This Is Now My Headcannon As Well! I Love Witcher 1, And Siegfried Was One Of My Favourite Characters!

This is now my headcannon as well! I love witcher 1, and siegfried was one of my favourite characters! I was sad that he did not make a reappearance in the third game, but seeing what became of the order, maybe it's better that way. If one assumes that he really is the lonely champion, it would be a nice form of closure for such a formidable character!

Something else i noticed, related to the lonely champion as a card:

- he destroys firesworn tokens - which could be seen as him not agreeing with the fanatics, and what became of the order.

- as op rightly remarked, the knight is surrounded by drowners. You know who else was surrounded by drowners when first encountered? - siegfried. (He battled against them with geralt on the way to the basilisk in the sewers).

Okay I wanna talk about Siegfried of Denesle for a hot second (especially in Gwent)

(gif by @thirstyforred​ )

Short background to Siegfried for all those that didn’t play the first game: Siegfried, son of Sir Eyck of Denesle, joined the Order of the Flaming Rose, the military organisation rooted in the Eternal Fire belief, when his father refused to take coin for hunting monsters after his mother fell gravely ill. Though he renounced his father he still followed a strict knightly code to do good and defend the weak. He felt that, although sometimes drastic, the Order would give him that opportunity. What he didn’t know was that the order was rotten to its core and the Grand Master Jacques de Aldersberg cooperated with the criminal organisation Salamandra to make money by producing the drug Fisstech and produce mutants - not the witcher kind though, those mutants were barely human anymore, mangled mounts of flesh made to kill and be killed.

In The Witcher 1 you have the possibility to support the order, but what this mostly looks like is supporting Siegfried. In the end he will see that the order is not all that he was promised it would be. He is named the next Grand Master by king Foltest and assissts Geralt with getting to de Aldersberg to stop him for once and all.

In The Witcher 2, if you have chosen the Order path in Witcher 1, you can meet him again. He will help you get inside Loc Muinne, where an important political summit takes place. Even more importantly though is that he will help Geralt and Vernon Roche to keep the heir to the Temerian throne, little Anaïs La Valette, out of king Radovid’s hands.

The big mystery however is that he does not show up in The Witcher 3. In one DLC you can get the dialogue choice to mention him once to shame a former order member, but that’s it. So what happened? The order had been gifted lands by king Radovid between Witcher 1 and 2, that’s why they stood as his private army in 2. In 3 however their assets had been seized and the Order been disbanded. The members either joined the Witch Hunters or turned to organized crime and banditry, producing fisstech. Absolutely not a word to be found of what became of the Grand Master. You can however find a note on a noticeboard written by a “Siegfried de Löwe” (Löwe=lion) basically threatening villagers if they didn’t pay protection money. It is unclear in-game if this is some other Siegfried or the same.

I will however argue on the basis of the Gwent standalone game that he is not, and even more important, he is doing morally better than the twisted organisation the order became.

The first big indicator for me is that he is a neutral card. All other order members are of the Syndicate faction, meaning they have an association with crime.

Next are his categories. “Human, Knight”. All units that have an association with the Eternal Fire or the Order have “Firesworn” and therefore marks them as belonging to the thus named religiously fanatic syndicate faction.

Then there lastly is his deploy ability “Purify all other units”. This means that all positive and negative effects are removed from your and your opponents units. Of course to sensibly use this ability you’d use it when your own units have mostly negative effects (like bleeding, or having their abilities locked) and your opponent having mostly positive effects (i.e. shield or defender). He is by far of course not the only unit that has a variant of the purify ability, but he has the only one that affects the whole board, giving a certain weight to his “purity”.

There are arguments that could counter this, I want to specifically mention the Philippa Eilhart cards (one is Northern Realms, the other Syndicate), because they show her at different stages of her story, so of course this Siegfried card could just be early-on Siegfried and at some point we will get a Siegfried: De Löwe card or something.

Another point could be, that such a card had to be made neutral (for example a lot of the Witcher cards are neutral as well as Yen and Ciri cards)

I do however have a funny little headcanon.

See this guy?

(gif by @thirstyforred​ of course)

This card is called Lonely Champion with the following flavour text: “So long as he continues the righteous fight the Order and its flame endure.” It shows him surrounded by drowners, run of the mill monsters, not involved with crime. So though he is a Firesworn unit, he is not Not Like The Others. Plus he has the immunity ability.

I like to imagine that this is Siegfried after having the order ripped out under him by Radovid, trying to fight the righteous fight on his own, adhering as the last one to the knightly values he wanted and expected the Order to incorporate.

Alright, thank you for reading! I know Witcher 1 is an … aged game, but if you should ever feel like diving into the games, keep in mind that you can only meet Siegfried if you play the first game! To all my fellow Gwent and Witcher 1 enthusiast: I would love to read your thoughts!