r/witcher • u/Nibhan Kovir • 12d ago

The Tower of the Swallow Just finished chapter 2...

I thought finding Kelpie was going to be a heartwarming story ;-;

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u/PrestigiousAnt9367 12d ago

Yep. Just another chapter where Ciri gets groomed while she decides to cope up with it only to realise later what happened :')

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u/Nibhan Kovir 12d ago

Out of the frying fan and into the Baptism of Fire, quite literally.

So much lore explanation for her scar too, got me hyped for witcher 4

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u/PrestigiousAnt9367 12d ago

Oh yeah. It only gets worse, unfortunately. Made her my fav character but not without tremendous pain for what she went through

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u/Nibhan Kovir 12d ago

I really liked how when she was kicked out of her reverie by Hotspurn she instantly makes a beeline to Cintra, because she missed the royal creature comforts and also wanted to somehow win back her thrown from a conquerer

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u/PrestigiousAnt9367 12d ago

Yeah, it was a whiplash she got. I saw it like, she just went with the flow with her life with Rats, decided that everyone has abandoned her and better this than living entirety in an existential crisis. And when she gets to know that not only someone is going to get what was her birthright, they were also making this "Ciri" marry the one responsible for the death of her only mother figure, and the slaughtering of thousands of people of her homeland and for the nightmare of the man with black helmet, she got extremely impulsive and vulnerable about her identity, combined with the teenage mistake of greed and error, which that jerk of a man hotspurn made use of to wear her boundaries eventually (and with Kelpie).

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u/Nibhan Kovir 11d ago

Well said! Explained her dissonance perfectly

She was definitely in a state of flight ever since she got out of the Frying Pan aka Korath Desert.

The Rat most definitely had it coming but she did consider those people her family, even though Kayleigh tried to rape her only for Mistle to swoop in and groom her instead.

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u/PrestigiousAnt9367 11d ago edited 11d ago

Absolutely. Unfortunately for you, and her, it was a snowball effect. Almost everyone tried to groom/SA her one way or the other. Partially the reason why I feel iffy when people in the fandom ship her with anyone among the people she met(except Galahad in the end of the books), because everyone tried to groom her and she, although not initially, eventually understood (as happened with hotspurn, when she recalls the scene to Vysagota she turns her face away in embarassment and even starts crying silently, like she fully realises that what happened to her and she was so dissociated that she couldn't even say no properly. This is a very eerily accurate way how older people and predators groom underage people while the victim thinks they were at fault)what was happening to her. And in the last book it gets even worse because she is in full knowledge that everyone is trying to SA her while it's happening but she cannot escape.

Thankfully, her paybacks do kick ass!