game series.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yes.
00:09:09
Speaker
And which I think next year I would like to read that one.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:13
Speaker
Get into the Metro 2033.
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:14
Speaker
That looks like a fun universe.
00:09:20
Speaker
So he he was very critical of Andre for this.
00:09:24
Speaker
I believe he called him an old fool for doing it.
00:09:27
Speaker
And correctly, without disrespecting Sapkowski, he correctly pointed out you were never going to get this level of success, this level of international success without
00:09:41
Speaker
uh, that video game.
00:09:43
Speaker
So shut your mouth and, and take all the opportunities you can get.
00:09:47
Speaker
It's going to be, it's probably going to make you more money in the long run.
00:09:51
Speaker
Right.
00:09:51
Speaker
The book, a lot of book sales and all that stuff.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:55
Speaker
And, and, you know, he was a consultant on the TV show and I'm sure, I'm sure after, uh, the video game situation went where it went, he, he,
00:10:06
Speaker
rethought his interest in, in collecting on royalties.
00:10:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:10
Speaker
And being more, I guess, involved in what happens.
00:10:15
Speaker
Um, then again, the show has kind of fallen off of a cliff a little bit.
Henry Cavill's Departure from The Witcher
00:10:20
Speaker
Uh, especially now that, uh, Henry Cavill basically quit and he was replaced by the lesser Hemsworth brother.
00:10:31
Speaker
Um, yeah, yeah.
00:10:32
Speaker
Wasn't wasn't there talk about what was it?
00:10:34
Speaker
One of the doctor who's was going to play him at some point.
00:10:39
Speaker
Maybe.
00:10:40
Speaker
I don't know.
00:10:40
Speaker
I don't know.
00:10:41
Speaker
I just I think it's hilarious that Cavill.
00:10:45
Speaker
My assumption was that he left it so he could work on his 40K ship.
00:10:50
Speaker
But you pointed out that he left because he was pissed that it wasn't true enough to.
00:10:55
Speaker
So he left for the nerdiest reason possible.
00:10:58
Speaker
Giant dork Henry Cavill.
00:11:00
Speaker
Once again, once again, showing he is Nerdosaurus Rex in our culture.
00:11:06
Speaker
There can only be one.
00:11:08
Speaker
Right.
00:11:09
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:11:09
Speaker
So I think that's where we're at.
00:11:10
Speaker
So, Kevin, what do you say?
00:11:12
Speaker
Body marsh?
00:11:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's but this body in the marsh.
00:11:15
Speaker
When I tell you to dump a body in the marsh, you dump them.
00:11:22
Speaker
In the mind.
00:11:24
Speaker
Sweet.
00:11:24
Speaker
Okay.
The Last Wish: Structure and Themes
00:11:25
Speaker
I actually, I had so much fun reading these stories.
00:11:29
Speaker
I didn't take any notes.
00:11:33
Speaker
I was just like, I was just really just kind of just- Yeah, that's-
00:11:38
Speaker
It has that kind of vibe to it.
00:11:39
Speaker
They're very exciting, very fun.
00:11:41
Speaker
And I didn't want to stop every five minutes to to, you know, take notes and everything.
00:11:47
Speaker
So I do have some synopses I found online that I'm going to use to guide me a little bit.
00:11:52
Speaker
So if I miss something.
00:11:53
Speaker
Sure, sure.
00:11:54
Speaker
Forgive me.
00:11:56
Speaker
What we are dealing with with The Last Wish is a seven story short story collection.
00:12:03
Speaker
I think four of them were published individually in Fantastica magazine over the course of like the 80s and the 90s.
00:12:11
Speaker
And then when they were collected into this, he wrote something called The Voice of Reason, which is kind of these interstitial moments that connect with
00:12:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:22
Speaker
All of the stories.
00:12:24
Speaker
It's a clip show.
00:12:25
Speaker
That's what this book is.
00:12:26
Speaker
It's a clip show.
00:12:27
Speaker
It's a clip show.
00:12:28
Speaker
We haven't we haven't had the show.
00:12:29
Speaker
It's like the first episode of the show started out with a clip show.
00:12:33
Speaker
Right.
00:12:34
Speaker
Right.
00:12:34
Speaker
Very unorthodox.
00:12:36
Speaker
And yet somehow it works because he's going through these, you know, we get these little flashbacks and everything like that.
00:12:42
Speaker
So we start with the very first part of the voice of reason.
00:12:46
Speaker
And it's just sex.
00:12:48
Speaker
We start out with him getting, you know, seduced by a priestess of Melitele, I want to say.
00:12:57
Speaker
This temple, this female goddess kind of character.
00:13:01
Speaker
I'm actually going to look her up right now so I know if I can find out that she is a mother goddess.
00:13:07
Speaker
She's the mother goddess.
00:13:08
Speaker
She is the...
00:13:09
Speaker
Oh, she's the threefold goddess.
00:13:11
Speaker
OK.
00:13:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:11
Speaker
And she they in one of the voice of reason chapters, they kind of the head priestess who Geralt is there to speak with kind of talk gives like a little history about a little little like here's how Melita is a Melita or Melitel.
00:13:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:31
Speaker
Melitelle or something.
00:13:32
Speaker
I've been saying in my head, Melitelle.
00:13:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:35
Speaker
How she became is because like, oh, there were all these gods.
00:13:39
Speaker
And then Melitelle being the goddess, the goddess of mothers.
00:13:45
Speaker
She became something for mothers to scream out to while giving birth.
00:13:50
Speaker
And mothers are always going to be giving birth.
00:13:52
Speaker
So that's why she stuck around.
00:13:54
Speaker
Could there be a more Slavic explanation?
00:13:59
Speaker
For God, there is something they just, you know, Thomas Hobbes said that life is nasty, brutish and short.
00:14:07
Speaker
And the fact that he did not come from Eastern Europe is actually hilarious.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:14
Speaker
It's something beautiful with that.
00:14:16
Speaker
But yeah, I love that explanation.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:20
Speaker
So we basically just open up and if you're like me and you're at first, your only exposure to if you'll excuse the expression to The Witcher 3 was Geralt having sex and being nude in a tub and stuff like that.
00:14:34
Speaker
This is going to get you right into the right sense of things, because we've got a priestess of Militelli who she's got.
00:14:40
Speaker
She has she is silent.
00:14:42
Speaker
We find out she's taken a vow of silence and she's just getting into his bed.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:48
Speaker
She wants some Geralt.
00:14:49
Speaker
That's how we start.
00:14:50
Speaker
Yep.
Understanding Witchers: Origins and Roles
00:14:51
Speaker
This whole thing.
00:14:52
Speaker
That's the note we start on.
00:14:55
Speaker
He's a hot guy.
00:14:56
Speaker
He's a hot guy.
00:14:56
Speaker
Now let's get into that first story.
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:00
Speaker
So he has sex.
00:15:01
Speaker
He's a hot guy.
00:15:05
Speaker
So we start with the Witcher, which is the very first story.
00:15:09
Speaker
I think this one came out in the mid 80s.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:12
Speaker
it opens with Geralt coming into this town and it's, it's kind of a classic trophy moment of like,
00:15:21
Speaker
it's like a spaghetti Western.
00:15:22
Speaker
He comes into this town.
00:15:24
Speaker
We don't like the look of you.
00:15:25
Speaker
And we find out a little bit about the witchers and, and how they're not trusted.
00:15:30
Speaker
Uh, you know, there's like kind of a, there's kind of a, um, uh, just a nasty bigotedness that goes towards his kind.
00:15:37
Speaker
Um, even though it's, it's interesting.
00:15:39
Speaker
It's even though they, they kill monsters, you know, like, I mean, they, they, witchers do it for money, admittedly.
00:15:45
Speaker
Um, but, um,
00:15:48
Speaker
They're still on your side, but they're, they're, they're filled with magic and they were kidnapped as children.
00:15:54
Speaker
They're very, uh, master chief.
00:15:55
Speaker
It's the problem with witchers is that there is a, it's like, we're all Chris Claremont X-Men up in here because these, these dark ages bumpkins hate mutants, you know, they hate mutants and Geralt.
00:16:12
Speaker
Oh boy.
00:16:12
Speaker
Witchers are, I think, technically mutants in the world of, yeah.
00:16:17
Speaker
in this world.
00:16:18
Speaker
It's very interesting.
00:16:19
Speaker
Yeah, because they're basically stolen.
00:16:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's that it's that halo thing.
00:16:23
Speaker
They're stolen from their beds by other witchers who stuff them full of different herbs and stuff like feed them that stuff.
00:16:30
Speaker
Not really stuff.
00:16:33
Speaker
And
00:16:34
Speaker
Basically, if the kid survives this ritual process, then they are raised to kill monsters from a young age and they are immune to all kinds of poisons and they learn this magic that that nobody else has access to.
00:16:49
Speaker
And so there's a lot of mystery and weird shit that goes around them that, you know, it's.
00:16:57
Speaker
You kind of get it.
00:16:57
Speaker
It makes people make people nervous where it's like they don't know what it's all about.
00:17:02
Speaker
It's an X-Men thing, just like you said.
00:17:04
Speaker
Exactly.
00:17:04
Speaker
They fear what they don't understand.
00:17:06
Speaker
God loves man.
00:17:07
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:17:09
Speaker
So he shows up at this village bar and kills a few guys.
00:17:16
Speaker
You know, in self-defense, put some big air quotes around that.
00:17:21
Speaker
Because you get the feeling that Geralt could have resolved things without having to kill them.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yes, because and because he does constantly.
00:17:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:35
Speaker
That's something that we're going to we're about to get into, but I'm just going to say it now.
00:17:39
Speaker
Spoilers.
00:17:40
Speaker
Geralt doesn't kill much of the quarry he's hunting.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:46
Speaker
He finds ways around it.
00:17:47
Speaker
It's very clever, but it also makes you go, what the fuck did you just murder three men?
00:17:51
Speaker
Why'd you kill those guys?
00:17:53
Speaker
They were just, they were just, they're, they're racist.
00:17:56
Speaker
Sure.
00:17:57
Speaker
But like, Jesus Christ.
00:18:01
Speaker
So, uh, he gets, he gets taken away by the, by the city guard and, um, he gets to, uh, he, he gets taken to the castellan of the, of the city that he's in.
00:18:14
Speaker
Um, and, and, and tells them like, Hey, I'm here because you guys have a bounty for some, uh, creature, uh, uh, Striga.
00:18:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:22
Speaker
Um, and, uh, and so he gets the story.
