According to a new whisper, in hoping to entice anyone to check out their take on Andrej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels in the wake of Henry Cavill’s exit, the third season of Netflix’s The Witcher will not only reveal that fan-favorite bard Jaskier is bisexual, but also see him enter into a relationship with a series newcomer.
Word of this apparent character development was first made public on May 24th, courtesy of the fantasy fiction-centric news outlet Redanian Intelligence.
“We can confirm, what some of our readers assumed long ago is true,” wrote the site’s main proprietor, an individual going by the handle ‘Gravemaster’. “Jaskier is bisexual and his paramour for The Witcher Season 3 is Radovid.”
First introduced in Sapkowski’s fifth overall The Witcher novel Batpism of Fire, Radovid was originally shown to be the contentious young-boy-turned-king of the Redanian realm.
Having ascended to throne at the age of thirteen following the assassination of his father, King Vizimir, Radovid would eventually offer Geralt a bounty to help him find and kill the mastermind of his predecessor’s murder, the sorceress Philippa Eilhart.
However, Radovid’s own obsession with revenge and overall paranoia towards his reign would soon lead to his undoing, and the mad king would eventually fall at the hands of the very Witcher he once sought to manipulate.
Inspired by Sapkowski’s original character but not a wholesale adaptation of him, Netflix’s version of Radovid, as set to be portrayed by British actor Hugh Skinner, will differ slightly in that rather than being King Vizimir’s son, he will be the ruler’s cunning younger brother.
Gravmaster further noted that a scene seen in a previously-leaked-but-now-deleted-audition-tape for the role of Radovid submitted by Shadow & Bone actor Jesse Badger wherein the young prince is seen flirting with Jaskier – replete with a teasing request for to the bard “to show me how you play your instrument” – had made it into the final cut of Season 3, or at the very least “a very close version of it”.
Further, the scooper asserted,” there are more moments of flirtation and chemistry between Radovid and Jaskier later on. The two men develop a romantic relationship over the course of the season. And later, Jaskier and Radovid finally kiss.”
This rumor was published by Redanian Intelligence just one day after the series’ showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich teased a romantic arc for Jaskier in the upcoming season, all the while noticeably avoiding using any gender-specific language.
“Jaskier falls in love,” divulged Schmidt Hissrich in a promotional interview with Netflix. “And it’s with a character who fans will know [and] continues showing up in the books. So what happens this season between them will have ripple effects for a very long time.”
“He’s having his hot girl summer,” jokingly added the character’s actor, Joey Batey. “It’s been really rewarding to see [his love life] told in a very visual way. [We] ensured that these romances are told truthfully — and sensitively and carefully, without resorting to stereotypes.”
“Hopefully we’ve created something that is special, a sapioromantic and sapiosexual [connection] that is as flawed as any other relationship in this show,” he added. (Sapioromantic and sapiosexual feelings being those which are rooted in one’s attraction to an individual’s intelligence rather than their physical appearance).
It should be noted that in the original The Witcher lore, as seen across both Sapkowski’s novels and CD PROJEKT RED’s video game trilogy, the character upon which Jaskier is based – Dandelion – is never depicted as anything as heterosexual.
In fact, the bard is regularly shown to be a notorious womanizer whose exploits include sneaking away from his own concert to visit a brothel in The Last Wish, seducing and then skipping out on a young woman to whom he was giving music lessons to in The Witcher, and being caught by Geralt via the megascope in Loc Muinne in bed with a women recounting tales of their shared adventures in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
The third season of The Witcher – the the last starring Henry Cavill as Geralt – rides onto Netflix on June 29th.