In The Witcher (2007), Jacques de Aldersberg wasn’t your average villain. He saw famine, war, and even existential threat (the White Frost), and so he acted with fanatical urgency. He wasn’t merely evil; he was convinced he was humanity’s last hope, and that conviction consumed him.
What if that belief didn’t come from power, but from fear? What if the systemic failure behind what Jacques the villain did, was that no one reached him early enough to change his path?
Fictional villains are often treated as an inevitability, as if their downfall was programmed into their DNA. What if some villains were preventable? What if we met them earlier; met the fear, the precociousness, the burden of knowing too much too soon – with support rather than isolation and dismissal?
The Witcher, a fantasy RPG, offers a sharp lens on these questions. Jacques de Aldersberg may be a fictional villain, but the forces that formed him draw parallels to real life. We have systems that reward foresight and punish vulnerability. We have cultures that fear difference in children and fail to guide it. We have institutions that conflate vision for authority, and urgency for justification.
This essay doesn’t look to redeem or soften the harm caused by villains like Jacques, fictional or real. Instead, it asks how can we prevent their making in the first place by intervening upstream: by showing up with care, and with systems built to hold complexity before it turns into control.
This isn’t an argument for absolution, not at all. It’s an invitation to look backward, and recognize the moments where fear, unmet, turned into ideology.
Jacques in Collapse
Jacques’s character was not driven by greed or cruelty in the traditional sense, he truly believed he was acting in humanity’s best interest. His belief justified authoritarian control, experimentation on innocents, and widespread oppression. He became a tyrannical villain due to unchecked extension of his foresight, of his visions. His sincerity to prevent extinction was real, but so were the atrocities he endorsed with conviction to avoid it.
He led the Order of the Flaming Rose to prepare for what he believed was an inevitable apocalypse. He mistook the urgency of his vision for a mandate to centralize power and eliminate all dissent.
He built both ideological walls and literal ones. He sought to save humanity from extinction, and in doing so, sanctioned purges, silenced disagreement, and reimagined cruelty as necessity.
The horror of his actions was rooted in a tragic belief: If I don’t protect humanity, no one will.
Whatever his intentions, the world remembered him not for what he feared – but for what he devastatingly chose to do.
The Geralt Model
Where Jacques was a study in visionary determinism, Geralt offers a counter-model: the capacity to live in contradiction and ambiguity. He listens, and hesitates. His strength was in the sword and in his restraint, in decisions made without ever being sure they were right.
The game never gave you any answers. It forces you to sit in the choices you made without knowing if you made the right ones.
Geralt’s core question, one Jacques never seemed to ask, is:
“Who am I protecting, and who gets to decide how?”
Where Jacques tried to seal the future behind ideology, Geralt holds space for the mess of it.
Holding the Alvins
Jacques wasn’t always like this. Few villains are. According to a popular (but intentionally ambiguous) fan theory, before Jacques became the Grand Master, he was a little boy named Alvin; magically gifted, deeply afraid, and failed by every system meant to care for him.
Alvin was a Source, he was a child with chaotic power and haunted by visions of catastrophe. He was orphaned and passed between caregivers, traumatized by early exposure to violence on a devastating scale.
Alvin was eventually taken in by Geralt and his companions, while they weren’t unkind, they certainly tried their best, but they were ultimately unequipped. Geralt, a witcher, was trained to slay monsters, not nurture a traumatized child. Alvin’s fears were met with dismissal – his pain wasn’t seen; it was treated as overreaction.
Alvin didn’t need to be told to “control it”. He needed someone to sit with him through his fear without treating him like a task.
Tragically, Geralt, despite all his strengths and good intentions, ultimately lost Alvin. That failure – quiet, invisible, possibly preventable – haunts the world in silence.
I can’t help but to wonder, how many Alvins have we overlooked, misunderstood, or rushed past, and what have they become because of it?
An Alternate Future
What if Alvin had been treated differently?