00:18:25
Speaker
The story is that, um, this King slept with his sister, uh, got her pregnant and, uh, and, and she dies having the baby and the baby is, uh, they, they put, they put them both in a coffin together.
00:18:40
Speaker
And, uh, and then like years later, uh,
00:18:43
Speaker
the baby now kind of grown into this horrible thing starts killing everybody in the palace.
00:18:52
Speaker
So they've abandoned this palace and built a whole other one.
00:18:55
Speaker
There's a brand new palace.
00:18:57
Speaker
Don't worry about it.
00:18:58
Speaker
The king is in a new palace.
00:18:59
Speaker
The old one is haunted by his inbred incest daughter who is a monster.
00:19:09
Speaker
Don't worry about it.
00:19:10
Speaker
Don't worry about it.
00:19:12
Speaker
Don't worry about it.
00:19:13
Speaker
So at first it feels like this is going to be a real simple solution, but, uh, Gerald has it pointed out to him that, um, you cannot kill the stricke.
00:19:25
Speaker
The whole point is they don't want you to kill it, uh, because it's still the King's daughter.
00:19:31
Speaker
So you gotta come up with something else.
00:19:34
Speaker
Uh, you gotta, uh, and he's also, uh,
00:19:37
Speaker
offered a deal by these by this other organization that kind of wants to overthrow the king.
00:19:44
Speaker
Like, hey, we'll pay you not the entire amount.
00:19:47
Speaker
It's like 3000 gold or something like we'll pay you not the entire amount, but more than you'll get from the king if you kill this thing.
00:19:56
Speaker
So we'll meet you in the middle if you.
00:19:59
Speaker
Oops, I killed her.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:00
Speaker
And we can we can use that.
00:20:03
Speaker
We have leverage.
00:20:04
Speaker
And one of my favorite bits is Geralt is he's very pissy about money because there's a moment where so the cast on is like, all right, well, to figure out to cure it or whatever.
00:20:21
Speaker
It's a thousand orange, I think is the name of the currency.
00:20:24
Speaker
Orange.
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:26
Speaker
So he's like, it's a thousand.
00:20:28
Speaker
And meanwhile, then the cast on is like, all right, well, this guy tried it.
00:20:31
Speaker
This guy tried it.
00:20:34
Speaker
One Witcher came in and got killed.
00:20:36
Speaker
Another Witcher like took one look at it and ran.
00:20:41
Speaker
And then after all that, Geralt is like, well, yeah, I'll do it for fifteen hundred.
00:20:46
Speaker
And the guy's like, it's a thousand.
00:20:48
Speaker
And he said, well, the last switcher came in here, ran away, which means a thousand was not enough for him to stay.
00:20:55
Speaker
So it's fifteen hundred.
00:20:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:58
Speaker
And it's, it's, and you raise an interesting point with that where like right off the bat, we are shown like we, right off the bat, we're shown that witchers badass and everything like that.
00:21:08
Speaker
But then we find out that witchers are, they can be cowardly.
00:21:12
Speaker
They can be killed.
00:21:14
Speaker
So it's, it doesn't necessarily make him any greater than the people around him so much.
00:21:21
Speaker
He's just better equipped when it comes down to things, which I thought was a nice touch.
00:21:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:27
Speaker
So basically he has to spend the night at the palace for like, what is it?
00:21:32
Speaker
Like three nights or something.
00:21:34
Speaker
Well, it's so it's not it's only one night.
00:21:37
Speaker
But he says there with the problem with Striga's is that there's complications sometimes.
00:21:43
Speaker
Sometimes it's one night.
00:21:44
Speaker
Sometimes it's three nights.
00:21:45
Speaker
Sometimes you have to do this.
00:21:46
Speaker
Sometimes you have to do this.
00:21:49
Speaker
So that's why he's like he he's explaining all the rules to the to the castle on.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:56
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:21:57
Speaker
And so they're hoping he's getting a lot of and this happens a lot in these stories.
00:22:03
Speaker
He's getting a lot of different people offering him different stuff.
00:22:07
Speaker
Some of them say, just kill her.
00:22:09
Speaker
We'll pay you.
00:22:10
Speaker
Don't kill her.
00:22:11
Speaker
Let's see if she's a. And then there are the people who are like, well, find out if she's a lost cause.
00:22:16
Speaker
And if she's a lost cause killer, just the middle ground.
00:22:18
Speaker
You got all these people offering different stuff.
00:22:21
Speaker
So Geralt ends up at the palace, the old one.
00:22:27
Speaker
Well, classic palace class first.
00:22:29
Speaker
He meets.
00:22:30
Speaker
So first he meets the king.
00:22:32
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:34
Speaker
He meets full test, who is the father who kind of like represents himself as like, listen, I understand if you have to kill her in self-defense.
Geralt's Resourcefulness Against the Striga
00:22:44
Speaker
Right.
00:22:45
Speaker
Right.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, she is.
00:22:47
Speaker
But and if you do that, I'm not going to like execute you.
00:22:50
Speaker
I'm going to yell at you and send you on your way with no money.
00:22:55
Speaker
It is basically right.
00:22:56
Speaker
OK.
00:22:57
Speaker
OK.
00:22:57
Speaker
I do remember.
00:22:58
Speaker
And that's why I was thinking three nights.
00:23:00
Speaker
Basically, it's there's kind of vampire rules here where she lives in this coffin and.
00:23:08
Speaker
He has to keep her in the coffin by sunup, by the third crowing of out of the coffin.
00:23:16
Speaker
She has to be.
00:23:17
Speaker
She has to be.
00:23:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:19
Speaker
She can't be in the crib at sunup.
00:23:21
Speaker
Right.
00:23:22
Speaker
And that should cure her.
00:23:24
Speaker
And they even point out, like, she'll be very simple minded if she gets turned back, because at this point she's a teenager.
00:23:32
Speaker
She's a 14 year old who has not learned a damn thing.
00:23:36
Speaker
Right.
00:23:36
Speaker
So she's going to be.
00:23:38
Speaker
But she'll at least be a human being and she'll be alive.
00:23:41
Speaker
So, yeah, we do have that moment.
00:23:42
Speaker
So, yeah, thank you.
00:23:44
Speaker
So Geralt spends the night at the place he finds the coffin.
00:23:52
Speaker
And indeed, we've got the Striga.
00:23:57
Speaker
in there.
00:23:58
Speaker
Uh, but I'm, I'm getting ahead of myself though.
00:24:00
Speaker
Uh, so he's, he's in there and a, uh, member of royalty, the royalty kind of comes to him and tries to, uh, bribe him to basically and say, yeah, just get out of here.
00:24:11
Speaker
Like I'll give you half of what the King was offering you.
00:24:15
Speaker
If you just get out, because again, that gives them leverage over the King and it makes it easier for them to say he couldn't even get rid of this horrifying, horrifying abomination that happens to be his kid.
00:24:25
Speaker
Right.
00:24:26
Speaker
Um,
00:24:27
Speaker
So Geralt refuses and instead ties the guy up.
00:24:33
Speaker
And and and and the guy wakes back up again later at night and and he gets and he and he says, you should let me go.
00:24:44
Speaker
And he says, yeah, sure.
00:24:45
Speaker
I'll let you go.
00:24:46
Speaker
Because that was the whole point.
00:24:48
Speaker
He wants him as bait.
00:24:49
Speaker
So.
00:24:51
Speaker
A strigabate.
00:24:53
Speaker
A strigabate.
00:24:53
Speaker
And he runs and he runs out and immediately gets torn to shreds by this horrible thing.
00:25:01
Speaker
It's described as it's kind of again, it's very Conan, like where it's kind of apy.
00:25:06
Speaker
It's very big and powerful.
00:25:08
Speaker
It's got big, giant, nashy teeth.
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:11
Speaker
And he gets torn to shreds immediately.
00:25:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:15
Speaker
So we get our fight scene.
00:25:17
Speaker
One of the things that distinguishes a Witcher is they have their regular weapon and then they have a silver weapon.
00:25:25
Speaker
Geralt has a silver sword and the silver is something that is, you know,
00:25:32
Speaker
You run into that in all kinds of folklore where that's the thing that can kill most monsters.
00:25:38
Speaker
And the stress is most because in another story, he'll like explain like, yeah, there's no it's it's it's the rules are all over the map.
00:25:48
Speaker
It's just silver is good for most.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:51
Speaker
Right.
00:25:51
Speaker
Exactly.
00:25:53
Speaker
So he they get into a huge fight.
00:25:55
Speaker
He tries to tie her up.
00:25:56
Speaker
It doesn't work.
00:25:58
Speaker
And he uses some of his magic to just fuck with her head, basically.
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:04
Speaker
She's feeling all this viciousness and evil and that sort of thing.
00:26:08
Speaker
And so he kind of uses it.
00:26:09
Speaker
It's a it's a I'm rubber, your glue kind of situation.
00:26:12
Speaker
And he bounces all those emotions back to her and she runs off.
00:26:17
Speaker
So.
00:26:19
Speaker
What do you do in a situation like this?
00:26:21
Speaker
You hide in plain sight.
00:26:22
Speaker
So he gets inside the coffin.
00:26:24
Speaker
It was like, well, she can't be in the coffin if I'm in the coffin.
00:26:28
Speaker
Like, I'm not sure you thought about this, Geralt.
00:26:30
Speaker
Can't can't can't argue with that airtight logic.
00:26:36
Speaker
He's literally in there with this girl's mother's corpse.
00:26:38
Speaker
The corpse of her mother.
00:26:40
Speaker
The mummified corpse of her mother.
00:26:42
Speaker
Mummified corpse.
00:26:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:26:44
Speaker
Thankfully, she doesn't stink anymore, but that's what's happened.
00:26:48
Speaker
And...
00:26:49
Speaker
And it works.
00:26:51
Speaker
He stays in there.
00:26:52
Speaker
The strigger does not make it back to the coffin in time.
00:26:56
Speaker
And when he leaves the coffin, he is he finds a 14 year old girl.
00:27:03
Speaker
We get we do get a quick moment there where we think it's over and you're you're left to go.
00:27:08
Speaker
Ah, everything's fine.
00:27:09
Speaker
And then, of course, she turns and tries to claw him and that sort of thing.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:13
Speaker
She still hasn't like fully transformed back yet and has like the Striga claws and nearly decapitates him.
00:27:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:23
Speaker
Cuts his throat.
00:27:25
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:27:26
Speaker
And and he hears the final crow of the rooster and has to bind himself and passes out.
