Too much witcher fanfiction either makes Vesemir a simple malicious child abuser, or a harmless and blameless old man, and frankly he's neither and both are boring as fuck interpretations of that character
Did he partake in the same culture that produced witchers for centuries and perpetuate practices which were, in fact, abusive by any reasonable definition? Absolutely.
But that doesn't actually indicate that he's heartless, and neither does him being a victim of the same culture/system make him blameless - it just basically shows him as being fully indoctrinated in it, at least before the fall of Kaer Morhen and the loss of the knowledge and methods needed. He suffered the Trial of the Grasses himself and still stood by and watched, and likely even assisted, as subsequent generations of boys were subjected to the same to make more witchers, watching many of them die in the process.
I think he did, in his own way, care about those boys, he certainly had a hand in raising Geralt directly, given that it was to Vesmir that Visenna handed her infant son. He is clearly shown to be rather attached to the surviving Wolf school witchers at least by the time of the books and games. He buried a lot of the same kids he raised and you can't convince me that he felt nothing about any of it. There's a lot of tragedy humming along in the subtext around Vesemir, he's a mixture of both victim and perpetrator, of someone who is basically a cog in a much larger machine that he could have stepped out of but was always too blinkered to see it.
There's a lesson there, for sure, and I could understand someone condemning him for it (Lambert definitely has conflicted feelings around Vesemir and is entitled to them, given his history), but flattening that into a kind of exaggerated cartoon villain portrayal is missing a lot.
(And very indicative of spending too much time among certain discourse circles on tumblr, probably.)
And he's also not just some physically and mentally busted-down old man in his dotage - He might show the wear and tear of approximately three centuries on even a mutant's body, but he's hardly puttering around in confusion either, and is clearly still capable of doing his job.
idk I hate how fandom handles characters like this - either reducing the muddied, gray moral aspects to black-and-white thinking or treating any character older than 30 like they're already drooling on themselves and ready for a nursing home rocking chair.
Maybe that's me being 40 and fed up with the kind of things 20 year olds write about anyone older than their own age, but I'm tired of the two-dimensional cartoon portrayals of both complex characters and complex moral issues.
(If you want simple, pat morality in your fiction, the witcher series is absolutely no the place to go looking for it, in any case - half the books are about Geralt learning the harshest ways possible that reality never spares an idealist's feelings)
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