I will never not laugh when I see someone say “Jaskier is useless.”
People have watched so many superhero movies that they think everyone has to glow or shoot lasers to have value.
I mean…sure, yes...he is useless…IF you consider the human experience of friendship, love, and art a complete and utter waste of time. lmao.
Just because Yen is magical and Geralt is a warrior doesn't mean that this is a superhero group. It is not. Forget about the Avengers and the Justice League for a second. Forget about Star Wars. This is not a team formed to save earth. This is not a band of rebels throwing off imperialists.
The Witcher is a found family. Their most pivotal decision is to love and protect one(1) child. Their most important super power is love.
Geralt, Yen, and Ciri’s biggest problems are that people want to use them as tools. People see Geralt as a tool to rid them of inconvenient problems without having to get their own hands dirty. They see Yen as a tool to amass power, and they see both of them as rungs to use to get to the ultimate tool. Ciri.
Geralt, Yen, Ciri, these people are fucking exhausted. And I don’t mean they need naps (though they do). They are all that bone deep, hollow, exhausted that comes from having to battle every moment of every day to be seen as a PERSON. The kind of exhausted that comes from not being able to trust ANYONE because there is a price on your head.
Jaskier is their person. Yes it takes time to get there with Yen. But he gets there. He is their port in the storm. He would never turn them in not for any amount or any gift or anything. He is the person that they know beyond a shadow of a doubt does not give a fuck about power and who isn’t capable of seeing them as anything but friend shaped. Person shaped. They are his folks.
He is important to them because how do you even keep going with the world against you, without one person at least who just loves you for you? Who just loves your bad jokes and your navel gazing and who sees your prickliness for what it is? Vulnerability?
Wouldn’t you fold and give up without that? Without friendship? What would the story be then?
And for Mr Jaskier, that’s not even getting to the crucial deeply important cultural role that troubadours play in a world with no television or internet or data storage. It’s not even touching on his role as a narrator, historian, and world builder. And that’s not even getting to the 'art is an integral, crucial part of this fictional universe, (just like it is in real life)' part of it.
It’s not even touching on the fact that his “gossip” often turns out to be critical intelligence and his fame and political savvy are constantly bailing them out of trouble.
If you can look at Geralt *gestures at his whole deal* and not see that this poor man needs a friend more than literally anything else in the world...then I cannot relate. And if you can look at Yen and Jaskier or Ciri and Jaskier and not see how beautiful that is, people drawn together by the undeniable need for found family and the undeniable value of loyalty in a shitty world, then I don’t know, man. We are on different ass wavelengths.
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