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:36
Speaker
Fair, totally fair, which I loved because you don't get a lot of stories like this that end with.
00:27:44
Speaker
And then the bad guy was down and then our hero was right.
00:27:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:49
Speaker
It's fantastic.
00:27:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:51
Speaker
So the story kind of concludes with him waking up and.
00:27:58
Speaker
And gets his money and that's it.
00:28:02
Speaker
That's the whole thing.
00:28:03
Speaker
The Castellan is like, 14 year old girl nearly killed you.
00:28:07
Speaker
And he's like, that's crazy.
00:28:10
Speaker
That's crazy.
00:28:12
Speaker
And he's like, yep.
00:28:16
Speaker
I'll take my money now.
00:28:18
Speaker
Thanks.
00:28:19
Speaker
That's the end of that story.
00:28:21
Speaker
It's terrific.
00:28:22
Speaker
It doesn't, it doesn't, we got some, and this is, this sets up a lot of the tropes that you're going to run into with all of these stories.
00:28:30
Speaker
We do have action scenes, but they don't just end with him lopping off the beast's head or something like that.
00:28:37
Speaker
He's way more clever than that.
00:28:39
Speaker
There's always something – there's a twist to it.
00:28:41
Speaker
There's always a twist.
00:28:42
Speaker
Right.
00:28:43
Speaker
And I think that's really fun.
00:28:45
Speaker
So we cut back to the voice of reason and Geralt – I keep wanting to say Geralt and I don't know why.
00:28:55
Speaker
Geralt is woken up with his quiet friend by Nanique, who is a priestess there.
00:29:03
Speaker
And we basically find out that he has been wounded recently.
00:29:06
Speaker
He's been hurt from one of his jobs and he's come there to... Oh, actually, it's from the neck.
00:29:14
Speaker
That's what it is.
00:29:15
Speaker
He's still binded by the neck.
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah, we find out that this Driga thing is basically...
00:29:23
Speaker
Timeline wise, right before the voice of reason stories.
00:29:30
Speaker
Yes.
00:29:30
Speaker
Yes.
00:29:31
Speaker
That's that's the inciting incident for all of this.
00:29:33
Speaker
Like he's he's badly wounded.
00:29:35
Speaker
And so this is leading into it.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:39
Speaker
This is where, as Kevin pointed out, we get kind of an explanation of the goddess and where he is and that sort of thing.
00:29:49
Speaker
Here comes another trope.
00:29:50
Speaker
We get like this discussion of faith here.
00:29:56
Speaker
And this is, again, this is a trope for the Witcher where they get into discussions on the nature of evil, the nature of humanity, the nature of God and religion and that sort of thing, which, again, you don't always see in these sword and sorcery things.
00:30:15
Speaker
And it's actually handled very well.
00:30:18
Speaker
I think if someone told me ahead of time, they were like, oh, yeah, he stops and philosophizes with these characters all the time.
00:30:25
Speaker
I'd go, oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
00:30:28
Speaker
But it's very well done.
00:30:30
Speaker
And he's not a –
00:30:34
Speaker
He actually even has a line later where someone says, good sir.
00:30:37
Speaker
And he goes, I'm not a good man.
00:30:40
Speaker
Don't call me that.
00:30:41
Speaker
And he's not.
00:30:43
Speaker
Geralt is the definition of chaotic neutral or at least lawful neutral because he has his own kind of code.
00:30:49
Speaker
He does.
00:30:51
Speaker
But he's not.
00:30:52
Speaker
But it doesn't always savvy with everybody else's.
00:30:55
Speaker
Right.
00:30:56
Speaker
And what's funny is he's an atheist.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:01
Speaker
Yeah, which again, you don't see in the fantasy world very often.
00:31:04
Speaker
In the fantasy world, he's like, he doesn't believe in God.
00:31:06
Speaker
He believes in what he, he believed, like, he's like, I believe that there, there's like fundamental forces in the world and people make up gods to personify them.
00:31:19
Speaker
But that doesn't mean these gods actually exist.
00:31:22
Speaker
It's just that these forces exist.
00:31:24
Speaker
And I was like, that's kind of an interesting, because clearly it's a world of magic and monsters and all that stuff.
00:31:29
Speaker
Right.
00:31:30
Speaker
Right.
00:31:30
Speaker
But to him, that doesn't mean that there is a being at the end of that.
00:31:36
Speaker
Exactly.
00:31:37
Speaker
It's just it's your argument of what is that being?
00:31:40
Speaker
Right.
00:31:41
Speaker
And that it's it's it's pretty cool.
00:31:43
Speaker
It's an actually interesting distinction.
00:31:47
Speaker
And that brings us into A Grain of Truth, which is our second short story.
00:31:50
Speaker
Right.
00:31:52
Speaker
This one begins with Geralt riding through a forest.
00:31:57
Speaker
He's on horseback.
00:31:59
Speaker
His horse's name is Roach.
00:32:00
Speaker
Yes.
00:32:01
Speaker
Which I love.
00:32:02
Speaker
And I don't know if that's a direct translation of what it is called in Polish.
00:32:07
Speaker
I did not check because I'm a hack and a fraud.
00:32:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:10
Speaker
But Roach is what he calls his horse in the show, too.
00:32:14
Speaker
Yeah, and in the game.
00:32:17
Speaker
I love it.
00:32:18
Speaker
It's so funny.
00:32:19
Speaker
So he ends up finding these corpses, dead bodies, and he's investigating them.
00:32:29
Speaker
And follows, he tracks them, basically.
00:32:32
Speaker
Tracks where whatever killed them must have come from and comes to this kind of like –
00:32:38
Speaker
that is being devoured by the wilderness, is being reclaimed, basically just completely abandoned, run down kind of situation.
00:32:48
Speaker
And he ends up meeting Nivellen, who is this horror.
00:32:54
Speaker
I thought just like an ogre kind of troll character, but but is also
00:33:00
Speaker
a talker.
00:33:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:02
Speaker
As we'll find
Nivellen's Story: Beauty and the Beast Motifs
00:33:03
Speaker
out.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:04
Speaker
Uh, they, they start, they start out with fighting and that sort of thing.
00:33:08
Speaker
And, uh,
00:33:10
Speaker
And then it becomes clear that he's he's trying to it becomes clear that Nivellen's trying to scare him off.
00:33:15
Speaker
I don't want you here.
00:33:16
Speaker
I don't I want to be left alone.
00:33:18
Speaker
And Geralt's like, I'm not I'm not that guy.
00:33:20
Speaker
I'm not going to I'm not interested in that.
00:33:22
Speaker
Yeah, you're not going to be able to get me to run off.
00:33:25
Speaker
And Nivellen's like, oh, OK, well, you want to come inside and have something to eat?
00:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly it.
00:33:31
Speaker
He's like, do you want to come in and eat?
00:33:33
Speaker
And Geralt's like, yeah, sounds good.
00:33:35
Speaker
Yeah, I can eat.
00:33:37
Speaker
So I can eat.
00:33:39
Speaker
So we go inside, we find his magic table that he like, he hits the table and anything he wants is going to like appear out of it.
00:33:46
Speaker
So he hits it, gets a carafe of wine, hits it and gets them some dinner.
00:33:50
Speaker
Um, it's a whole thing.
00:33:52
Speaker
The whole house is magic.
00:33:53
Speaker
He can, he basically tells the house whatever he wants and it happens.
00:33:57
Speaker
It is very beauty in the beast.
00:33:59
Speaker
Uh, it is very, very that.
00:34:02
Speaker
So we find out, uh,
00:34:05
Speaker
the story of Nevelyn and it's, and it's the majority of this story is his story.
00:34:11
Speaker
Um, and again, this is, this is them discussing things.
00:34:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:14
Speaker
Nevelyn it's this, the 90% of the lines in this story are Nevelyn dialogue.
00:34:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yes, yes, yes.
00:34:24
Speaker
And long story short, he has basically been cursed.
00:34:30
Speaker
I think what was it?
00:34:31
Speaker
He's like part of it.
00:34:32
Speaker
He was part of like a bandit.
00:34:33
Speaker
He was part of it.
00:34:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:34
Speaker
So his grandfather ran a bandit bandit group.
00:34:38
Speaker
His father like we're not talking like like cheapo bandits.
00:34:42
Speaker
These are these are these are the premium bandits.
00:34:45
Speaker
They hit the rich folks.
00:34:46
Speaker
They like they had their they had a mansion.
00:34:49
Speaker
Based on they're just thieving.
00:34:53
Speaker
Right.
00:34:53
Speaker
Right.
00:34:54
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:34:55
Speaker
So they and everything's going great.
00:34:57
Speaker
This is a family business.
00:34:59
Speaker
He's done this with his dad and with his dad's dad and et cetera.
00:35:02
Speaker
And it all comes to a head when he ends up he is he is.
00:35:09
Speaker
I don't know if you can put it this way, but persuaded into raping one of their captives, who is a priestess of Coram Og Terra, who is like the worst, like the goddess of death, the lion headed spider.
00:35:26
Speaker
God, I think.
00:35:27
Speaker
Holy shit.
00:35:29
Speaker
What a great image.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly it.
00:35:33
Speaker
It's just like the God.
00:35:34
Speaker
I looked this one up.
00:35:35
Speaker
It's like the goddess of cruelty and death and like absolutely the last person you want to be on the bad side of.
00:35:44
Speaker
And and so this woman, rightfully so, curses him and he is turned into this horrible thing.
00:35:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:55
Speaker
And we get his story and find out basically that he is he's the thing that that you tell your kids about in the woods to keep them close to the house.
00:36:06
Speaker
Right.
00:36:06
Speaker
He has become this local legend, this creature.
00:36:10
Speaker
And he.
00:36:13
Speaker
Gets this idea that the only way, because he thinks about it, he's like, well, I'm a fairy tale now.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:19
Speaker
I'm a fairy tale.
00:36:20
Speaker
True love, right?
00:36:21
Speaker
Right.
00:36:21
Speaker
So what happens with this?
00:36:23
Speaker
I just need, I need a virgin to fall in love with me and to make love to me and I will be transformed.
00:36:31
Speaker
That's how these things work, obviously.
00:36:34
Speaker
So he's-
00:36:36
Speaker
because he kind of gets back into his highwayman style shit.
00:36:41
Speaker
And finally, a merchant passes by and he jumps out.
00:36:46
Speaker
Makes me think of a Mike Birbiglia joke.
00:36:48
Speaker
He basically runs out to the road and goes, where's your daughter?