Someone reads him stories. Walks him through his visions and nightmares. Teaches him to wield power in collaboration, not domination. Someone shows him how to feel safe without needing to control the future.
Imagine, metaphorically, in an alternate universe, that instead of becoming a Grand Master, Alvin heals.
In that version, he still sees the apocalyptic visions, but he learns how to hold his fear. He builds systems – resilient food networks, voluntary migration paths, magical energy stewards, and ethical frameworks for scarcity.
Maybe he even starts a gifted school, for precocious kids like he once was. A place where children like him are mentored. Maybe the Frost still comes, and people survive – not because they stopped a villain like Jacques, but because Jacques never had to exist. The energy once spent fighting him was spent collaborating with Alvin instead – building strong communities from the start.
There’s absolutely no evidence in the game that this could happen, however, the metaphor holds: the possibility when potential is supported upstream, not feared into silence or shaped into control.
The transformation from Alvin to Jacques reflects a pattern that psychologists like James Gilligan and Gabor Maté have observed in real life: when a child’s deep sensitivity or precociousness isn’t supported, it can turn into control from unmet fear. Systems that fail to meet early emotional need often later face its consequences, in ideologies that arise from a deep need for certainty. What The Witcher shows, and what psychologists confirm, is that early care is both humane and systemic prevention.
Why This Matters
The real world is full of young Alvins. When systems fail to meet their fear with care, they risk becoming Jacqueses. Not all at once, just slowly, and with heartbreaking conviction.
- Sometimes, a precocious child, when hurt and dismissed, becomes an adult without support.
- And sometimes, an adult without support becomes a visionary without challenge.
- And a visionary without challenge, without checks and balances, may over time, become something else entirely.
This essay isn’t a plea for sympathy. It’s a call for upstream systems that intervene earlier, not with admiration or punishment, but with infrastructure that can hold complexity before it metastasizes into ideology.
The goal isn’t to rewrite The Witcher, the tragedy of what happened is part of its beauty. However, perhaps we can notice what the story already shows us: villains are not always born. Some are made, and some could have been prevented.
In quiet moments, when my kids are asleep, I like to imagine that alternate ending, of Alvin smiling. Not to undo the narrative, but to let it redesign the present.
Reaching the Jacqueses
It may be naive to think we can reach the Jacqueses of today. Some have grown so distant, so insulated, that their decisions no longer seem influenceable by ordinary people.
And yet, they weren’t always like this.
Many began like Alvin: perceptive, intense, and overwhelmed. If foresight detached from trust can become control, then the question isn’t “how do we fix them?” but rather:”what might it take for them to trust again?”
When systems are too rigid to allow real change, when reform is out of reach and critique too dangerous, empathy might not seem like a viable solution – and yet, it may be one of the last tools we have.
Empathy as a small act of human rebellion, a gesture that sees their fear, not to validate their answers, but to ask different questions.
What if we said:
“We see what you’re trying to prevent. We see the weight you carry, and maybe the pain behind it. What would it take for you to share that burden instead of going at it alone?”
Some will ignore it, some may double down. A few, for a heartbeat, might hear something they hadn’t expected: not defiance, nor constant agreement, but recognition.
When any change of existing systems seem statistically unlikely, and nothing else is working, maybe we can humanize the space between people, even when those structures won’t move.
It’s not absolution, not at all. It’s an invitation to listen without judgement, to speak gently, even when outcomes don’t change.
For the Alvins
Perhaps, most of all, this is about no longer failing the young Alvins of this world.
The ones who see too much, too soon.
The ones whose power arrives before they know what to do with it.
The ones who aren’t dangerous, just unaccompanied.
We stay.
We listen.
We teach them it’s alright to be afraid and brave at the same time.
We offer warm soup, pat their head, and give them hugs.
We rub their backs when their hearts break for the first time.
We take deep breaths when all we want is to shout at them for a costly mistake.
We sit beside them when their anxieties come creeping at 2am.
We teach them how to carry the future, not by bracing against it alone, but by learning to share its weight with others.
And then, when they’re ready, we let them go free.
