While Tissaia is still critical of her, labeling her “piglet” during her training (so named because Yennefer’s father sold her to Tissaia for less than he would get for one of his pigs), Yennefer is not ostracised by her sister either for her disability or slower understanding of her powers. Until she receives her enchantment, Yennefer has hunchback and severe jaw deformities–the result of being cursed with a “twisted spine.” While her disability made her an outcast in Vengerberg, it goes wholly ignored by her sister initiates at Aretuza. From that moment on, elements of this characterization are broken down as The Witcher takes deliberate steps to keep Yennefer from the typical trappings of a powerful female character in a male-driven story. It is arguably Yennefer’s lowest moment in the series. In this moment, she is subservient to the well-dressed, almost regal Tissaia-roles that will reverse in the final episode. We’re made to see her as “beastly,” as Tissaia says, a combination of her visible impairments, the ragged state of her appearance, and the fact that she is still kneeling in the mud. In the scene, Yennefer struggles with the feed for the animals, only to be knocked over by her father into the mud and covered with the feed. This characterization reaches a pinnacle when Tissaia de Vries ( MyAnna Buring ) comes upon her, after sensing Yennefer’s chaos. She’s ridiculed and abused, both physically and verbally, by those in her village and her father. Yennefer is initially introduced as a disabled unfeminine outcast, with an unharnessed power. But The Witcher, with Lauren Schmidt Hissrich at the helm, left this trope in the pilot episode where Renfri ( Emma Appleton ), a Child of the Black Sun, uses her sexuality and charm to play with Geralt’s emotions and lure him into a trap. Its lead female character, Yennefer of Vengerberg ( Anya Chalotra ), is a powerful, beautiful mage who could have been the sensual sorceress who lures Geralt to his downfall. Bitches all, they must be eliminated, reformed, or, at the very least condemned.” In addition, “those rare women who are shown in fiction as both powerful, and, in some sense, admirable are such because their power is always based if not on beauty, then at least on sexuality.”Įdwards goes on to say that these women’s power is frequently seen as a means to an end, with “the men who succumb to it losing everything, including frequently, their masculinity.”Īnd certainly, The Witcher could have easily fallen into this age-old trap. In male-centric stories, Edwards argues, “power unfeminine and that powerful woman, quite literally, monstrous. Edwards states that if we read male-driven centric text and media as the authors intended which makes us repeatedly choose men as the characters to identify with-identifying with Hamlet instead of Ophelia. As though it heard this challenge through the chaos, the show rose up and defied expectations.Īs women, it is often difficult for us to find a female character to identify within male-driven dramas like The Witcher. Touted as the new Game of Thrones, I was expecting the same world-building narrative with an unsure dedication to character arcs, especially for the female characters the way that Thrones had, especially in its later seasons. I went into Netflix’s new original series, The Witcher, with the same low expectations I have of any highly anticipated new sci-fi/fantasy series.
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