00:36:51
Speaker
And the merchant says, my daughter's eight, please.
00:36:56
Speaker
I can't.
00:36:57
Speaker
And Nivellen's like, oh, man.
00:37:00
Speaker
No, I don't know that.
00:37:02
Speaker
No, no, no.
00:37:02
Speaker
Never mind.
00:37:03
Speaker
I don't feel good about that.
00:37:06
Speaker
And by the way, he has like a fucking shit ton of treasure.
00:37:10
Speaker
And this is just from the family biz.
00:37:12
Speaker
It's just piled up in their mansion.
00:37:15
Speaker
And he feels bad for what he's done.
00:37:17
Speaker
And so he goes to the merchant and goes, all right, come here, come here.
00:37:20
Speaker
And he like fills the merchant's bag with like gold and jewels and shit and says, go on, please.
00:37:25
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:37:25
Speaker
Have a nice day.
00:37:27
Speaker
So what happens is the merchant goes back, tells all his buddies, you're not going to believe this.
00:37:35
Speaker
And they believe him.
00:37:36
Speaker
And the next day, another merchant shows up with his daughter,
00:37:40
Speaker
Who is not eight at the very least.
00:37:43
Speaker
So he basically exchanges his daughter for a bag full of golden riches and stuff like that.
00:37:51
Speaker
And he's,
00:37:53
Speaker
The daughter stays with him.
00:37:54
Speaker
It's Beauty and the Beast.
00:37:55
Speaker
She's horrified by him at first.
00:37:57
Speaker
And, you know.
00:37:59
Speaker
And then Nivellen's like, you know, these these women, they come over and then they're horrified.
00:38:06
Speaker
And then they're all monster fuckers, you know?
00:38:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:09
Speaker
They all end up being monster fuckers.
00:38:11
Speaker
He goes, eventually he's like, yeah, they're like, oh, no.
00:38:13
Speaker
But there may be something there that wasn't there before.
00:38:16
Speaker
And suddenly they're there.
00:38:19
Speaker
They're fucking beasts.
00:38:20
Speaker
And that's that's what this is.
00:38:22
Speaker
And and he and he and the right off the bat, he finds out, oh, it doesn't work.
00:38:28
Speaker
He's still a monster.
00:38:29
Speaker
But he keeps doing it.
00:38:31
Speaker
He keeps doing it.
00:38:31
Speaker
And we get into this cycle.
00:38:34
Speaker
He keeps these girls with him for a year and he sends them on their way afterwards and he's shown them the good life because he takes very good care of them.
00:38:43
Speaker
He talks about how a lot of these girls, when they show up at this place, they are still covered in bruises from their dads beating them and stuff.
00:38:51
Speaker
And so he's like actually very nice to them.
00:38:53
Speaker
He gives them nice clothes, you know, that stuff feeds them.
00:38:57
Speaker
He gives.
00:38:57
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:38:58
Speaker
He shows them a year of the good life.
00:39:00
Speaker
They they have a lot of sex.
00:39:01
Speaker
They turns out they're monster fuckers and and and then they move on.
00:39:05
Speaker
And over the process of this, it becomes clear this isn't going to work.
00:39:11
Speaker
But it also becomes clear that he's like, you know what?
00:39:14
Speaker
This isn't so bad.
00:39:17
Speaker
He kind of comes to an understanding with himself where this is not a bad life that I'm leading.
00:39:23
Speaker
I have everything I need.
00:39:26
Speaker
Girls are into me every now and then.
00:39:29
Speaker
It's a pretty cool situation.
00:39:33
Speaker
So.
00:39:34
Speaker
He's kind of made his peace with the whole thing by the time Geralt finds him.
00:39:39
Speaker
And we get a moment at the end of the story where Geralt, he's been asking him throughout throughout the story.
00:39:45
Speaker
He's been asking him, like, so you're here by yourself.
00:39:49
Speaker
Are you here by yourself?
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:50
Speaker
But are you here by yourself?
00:39:52
Speaker
And and and the devil is like, you know, I'm not here by myself.
00:39:56
Speaker
You know, I'm not here by myself, damn it.
00:39:58
Speaker
So it's like, yeah, I got a lady in the house.
00:40:02
Speaker
Fuck you.
00:40:05
Speaker
But he talks about how he's been having horrible dreams, and he thinks that this is not the end of his transformation, essentially.
00:40:12
Speaker
That right now he's – what's the word?
00:40:17
Speaker
Lucid.
00:40:19
Speaker
He is, you know, sentient, but he has a feeling that that's not going to be the case.
00:40:26
Speaker
And if and he basically after a nice evening of storytelling and wine and dinner with Geralt, he makes him promise that if he does become this mindless, senseless monster, will Geralt come back and take him out?
00:40:42
Speaker
And Geralt agrees.
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:44
Speaker
So.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:46
Speaker
It's actually a really it's a really lovely kind of moment.
00:40:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:52
Speaker
And then we come back to this.
00:40:54
Speaker
It's kind of a weird ending.
00:40:57
Speaker
Oh, gosh.
00:40:59
Speaker
Hold on.
00:40:59
Speaker
This part.
00:41:01
Speaker
So he's he's with Roach.
00:41:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:04
Speaker
And yeah, he's leaving.
00:41:05
Speaker
He's leaving with Roach.
00:41:06
Speaker
And he's like, hmm, Roach is acting weird.
00:41:09
Speaker
Right.
00:41:10
Speaker
Right.
00:41:11
Speaker
And like he remembers that the guy Roach didn't act weird around the guy.
00:41:19
Speaker
He like she so she so she sees through the the guise of of who he is.
00:41:27
Speaker
He Roach knows that he's a human.
00:41:29
Speaker
Roach only gets kind of skittish around actual monsters.
00:41:33
Speaker
And so then Geralt's like.
00:41:35
Speaker
Hmm.
00:41:36
Speaker
OK.
00:41:37
Speaker
And he heads back.
00:41:38
Speaker
He had he had been riding away and he heads back and he finds a woman just kind of like sitting there.
00:41:47
Speaker
And he's like, what are you?
00:41:51
Speaker
He keeps asking it.
00:41:52
Speaker
What is like?
00:41:53
Speaker
Are you this?
00:41:53
Speaker
Are you that?
00:41:55
Speaker
And then it attacks him and he realizes it's a Brooks, which is a type of mind control vampire thing.
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:02
Speaker
And this is basically what's responsible for the Nivellen being this way.
00:42:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:08
Speaker
The dreams and all that stuff.
00:42:11
Speaker
It's it's been keeping.
00:42:13
Speaker
So so they fight.
00:42:16
Speaker
They they they fight.
00:42:18
Speaker
They go back and forth.
00:42:19
Speaker
The Brooks keeps transforming between a beautiful woman and a bat like creature.
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:26
Speaker
Which is wild.
00:42:27
Speaker
And then he's cool.
00:42:29
Speaker
It's pretty cool.
00:42:30
Speaker
And then Nivellen is like finally realizes, holy shit, this is no good.
00:42:40
Speaker
And he impales the Brooks, stabs her through the chest, through the heart with a wooden stake.
00:42:47
Speaker
That's right.
00:42:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:48
Speaker
Not like a wooden stake, like a part of his house.
00:42:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:52
Speaker
Right.
00:42:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:52
Speaker
Like he literally rips and he's talked about this before where like he's wrecked the shit out of this house because he's so strong and he likes showing off for his girlfriends that come by and he's wrecked chair after chair.
00:43:04
Speaker
He goes, there are hardly any chairs left.
00:43:07
Speaker
Right.
00:43:07
Speaker
So he just, yeah, you're right.
00:43:08
Speaker
He just like rips off some of the house and just.
00:43:11
Speaker
Impales her with right through.
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:14
Speaker
And it kills her.
00:43:15
Speaker
And then he transforms back into a human because he then Geralt's like, so, you know, the fairy tales are sometimes are the there's a lot of grain.
00:43:28
Speaker
There's a grain of truth.
00:43:30
Speaker
The title title card to the fairy tales because it needed to be true love.
00:43:36
Speaker
And the Brooks.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:37
Speaker
actually loved him and he actually loved the Brooks, even though they were toxic.
00:43:44
Speaker
She was toxic to him.
00:43:46
Speaker
Right.
00:43:47
Speaker
Which, yeah, that's relatable.
00:43:50
Speaker
But yeah.
00:43:51
Speaker
So and so he did the curse is removed and Nivellen is is restored to a human being again.
00:44:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:02
Speaker
Again, really interesting tropes where
00:44:05
Speaker
The monster isn't who we think it is, and Geralt doesn't even end up killing anybody in this.
00:44:11
Speaker
It's it's.
00:44:12
Speaker
It's pretty cool.
00:44:14
Speaker
We come back to the voice of reason.
00:44:17
Speaker
We get some knights from the Order of the White Rose.
00:44:21
Speaker
Very, very serious knights.
00:44:23
Speaker
Very, very serious knights.
00:44:26
Speaker
Very serious, very like stereotypical paladin kind of characters.
00:44:32
Speaker
And they've showed up to the temple basically demanding that they throw Geralt out so that they can kill him.
00:44:40
Speaker
Or at least run out of town.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:44
Speaker
And, you know, they want to duel.
00:44:48
Speaker
They want to kill him.
00:44:49
Speaker
They want all this kind of shit.
00:44:51
Speaker
And Nanique is not giving him up.
00:44:54
Speaker
Right.
00:44:54
Speaker
Absolutely not.
00:44:55
Speaker
And she's kind of almost as pissed with Geralt as she is with them because she's like, I don't want these people at my house.
00:45:02
Speaker
These people leave my temple, you know?
00:45:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:05
Speaker
So finally, after a lot of back and forths, the knights leave.
00:45:10
Speaker
But but, you know, we'll be back.
00:45:12
Speaker
We'll be back.
00:45:13
Speaker
And in great numbers.
00:45:15
Speaker
And great.
00:45:16
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:45:17
Speaker
That's exactly it.
Moral Dilemmas in 'The Lesser Evil'
00:45:20
Speaker
And that cuts us into our third story, The Lesser Evil.
00:45:24
Speaker
And this one is starts with Geralt after a hunt.
00:45:30
Speaker
He has killed a kicker more, which I looked that one up, too.
00:45:34
Speaker
And that's like a Slavic house elf or something like that.
00:45:38
Speaker
It's described as like a spidery.
00:45:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:41
Speaker
Goblin.
00:45:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:42
Speaker
The kicker more is a is massive in the way that it's portrayed both the show and the book.
