The Witcher’s Cool Girl Has No Chill
Even before it debuted on Netflix in December of 2019, The Witcher was polarizing viewers. The series is based on the book series of the same name by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, which has already been successfully adapted into an equally divisive Witcher video game franchise. This controversial series has been criticized for its misogyny, and we see some of those problems permeate in the new show.
Both the video game franchise and the show are centered on the titular Witcher, Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill). He is a magical mercenary traveling the medieval lands known simply as “The Continent” for his creature-hunting expertise. He is officially hired to stop magical creatures from hurting people, but usually, it happens to be the other way around.
This is a grim fantasy land where it’s often humanity that turns out to be the real villain: the elves have been pushed off their native lands, mighty dragons have been driven to the edge of extinction, and human rulers are petty tyrants who care nothing for their citizenry. Geralt, technically being a magical creature himself, many times empathizes with these creatures over humanity, and it makes for some interesting, albeit predictable, tension.
In traditional conservative fantasy, the world would not deviate from his perspective. The Witcher would fall into a long line of fantasy works that manage to make the strapping guy “the real” oppressed one (see Carnival Row, The Mandalorian, and The Harry Potter Universe). The show tries to counteract this by having powerful women on every rung of the political spectrum — both the good, the bad, and the complicated.
The most prominent of these women is Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), the magical sorceress who would sooner let the world burn than meet its expectations. Yennefer straddles a lot of complicated intersections of what a woman, particularly a “strong woman,” should be.
Attractive, empathetic, cold, and deadly, she is a “Cool Girl” with no chill. Her portrayal is both a subversion of one of cinema’s most damaging tropes, while simultaneously being the enforcement of one.
The Cool Girl is a trope written by and for men as the manifestation of two paradoxical, patriarchal desires. She is a woman who is strong and independent, but simultaneously, she is also a woman who doesn’t have emotional needs of her own. She is a Stepford Wife who doesn’t display the artifices of being controlled because her genuine goal in life is to “coincidentally” like all the same things her male partner likes at all times. As the video series The Take commented:
“This bro-y temperament is packaged in an effortlessly hot female form. She’s easy-going and never gets angry. Most saliently, The Cool Girl isn’t a real girl. She is a myth, created by men, perpetuated by women pretending to be her.”
Cool Girls are women who enjoy guy things like sports, cars, and beer, but also don’t make a big deal about “girly” things like emotions and being a functional human being. Cameron Diaz’s Mary in the 1998 film “There’s Something About Mary” is a perfect example. She genuinely likes traditionally masculine activities and desires a partner who can keep up with her enjoyment of these activities.
She is also “traditionally” attractive (i.e., thin, blonde, white), and is the fixation of all the men in her life. Mary has been stalked so intensely, that as an adult she had to change her identity and move to a different state. This premise seems horrific, but because it was written and directed by men, her stalking is depicted as comedic. She falls for protagonist Ted (Ben Stiller) after he has the “courage” to admit that stalking her was wrong. Her feelings are ancillary to how the male protagonist feels about her, and in the end, she dumps long-term partner Brett Favre (of real-world football fame) because Ted’s such a “nice guy.”
The “Cool Girl” trope was common in the 90s and 2000s (and now) as men tried to reconcile their sexist desire for control with the relatively new norm of female empowerment. We see it replicated again and again with Megan Fox’s mechanic character Mikaela Banes in Transformers (2007 to present), Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) in How I Met Your Mother, and Jennifer Lawrence in many of her breakout roles.
The men who wrote these stories are defining empowerment for these Cool Girls as uncritically affirming both male activities as well as men themselves. These women do not question their male partner’s motivations or demand emotional needs of their own, lest they are labeled clingy, needy, and uncool.
The validity of this trope started to be called into question more seriously in the early 2010s, which was coincidentally around the same time that women started to gain the power to question such things.
The most seminal work on this topic was Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl — later adapted into a movie in 2014 — that deconstructed the psychic toll such unrealistic expectations have on the women who try to replicate them. As the main character, Amy Dunne (played by Rosamund Pike in the film), says of this trope in the book:
“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
Amy becomes so resentful of these expectations that she frames her husband for her own murder. She disappears and leaves behind enough evidence for police to suspect him, all while watching the incident in the news from a safe distance several states over. Flynn seems to imply that the Cool Girl is not only unrealistic but a debilitating expectation that can drive women to insanity.
The Cool Girl continues to exist in the public consciousness, but its no longer viewed as innocuous. We have started to call attention to what this means. This revaluation makes Yennefer’s portrayal complicated because, in the TV show, she is a Cool Girl written like a person (not just a male fantasy) and we as the viewer are left wondering if that’s okay.
Yennefer has many of the archetypical qualities of a Cool Girl. She is traditionally attractive and detached. In season one, she moves through the world, pretending as though she is disengaged from the conflicts of The Continent, even though as a sorceress, she is very much connected to it. There is one haunting scene where she gives a monologue to a dead baby, where she advocates for radical ambivalence: “I’m sorry you didn’t have a life. But if truth be told, you’re not missing much.”
