Talk:In the Heart of the Woods/@comment-212.183.176.68-20180502123749

IMHO the real "monster" here is Sven and his crownies, not the Leshen!

They kill the elders whatever route you follow, even if you side them and kill the monster... why? What threat do they pose now that their beloved "spirit" is gone? Not to mention how easily Sven gets rid of the poor girl... even if they are lovers (or at least close).

In my first run I started the quest siding Harald but then I decided to give Sven a try, and when I found out about Hilde told him to "get rid" of her... I was quite sure that telling him so would make him back off from the whole thing and ask if there was another way of solving the problem... but no, he killed her with little remorse... a blatant example of "greater good" or pure evil? It was too late then to go on with Harald and killed the leshen (with the hope of avoiding a bloodbath this way...).

In my second run I sided Harald and renewed the pact, and the whole quest suddenly turned on its head! First of all the "offerings cutscene": as other users pointed out during the scene we can see the Leshen standing behind Geralt, accepting the offering... a strange behaivour from a monster, even more from a Leshen (think about all the other we encounter in the game...). Then the game, both in the mission and monster descriptions, tells in bold letters that the leshen "truly did help the village", that killing it "would do more harm than good" and that in the end Sven "had killed more people in one afternoon than the monster had in years".

''And if you think about it what the Leshen does is not so different from the Witchers Trials, and Harald tells you so. Three out of ten childrens survive and become a Witcher, seven dies in the process... how can we accept this as right but condemn the Leshed for doing a similar thing (the surviving hunters are said to be renowed for their skills in all Skellige)?''

And  let's all remember that Geralt is of course a witcher (a monster slayer) but in the books he tends to kill monsters only when they pose a direct threat, not just for greed!