00:45:51
Speaker
Right.
00:45:51
Speaker
Right.
00:45:52
Speaker
But yeah, he just has it on the back of a donkey or something.
00:45:55
Speaker
Right.
00:45:55
Speaker
And he's just he's just on his way into this town to collect a reward on it.
00:46:01
Speaker
Like, hey, I killed this thing.
00:46:03
Speaker
Will anybody pay me for this thing?
00:46:05
Speaker
Right.
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:06
Speaker
It's not a bounty, by the way.
00:46:08
Speaker
He's just he's just bringing like, hey, I killed that.
00:46:11
Speaker
You guys don't have to deal with that anymore.
00:46:12
Speaker
Right.
00:46:13
Speaker
Give me some money.
00:46:14
Speaker
Like that's literally, that's literally his, his, his stance on the whole thing.
00:46:20
Speaker
And you have to wonder like, Oh, he does this a lot.
00:46:22
Speaker
This is how this works.
00:46:24
Speaker
So he goes in and he meets the town guards and the alderman there.
00:46:30
Speaker
And they're like, Oh yeah, sure.
00:46:31
Speaker
You know, you know, who's going to be interested in that master Irian.
00:46:37
Speaker
And he is a wizard who lives in this tower.
00:46:40
Speaker
So let's go to master Irian.
00:46:42
Speaker
And at first, it's very much a don't no one see the wizard.
00:46:46
Speaker
No way.
00:46:46
Speaker
Not know how.
00:46:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:48
Speaker
Kind of situation where they're just like, no, you're not coming inside.
00:46:52
Speaker
And then they realize who he is.
00:46:55
Speaker
And and mysteriously, the voice that has been talking to them and refusing their entry says, all right, Geralt come in.
00:47:03
Speaker
The rest of you fuck off.
00:47:04
Speaker
So Geralt walks into this place and it's this illusory room.
00:47:09
Speaker
It's filled.
00:47:11
Speaker
It's like a beautiful hanging gardens kind of situation.
00:47:15
Speaker
With naked women.
00:47:16
Speaker
Complete with naked women picking fruit and shit.
00:47:21
Speaker
And he finds that the wizard, Aireon, is actually Stregobor.
00:47:28
Speaker
Stregobor.
00:47:29
Speaker
Stregobor.
00:47:32
Speaker
who is a wizard that he has, he has background with.
00:47:36
Speaker
He has, he has, he knows.
00:47:38
Speaker
And he finds out.
00:47:39
Speaker
Stregobor is like, we're friends.
00:47:41
Speaker
And Geralt's like, I don't think that's the right word.
00:47:44
Speaker
I don't know if that's the word.
00:47:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:46
Speaker
It gets tense.
00:47:49
Speaker
So Stregobor is, is, is,
00:47:52
Speaker
Taking care of taking care of he's taken over this tower and has taken the name Master Eryon because that's like, yeah, Eryon's been dead for 200 years.
00:48:00
Speaker
I just took.
00:48:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's an alias.
00:48:04
Speaker
That's really what it comes down to.
00:48:06
Speaker
And he's happy to.
00:48:07
Speaker
Yeah, he says it's like, oh, yeah, I'm just honoring him by doing this.
00:48:10
Speaker
And it's, you know, this is an AKA.
00:48:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's what this is.
00:48:15
Speaker
So they get into a conversation and Stregobor, they basically start talking about.
00:48:22
Speaker
monsters.
00:48:23
Speaker
And we get information on this thing, the Curse of the Black Sun, which is kind of a curse and kind of
00:48:33
Speaker
They don't go into a lot of the specifics, but the idea is that there was this time that was brought on by wizards like Strigobor where any people who were born under this sign became hideous, horrible monsters.
00:48:51
Speaker
Right.
00:48:53
Speaker
And one such monster is hunting Strigobor down.
00:48:57
Speaker
And as long as he's in the tower, he's fine.
00:49:00
Speaker
He's not he's fine.
00:49:01
Speaker
He's got everything he needs, but he doesn't want to be in that tower for much.
00:49:06
Speaker
But much.
00:49:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:07
Speaker
Much like the guy from the thing.
00:49:10
Speaker
He doesn't want to spend the rest of the winter tied to this fucking couch.
00:49:14
Speaker
Right, right.
00:49:15
Speaker
Exactly.
00:49:15
Speaker
Exactly.
00:49:16
Speaker
And it's that's exactly.
00:49:19
Speaker
And he's so he basically says, you know, so it would be a lesser evil if you just found this this this girl and kill her because she is a monster.
00:49:33
Speaker
They call her the Shrike because she likes to impale her enemies and all that stuff.
00:49:39
Speaker
And she's the leader of a band of brigands, you know,
00:49:43
Speaker
And he talks about like she had a group of seven gnomes that she paled around with.
00:49:51
Speaker
That she got them out of mining and into being bandits.
00:49:56
Speaker
And then they all got killed.
00:49:59
Speaker
And we don't know how that happened.
00:50:03
Speaker
It is hilarious because they talk about how the women who were cursed were.
00:50:08
Speaker
to be these monsters the wizards like rounded them up and created a tower for each one of them and imprisoned them it's got a and so you've got this uh rapunzel thing yeah uh and he says and a lot of them we we underestimate a lot of them escaped and this is one of them yeah um and uh it's a she's a former princess you know she was born into rapunzel plus snow white snow white yeah that's exactly it and so
00:50:37
Speaker
But she's Shrike, man.
00:50:38
Speaker
She went by Renfri.
00:50:39
Speaker
She's now Shrike.
00:50:41
Speaker
It would be better if you just killed her.
00:50:43
Speaker
And Geralt's like, I'm not going to fuck it.
00:50:45
Speaker
You were responsible.
00:50:46
Speaker
You did this.
00:50:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:47
Speaker
Like you guys, wizards like you made this.
00:50:51
Speaker
If she's a monster, you guys made her into one.
00:50:53
Speaker
I have no interest in this.
00:50:55
Speaker
Fuck off.
00:50:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:56
Speaker
Which I thought was fair.
00:50:59
Speaker
So Geralt.
00:51:03
Speaker
ends up meeting them.
00:51:05
Speaker
He, he, he runs into them at a tavern in town and, and he, he basically wants to talk to her and like, like, what is this all about?
00:51:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:15
Speaker
Let's, let's, let's see what her side of the story is.
00:51:18
Speaker
And she is of course surrounded by all of her, her thugs and goons and that sort of thing.
00:51:23
Speaker
And, and violence almost breaks out, but she shows up at just the right time and goes, Hey, I'll talk to him, whatever.
00:51:29
Speaker
It doesn't matter.
00:51:29
Speaker
I love that.
00:51:30
Speaker
One of the goons is just named 15.
00:51:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:32
Speaker
Yeah, 15.
00:51:33
Speaker
There's got to be a story there.
00:51:35
Speaker
And I.
00:51:37
Speaker
I love it.
00:51:38
Speaker
I love the idea that I like when writers do that, by the way.
00:51:42
Speaker
I like when writers throw in something like that, that you're like, oh, there's got to be some sort of backstory or something like that to that.
00:51:50
Speaker
But they're not going to tell us.
00:51:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:51
Speaker
We get like a hint at it, but not much else.
00:51:54
Speaker
No, no.
00:51:55
Speaker
We never find out for sure.
00:51:57
Speaker
They certainly don't like give us a novella about it the way that American writers would do.
00:52:03
Speaker
Right.
00:52:05
Speaker
So –
00:52:08
Speaker
He meets her and finds out she's got this decree from the king that makes her and her team like not royalty, but like they're under the protection of the king.
00:52:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:21
Speaker
So you can't fuck with me.
00:52:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:24
Speaker
She has diplomatic immunity.
00:52:27
Speaker
Exactly.
00:52:31
Speaker
And so they have kind of an out and she kind of.
00:52:35
Speaker
Keeps him at an arm's length and doesn't give him a lot of information.
00:52:39
Speaker
But later, when Geralt makes his way back to the room he's staying in, she has broken in.
00:52:47
Speaker
She's basically like assassins creeded her way into his room and says, I had basically said, I couldn't talk about who I am and all that shit.
00:52:56
Speaker
You know, in front of the fellas, those dudes in front of the guys can't do that.
00:53:02
Speaker
So so she basically throws Stregobor's idea back to Geralt, basically saying, I am I am if I'm a mom, I don't know what I am.
00:53:14
Speaker
She goes, I don't know what I am.
00:53:15
Speaker
He made me into something.
00:53:17
Speaker
We don't get any inference of what kind of a monster she's supposed to be.
00:53:22
Speaker
Right.
00:53:23
Speaker
She's just this.
00:53:24
Speaker
She's just a murderous monster.
00:53:26
Speaker
And they come and Strigobor has compared her to the Kikamore that he's killed.
00:53:31
Speaker
And then later she compares Strigobor to the Kikamore.
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:36
Speaker
Basically saying it would be better if he died, if he died.
00:53:40
Speaker
And she talks about how, like, yeah, Stregobor was the the wizard who was with my stepmother.
00:53:48
Speaker
He filled, you know, her and him like work together to make my life a living hell.
00:53:53
Speaker
They tried to kill me with a poison apple.
00:53:55
Speaker
Right.
00:53:57
Speaker
The there they they sent me out into the woods with a huntsman who tried to murder me.
00:54:04
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:54:04
Speaker
All of the, all of the fairy tales.
00:54:07
Speaker
It's so good.
00:54:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:08
Speaker
It's, it's, Oh my God.
00:54:10
Speaker
She was like sent into a, she was put in a well at one point.
00:54:15
Speaker
It's like, Lassie saved her.
00:54:16
Speaker
It's just all.
00:54:17
Speaker
It's, it's wild stuff.
00:54:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:20
Speaker
It's, it's terrific.
00:54:21
Speaker
It, it, we do get a like nice concentrated dose of classic European fairy tales here.
00:54:28
Speaker
Um, yeah.
00:54:29
Speaker
She basically says, you know what?
00:54:30
Speaker
We're going to leave.
00:54:32
Speaker
We're going to leave.
00:54:32
Speaker
You know, you're right.
00:54:33
Speaker
Because Geralt's like, I don't.
00:54:34
Speaker
People are going to die.
00:54:36
Speaker
Like, it's not just going to be if it was just you or just him, that would be one thing.
00:54:41
Speaker
But other people are going to die, too.
00:54:44
Speaker
And that's not necessary.
00:54:46
Speaker
And so she kind of goes, all right, you've convinced me.
00:54:49
Speaker
I'm not.
