I checked out The Witcher on the basis of random gifs showing up on Tumblr and Act’s comments that the books had been surprisingly non-misogynistic after the miserable disaster that was the games.
It has a lot of women, who do a lot of talking, and it portrays the women in a really…on their own terms way, is the best way I can articulate it, and this is both what I want and deeply unsettling. I am three episodes in and intensely invested in seeing the rest of it, but there is the unshakable sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like, you can’t have women like this and mean it that way, right?
Let’s briefly outline one of the plots of the opening episode (it is, additionally, a very confusingly interwoven story). Our protagonist arrives at a town, a wizard tells him to kill an evil princess on the basis she was born evil, the princess tells him to kill an evil wizard on the basis his “born evil” stuff destroyed her life, our protagonist insists that after past experiences he deals with these sorts of moral dilemmas by refusing to take part, “cool what if we decide we’ll get everyone else killed over this if you refuse” reply the other two. And it ends with the girl dead.
Only.
When the wizard tells his tale, Geralt calls bullshit. Pokes holes in his claims. The man’s very own narration stumbles around, saying he’s right because the girls have internal mutations, that’s why they have to be killed, then doubling on itself to claim that well they know the girls are monsters because they autopsied them after their deaths…
When the princess tells her tale, there are no contradictions, and Geralt says okay, I see your point, and I don’t think you were wrong for what you’ve done, but you don’t have to do this. Don’t keep killing.
But it does end with the princess dead and the wizard alive. So is this one of those ~who can say~ situations, you know? Where it’s very tragic, and we’ll never quite know who was telling the truth and who was lying, but the guy lives and the girl dies, the powerful instigator lives and the one seeking revenge dies. And it’s sad there wasn’t a better solution, but…well.
And yet everything in the way it’s presented seems to be that the wizard was in the wrong, to the very last where he’s chomping at the bit to collect the body, then incites the town on Geralt to get past him. That it’s not a tragedy because well there was nothing you could do, well who knows really sometimes there’s no right answer, well there are no right answers, well sometimes you do your best only to find refusing to do a bad thing won’t stop it, but a tragedy because Geralt chose wrong.
But that can’t be it. Or, if it somehow is, it’s at most the kind of tragedy that’s just going to repeat, where people will keep choosing the same sides, because it’s not like that story can end differently even if people are a bit sad.
And then we reach the third episode, which involves Geralt reenacting the situation with a new set of people only this time he feeds the guy to blame to the inarguably monstrous princess without even needing to.
I just talked about Kill la Kill, which was built around skimpy fanservice outfits and nudity. The first few episodes showed a certain degree of respect for its characters and I believed it easily. I never found myself waiting for the narrative to backhand one of the characters and go, “Just kidding!”
With The Witcher, I kept expecting the worst. It’s an American show. It’s live-action. It’s live-action medieval fantasy with naked women so this is going to be Game of Thrones again with the lovingly featured rape and torture. The main character’s a guy and he’s so central he’s right there in the title, even if the source material was more balanced there’s no way an adaption would pass up the chance to make it more about him. Female characters keep appearing, and sticking around, and getting to be characters even when a guy could be one instead, and talking, and doing shit, and being flawed people and having layers and the narrative acting like this is normal and fine and I like all of it, but it can’t possibly mean it the way I’m taking it. It must hate them because that’s just how these things go. I’m so used to people finding fault in women where I see none, to meaning something terrible and unforgivable with traits I find fine, that I know it has to be here somewhere.
And even with the third episode, I find myself picking at threads. Does it mean anything that this princess had no agency, wasn’t capable of even asking for help herself? Does having any control over your actions disqualify you from being saved? Does her voicelessness make her a better victim? Even though the episode itself has Geralt explicitly draw the connection between the two again and again, even though he retells the story as just him failing to save someone, no caveats, no “because she was past saving but this one might be different”. Nothing the show says fully convinces me. I’m not sure anything could – until the story is finished, there’s always that possibility.
But. It is a story with wonderful and intriguing characters so far, full of women neither the story nor the other characters hate, and with every sign of continuing on that path.