Perhaps the most radical act, at the end of the day, is to recognize when to intervene upstream.
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Upstream interventions and the making of a fictional villain
In The Witcher (2007), Jacques de Aldersberg wasn’t your average villain. He saw famine, war, and even existential threat (the White Frost), and so he acted with fanatical urgency. He wasn’t merely evil; he was convinced he was humanity’s last hope, and that conviction consumed him.
What if that belief didn’t come from power, but from fear? What if the systemic failure behind what Jacques the villain did, was that no one reached him early enough to change his path?
Fictional villains are often treated as an inevitability, as if their downfall was programmed into their DNA. What if some villains were preventable? What if we met them earlier; met the fear, the precociousness, the burden of knowing too much too soon – with support rather than isolation and dismissal?
The Witcher, a fantasy RPG, offers a sharp lens on these questions. Jacques de Aldersberg may be a fictional villain, but the forces that formed him draw parallels to real life. We have systems that reward foresight and punish vulnerability. We have cultures that fear difference in children and fail to guide it. We have institutions that conflate vision for authority, and urgency for justification.
This essay doesn’t look to redeem or soften the harm caused by villains like Jacques, fictional or real. Instead, it asks how can we prevent their making in the first place by intervening upstream: by showing up with care, and with systems built to hold complexity before it turns into control.
This isn’t an argument for absolution, not at all. It’s an invitation to look backward, and recognize the moments where fear, unmet, turned into ideology.
Jacques in Collapse
Jacques’s character was not driven by greed or cruelty in the traditional sense, he truly believed he was acting in humanity’s best interest. His belief justified authoritarian control, experimentation on innocents, and widespread oppression. He became a tyrannical villain due to unchecked extension of his foresight, of his visions. His sincerity to prevent extinction was real, but so were the atrocities he endorsed with conviction to avoid it.
He led the Order of the Flaming Rose to prepare for what he believed was an inevitable apocalypse. He mistook the urgency of his vision for a mandate to centralize power and eliminate all dissent.
He built both ideological walls and literal ones. He sought to save humanity from extinction, and in doing so, sanctioned purges, silenced disagreement, and reimagined cruelty as necessity.
The horror of his actions was rooted in a tragic belief: If I don’t protect humanity, no one will.
Whatever his intentions, the world remembered him not for what he feared – but for what he devastatingly chose to do.
The Geralt Model
Where Jacques was a study in visionary determinism, Geralt offers a counter-model: the capacity to live in contradiction and ambiguity. He listens, and hesitates. His strength was in the sword and in his restraint, in decisions made without ever being sure they were right.
The game never gave you any answers. It forces you to sit in the choices you made without knowing if you made the right ones.
Geralt’s core question, one Jacques never seemed to ask, is:
“Who am I protecting, and who gets to decide how?”
Where Jacques tried to seal the future behind ideology, Geralt holds space for the mess of it.
Holding the Alvins
Jacques wasn’t always like this. Few villains are. According to a popular (but intentionally ambiguous) fan theory, before Jacques became the Grand Master, he was a little boy named Alvin; magically gifted, deeply afraid, and failed by every system meant to care for him.
Alvin was a Source, he was a child with chaotic power and haunted by visions of catastrophe. He was orphaned and passed between caregivers, traumatized by early exposure to violence on a devastating scale.
Alvin was eventually taken in by Geralt and his companions, while they weren’t unkind, they certainly tried their best, but they were ultimately unequipped. Geralt, a witcher, was trained to slay monsters, not nurture a traumatized child. Alvin’s fears were met with dismissal – his pain wasn’t seen; it was treated as overreaction.
Alvin didn’t need to be told to “control it”. He needed someone to sit with him through his fear without treating him like a task.
Tragically, Geralt, despite all his strengths and good intentions, ultimately lost Alvin. That failure – quiet, invisible, possibly preventable – haunts the world in silence.
I can’t help but to wonder, how many Alvins have we overlooked, misunderstood, or rushed past, and what have they become because of it?