00:54:49
Speaker
I'll leave.
00:54:51
Speaker
And maybe maybe me and Strigobor will meet somewhere else, you know, and just not here in town.
00:54:56
Speaker
And then they fuck.
00:54:58
Speaker
Uh, that happens that.
00:54:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:01
Speaker
Because it's Geralt, you know, what it's Geralt.
00:55:04
Speaker
He's she, when he, when he actually enters his room, he hears her and he like tackles her not knowing who she is.
00:55:11
Speaker
And she says, make some comment about like, I knew you were going to be on top of me at some point tonight.
00:55:16
Speaker
I just didn't know it was going to be immediately.
00:55:17
Speaker
Uh, it's, it's pretty great.
00:55:21
Speaker
Uh, it's just good lines.
00:55:23
Speaker
Um, so in the morning, uh, uh,
00:55:26
Speaker
Geralt's having having dinner with the not dinner, sorry, breakfast with the family of the people who put them up for the night, who is the alderman who also has he has history with.
00:55:38
Speaker
And he basically realizes through the story that Alderman is telling him that.
00:55:46
Speaker
Renfri Shrike has no, she's not actually going to leave.
00:55:50
Speaker
Right.
00:55:50
Speaker
And she's, you know, she's going to use, I'm just going to read it out here that as they, as they write it here in the wiki, because it's way better than I would have put it.
00:55:59
Speaker
So she plans to use the fact that the local mage in any given town is duty bound to do what he can to protect the town.
00:56:08
Speaker
So she's going to kill everybody to force him to leave his tower.
00:56:13
Speaker
Right.
00:56:14
Speaker
Which is,
00:56:16
Speaker
Effective.
00:56:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:18
Speaker
Bold play, and we'll see how it turns out.
00:56:21
Speaker
Right.
00:56:21
Speaker
The thing is, Geralt knows Stregobor, and he's like, Stregobor is not going to leave his tower.
00:56:26
Speaker
I don't think that's... I think we're thinking of a different wizard.
00:56:30
Speaker
I think this is a different wizard.
00:56:34
Speaker
So Geralt makes his way out into the village, the town, and finds their band, and he's like, I...
00:56:46
Speaker
I'm just going to have to kill these people.
00:56:48
Speaker
Right.
00:56:49
Speaker
To stop them from hurting any innocent people.
00:56:51
Speaker
So we get some pretty terrific fight scenes, basically.
00:56:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:57
Speaker
Finally, we do finally get our final boss moment, almost final boss moment with him fighting Renfri and her basically begging him to help her get Stregoborn.
00:57:10
Speaker
And she ends up getting shot.
00:57:15
Speaker
No, no, sorry.
00:57:16
Speaker
He gets shot almost and, you know, does the cool spinny blade.
00:57:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:57:23
Speaker
Kind of thing.
00:57:24
Speaker
Renfri is really good at sword fighting.
00:57:29
Speaker
She has him back on his heels.
00:57:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great fight.
00:57:33
Speaker
Like, it's not, you know, she's got absolute skills and...
00:57:38
Speaker
And it's great because she's pointed out several times, I was raised a princess.
00:57:42
Speaker
I was supposed to be soft.
00:57:44
Speaker
And she's constantly making jokes about this, by the way.
00:57:47
Speaker
She talks about like, you know, I'm going to go out and sleep outdoors if I leave your room right now.
00:57:56
Speaker
And I'm a princess.
00:57:58
Speaker
And I could feel a pee under like 19 mattresses.
00:58:02
Speaker
So my delicate constitution –
00:58:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:05
Speaker
You should just let me stay here.
00:58:07
Speaker
And that totally works, by the way.
00:58:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:09
Speaker
Right.
00:58:11
Speaker
So finally they fight and she loses.
00:58:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:18
Speaker
So and then Strigobor, that's when Strigobor shows up and he's like, oh, oh, yeah.
00:58:22
Speaker
Oh, gosh, I came as soon as I came as soon as I could.
00:58:26
Speaker
Oh, the fight's over.
00:58:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:29
Speaker
But he and he says he wants to perform an autopsy, which is not a word you hear a lot in fantasy, but he wants to perform an autopsy to prove that.
00:58:38
Speaker
In his in his mind that this curse, this curse of the moon, whatever, is what made her evil.
00:58:46
Speaker
And Geralt tells him to back the fuck off.
00:58:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:50
Speaker
He's very protective of her body.
00:58:52
Speaker
No one's touching her.
00:58:53
Speaker
Right.
00:58:54
Speaker
And and we get this really interesting moment.
00:58:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:59
Speaker
That the townspeople start throwing shit at the Witcher.
00:59:04
Speaker
Right.
00:59:05
Speaker
Because we go back to that original moment in the very beginning of this book where it doesn't matter.
00:59:12
Speaker
He did all of this to save these townspeople from getting hurt or something like that.
00:59:17
Speaker
And it doesn't matter.
00:59:18
Speaker
They're throwing rocks at them and everything like that.
00:59:20
Speaker
And he's just kind of...
00:59:22
Speaker
OK, fine.
00:59:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:23
Speaker
And, you know, and leaves.
00:59:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:27
Speaker
His friend, his friend, the alderman is like, you got to go.
00:59:32
Speaker
And by the way, don't come back.
00:59:34
Speaker
Don't ever come back.
00:59:35
Speaker
Don't come back.
00:59:36
Speaker
And this is how he becomes known as the butcher of Blaviken.
00:59:39
Speaker
Right.
00:59:40
Speaker
Because he killed a bunch of goons in the street that were going to slaughter the town.
00:59:44
Speaker
Right.
00:59:45
Speaker
So he has, so there's no justice whatsoever.
00:59:49
Speaker
And it's, it's actually, it's a really kind of sad ending to the story.
00:59:54
Speaker
And again, it's that trope that keeps coming up where none of these stories so far have ended with him.
01:00:00
Speaker
Like I hunt the monster, I kill them.
01:00:02
Speaker
No, it's always something.
01:00:04
Speaker
There's always something more to it than that.
01:00:06
Speaker
And I think that's, that's the kind of the perfect place to, to end tonight.
01:00:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:12
Speaker
So, yeah.
01:00:13
Speaker
Kevin, what do you think so far of The Last Wish?
01:00:16
Speaker
It's a lot of fun.
01:00:18
Speaker
And I'll say this.
01:00:22
Speaker
These stories are some of the best.
01:00:26
Speaker
Their adaptations in the show are some of the best individual characters.
01:00:33
Speaker
like adaptations that the show does of Witcher storytelling.
01:00:38
Speaker
They're pretty much untouched from the book to the show.
01:00:43
Speaker
And it's they're a lot of fun.
01:00:46
Speaker
It's it's there.
01:00:47
Speaker
The stories are
01:00:48
Speaker
Especially with the idea that, OK, yeah, no, he he goes after a monster and he kills the monster.
01:00:57
Speaker
And like a lesser writer would just focus on the story about him overcoming a monster.
01:01:03
Speaker
Like him overcoming a monster is the mundane for him.
01:01:09
Speaker
It's the least interesting part of the whole thing.
01:01:11
Speaker
It's it's him dealing with the the context and the repercussions that just doing what he does is is the problem.
01:01:23
Speaker
You know, it like he gets he gets kicked out of the town for saving them.
01:01:30
Speaker
Right.
01:01:31
Speaker
He nearly gets decapitated by the 14 year old girl.
01:01:35
Speaker
It's it's it's a lot of, you know,
01:01:39
Speaker
It's interesting.
01:01:40
Speaker
I'm having a lot of fun with The Last Wish so far.
01:01:44
Speaker
Yeah, me too.
01:01:46
Speaker
It is, you know, because I compared it to, you know, Robert E. Howard and Conan and those classic pulpy sword and sorcery things.
01:01:55
Speaker
But it's actually far more complex than that, because whereas...
01:02:02
Speaker
a Conan story would end with, you know, I've killed the monster and I get my prize and I take a girl with me and that kind of thing.
01:02:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:12
Speaker
It's always it's never as simple as that.
01:02:14
Speaker
And I really like that.
01:02:16
Speaker
And it's done well.
01:02:17
Speaker
He's a terrific writer.
01:02:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:19
Speaker
So this is this is super fun.
01:02:21
Speaker
I'm really glad we're reading this.
01:02:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:24
Speaker
OK, well, now that we've now that we've wrapped that up, Kevin, I have one last question for you.
01:02:29
Speaker
Yes.
01:02:31
Speaker
What are you playing?
01:02:32
Speaker
Ooh.
01:02:34
Speaker
What am I playing?
01:02:35
Speaker
All right.
01:02:35
Speaker
So I'm playing two things right now.
01:02:39
Speaker
Let me fire them up.
01:02:42
Speaker
Okay.
01:02:42
Speaker
So the shortest one I'll talk about is I started playing an early access game, point and click horror game called Midnight Special.
01:02:50
Speaker
Okay.
01:02:52
Speaker
Which is...
01:02:55
Speaker
It's a neat little... It came up in my queue.
01:02:59
Speaker
I was like, this looks interesting.
01:03:01
Speaker
I'm going to try it.
01:03:03
Speaker
It's very, very early access, so there's some weird glitches and things like that.
01:03:09
Speaker
But I'm enjoying it so far.
01:03:11
Speaker
The controls are a little weird, and I think if I send feedback in for the early access, it would be that, like...
01:03:20
Speaker
the there's like the left click to go and the right click to inspect.
01:03:24
Speaker
But sometimes when you click on things, it's like tries to pick it up and it's like, I can't pick that up.
01:03:31
Speaker
I feel like the inspect should be the default rather than, you know what I mean?
01:03:35
Speaker
Just like little things.
01:03:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:36
Speaker
Tweaky things like that.
01:03:38
Speaker
Or do the thing where you right click to change what interaction you want to do with the object.
01:03:43
Speaker
Exactly.
01:03:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:45
Speaker
The other thing I'll mention is that the main character that you're playing as Sarah is a think her name is Sarah.
01:03:54
Speaker
I can't remember.
01:03:55
Speaker
It better be because this is clearly meant to be clock tower.
01:03:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:00
Speaker
So yeah, she has her breast.
01:04:03
Speaker
This is have jiggle physics as she walks.
01:04:05
Speaker
Jesus Christ.
01:04:08
Speaker
So that's a little much.
01:04:11
Speaker
I think I don't think they need that.
01:04:15
Speaker
She's breasting boobily.
01:04:16
Speaker
She breasts boobily in this game.
