this made me have so many triss/trissefer/merihart thoughts in discord which i will now paste here:
so my take on it is–triss who is not who she was, who maintains the outer appearance of being caring and soft but can’t make herself genuinely feel those things anymore, but she loves yennefer, and she wants SO BADLY for yennefer to love her that she makes yen believe triss is a Good Vampire, works with yen to take down other vampires, yearns for yen’s approval
and then one day yennefer discovers triss is still killing people. and vamp philippa (perhaps the one who turned triss) has been watching and laughing at triss’s weakness, telling her it’ll all collapse soon enough, and when it does and triss only barely escapes the fight with yen with her life, phil swoops down on her to ~comfort~ her and remind her who she truly is now
in fact maybe triss wants yen’s love so bad that for a while she even does live off animal blood, or occasionaly drinking from people but not enough to kill…but she just misses the POWER she felt when she drained people, how GOOD it felt, how FREE
there’s a moment where triss comes really close to truly committing to the good side. she loves yennefer so much, is so drawn to her and needs her so much…but then, eventually…she’s alone again. and the need is so strong
there’s also a thing where. vamp philippa’s love is (seemingly) unconditional. she knows triss’s darkest nastiest depths and still wants her. whereas with yen, triss has to deserve it, and that’s so hard
OH MY GOD WHAT IF. WHAT IF. what if yennefer sees how hard it is for triss not to drink from people, and offers to let triss drink (a limited amount) from HER. and triss (who is down to only killing one person a month instead of two a week) takes her up on it eagerly bc the idea of drinking from yennefer is so heady and, frankly, hot, the idea of yen feeding her, of triss consuming her–and it’s INCREDIBLE and they’re both really turned on and maybe they fuck about it, and it becomes like a weekly thing. and oh, the utter betrayal and violation yen feels when she realizes triss was still killing even then….the only way triss escapes is by turning into a bat and getting the hell out, which she wouldn’t have been able to do if she hadn’t been eating people. but then, she wouldn’t have had to. GOD.
Ending scene: It’s a big showdown between the three. It looks like Triss is going to stay with Philippa. Yennefer tries one last time to save Triss- she doesn’t care if Triss chose Philippa, wouldn’t contest it, but she *knows* that Philippa is bad for her, and she wants Triss safe.
So Yennefer and Philippa fight.
At first, it’s evenly matched- Yennefer is a skilled hunter, but Philippa has not lived long just by sitting around. Triss watches though, undead heart somehow beating in her throat, as Yennefer keeps getting battered. Until finally, her sword and stake are knocked out of her hands, and Philippa pins her to the ground.
Phillippa says something, but Triss can’t hear her over her own feral fear. One moment, she’s standing on the sidelines, hand over her mouth as she watches the fight. The next moment, that hand is plunged into something wet and rotten, and when she pulls it back, she realizes she’s clutching Philippa’s heart. Phillippa looks back at her, spitting up black ichor. Triss can only as the light in her eyes dies, and she does too.
Within moments, Yennefer’s crawling out from underneath the corpse, now truly devoid of life. She gets her sword and cuts the head off with one decisive strike- there will be no revival for Philippa Eilhart.
Then she turns to Triss.
“Are you going to kill me?” Triss says. Philippa’s heart has dropped to the ground, and she kneels next to it, eyes dull and hands black and sticky with ichor.
“I should,” Yennefer says, her voice raspy. She swallows a sob. “For all the destruction you’ve wrought, Triss Merigold, I should kill you and burn your body until even the ashes are gone.”
Triss sighs. She tilts her head back with a sad smile, exposing her neck. “Go ahead,” she says quietly. “For what it’s worth… I’m sorry, Yen.”
The moon shines bright as Yennefer lifts her sword.
You’re the most recognised and internationally praised superhero, but you don’t fight any crime. Instead, you use your powers over stone and metal to repair the damage caused by the catastrophic fights other heroes get into.
They didn’t call you a superhero when you started. You didn’t claim to be one, either.
You didn’t have a costume or a sponsor or training or anything like that. You were just a kid who had just seen your entire world knocked down. So, in a moment of childish determination and belief, you thought you could fix it all.
The first emergence of your powers wasn’t a huge triumphal moment. Moving stone and earth and steel doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about how to stack things up so they don’t fall back over again.
Your first attempts crashed right back down again. That was your first lesson.
—
Even when you got good at what you did, they didn’t call you a superhero.
You still didn’t have a costume, but you’d gotten your hands on every architectural diagram you could and done plenty of practice. Then you started to show up to the aftermath of battles and put them quietly together again.
But it still wasn’t right. You couldn’t do much if you didn’t have the diagrams for the buildings demolished–if the city planners didn’t let you have them.
So you stitched together a costume, something bright and colorful that would grab the attention of the cameras on the scene afterward as you tried to work.
“Look! Someone’s putting those houses back together!”
The effect was instantaneous. The moment you’d grabbed public attention, there were requests for interviews, think pieces–each giving you a platform to ask for the help you needed.