The character of Yennefer is also the subject of rampant male objectification. It’s easy to find searches on the web that articulate how “hot” she is, such as BestOfComicbooks.com’s 2018 list of “49 Hot Pictures Of Yennefer From The Witcher Series Which Will Make You Fall In Love With Her Sexy Body.” Her body is a commodity for some members of the fandom, and there is validation in the TV series as well. Yennefer is objectified multiple times on screen (though refreshingly, this extends to Geralt as well) in a way that’s inescapable for the viewer:
Source: The Witcher (2019)
The show uses her body to engage in a type of fanservice, and like any Cool Girl, Yennefer is down to have sex. Her and Geralt first meet at an orgy she has magically orchestrated out of boredom. She engages sexually with Geralt casually over the literal decades, and at first, it seems very chill. In a stereotypical narrative, she would dutifully end up with Geralt after he slowly chipped away at her “unobtainable” veneer.
From the onset, it’s made transparent to the viewer, however, that the Cool Girl persona she puts on is constructed. Yennefer is not actually as detached as she wants to appear. She gets into a fight with Geralt because she discovers he magically wished for her, and she dramatically breaks up with him. She petulantly refuses to listen to her magical mentor Tissaia de Vries (MyAnna Buring) at nearly every turn. She tracks down her spurned lover Istredd (Royce Pierreson) out of the blue, years after he’s moved on.
She is emotional to her core — the very opposite of chill.
Her beauty is also literally fabricated, and by no means “effortless.” She originally had a hunchback, and her father sold her into slavery because he considered her to be too disfigured to love. She gets a magical surgery to become “beautiful” not for beauty’s sake — Tissaia gives a very moving speech about her being perfect just the way she is — but out of a desire to obtain power. As she tells her former lover Istredd:
“My world is cruel, and predictable. You enter. You survive. You die…I want to be powerful. It is what I am owed.”
Yennefer is not living for the women and men around her, but for herself. She does terrible, complicated things that often defy other people’s expectations to a frustrating degree. She vies for a position at court, only to abandon it once she gets bored. She finds the perfect “nice guy” and spurns his happily ever after to pursue power. She sacrifices her ability to give birth in exchange for beauty and then spends years trying to find a magical way to get it back just because she can.
This last point is particularly poignant, given the reality that powerful women are often expected to sacrifice aspects of their feminity to gain power. In the real world, successful women will defer pregnancy altogether to climb an inch up their male institution of choice.
From this lens, her surgery can metaphorically be viewed as the sacrifice women make to gain power in a patriarchal world. Yennefer resents that she was forced into such a position at all, and is fighting it. As she tells Geralt about her desire to reclaim her fertility: “They took my choice. I want it back.”
The entire first season, people are trying to get her to conform to the world around her, even the people who care for her immensely. Her mentor, for example, paints her “erratic” behavior as a liability. As Tissaia tells Yennefer in the second episode (Four Marks) on why she might fail as a sorceress: “You lie. You succumb to emotion. To weakness. Do you actually have what it takes?”
Again, the push for women to conceal their emotions is something very much rooted in the real world. Women are often taught to “man-up” and not express feelings to get ahead, and Yennefer refuses to adhere to this false choice.
In fact, her emotional nature turns out to be the thing that saves the Continent from the antagonistic Nilfgaardian Empire. In the last episode of the first season (Much More), she defeats an army by unleashing all her fiery fury at once. She gives in to the chaos inside her, her rage, and it turns out to be the thing the world needed.
Yennefer is so uncool, the world burns around her, and the show suggests that this is a good thing.
This depiction of Yennefer might make it sound like The Witcher is a feminist masterpiece, but like with Yennefer herself, it’s complicated.
There are a lot of profoundly complex women on this show. We mentioned Tissaia already, but there’s also Ciri (Freya Allan), the magical princess (and another lead character) who had to run away after Nilfgaard sacked her kingdom. There is Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni), the authoritative Nilfgaard sorceress leading the armies against the North. And let’s not even get started on the complexity of Ciri’s grandmother Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May), the woman so ballsy she told fate to screw itself.
These women are fascinating portrayals of powerful women in a patriarchal society, but unfortunately for us, there’s also the men, and they often undermine these women’s moral point of view in the narrative. The loose rules of this fantasy world mean that the text itself often bolsters the actions of the men.
In episode three of the first season (Betrayer Moon), for example, the Witcher stumbles across a kingdom haunted by a monster. This magical creature is the lovechild of an incestuous relationship between a king and his sister. This depiction is controversially cast as true love, and it’s the court physician who turns out to be the man responsible for the curse. A confession from him confirms the king and queen’s love. So we, as the viewer, are forced to accept the consensual nature of this relationship — the sister’s perspective centuries buried.