01:04:19
Speaker
And listen, I, you know, far be it from me to shame anyone for breasting boobily.
01:04:27
Speaker
But it just seems out of place.
01:04:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:34
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:35
Speaker
This is, this is, I mean, this, it seems I'm seeing like, I'm watching a video of it right now.
01:04:39
Speaker
I'm seeing a lot of clock tower.
01:04:41
Speaker
I'm seeing like Friday the 13th, the NES game.
01:04:45
Speaker
Like there's all kinds of interesting stuff in here.
01:04:47
Speaker
So
01:04:49
Speaker
Why are we throwing in boobs?
01:04:52
Speaker
I don't know.
01:04:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:54
Speaker
But it looks cool.
01:04:55
Speaker
It looks pretty neat.
01:04:56
Speaker
It looks neat.
01:04:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:58
Speaker
Just like, you know, that's my one feedback is the breasting boobily.
01:05:06
Speaker
Sure.
01:05:07
Speaker
Sure.
01:05:08
Speaker
So, but if I am so that's that's I've played that for a little bit.
01:05:14
Speaker
I think I'll return to it.
01:05:16
Speaker
I think I accidentally quit out without saving.
01:05:18
Speaker
So I probably just have to replay everything that I've done already.
01:05:21
Speaker
It's one of those games where it's like it's an early access.
01:05:24
Speaker
The save option is was not like didn't pop out to me right away.
01:05:29
Speaker
It was like, is this going to save automatically or not?
01:05:31
Speaker
I don't know.
01:05:32
Speaker
And I quit.
01:05:33
Speaker
And I was like, I'm not sure that saved.
01:05:35
Speaker
I don't think that happened.
01:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think that happened.
01:05:37
Speaker
But, okay, so the other thing I've been playing is, oh, you know what?
01:05:43
Speaker
I should mention I beat Claire Obscure Expedition 33.
01:05:49
Speaker
Nice.
01:05:51
Speaker
It'll be on my game of the year list.
01:05:53
Speaker
I don't think I'm as hot on it as other folks are after I got through to the ending.
01:06:00
Speaker
And talking about the ending kind of like spoils a lot of the twists and turns the story takes.
01:06:06
Speaker
But it was like you're presented a choice at the end that just kind of like I was like, that's bullshit.
01:06:14
Speaker
Oh,
01:06:17
Speaker
Is it kind of that binary old school good versus bad Paragon?
01:06:22
Speaker
No, it's not even good versus bad.
01:06:25
Speaker
It's just two choices that are like, I feel like we could go, we can't have a third option that would be like a little bit more balanced.
01:06:34
Speaker
They're very extreme choices though.
01:06:37
Speaker
They're not a good and bad.
01:06:39
Speaker
I wouldn't say.
01:06:40
Speaker
Although one, I'll say it seems like one is more obvious to be the good ending and it's not.
01:06:49
Speaker
It just really depends on your takeaway.
01:06:51
Speaker
Anyway, that's kind of where I landed on Expedition 33.
01:06:53
Speaker
It'll be on my game of the year list.
01:06:55
Speaker
Not on my it's not my game of the year.
01:06:58
Speaker
Like other people have said, it's it's good.
01:07:02
Speaker
It's up there.
01:07:03
Speaker
I beat it in 33 hours.
01:07:05
Speaker
And, you know, it's that's pretty quick for that style of game.
01:07:11
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:07:12
Speaker
Damn.
01:07:13
Speaker
But something new I've been playing, which I really like so far, is South of Midnight.
01:07:21
Speaker
Okay, tell me all about this because that looks good.
01:07:24
Speaker
Okay, so you need to play this, Phil, because you're a southern boy.
01:07:29
Speaker
This is very steeped in African-American southern folktale type stuff, as well as general southern folktales.
01:07:41
Speaker
Sure.
01:07:42
Speaker
I think one of the cool things is that the enemies that you fight in the game are haints.
01:07:48
Speaker
And oh, cool.
01:07:50
Speaker
All right.
01:07:51
Speaker
Are what Annie, if you've seen sinners, paints are what Annie thinks are attacking before she realizes that they're vampires.
01:08:02
Speaker
So I would say sinners in South of Midnight are actually a very interesting pairing.
01:08:09
Speaker
South of Midnight takes place in like more like in present day.
01:08:14
Speaker
And but still they do.
01:08:18
Speaker
It's an interesting parallel to play that to watch that movie and play this game because it's African-American folklore and storytelling that is really solid and interesting to take part in.
01:08:34
Speaker
And a lot of it's a lot of.
01:08:38
Speaker
You know, there's some of the hoodoo and hoodoo-voodoo type stuff in both of them.
01:08:48
Speaker
Really fun.
01:08:51
Speaker
And I think it's...
01:08:54
Speaker
For for those of you who have spent time in the south, I think it's it.
01:08:59
Speaker
It makes sense to fire it up and play it in the logo.
01:09:03
Speaker
You'll see there's a bottle tree, which is.
01:09:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:08
Speaker
A very big thing.
01:09:09
Speaker
That's a very important element to the story is the bottle tree.
01:09:14
Speaker
So it's a, it's a kind of a game.
01:09:17
Speaker
Is it?
01:09:18
Speaker
So I'm sorry.
01:09:19
Speaker
It's like an, yeah, yeah.
01:09:20
Speaker
It's like an action game.
01:09:21
Speaker
It's, I would say the closest analog is to the like recent God of war games where you like, you're going through a level and then you go to a spot, like a little mini arena where you fight the enemies and
01:09:39
Speaker
Okay, and then there's might be a puzzle, but instead of puzzles in South of Midnight, it's mostly traversal type stuff.
01:09:46
Speaker
So there's a bunch of traversal mechanics.
01:09:48
Speaker
You got double jumps.
01:09:49
Speaker
You got grappling hooks.
01:09:50
Speaker
You got gliders.
01:09:53
Speaker
You got things like that.
01:09:54
Speaker
So it's
01:09:55
Speaker
So it's got some platforming to it.
01:09:57
Speaker
It's platforming with some little mini arena like enemy fights where you fight the haints and then you have to your character is a weaver and she has to untangle the knots of like they're called stigma.
01:10:17
Speaker
uh okay so like this all the this guilt and bad feelings turns into a knot and she has to use her weaver powers to untangle that knot and the whole game is about like overcoming guilt and generational trauma and there was the first
01:10:36
Speaker
the first story that you the first person that you like heal, it's called healing a person.
01:10:44
Speaker
The first person that you heal the story had me in tears by the end.
01:10:50
Speaker
Like, like it's a very powerfully written game.
01:10:54
Speaker
So you're playing as a character.
01:10:59
Speaker
I believe her name is Hazel.
01:11:01
Speaker
She is going off to college.
01:11:03
Speaker
She's a track star.
01:11:05
Speaker
And there's a hurricane coming.
01:11:08
Speaker
And while she's out and checking on her neighbors, the river floods and washes her house with her mother in it down the river.
01:11:18
Speaker
And it's just her chasing after her mother.
01:11:20
Speaker
And as she is running after her mother, the things start getting weirder and weirder.
01:11:28
Speaker
And I would say one other story, one other movie I would reference is Big Fish.
01:11:35
Speaker
It's oh, OK, it has it really has a vibe of big fish and not because there is a literal big fish who acts as your narrator.
01:11:46
Speaker
There's this catfish who looks like he is weaved together out of like quilts and things like that.
01:11:51
Speaker
Who's he's like, oh, I'll tell you this story.
01:11:55
Speaker
Oh, God damn it.
01:11:58
Speaker
This looks.
01:11:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:58
Speaker
I was like,
01:12:01
Speaker
I was intrigued as hell by this, but the fact is I hadn't heard much about it since it came out.
01:12:06
Speaker
So I'm really glad that you're playing it.
01:12:08
Speaker
It's an excellent game.
01:12:09
Speaker
I just I just beat the second boss gator named Two Toad Tom, who
01:12:17
Speaker
Fucking Christ.
01:12:17
Speaker
How am I not supposed to love this?
01:12:19
Speaker
Jesus Christ.
01:12:20
Speaker
You know, you heal Two-Toe Tom's stigma, the wound that he's been carrying around, the guilt that he's been carrying around.
01:12:29
Speaker
So it's not about killing.
01:12:30
Speaker
It's about healing.
01:12:32
Speaker
It's not about killing, it's about healing and undoing, doing what you can to undo the damage that trauma has caused.
01:12:40
Speaker
Well, this looks beautiful.
01:12:46
Speaker
Yeah, so South of Midnight, highly recommend it.
01:12:48
Speaker
It's actually by the same developers who made We Happy Few.
01:12:55
Speaker
Oh, OK, which is interesting.
01:12:58
Speaker
Interesting.
01:12:59
Speaker
But yeah, this game is tremendous.
01:13:02
Speaker
It'll be high up on my list at the end of the year.
01:13:05
Speaker
This looks fun.
01:13:06
Speaker
This looks really fun.
01:13:07
Speaker
I'm definitely going to.
01:13:08
Speaker
OK, I'm glad you played it.
01:13:09
Speaker
I'm glad you're saying that because that's pushed me over the edge there.
01:13:14
Speaker
And I because it's on Game Pass, I've been playing Doom Dark Ages.
01:13:21
Speaker
How is that?
01:13:22
Speaker
It's good.
01:13:24
Speaker
It's a Doom game.
01:13:24
Speaker
Sure.
01:13:26
Speaker
It doesn't run as well as I would like to.
01:13:30
Speaker
It's very dark.
01:13:32
Speaker
Okay.
01:13:34
Speaker
And I think part of that's probably because my computer just doesn't handle the lighting as well as it could.
01:13:40
Speaker
Sure.
01:13:42
Speaker
But it's I'd say it's got me more hooked than it's like less than the than Doom 2016, but more than than Eternal.
01:13:56
Speaker
Okay.
01:13:56
Speaker
Okay.
01:13:57
Speaker
Kind of like in between the two.
01:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, the second one was kind of... It was fine.
01:14:03
Speaker
But it was too much.
01:14:04
Speaker
You know what?
01:14:05
Speaker
My problem with the second one, it was too much about the big arena fights rather than just going through a level.
01:14:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:15
Speaker
This kind of rebalances that a bit.
01:14:18
Speaker
And there's more focus on melee in this one.
01:14:24
Speaker
It's set, you know, a long time ago.
01:14:27
Speaker
Sure.
01:14:28
Speaker
And your one of your primary weapons is a shield of which you do Captain America bullshit with it.
