See this is what annoys me about The Witcher. (cont'd)

TW: Rape mention, discussion of sexism and general bigotry.

The Witcher is a story that loves to be realistic and grounded in logic. Even when there's magic in the world, they put effort into making everything real and true to life. The mechanics of physical things are really well-represented throughout.

When Vesemir gets hurt, Geralt acknowledges that the wound needs cleaning. When Geralt examines a monster's corpse to determine date and cause of death, he uses real-world techniques to do so (noting that maggots have hatched in the wounds, implying about a week has passed).

The Witcher takes this approach to worldbuilding its human society too. The gender roles especially are very firmly baked into the world. "Men are soldiers, hunters, and farmers. Women are mothers, wives, and herbalists and so on," The Witcher tells us.

"Poverty and hardship is rampant. War is tearing the world apart. Setting people against each other, making an already tough life bleaker." The Witcher continues and makes many, many references to women being raped throughout.

Seriously, a *lot* of references. The Witcher wants you to know that the women of its world are in constant peril of being sexually abused.

And I get why the writers are doing this, in theory. They want the setting to be evocative of real-world medieval Europe.

I'm not denying that things weren't exactly progressive back then; most people would agree that things were bad. I'm not denying that soldiers would often resort to such things either as a deliberate tactic to demoralise the enemy or simply as a point of cruelty.

If you, as a writer, want to use sexual violence as a worldbuilding device like that, I'm not going to stop you. I won't enjoy it, but I won't stop you. I get it: "realism", "historical accuracy" etc etc.

So if this game is so committed to accuracy that it will put most of its female characters firmly into this passive role, why oh why does this peasant woman who's been stuck in a mine for 5 days have perfect eye shadow on???

Why hasn't it washed off or smudged? When did she put it on? How did she afford high-quality makeup in the first place? It's completely inexplicable, but when you ask anyone why the game casts women consistently as victims most people say "well that's how it was back then."

"CD Projekt don't have a choice, they have to be committed to historical accuracy. If they had men and women be equal, that would ruin the theme of the game! Besides, we have characters like Yen and Ciri who don't fall into that trend why are you complaining?"

(Of course, Yen and Ciri being exceptions to the rule doesn't mean the rule doesn't exist in the first place so bringing them up is somewhat of a moot point. If anything, their existence as exceptions simply *strengthens* the already existing paradigm of male dominance.)

Then you realise "hold on, this game is set in a fantasy world. Why is it committed to historical accuracy at all? I mean, if it's going to ignore that in order to make all the women look like models why bother with all the other stuff?"

Simple: this game is made for the male gaze.

I know I'm late to the party on this one. The game is 5 years old already. But I saw that character (a minor NPC named "Miner's Wife", no name required for a mere woman apparently) and just had to say something.

Bottom line: if you're going to make anything with a strong theme, stick to it. It's ridiculous to me that they'd completely forget what the game is all about just to make sure the player never has to see a woman without makeup on.