S.B. Likes a Thing: The Witcher

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Witcher series on Netflix. On one hand, I’d heard good things about the book series from a Polish former coworker of mine; on the other, I’m a bit suspicious of the psudo-medival European fantasy subgenre due to the intersection of Sturgeon’s Law and Tolkien stans. To my delight, Witcher stuck the landing on several tropes that are extremely hard to use without wrecking yourself. (Spoilers abound, so come back later if you plan to watch the series without me spilling plot points first.)

Supernatural species as indigenous people

Plotlines where non-human mythical creatures serve as an allegory for an oppressed people group tend to run into trouble almost immediately, so I was fairly suspicious of how the elves in the series would be depicted. But the series dodges the usual pitfalls by letting a surviving community of elves fill us in on the backstory, which is chillingly familiar to Indigenous peoples anywhere in the world: when humans landed in the world of the series due to a supernatural conjunction of realities, the elves offered them space, resources, and instruction in magic. Instead of establishing a cooperative society, the humans turned on the elves who had helped them. By making the humans and elves equal in technology, intelligence, and ability to use magic, we see that human dominance in this world isn’t the result of self-defence or superior technology winning out. Humans are simply willing to commit genocide and to damage the land that supports them in order to ‘win’. 

Magical cure for disability

Within the chronic illness and disability community, the idea of ‘curing’ a disability is fraught; even people with the same disability or chronic condition may have profoundly different feelings on whether they would want to be able-bodied or neurotypical if the opportunity presented itself. Fictional representations of disabilities being cured-- especially by supernatural means-- tends to fail because the ‘cure’ is either a convenient way for the narrative to stop dealing with the character’s disability, present able-bodied status as a reward for the disabled character, which is in itself a labyrinth of disturbing implications, or show characters who weren’t really living their best lives until their disability is ‘fixed’. The Witcher shows Yennifer, who has skeletal deformities due to her mixed human and elvish ancestry, as able to find romance and pursue her studies in magic while living with her disability. However, she is also acutely aware of how she is perceived because of her appearance and her political ambitions are a large part of her decision to undergo an extremely painful magical transformation.  

Beauty and power

A lot of media gives a token nod to the fraught relationship between conventional beauty-- especially female beauty-- and social capital as they zoom straight to objectifying the female characters. (The alternative, wherein the narrative loudly insists that the female character is somehow superior due to not being conventionally attractive, is almost as irritating). Witcher dodges this, without sacrificing any moments of enjoyable fanservice, and even those clearly serve plot and character development. I give credit to both creator Lauren Schmidt and actress Anya Chalotra for threading the needle of portraying a character who uses her beauty and sexuality for power and personal gain without the narrative itself objectifying her.