01:14:36
Speaker
Of course.
01:14:37
Speaker
Of course.
01:14:39
Speaker
Naturally.
01:14:41
Speaker
You have, you know, your regular guns, but you're it's it's funny how secondary the guns feel in this game.
01:14:47
Speaker
Most of the time you're like, I'm throwing it.
01:14:50
Speaker
I'm throwing it.
01:14:50
Speaker
I'm punching.
01:14:51
Speaker
I'm doing all that stuff.
01:14:52
Speaker
One of the things that's interesting is they got rid of, for the most part,
01:14:57
Speaker
the glory kills.
01:14:59
Speaker
Really?
01:15:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:01
Speaker
And I understand because in Eternal, the problem with the glory kills is that they slowed for such a big game with a lot like you're constantly killing things.
01:15:11
Speaker
The glory kills were like four seconds each time you hit the button.
01:15:15
Speaker
Whereas in this, it speeds up the combat a lot by doing the execution kill.
01:15:20
Speaker
It doesn't slow things down.
01:15:21
Speaker
It doesn't do slow motion or whatever.
01:15:24
Speaker
They'll do glory kills for bosses, but not for regular enemies.
01:15:29
Speaker
So I think that was just a decision on their part to like, all right, we're going to speed up the gameplay a little bit more by removing the glory kill.
01:15:37
Speaker
There's still executions, but the glory kill where it's like...
01:15:42
Speaker
Zoom in slow motion.
01:15:43
Speaker
He's ripping things vertically, you know, whatever.
01:15:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:47
Speaker
We got rid of that.
01:15:47
Speaker
I mean, that makes sense for what they're trying to do.
01:15:50
Speaker
I mean, yeah.
01:15:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:51
Speaker
Makes a lot of sense.
01:15:52
Speaker
So that's what I've been playing.
01:15:54
Speaker
Phil.
01:15:55
Speaker
Cool.
01:15:56
Speaker
What are you playing?
01:15:58
Speaker
Oh, well, start with I played a demo of a game called Cast and Chill.
01:16:07
Speaker
I'm fishing this.
01:16:09
Speaker
The easiest thing that I can compare it to is it's basically the fishing version of Keep Driving.
01:16:16
Speaker
OK, it looks almost identical in its style and it delivers exactly what it says on the tin.
01:16:24
Speaker
It is a very chill fishing game.
01:16:28
Speaker
There are fishing mechanics, but they're not as complex as you've seen in some other games.
01:16:34
Speaker
You go out.
01:16:36
Speaker
on your boat with your dog, you can pet your dog and go out and catch different kinds of fish.
01:16:43
Speaker
Find out the different kinds of fish that are in different watering holes and try to catch all the fish there.
01:16:49
Speaker
Sell what you get.
01:16:50
Speaker
Beat your, you know, scores, upgrade your boat, upgrade your ship.
01:16:56
Speaker
It's gorgeous.
01:16:58
Speaker
At least the demo is autumn and it's just you're in, it looks like Pacific Northwest somewhere, like just mountains and golden trees.
01:17:09
Speaker
It's exact, it's cast and chill.
01:17:11
Speaker
It is very chill.
01:17:13
Speaker
Um, it's great.
01:17:15
Speaker
I think it's terrific.
01:17:16
Speaker
Uh, uh, it, the demo is worth absolutely worth playing.
01:17:20
Speaker
Um, it's, it's just a nice mellow sort
Gaming for Relaxation
01:17:24
Speaker
of game.
01:17:24
Speaker
And it helped me to understand, uh, with these next two games that I am in my leave me alone.
01:17:34
Speaker
I just need to relax video game era.
01:17:38
Speaker
Uh,
01:17:39
Speaker
You know, I can't believe it only just occurred to me, Kevin.
01:17:43
Speaker
My kid isn't even a year and a half years old.
01:17:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:47
Speaker
I don't necessarily I will.
01:17:52
Speaker
I will play more involved, complicated games, but it takes a lot more for me to.
01:17:59
Speaker
Okay, let's get into this.
01:18:00
Speaker
Let's invest myself in this, that sort of thing.
01:18:04
Speaker
And with that being said, one of the games I ended up playing a lot this past week was Drop Dutchie.
01:18:14
Speaker
I think it's terrific because
01:18:16
Speaker
your description, I don't know how it would have been if I had gone into it sight unseen, because I totally see what you mean about it not being quite what you expected.
01:18:29
Speaker
For those of you who weren't in the last episode,
01:18:33
Speaker
Drop Duchy is a Tetris like, if you will, where it's a city builder and you're using Tetris pieces.
01:18:40
Speaker
Now, one of the things you said that threw you was that unlike Tetris, the the the pieces don't automatically go down.
01:18:48
Speaker
They do.
01:18:50
Speaker
It's just it's very slow when you're in the first difficulty levels.
01:18:54
Speaker
It speeds up.
01:18:56
Speaker
OK.
01:18:57
Speaker
But yeah.
01:18:59
Speaker
I but I think because you made the point of saying that it actually helped me go, OK, let's let's let's see what this is all about.
01:19:07
Speaker
And I ended up really enjoying it.
01:19:11
Speaker
It's got a lot of fun mechanics to it.
01:19:14
Speaker
It's bite sized.
01:19:15
Speaker
You can get through, you know, a run of it, you know, 20 minutes, something like that.
01:19:21
Speaker
Sure.
01:19:21
Speaker
And it's involved, but not too involved.
01:19:25
Speaker
Again, it's very laid back, but fun.
01:19:31
Speaker
Now, for games that are just straight ass laid back, I went ahead and got the full version of Tower Dominion, which I played the demo of.
01:19:42
Speaker
during Next Fest and the full game was released.
01:19:46
Speaker
It is a tower defense game and it is a they have gloriously and beautifully ripped off Warhammer.
01:19:55
Speaker
It's terrific.
01:19:56
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:19:56
Speaker
The logo.
01:19:58
Speaker
Look at that shit.
01:19:59
Speaker
Like it's it's super fun.
01:20:01
Speaker
It's it's it's cute.
01:20:03
Speaker
It's cartoon characters and that sort of thing.
01:20:06
Speaker
But oh, my God, it's like but you have a billion different leaders to choose from that you have to unlock over the course of the game in three different kinds of worlds, three different kinds of armies.
01:20:15
Speaker
Yeah.
01:20:15
Speaker
There are a lot of things like 70 percent of the units and the way that the teams play is the same.
01:20:22
Speaker
Sure.
01:20:23
Speaker
But there's just enough different between them that your strategy will change.
01:20:27
Speaker
And it will also change based on the leader you're using.
01:20:29
Speaker
But you look at it and you're like, oh, my God, that's a comissar.
01:20:31
Speaker
Oh, my God, that's a space.
01:20:33
Speaker
Jesus Christ.
01:20:33
Speaker
Guys, guys, guys.
01:20:36
Speaker
They have ripped it off beautifully.
01:20:40
Speaker
I, I really enjoy it.
01:20:42
Speaker
I think one of the things that sets it apart from your standard issue, um, tower defense game is that you are actually choosing, you start out with just, it's, it's like a, it's, it's like a Tetris thing.
01:20:55
Speaker
It's like tiles, right?
01:20:57
Speaker
Uh, you start out on a few tiles, uh, with the road leading up to your base and every turn or two, you
01:21:04
Speaker
you have to pick a new tile.
01:21:07
Speaker
You have to place a tile so that you are determining where the enemies are coming from.
01:21:14
Speaker
And one of the most satisfying things I ever did was I had my base in the middle and I managed between a little bit of luck and some re-rolls and stuff like that, I managed to make a spiral of the road.
01:21:29
Speaker
Going around and and I tell you what the satisfaction of setting up just a goddamn spiral shooting gallery for all these bugs trying to kill my base is divine.
01:21:42
Speaker
It was amazing.
01:21:43
Speaker
That's amazing.
01:21:45
Speaker
It's a lot of fun.
01:21:46
Speaker
It's very chill.
01:21:48
Speaker
Are the enemies Tyranids?
01:21:50
Speaker
For all intents and purposes, they are bugs.
01:21:53
Speaker
They're a lot squishier than Tyranids, but yeah, they're for all intents and purposes, Tyranids.
01:21:58
Speaker
And, you know, they increase in their abilities.
01:22:02
Speaker
You've got four different difficulty levels.
01:22:05
Speaker
There's plenty of game to play.
01:22:08
Speaker
And it is and it's very chill.
01:22:10
Speaker
It's the kind of thing where I was working from home today and I could get some work done and then I could go over and do a round of that and then get some more work done.
01:22:17
Speaker
Right.
01:22:19
Speaker
And it's it's it's very engaging.
01:22:20
Speaker
It's again, I am in my I am playing video games to relax.
01:22:25
Speaker
Don't talk to me era.
01:22:27
Speaker
Right.
01:22:27
Speaker
And this and this is feeding right
Celebrating 200 Episodes
01:22:31
Speaker
into it.
01:22:31
Speaker
Right.
01:22:31
Speaker
Game of the Year list is going to look real, real lazy this year.
01:22:35
Speaker
Real weird.
01:22:39
Speaker
Gotta get real weird with these games.
01:22:41
Speaker
So yeah, so that's what I've been playing.
01:22:44
Speaker
Awesome.
01:22:45
Speaker
Oh, and by the way, happy 200th episode, my friend.
01:22:49
Speaker
Happy 200th episode.
01:22:50
Speaker
This is the 200th.
01:22:51
Speaker
What about that?
01:22:54
Speaker
I know.
01:22:55
Speaker
I know.
01:22:55
Speaker
I can't believe we didn't top load that, but it's, it's, I think it's very appropriate to start on something unique like this for our 200th episode.
01:23:02
Speaker
I love you, man.
01:23:03
Speaker
This is, this is, this is a great show.
01:23:05
Speaker
Great show.
01:23:06
Speaker
200 episodes.
01:23:07
Speaker
How about it?
Humorous Anecdote: The Weeping Angel
01:23:09
Speaker
How about it?
01:23:10
Speaker
How about it?
01:23:11
Speaker
And for, for 200 episodes, uh, there has been a weeping angel in my garage.
01:23:18
Speaker
Uh, it's kind of stuck in there.
01:23:19
Speaker
What do I do about that?
01:23:22
Speaker
OK, OK.
01:23:25
Speaker
How much liquid cash do you have?
01:23:27
Speaker
You know what?
01:23:31
Speaker
Never mind.
01:23:31
Speaker
You're going to burn it anyway, so it doesn't.