With The Witcher, I kept expecting the worst. It’s an American show. It’s live-action.
This is an important part, and I think it’s ultimately what happened to the games as well. When you portray naked women, you draw an audience and creators who expect other, worse things out of the portrayal of women. There might be exceptions, but that seems to be the trend.
I don’t remember as much about the books as I should, tbh. Didn’t re-read them. I do know people have complained that the show is not enough like GoT for them. That’s a good sign.
I do know people have complained that the show is not enough like GoT for them.
There’s been a lot of on-screen sex but it’s all been consensual, with rape being limited to dialogue or a threat that was avoided. And nobody’s been tortured either.
My first thought was, “Wow, was this someone who actually understood the books?” And then I wondered about something else, and found an answer:
This is the creator and writing staff. It was created by a woman, and the writers are a 50/50 split.
It’s almost like it matters to have minority writers!
Oh, that explains so much. I went looking to the books and, they’re good, but I expected the show to have been dialed down the female characters and instead it’s dialed them up even more. But not only is that a female showrunner, but they were in charge of Umbrella Academy, which I also loved, and which came from source material that was vile garbage even by comics standards. (Oddly, it didn’t trigger the same anxiety for the female characters, I think because it’s a modern setting. I’ve become one of those people who can sooner believe in a medieval setting with dragons than with female agency.)
It is honestly pleasantly surprising how much the series went out of its way to give female characters big roles. Like, it would’ve been easy to just adapt the first book since it has a very series-friendly episodic structure, but then Yen would have appeared, like, once, in a story where she sorta fucks over Geralt without much context given to understand what’s her deal, while Ciri just wouldn’t be present on account of not even being born yet.
The series had to drastically alter the underlying structure of the story so all three of them could be co-stars, which is pretty cool. It also allowed the show to do some interesting things with converging timelines and providing context at the dramatically appropriate moments.
Do tell.
(Also, on topic of shows made by women with a lot of female characters with agency, I would recommend Russian Doll if you’re into character drama/exploration with mild fantastic elements.)
The Umbrella Academy comics are actually so bad I can’t even rant coherently about them, and I can’t compare how the show handled it because the show took the most basic aspects of the premise, lit the rest on fire, then redid everything while watching it burn.
Half naked women constantly, but the art is absolute shit so it’s like, no one can even be enjoying this! They’re being objectified as just a personal fuck-you to any woman who tries reading it I guess? The characters…aren’t. Just aren’t. Also it’s taking place in a generic superhero setting and there’s random supervillains and space aliens and shit and they have anti-gravity belts and it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, it’s just there because comics “writers” are just cargo cultists, but like, some incredibly incompetent cultists that the rest of the cult kicked out years ago.
Oh also nobody in the comics is gay and God personally hates gay people.
Wait, what? Is it a hyperbole or an actual stance the comic takes? I kinda wouldn’t expect such open vileness even out of comics.
The rest is… yeah. COMICS! to the max.
Literally God calling someone a slur, from what I was told – it was in the second or third comics storyline, and even I couldn’t justify reading past the first.
COMICS
The timeline is pretty neat, yet I have seen some people point to it as the reason why they don’t like the show. I think some people think the order of the scenes is random, and don’t realize it follows a certain logic (ie, for each of the three main character, the scenes are actually in chronological order).
I’ve seen that too, and, like, it’s not necessary invalid: if you couldn’t follow the show because of it, then you couldn’t follow the show, no amount of talk about artistry would fix it.
But it did work for me, and I think there is a place for more experimental shows that play around with narrative conventions, especially now that we have a fuckton of shows that cover a wide variety of genres. They don’t have to work for everyone to justify their existence.
I really think people are obsessing about the timeline too much. As far as I could tell, it doesn’t actually matter if you can’t line up the pieces in a given episode, you can just treat it as three different plotlines. And given some of the transitions did everything they could to hide the fact they were transitions, I think the show was fully intending for people to only realize things are happening at different times about halfway along.
