It seemed inevitable, but yesterday CD Projekt Red made it official: it’s working on a new open world Witcher game. The company didn’t say anything about what the game would be about, but it did send fans into speculation mode with teaser art showing a medallion covered in snow. Now some of them are relying on one particular Witcher wikipedia entry to interpret the image. There’s just one problem. The page is fake.
The medallion in the teaser image looked feline, but also very different from The Witcher 3’s established emblem for the School of the Cat faction. Some fans on Twitter and Reddit surmised it could be a Lynx. They have pointy ears and look cat-like. Lynx also like the snow. This led fans to a wiki entry on the Fandom website titled “School of the Lynx.”
https://t.co/XtbfqscMWr pic.twitter.com/eK6ZIbfLRa
— The Witcher (@witchergame) March 21, 2022
Here’s some of what it says:
The school as such, arose after a brief chat between the other members of the Cat School, Lambert and Keira Metz, who after a chance meeting, decided to join forces to recover the caravan. Lambert’s motivations were clear, to honour his friend Aiden and to have his legacy somehow continue.
After that talk, he was named leader by the other members of the Cat’s School, and Lambert had an idea and decided to reform the school. This being the third and most radical reform. Which transformed the School of the Cat into the School of the Lynx.
The page goes on to reference a “Second Witcher Tournament” and Lambert and the school eventually migrating to a “Western Continent” that sounds suspiciously like the Americas. Wild stuff! Except it’s all fanfiction or “fanon.” Still, unsuspecting Witcher fans could be forgiven for not catching that right away. The page is the number one result in Google when you search “Lynx Witcher.” Fandom also hosts the real fan wiki for Witcher canon. Plus many fans only know the video games or TV show, so it’s not inconceivable that the books those media are based on, written by Andrzej Sapkowski’s, really do go that far afield (they do not).
“The thing that attracted me was to help to expand the lore of the Witcher world in some way,” one of the authors behind the page, Witcher190, told Kotaku over Discord. “I’m not anyone approved by Saposwki, nor CD PROJEKT, but I liked the idea of helping, just like George Martin’s consultants with ASOIAF. Especially since Saposwki leaves a lot of things up in the air. As well as trying to cohere the various media of the franchise in some form.”
Witcher190 has worked with Fanon user SMiki55 and others to try and fill in the many holes in the Witcher universe with their own preferences, including other landmasses that more closely resemble those of the real world. Melukka, meant to be a version of India, was even directly mentioned in The Witcher tabletop game charity livestream campaign featuring Matt Mercer and others a few years back.
It’s not clear where the idea for a School of the Lynx first originated. Schools are barely referenced in the original books, and are mostly a creation of CDPR’s video game adaptations. The game code in the Blood and Wine expansion for “Feline School” armour pieces calls them “Lynx,” and online searches for Witcher schools show fan art for a Lynx medallion, which is where Witcher190 said he first heard about it.
In light of the new teaser, however, School of the Lynx is getting tossed around like actual canon. “Since people keep getting confused. There’s a webpage ‘School of the Lynx’ which is fan made fiction,” wrote YouTuber LegacyKillaHD on Twitter yesterday. “States it at the top of the page. In the Witcher universe, a Lynx school doesn’t exist… yet.”
That “yet” took on new meaning today after CDPR global community director Marcin Momot responded to speculation about the medallion being a Lynx with a GIF of Kenan Thompson aggressively nodding. Even if the current fanon around the School of the Lynx doesn’t get adopted, the Lynx medallion itself could soon become official canon, at least within the world of the games.
— Marcin Momot (@Marcin360) March 22, 2022
Other theories have speculated that the new Witcher game could be teasing Ciri as the main character because she sports a cat medallion taken from another fallen Witcher. But CEO Adam Kiciński previously claimed there would be no Witcher 4, implying that whichever games came next would offer some sort of clean break with the characters at the centre of the current trilogy. We’ll see. CDPR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the meantime, the Witcher subreddit has been running with the idea of a new School of the Lynx, and the fanon around it created by Witcher190, SMiki55, and others has gotten more attention then he ever expected. I’ve seen a lot of new comments on the fanon wikia and I’m really happy about that,” Witcher190 said. “The Witcher is a saga that I loved and helped me through a very dark time in my life. I would like nothing more than for these ideas to become reality, not in a new book (if Saposwki would want to somehow, which I doubt) but in a new game, either with a mention, a cameo or an appearance in a Gwent update.”
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