I'm beginning to wonder if the people who like Minthara are also the same people whose first Star Trek was Voyager.
Yeah I am interested to know who exactly she appeals to. I'll never follow the evil path so I watched the romance scene on youtube. To me it was pretty meh -- some soft porn with some mild D/s elements. Liara's review said the D/s elements weren't 'filmed' correctly so it doesn't seem that her audience isn't lovers of kink. My guess is that her character specifically appeals to those who appreciate sex as reward fantasies.
The narrative tension in ST: TNG was "you have a set of principles, can you keep to them in the face of credible challenge"? Which, as you note, was worn down in subsequent Star Trek variations. My personal theory for the popularity of the Witcher type "grey morality" / "no alignment" is the U.S.' endless wars. Soldiers are fighting a war that started before they were born and no one seems to know what the greater principle is -- outside of some generalized sense of patriotism or the like. So a character like Geralt that just does the job they were given and who has a limited ability to influence the larger events taking place in the world resonates in a way that character that CHARNAME with their ability to bend the universe through the application of willpower does not.
People seem to forget that the Witcher's world is very Polish, Nilfgaard is the stand in for Sweden/Germany and most of the Kingdoms when they're not being Poland/Baltic States are Germany/Russia. The reason the Witchers world is so morally grey is because the only sympathetic actors are the people with no agency in their world. Even the ones who try to preserve their identity are tainted by the levels of violence they resort to. I didn't pick up on this in the first game too much, but after reading some of the books and then playing the later games with this in mind, there are a lot of anachronistic traits in the world that point to this kind of allegory, with it sometimes being the Deluge and sometimes being WWII.
It'd be really interesting to look into the parallels between Polish fiction and American fiction.
Then again, I'm one of those simpletons who doesn't always understand what people mean when they say that morality is a difficult question. The people that say they live in a morally grey world usually are saying more about themselves than the world. These are typically the same people who think Cersei is a capable leader and Ned Stark was a fool to be principled in politics. #lawfulstupid