Thanks for the review! Wow. Judging from what you say, maybe we’re finally getting an adaptation of the Witcher that will be faithful to the original. I wasn’t optimistic about the show tbh. I’ve read a couple of interviews with the creator and she seemed to get what the fans want but… Well, between the fact that a lot of the American fans were drawn in by the games and Netflix’s disastrous track record of adaptations I was very sceptical.
>>So is this one of those ~who can say~ situations, you know?
When I first read this story as a kid it looked like a textbook example of manpain, tbh. In part, it still does to me today, but Sapkovski partially redeems himself by making it have a point further into the series.
Okay, on to the most important question… Since you’ve played the games, I don’t think it’s a spoiler (but possibly it is? I don’t remember if it ever came up in the games, sorry). How is infertility angst dealt with? Is the topic dealt with respectfully or are we getting something like Joss Whedon’s Black Widow? Oh god, there are so, so many thing in that arc that the adaptation can mess up.
When I first read this story as a kid it looked like a textbook example of manpain, tbh. In part, it still does to me today
I’d say it’s the standard being about the protagonist, who as usual is male and so plays right into the broader problem of these stories revolving around guys. (And that’s extra uncomfortable tied to a story where the background is a lot of girls having guys imprison and kill them.) But he’s not, for example, specifically sad that her being dead means he can’t keep having sex with her, despite what TvTropes apparently thinks.
How is infertility angst dealt with? Is the topic dealt with respectfully or are we getting something like Joss Whedon’s Black Widow?
So I haven’t played the games (or read the later books) like Act, but the show changes it from “sorceresses are just like that” to “that gets hacked out to fuel the cosmetic surgery spell” which I was ambivalent about, but having seen the full season, I think it actually worked out incredibly well.
Yennefer doesn’t specifically care she’s infertile. It’s that she gave up things with the promise she’d be happy and accomplish things, and then she didn’t get either, and so she decides fine, I want everything for nothing because trying to exchange one thing for another has blown up in my face, and also I will refuse to accept any help doing this because I’m a mature fucking adult and mature fucking adults don’t half-ass their mental breakdowns, and I have chosen “baby” as the shorthand for this but by god if you dare try to actually talk to me about it you are going to realize very quickly that the problem is way bigger and also double fuck you for daring to offer a solution to the thing I claimed was my problem and triple fuck you for the very concept of “help”.
I love Yennefer so much.
>>that gets hacked out to fuel the cosmetic surgery spell
Goddamnit. Well, I hope they at least will keep Geralt’s inane infertility tantrum too, rather than making it a women-only issue.
>>I love Yennefer so much.
I know, right?? Ciri will always be my #1, but Yen is so fun.
No, I know it sounds awful but it actually really, really works, and thinking about it it really is so much better than sorceresses just not being able to have kids because it’s how magic works. (Especially since I don’t get the impression this is such a thing with Polish culture, but America at least is really big on the specific idea that powerful/monstrous women automatically lose the ability to have kids by divine decree.)
Unlike her peers, Yennefer actually bullies the guy into taking her womb and doing the spell, and she suffers horribly which she also very explicitly chooses, all because her life experiences up to that point have been telling her that if she just suffers enough now she’ll be happy later. And because of it, she does manage to get exactly what she wants. Cut to thirty years later when she’s miserable and a bunch of rapidfire traumatic events convince her that she is desperate to matter in any way, absolutely nothing she does matter no matter her power, she is completely disposable, and that the only thing that’s obligated to care about you is a baby.
Geralt is still sterile but not only that, their conversation is just great. “Look magically getting a womb will not magically make you a good mother,” Geralt tries to reason. “You are literally running around a mountain trying to murder a dragon because it maybe has something you want and we both know a baby will not change that about you. Have you actually thought about what a baby means besides that someone prevented you from having it? Please please please can we have a sane and adult conversation regarding how just being a woman doesn’t mean the solution is babies. I will even open up about my feelings. Please.”
“You have confused the fact I am very smart for the idea any of that intelligence is emotional, so no, we cannot,” retorts Yennefer. “I have decided I will be having this mental breakdown and if I wasn’t going to let God stop me I’m sure not letting you.”
