EDITOR’S VIEW
By Benjamin Rose
Silver And Steel
A few tens of hours into The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Geralt is having a bad day. He’s just watched Anna die after returning with the Bloody Baron to Crookback Bog and then found his erstwhile employer hanging from a tree in the middle of Crow’s Perch. Ciri is still nowhere to be found and all he has to go on for the moment is the suggestion that she might be in Novigrad. Needing a bit of coin, he digs up a tattered notice taken from the message board of the now-abandoned village of Downwarren and, skirting the scene of his recent failure, cuts through the swamp, avoiding the empty huts where Anna and her orphans once lived under the power of the Crones. It’s been a bad day, and the exercise he gets slaughtering random drowners en route to the contract issuer is welcome. Soon the picture comes into view. An unnatural fog permeates the southern swamp, signs of violence and mutilation scattered here and there. He finds the stammering peasant who posted the notice, haggles for a higher wage, and soon discerns that he’s dealing with an aged Foglet. Using the Eye of Nehalani he clears some illusionary rubble blocking its lair and, after a dance in the dark, guts the beast and brings back its severed head.
Immediately, the bullshit begins. “This is less than we agreed” he grunts, on receiving his payment, The peasant blathers on some sob story then promises “to pay ye double in a week”. At this point, Geralt can sit on his ass in the middle of Crookback Bog and literally meditate for a week to discover, lo and behold, the clown will actually pay. But nobody’s got time for that shit. Geralt chews out the unremunerative rube and goes on his way, undaunted by the fear that this stingy serf will leave a negative review on his Fiverr account. Nobody likes witchers anyway.
Meanwhile, in the alternate dimension known as Night City, USA (or is it NUSA?), small time mercenary and digital schizophrenic cyberpsycho V is dealing with trouble of another sort. Entitled Corpo C– Tucker Albach has committed a hit-and-run, putting a local son in the morgue. Her wealth and influence make her untouchable by the conventional justice system, so as Jason Statham says in The Beekeeper, when the laws for these things fail, “then you have me”, that is, V. But unlike Statham’s Adam Clay, V (like the real Jason Statham and, uh, everyone else in that movie) is in this for the eddies, not high-minded vengeance, and if she can’t expect to be compensated to the tune of a cool $15-20 million, she can at least make a few K doing the Lord’s justice. A warehouse full of bodies and one well-placed Jinchu-maru to the throat later, Padre Sebastian Ibarra rings her on the holo and confirms God is pleased.
“And the spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon and slew thirty men…plus Tucker Albach. Well Played, V. Bloody but efficient. Closing the contract.”
Padre
V collects 7000 eddies in the name of the Church. Amen.
If any trend has come to define modern sci-fi fantasy, it’s the creeping dominance, Game of Thrones aside, of “Low” over “High”. Less Fated Ones, more freelancers. Earnings, not Elessar. At a time when post-industrial capitalism and the decline of labor unions has hollowed out the middle class across the Western world, more workers than ever, from Forbes writers to Uber drivers, work freelance, and more attention than ever is being lavished on a trope witcher creator Andrzej Sapkowski arguably helped kickstart in the 80s and 90s in his original Witcher stories: the fantasy “Hero” (?) as neither salt-of-the-earth Cottage Core Hobbit, nor sexiest man alive Heir of Elendil, nor MILF of Dragons and Breaker of Chains, but…some guy. Geralt may be the world’s greatest swordsman and irresistible to women in The Witcher, but he’s also reviled as a mutant and his eyes scare cats (sorry, bakeneko…). The archetype of the morally ambiguous if not dubious killer-for-hire, Geralt’s work life is, in-between plowing sorceresses (when they’re not hypnotizing him to bash their enemies or throwing glass jars in his general direction) kinda shit. As Yen says in The Time of Contempt, Geralt’s job is not exactly glamorous:
“And as usual, they’ll be paying him peanuts for killing it…Which, as usual, will barely cover the cost of medical treatment should he be mauled by the monster.”
Yennefer, The Time of Contempt, Chapter 2, pg. 61
Yikes. But then there’s V, a fully borged-out cyber sorceress of whom the guards at Arasaka Tower in (Don’t Fear)The Reaper memorably scream at one point “Holy shit, its just one merc, one fucking street whore that’s killing us?!” Misogyny aside, V by comparison has a much nicer job, in the sense that her employers actually have a sense of manners and gratitude after dispatching her to murder a whole bunch of people, facilitate insider trading, steal cars, and so forth. She also gets paid way more than Geralt per mission and can buy Kaneda’s bike from Akira if inclined. Keanu Reeves inhabits her head and comes and goes as he sees fit, which is less annoying than it sounds. Her romance options kinda suck but…there’s Judy at least while she waits out Takemura’s marriage to corporate duty. So V has it a bit better, despite the fact that Geralt has lived for a century and V will die spitting blood in a state of psychosis at 23. Trade-offs. Nonetheless, despite their radically different points on the socioeconomic scale, both chooms are at heart freelance murderers. It’s what they do best, even when in Geralt’s case he’s reluctant to admit it. Hell, they’ve even both taken down meth labs for the boys in blue and aggrieved parents (or Redanian red, in Geralt’s case. Also V is sort of a part-time cop-killer, but whatever).