An Alternate Future
What if Alvin had been treated differently?
Someone reads him stories. Walks him through his visions and nightmares. Teaches him to wield power in collaboration, not domination. Someone shows him how to feel safe without needing to control the future.
Imagine, metaphorically, in an alternate universe, that instead of becoming a Grand Master, Alvin heals.
In that version, he still sees the apocalyptic visions, but he learns how to hold his fear. He builds systems – resilient food networks, voluntary migration paths, magical energy stewards, and ethical frameworks for scarcity.
Maybe he even starts a gifted school, for precocious kids like he once was. A place where children like him are mentored. Maybe the Frost still comes, and people survive – not because they stopped a villain like Jacques, but because Jacques never had to exist. The energy once spent fighting him was spent collaborating with Alvin instead – building strong communities from the start.
There’s absolutely no evidence in the game that this could happen, however, the metaphor holds: the possibility when potential is supported upstream, not feared into silence or shaped into control.
The transformation from Alvin to Jacques reflects a pattern that psychologists like James Gilligan and Gabor Maté have observed in real life: when a child’s deep sensitivity or precociousness isn’t supported, it can turn into control from unmet fear. Systems that fail to meet early emotional need often later face its consequences, in ideologies that arise from a deep need for certainty. What The Witcher shows, and what psychologists confirm, is that early care is both humane and systemic prevention.
Why This Matters
The real world is full of young Alvins. When systems fail to meet their fear with care, they risk becoming Jacqueses. Not all at once, just slowly, and with heartbreaking conviction.
This essay isn’t a plea for sympathy. It’s a call for upstream systems that intervene earlier, not with admiration or punishment, but with infrastructure that can hold complexity before it metastasizes into ideology.
The goal isn’t to rewrite The Witcher, the tragedy of what happened is part of its beauty. However, perhaps we can notice what the story already shows us: villains are not always born. Some are made, and some could have been prevented.
In quiet moments, when my kids are asleep, I like to imagine that alternate ending, of Alvin smiling. Not to undo the narrative, but to let it redesign the present.
Reaching the Jacqueses
It may be naive to think we can reach the Jacqueses of today. Some have grown so distant, so insulated, that their decisions no longer seem influenceable by ordinary people.
And yet, they weren’t always like this.
Many began like Alvin: perceptive, intense, and overwhelmed. If foresight detached from trust can become control, then the question isn’t “how do we fix them?” but rather:”what might it take for them to trust again?”
When systems are too rigid to allow real change, when reform is out of reach and critique too dangerous, empathy might not seem like a viable solution – and yet, it may be one of the last tools we have.
Empathy as a small act of human rebellion, a gesture that sees their fear, not to validate their answers, but to ask different questions.
What if we said:
“We see what you’re trying to prevent. We see the weight you carry, and maybe the pain behind it. What would it take for you to share that burden instead of going at it alone?”
Some will ignore it, some may double down. A few, for a heartbeat, might hear something they hadn’t expected: not defiance, nor constant agreement, but recognition.
When any change of existing systems seem statistically unlikely, and nothing else is working, maybe we can humanize the space between people, even when those structures won’t move.
It’s not absolution, not at all. It’s an invitation to listen without judgement, to speak gently, even when outcomes don’t change.
For the Alvins
Perhaps, most of all, this is about no longer failing the young Alvins of this world.
The ones who see too much, too soon.
The ones whose power arrives before they know what to do with it.
The ones who aren’t dangerous, just unaccompanied.
We stay.
We listen.
We teach them it’s alright to be afraid and brave at the same time.
We offer warm soup, pat their head, and give them hugs.
We rub their backs when their hearts break for the first time.
We take deep breaths when all we want is to shout at them for a costly mistake.
We sit beside them when their anxieties come creeping at 2am.
We teach them how to carry the future, not by bracing against it alone, but by learning to share its weight with others.
And then, when they’re ready, we let them go free.
Perhaps the most radical act, at the end of the day, is to recognize when to intervene upstream.
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