This was your second lesson.
–
You didn’t call yourself a superhero, or come up with the name yourself. You were never really good about all of those things. But once the attention was on you, you got offers from managers and sponsors. One, a blonde with perfect hair who introduced herself as “just Sandy”
“I don’t have any money.”
“That’s alright,” she said, her grin showing spectacularly white teeth. “All I need is for you to take on some gigs and give me a cut.”
Sandy set you up. She got you the costume people would know you for, gave you the name, managed all of the PR and set up interviews. Your fame skyrocketed, and soon you were seeing yourself on billboards.
Soon you had access to hundreds of city plans and blueprints. After enough attacks happened, you learned them well enough to hardly need to reference them. After a few years, you could rebuild a tower in a matter of minutes, and cities in a matter of days.
Your powers evolved as your understanding did. Soon, you could read the entire layout of a building just from touching. Then, just from touching the ruins. You no longer need blueprints, then–just your own hands on the metal.
The gigs were simple, too–just fixing up hero bases after they’d gotten wrecked in attacks. Feel good work that paid well.
With the help of many people, you do more. That’s the third lesson.
—
The problems started with the homeless thing.
You were in between projects and itching to use your skills more. Creating homes for the homeless seemed like the perfect, feel good project to flex on.
It was, for the first few weeks. Then came the backlash. City dwellers crying foul, saying they hadn’t agreed to an enormous den of undesirables in their backyards. There were protests, white suburban moms holding up signs about drug dealers and rapists and criminals.
It wasn’t your choice in the end. Eventually the city mandated that you deconstruct your shelter, or they would do it the hard way.
Regretfully, you took it down. You did not look in the eyes of the people that had sheltered there as they had to go on their way.
It was the same story in every area you tried to build shelters in afterwards.
—
“Can we just buy the land to build them houses?” you asked Sandy.
She clicked her perfect teeth. “Sorry, there are laws against building new things in the city. You need mayoral approval to start a new construction project.”
“Why?”
“Well, there are already too many empty houses,” she said matter of factly.
You stared. “What? Then let’s just buy those and put people in them!”
“You don’t have that much money,” she pointed out. “Not when you’ve been giving it away every year. Also, it wouldn’t do as much good as you think. Just think of the effect on the market–”
This is not why you fired Sandy. But it was the first time you thought of it.
—
Opinion started to turn against you when you began using your interviews and platform to talk about this problem, to demand permission to build or otherwise help. Exasperation turned to hostility when you started to reshape the landscape to be softer to the unhoused, anyway–when you created caves in parks where people could easily shelter, or made every bench large and soft so that anyone could have a place to sleep.
Laws and ordinances passed, all regulating the amount of alterations one was allowed to make to public property. About how many changes you were allowed to make as you were reconstructing a city. The fines for altering things started to heap up.
Firing Sandy didn’t help. Your good reputation was always as much her work as yours, but after what she said about—you couldn’t.
You couldn’t.
You learned not to read the scathing opinion pieces on you. That was the hardest lesson yet.
—
Of course, shit really hit the fan when you were contracted to rebuild another base.
It was a simple enough decision for you. You found out they had been building drones and firing them on civilians. That at this base Techno has been building surveillance technology that would be able to monitor every single person in the country at every moment, and be able to fire upon them with impunity the moment suspicious activity was detected.
It made you rethink every base you had built in the past.
“No,” you told them.
“You already signed your contract–”
Instead of dignifying that with an answer, you transmuted the entire area into the rockiest, most impossible terrain you could. Every trick you had learned to make land easier to build on–you reversed it, turning what had once been the base into a precarious canyon of jagged, diamond-hard steel, nearly impossible to remove or build on.
“I said no.”
—
Stopping the construction of the stadium was the next kicker.
“You’re insane!” said the heroes who came to remove you.
“They evicted a hundred families for this!” you spat. “Those were people’s homes. It’s disgusting that it’s allowed for the government to do that–much less to do it for-for a stadium? For entertainment?”
And so you stood there for the next 48 hours, deconstructing every single thing they tried to put on their ill-gotten land.
Then, they sent the heroes to stop you. You were never the best at fighting, so they knocked you out quickly.
—
They don’t call you a superhero now. Behind bars, you glance over every thinkpiece and profile about the world’s most beloved hero fell. You read speculation about evil, greed, madness. All things you’ve heard about “villains” who came before you.
It makes you wonder about those people. If maybe you had misjudged them, too.
But that’s alright, you realize after the sting of it fades away. That was the second lesson, after all–more than anything, you need people to be talking. And for all the bitterness in these words, you realize grimly that people will never stop talking.
Once you’ve thought things through, you decide you’re ready. The steel of your cell melts away. After all, there is no prison that can contain you. No earth or stone or metal can withstand your will.
Your legacy as the world’s greatest supervillain begins with a left turn down the hallway, right to where the other villains are kept.
This is BRILLIANT and I recommend it. It’s tough to be the good guy in a corrupt world.