Of Questing And Capitalism
So what is it about freelancing that has such an appeal? It’s relatable. At a time when cynicism is rife, where inherited privilege and social deference to expertise and authority are everywhere under attack, positioning the “hero” of a sci-fi fantasy adventure as “some guy/girl” trying to make a living is an inherently democratizing gesture. Even in the most notable high fantasy franchises of the 21st century, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and HBO’s Game of Thrones, the instinct to celebrate high status nobility is not without caveat. In George Martin’s world, of course, Tolkienesque traditionalism is deconstructed everywhere: The queen in exile becomes a villain, the the true king is a bastard, the kingslayer is virtuous, and the marginalized underdog is unlikeable (to blend references from both the show and the novels). In Lord of the Rings, Jackson, as the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey has noted1, minimizes Tolkien’s pronounced class differences among the characters (especially Frodo and Sam) and adds a layer of doubt to Aragorn that is absent from the book. Tolkien’s creation was never a trust fund king but, in an age where privilege of birth is off-putting even when backed up by demonstrated competence, the films ultimately affirm Aragorn’s God-given right to rule by reframing it as responsibility and obligation. He becomes a George Washington or Batman circa The Dark Knight figure in most respects—The reluctant leader, the Hero We Need. This carries into his coronation ceremony during one of the infamous 27-minute ending sequences of The Return of the King, where Vigo Mortensen proclaims
This day does not belong to one man, but to all. Let us together rebuild this world, that we may share in the days of peace.
And says to the Shire Folk at his wedding to Arwen, “My friends, you bow to no one”. To a writer of Tolkien’s 19th century aristocratic sympathies, this gesture would be inappropriate, but in a modern film, Aragorn’s condescension, in the sense of deliberately setting aside class differences in this instance, is essential. He may literally be King of the World, but he still stands by his mates and respects the everyman.
The other obvious appeal of the hero-for-hire trope is not cultural but financial. At a time when economists keep thumping macroeconomic data to convince us our standards of living aren’t falling, Americans are so fed up with inflation and illusory wage growth that Trump was recently out-polling Biden in many swing states whereas Britons look set to end 13 years of Conservative rule at the next election amidst a cost of living crisis. Well-publicized wins by organized labor in the SAG-AFTRA and UAW stikes of the previous year have done nothing to reverse the overall decline in worker protections and growth of inequality in America since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, whose very “Greed is good” celebration of excess coincided with high crime rates, speculative fiction, and emerging technologies to generate the cyberpunk aesthetic and genre. In films such as Escape from New York, Akira, Blade Runner, and Robo Cop we see society on the brink, caught between spiraling violence, social atomization, and the collusion of corporate and government cynicism in the ruthless pursuit of profit and power. Since the financial crash of 2008, globalization and the Washington Consensus of neoliberal capitalism have grown so odious and discredited politically that even the right wing parties who formed their traditional supporters and architects have grown violently opposed to them, in rhetoric if not always in substance. The age of free trade is over. The time of “friendshoring” has come.
Saving Ourselves
The hero-for-hire archetype is most famous in the works of Andrzej Sapkowski, CD Projekt Red, and other adjacent properties, but its appeal rests on a contradiction, the thin line between power fantasy and futile struggle, feast or famine, fame or fuck-up. At one end, Geralt is a well-read, well-armed, and (presumably) well-hung man’s man who excels at his profession and wins an immortal name. On the other hand, he’s something of a poorly paid wifeguy whose profession is dying and whose significant other’s friends give him endless shit for supposedly dating out of his league. As to mercs in Cyberpunk 2077, they’re more like rappers, I guess: brash, rich, and conspicuously consumptive when not actually broke, dead, indicted, or otherwise full of shit. That, or consultants, (whatever a consultant does. We have a lot of them in DC and after 30 years I still have no clue). The hero-for-hire is a hustler. They have good days, they have bad. They may be as tough, cool, sexy, or badass as you want to be, but in the end they’ve got bills to pay, bullshit to deal with, health care to finance, and so remain relatable. At a time when multiple geopolitical catastrophes seem to pop off each day, the freelance mercenary, the hero-for-hire, the killer-for-coin is something we can aspire to. They can’t save the world, but they just might save themselves.
- Referenced in The Road To Middle-Earth ↩︎