How The Witcher Subverted the Typical Found Family Expectations

This post contains spoilers for The Witcher.

The trailer for Netflix’s The Witcher Season 3 has dropped, and it focuses almost entirely on scenes between the four main characters and their unconventional found family (plus a bit of the old ultra-violence, of course). That’s not a surprise – the relationships between Geralt, Yennefer, Ciri, and Jaskier are at the beating heart of this show and its success so far.

In some ways, these four are a pretty typical “found family” of the type TV shows of many different genres love. All of them have lost their biological family. Geralt (Henry Cavill) was left with the Witchers at Kaer Morhen as a child, Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) was abused and sold by her step-father, Ciri’s (Freya Allan) family have (apparently) all been killed, and Jaskier (Joey Batey) has a mysterious past but appears to have run away from or otherwise been separated from his biological family.

In the absence of biological relatives, these four have found each other. As Geralt’s Child Surprise, Ciri has a semi-formal family relationship with him, and Geralt and Yennefer’s romantic relationship makes them more or less typical romantic partners. But as well as that, these four people, mostly alone in the world, have found each other and formed a mildly dysfunctional family unit, although whether Jaskier is the unruly older brother or third parent is up for debate.

In some ways, though, these four have subverted some of the typical tropes around fantasy families and TV found families in general. The show avoids the worst fantasy clichés around the idea of “destiny”, for example, by giving Geralt a healthily skeptical attitude towards it. The audience knows that the prophecies will all turn out to be accurate and will be fulfilled over the course of the show, as that is just how fantasy television works (even the cynical Game of Thrones includes only one prophecy, relating to Daenaeys’ son, that is not fulfilled). But when we are introduced to large numbers of characters in an unfamiliar world having po-faced conversations about “destiny”, it can become a little bit stale, and so the audience empathizes with Geralt’s resistance to the idea, even though we all know he will turn out to be wrong.

Perhaps more importantly, the show also subverts some of the typical tropes around the building of a family unit, especially relating to parenthood. Both Geralt and Yennefer have complex feelings about becoming parents that are more nuanced than what we usually see on television.

Most TV characters tend to have very clear feelings about children – they either want them, or they do not. And there are, of course, some people in real life who feel that way, who either know that they definitely want to have children, or who know that they definitely never want to have children, and who never change their minds. But it is also not uncommon for people (of any gender, despite certain clichés around women always wanting children) to be unsure or ambivalent, to not want children when they are younger but to change their minds when they are a bit older.

This is what is so refreshing about Yennefer’s journey in Season 1. As a young woman, she obviously feels confident that she does not want to have children, or at least that she is willing to sacrifice that possibility for the sake of beauty and power. Many decades later, her life and career not having turned out quite the way she had hoped, she finds that she wants that choice back again. She is not the same woman she was as a young girl, and her feelings are different. Her tragedy in Season 1 is that it is too late to change her mind about the bargain she made when she was much younger.

Geralt’s feelings about parenthood also change over the course of the series, and this was a deliberate choice on the part of the TV writers. In the books, Geralt knew that Ciri’s mother Pavetta was pregnant and deliberately invoked the Law of Surprise in order to gain custody of Pavetta’s child because he wanted to train the child as a new Witcher. In fairly typical fantasy fashion, he wanted an adopted child to carry on his own line of work.

In the TV show, on the other hand, Geralt has no interest in having a child of any kind by any means. He does not know that Pavetta is pregnant, and he invokes the Law of Surprise only because he is pressured into accepting a reward by Duny. He expects his reward to turn out to be a crop or a new puppy, and has no intention of claiming it anyway. His reaction when Pavetta throws up all over the floor (a woman vomiting on any TV series of any genre is nearly always a guarantee that she is pregnant and is almost never food poisoning or a stomach flu) is one of the most hilarious moments in an often funny first season.

He is not quite sure he wants her until he actually meets and grows to love her.

Geralt continues to feel conflicted about parenthood throughout the rest of Season 1. He tells Yennefer that has thought about it a lot, and that he does not think it is fair to bring a child into their lifestyle and their world. He only takes responsibility for Ciri when the rest of her family have been killed. From that point on, though, he seems to embrace his role as her father. Perhaps like many people who have a surprise child in real life, he is not quite sure he wants her until he actually meets and grows to love her.

The final member of this found family is Jaskier, and here too we can see some old tropes being subverted. Jaskier is much younger than Geralt or Yennefer while being slightly older than Ciri and his main role in the show is as the plucky comic relief. He would seem to fit the “older brother” role in this found family perfectly – think of John Hannah’s character Jonathan in the 1999 film The Mummy, for example, who is literally Rachel Weisz’s Evie’s older brother.

But Jaskier’s relationship with Geralt and Yennefer is far more delightfully complicated than that. His love for Geralt, his heartbreak – complete with break-up song – when they part ways, and his willingness to rub chamomile on Geralt’s “lovely bottom” all suggest his feelings for Geralt are neither those of a son nor a brother. He also has a certain romantic tension in some of his interactions with Yennefer, especially towards the end of Season 2, as they are forced to work together and, in another TV classic trope, briefly pretend to be husband and wife. He has not interacted with Ciri all that much yet, but certainly seems to join Geralt and Yennefer in being protective of her and risking himself to save her life.

The very end of Season 2 revealed that one of the series’ biggest villains is, in fact, Ciri’s biological father Duny, who is not so dead after all. This sets the series up perfectly to explore the tensions between her found and biological families. Will Ciri meet her biological father in Season 3, and will she have to choose between him and Geralt? Will our heroes’ found family come into conflict with her biological family (almost certainly, yes)? However it all plays out across Seasons 3 and 4, we can be sure that the strength of these four’s unconventional found family will be at the heart of it.