This is complex PTSD, a condition that can emerge after a big traumatic event but can also come from years of living with a constant low level of fear, paranoia, abuse, and a lack of security and safety. For the four years that followed the end of my marriage, I was unable to leave my apartment without risk of a panic attack - running into a neighbor at the mailbox could set off a grid of emergency lights in my brain unanswered emails would trigger my smartwatch to alert me of an escalating heart rate meeting friends for dinner would leave me in shambles, sobbing in my car. But no matter how much they increased or decreased my dosage, I could not bring myself to pay my bills, do my taxes, text back, attach the file someone needed to an email, shower, or do anything other than keep my son abundantly alive. I was never hungry or tired on the ever-changing cocktail of antidepressants and amphetamines I was prescribed. In the interest of privacy, I cannot divulge what I endured in the aftermath, only that the consequences have obliterated every aspect of my health. In the months and years that followed, a flood of long-hidden behaviors came to a bright surface, crumbling every structure of reality I knew to be true. In September of 2017, one month after buying our first home, two years after our son was born, and on my first book’s publication date, my partner of ten years abruptly ended our marriage. after not eating or sleeping for four days in a loop of avoidance and hypervigilance. My time is measured in labor, responsibilities, obligations, and guilt, which is to say, I have none.Īnd yet here I was, in the summer of 2020, on the couch slaying wights in a filthy apartment, ordering Postmates at 2 a.m. student, and the eldest daughter of working-class immigrants - not The Witcher’s target demographic.
I’m a 39-year-old Mexican American single mother, first-generation high-school graduate now Ph.D. The last place I expected to confront the pain of the end of my marriage was in video games. Something about it hurt, felt familiar in its undertones - the fragile intimacy the morning after a painful fight the realization that you can never truly know your partner the unspoken, knowing sense that he’s been inside someone else. I found myself restarting the game a few times to play through this opening scene again and again. Geralt: What’s it matter? Only ever thought of you.Īlready these weren’t just characters, they were two people with a history. Geralt: Of all the women I’ve known, you’re the only one who does her makeup before. She is still wary of his womanizing past, guarded after a betrayal. His desire for Yennefer goes unsatiated, rebuffed by her toying condescension, their spiky dialogue hinting at old conflicts. It’s a richly rendered cinematic introduction to the characters with a focus on the tension of Geralt and Yennefer’s relationship.
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The scene is a training ground meant to teach the player the controls and introduce the world’s mechanics, how Geralt moves, how to activate his “witcher senses.” Gamers play as Geralt throughout, but here, we watch him as himself, moving and talking on his own. We are anchored in the vulnerable space between lovers the morning after - the home to come back to at the end of the hero’s journey. For a fantasy role-playing game, the music is warm and folkloric - a slow, yearning melody played on classical guitar to evoke an almost painterly intimacy unlike the grand epic symphonies of more traditional fantasy games. The erotic tone of the scene is tempered by domesticity, family, the mundane threaded through with love and deep longing as its main emotional chord.
Despite her objectification, Yennefer is all business: She sends a magical lobster into the tub to nip Geralt in his sensitive bits, reminding him of his promise to their adopted daughter Ciri that he’d train with her. We are in the bedroom suite of Kaer Morhen, the witcher castle of the Wolf School, where Yennefer, the love of Geralt’s life, is also nude except for the towel wrapping her hair, her shapely figure leaned on a chaise, reading, posed to show off her perfect ass. Geralt of Rivia, the hero of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, is introduced to us naked, soaking in a steamy postcoital bath in a wooden tub. Photo-Illustration: The Cut, Photos: Getty, CD Projekt RED
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