Lifting Curses
Please note that the framing device of this piece has appeared as part of a summary for this game in an article for Haywire Magazine in 2016.
Mantled in streaks of charcoal and determined fury, a storm is gathering strength over the horizon. It approaches swiftly as I make the White Wolf weave through the undergrowth. A spectre haunts the heart of the forest; a man from the nearby village pleaded with us to break her curse and set her free. I stand beneath old sentinels, whose emerald crowns now bow to tempest; their shade conceals a circle of abandoned buildings with a makeshift palisade to ward off the howling wind, tightly hugging an old well in their midst; it did nothing to protect the fledgling village from a terror external.
[. . .]
The White Wolf commits her bones to the flames, a small measure of peace, but it is not enough. In this early instance — one of many to come — Wild Hunt adjusts its lens to capture not the vast, sweeping spaces of its world, but the minute details of personal tragedy that bounce in wide echoes across the Northern Realms. It invokes whole histories of abuse, blood and strife in landscapes haunted by myriad invisible crimes and curses, and the necro-political maneuvering that might be the greatest of them all.
Wild Hunt and its rendition of masculinity seem to mark yet another entanglement with the deployment of apolitical thought, political neutrality and, therefore, apathy. Protagonist Geralt of Rivia and his mutation-induced lack of emotional expression and dire pragmatism render a subject who considers himself neutral and post-political, caught in the more immediate concerns of interpersonal relationships and the cultivation of a self-made family. Wild Hunt, however, makes it clear that these desires are irreconcilable: it is about laying to rest a dying world disturbed and agitated by human intervention, and doing so with as much kindness as can be mustered in a bleak and desolate but not hopeless place.
Masculinity has been stripped of its false permanence, uprooted and cast into the fray of socio-political conflict. This destabilization of identities previously considered dominant and secure has prompted predictable forms of resistance: in reaction to the multiplicity of conversations on gender, race and class as well as the blurring of identity in the rapid pace of capitalist life, the rhetoric of apoliticism is deployed in the name of obfuscation and silence. It is a magnificent sleight of hand that results in the re-affirmation of the status-quo, which is retroactively inscribed with the ephemeral qualities of ‘nature’ and ‘truth’ so as to make it impregnable to dissent.
The structures of digital communication have further obfuscated the work of political agents, who, in appealing to a set of supposed ‘natural’ qualities, have successfully circumnavigated the impression of having a ‘political’ program at all. They make the case for a ‘natural’ order unburdened by the presumed artifice and corrosive influences of politics. But their belief in the apolitical betrays an underlying sentimentality, a torrent of uncertainty masked in “common sense” that proxy-politicians who do not see or know themselves as such have become adept at navigating in their favor.
Pragmatism, as the mask under which apoliticism may express itself as ‘reasonable’, is the way in which Wild Hunt may play all the sides; it is not a coincidence that the series has remained immensely popular across the reactionary political spectrum, which has prompted in me a sort of lingering resentment that it does not at least partially render explicit its protagonist’s conflicted ideology as a kind of cowardice that misunderstands the corrupt worldly machinations of its political landscape to be irrevocably lost.
Portraying such an ideal of traditional masculinity as the object of persecution — Witchers are on the brink of extinction — without interrogating how much power is given to them makes for hollow characterization: these are figures that emerge from a popular work of fiction that arguably refuses to reflect on their dominance of and participation in the political process, which ultimately obscures what might be able to alleviate their enduring cynicism: solidarity. It is a kind of survival fantasy, which rejects solidarity in a political sense, as a force that transforms society more generally, but embraces it in the microcosms of the (self-made) family that can stand against the whims of the wider world.
Even though there is an eventual save-the-world bent to the narrative much, much later during its playtime, Wild Hunt never loosens its grasp on interpersonal relationships that form the flesh and marrow of its experience. Particularly, it is made abundantly clear that players do not necessarily inhabit the body of a savior: focalizer rather than protagonist might be a more accurate description of Geralt’s role in the narrative; he is the person through which we witness the events of a story in which he may be a central character, but certainly not the axis around which this world revolves. There is a lot of intimately-woven character work does not allow the “White Wolf” to succumb to his own legend, but sketches a person with the weight of many shifting alliances, friends and lovers on his shoulders: systems and decisions are primed to contextualize Geralt of Rivia as someone who must learn how to let go, or suffer the consequences.
[. . .]
Through the ‘witcher’s sense’, an alternate vision mode, Wild Hunt approximates investigation as it highlights objects and paths in the environment that form intricate trails of clues; it calibrates how we look at the play-world in a way that is supposed to simulate the Witchers’ mutation-induced, supernatural perception. It casts us as digital archaeologists, detectives and hunters as we unravel the past to chase the present. A button-press re-surfaces the imprints of history on the level geometry: they flare an unequivocal, bright scarlet as history is violently re-asserting itself.
Instead of articulating his own brand of counter-politics, the titular Witcher insists on his resistance to political categorization. Evident in this reluctance, however, is the formation of a counter-politics that has fortified itself in the structures of apolitical thought: politics, here, is the pathology of authority. It describes continuous manipulation and mismanagement inflicted upon individuals and whole populations by forces beyond their immediate control. The result is an abundance of arbitrary violence in displacement, disorientation and discrimination. Whether we encounter abuse or murder, the Northern Kingdoms are drenched in flesh and blood. The way Geralt tells it, politics can birth nothing but carnage, so it can never be identified as a possible solution. It is always already lost.