Yeah, that’s Geralt and Yen alright. Man, I gotta watch the show. I was going to start with a friend yesterday but we went to see Knives Out instead. Btw, Knives Out is pretty good.
Okay, this does sound better. Thanks for the explanation! :) I’ll give the show a try.
Just finished watching the season, and wow that was some good stuff. Yennefer’s expanded backstory was 100% the best addition. Her clashes with Geralt and her teacher had the best dialogue of the show.
Ciri’s not as much, sadly. Not that I didn’t like her, but half the time spent on her felt kind of pointless; at best it was a clumsy primer for her later prominence. Brokilon Forest for instance fell utterly flat in the show, while it was meant to establish the bond between the future dad/daughter witchers in the books.
Like, I get they probably didn’t want to get an even younger girl for one very action-light, character-building episode, but a) they should have just cut Brokilon outright in that case, and b) their meeting at the end doesn’t have the same impact as their reunion would. Calanthe and Eist were fun, though. It’s not spelled out, but Calanthe spent like thirty years fighting off both internal politics and border incursions to protect her throne. What a beast.
Expanding on the Brokilon thing, like, I seriously appreciate how difficult a situation that early meeting between Geralt/Ciri put the show-runners in. The way the show/season was structured, Geralt and Ciri just can’t meet that early. That might work from Geralt’s timeline, but we really are supposed to be following teenage!Ciri through her own adventure, and it slights those trials to ignore them for an episode and go back in time.
Geralt meeting Yennefer for the first time was done perfectly, at a crucial point in their individual storylines. It worked because everyone’s storylines, running in different timeframes, parallel and internally consistent, were finally allowed to intersect after decades in-universe. The characters aren’t supposed to meet until they’re ready to meet. On the one hand, Geralt rescuing Ciri from Brokilon would break that really good structure, but on the other hand, it was actually really important from a character perspective. Yennefer criticized Geralt for neglecting his Child Surprise, which would have a lot more meaning to it if we’d literally seen him abandon her, the way it happens in the books.
The Brokilon short story showed that destiny isn’t everything: there is ‘something more’ that’s required to really make it work, and Geralt and Ciri had it. Geralt running away from that was a huge low point for him. He abandoned an orphaned child that had instantly become so dependent upon him that she only slept well at his side. He deserved to get shit on for doing that. Instead we got… what was the Brokilon episode even about? Just demonstrating that Ciri was too powerful to be swayed by the Waters? Giving some character depth to the elf kid? It ultimately seemed to just be an elaborate cameo for the dryads. A waste.
Yeah, the Brokilon thing both completely did not work (“hey, magical destiny forest!!! okay we’re leaving now bye”) and misses out on the hilarity of Geralt getting suckerpunched by destiny and still thinking that if he can just pry the kid off his leg and run fast enough it won’t be a problem again.
I suspect the problem isn’t just that the interwoven stories meant they didn’t want younger!Ciri to feature – we do glimpse the younger versions of Incest Royalty, and I think it’d have been a funny contrast with present!Ciri’s misery slog to have younger!Ciri running around a forest being a little shit – but that they were committed to having something all three storylines feature each episode and they couldn’t think of enough ways to differentiate the misery slog so sidetrack to magic destiny forest for two episodes. (And I can see the upside of having Geralt never meet Ciri – the books had time to explain that the surprise thing is serious binding business but the show hadn’t got that across that well, so having Ciri see this complete stranger and be !!! on sight helped convey that yeah, this is why Geralt was so torn up about a kid he’s never met, they are by magic law loving family members who horribly missed each other.)
Ciri’s not as much, sadly. Not that I didn’t like her, but half the time spent on her felt kind of pointless; at best it was a clumsy primer for her later prominence.
Yeah, most of Ciri’s stuff felt kind of eat-your-vegetables, where there’s stuff you need to learn about for when we hit “present day, present time” when everything syncs up so we have to do this. And despite the fact that objectively there was a lot of information, yeah, it felt pointless.