We see this again with Queen Calanthe from the kingdom of Cintra. In episode four (Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials) we learn she doesn’t want her daughter to marry a cursed knight of low birth. Calanthe uses both force and manipulation to try and prevent the arrangement.
In doing so, Calanthe turns out to be violating a cosmic force of the universe called “The Law Of Surprise” (i.e., someone is owed what their debtee did not know they have). In this case, Calanthe’s husband unwittingly promised their daughter to this knight, and she now has to submit to this law. Her daughter also coincidentally loves the knight, continuing a trend of convenient love that prevents the men from being demonized in the text. The narrative forces Calanthe’s hand, and in the end, this fictional conceit proves her wrong and the male knight right.
Calanthe’s resistance to The Law Of Surprise would lead to the eventual sacking of her Kingdom by Nilfgaard because she refuses to hand her grandaughter over to The Witcher, who was also promised Ciri by the same mystical force. It’s heavily implied that this fate could have been avoided if only she listened to Geralt. We are left blaming the woman who tempted fate, even though that ultimatum would not have existed if Geralt had not decided to collect in the first place.
The men are almost always proven right or superior by the narrative at the expense of the strong women around them, and that includes Yennefer. When she first meets Geralt, she is trying to bind herself to a genie to restore her fertility. Her methodology is discovered to be wrong (despite having studied magic for decades), and the Witcher has to save her before the genie rips her apart.
On a meta-level, the rise of Nilfgaard — the evil empire on the show — is implied to be Yennefer’s fault. She was supposed to go there on assignment, and during episode six (Rare Species) a prophetic dragon directly insinuates that a stronger sorceress (i.e., her) may have been able to stop the country’s rise:
“Perhaps if Nilfgaard’s religious zeal had been tempered earlier by a stronger hand…:
When you get down to it strong, complicated, “problematic,” women can be blamed for many of the Continent’s largest snafus (i.e., the rise of Nilfgaard, the fall of Cintra, etc.).
There’s also the issue of how the framing of many of these scenes undercuts the empowering message being sold to us textually. If you have ever seen the Feminist theory episode of pop culture critic Lindsay Ellis’s introduction course to film studies, then you are familiar with the concept of how visuals can sometimes sabotage what’s being said by the characters.
Ellis uses the first Transformers movie to discuss how the dialogue is empowering, but Michael Bay’s misogynistic filmmaking dilutes that message. We all remember Megan Fox’s car scene, and yet what’s often forgotten in that scene is her discussing the misogyny she faces in the realm of automobile repair:
Mikaela: My dad. He was a real grease monkey. He taught me all about this. I could take it all apart, clean it, put it back together.
Sam: That’s weird. I just wouldn’t peg you for mechanical.
Mikaela: Well, you know, I don’t really broadcast it. Guys don’t like it when you know more about cars than they do.
The text is empowering, but Michael Bay’s framing is, well…
Source: Transformers (2007)
Similarly, Yennefer says a lot of important things textually, but the framing we see on screen undermines her words. When Yennefer gets magical plastic surgery, for example, the symbolism behind the operation is that it’s a form of genital mutilation. The scene is spliced with Geralt fighting an actual monster, and we aren’t meant to think it’s a “good thing.”
There is textually a complexity as to why Yennefer is getting this surgery (power, expectations, etc.), but visually her surgery is framed sort of sexually.
Source: The Witcher (2019)
Yennefer may scream in pain, but viewers are “treated” to her lying back, and then after her reproductive organs are removed, we see her exhausted naked body. This visual language spattered throughout this show is what makes the feminist moments within it so frustrating. Good points are being made here, and they are being undercut by contradictory visual and narrative messaging.
Whose story matters here — Yennefer’s or Geralt's? Because they do not seem to exist on the same moral footing, and they often contradict.
The Witcher is admittedly a hard text to adapt. It has a sprawling world that requires a lot of exposition to establish, and on top of this, it also has a very toxic fandom that has carried over from the video game series and books. You have an audience that played those games, and there is an expectation that those norms will bleed through into this new series.
It’s clear, though, that showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich does not want to tell the same type of story. The decision to have two female main characters running side-by-side Geralt’s story demasculinized the narrative in a good way.
As the first season progressed, it became apparent that Geralt was not going to be the singular, driving force behind everything in the narrative. The final episode tellingly ends with Ciri, who has been trying to reunite with Geralt the entire time because of The Law Of Surprise, asking him: “Who is Yennefer?”
The screen then cuts to black.
The series is at war with itself as it strikes a balance between affirming its male fans' toxic fantasy of feeling special, while simultaneously easing those said fans into the reality that women can be heroes too. It creates a chimera soldered together by empowerment and misogyny alike. This makes the show cringeworthy to watch at times, and enjoyable at others.
Yennefer serves as a salve for those bruised egos. She has the appearance of a Cool Girl — the prize “nice guys” have believed to be theirs for decades — but she does not act like one at all. She is a messy, emotional being of immense power.
She has no chill whatsoever, and for chaos’ sake, men better get used to it.