I'm sorry, but I always found it kind of depressing that the Geralt/Ciri dynamic was touching and worked so well because no one expects men to be good fathers.
If Geralt was a woman, no one would care that he loved Ciri, because women are expected to love children. Meanwhile, it's an acceptable norm for men to be bad fathers.
In Sapkowski's world, the only good women are women who are motherly (Nenenke) or want to be mothers. Yennefer's goodness stems from the fact that she loves children: she protects a baby dragon, saves a pregant woman's baby, she wants desperately to be a mother herself, and she risks her life to protect Ciri, which results in her imprisonment and mutilation.
But Geralt's mother is depicted as being a terrible person because she gave her own son away to become a witcher. Geralt reprimands her without restraint and is seen as justified for having done so. Because "good" women don't give away their children. It's never taken into account that maybe Geralt's mother was lied to. Maybe she didn't know Geralt could die from the transformation. Maybe it was the only way for him to have a better life. Maybe she had no fucking choice. But instead of being given a chance to explain, she docilely accepts Geralt's anger and falls silently into the role of caring for him when he's injured. Like a good little she-devil.
Meanwhile, the Lodge of Sorceresses are all evil women because they abuse children (Phillipa Eilhart's treatment of young Prince Radovich), are single, childless, queer, and wish to twist Ciri's unborn child into their puppet.
Likewise, Vilgefortz the evil wizard is a horrendous man who captures pregnant girls and rips out thier fetuses, in preparation for what he's going to do to Ciri's unborn child.
Yennefer and Geralt are both depicted as good because they love children, Ciri in particular. And while that works great for Geralt -- men should be encouraged to love children -- it sucks for Yennefer to be yet another female character defined solely by the fact that she posseses a uterus.
Take away Yennefer's desire to be a mother and her insecurities about her former hunchback appearance and what is left of her personality? Not much. Yennefer doesn't HAVE a personality. Her entire being is centered around a bunch of stereotypes about women: Yennefer wants children desperately and is insecure about her weight.
After some reflection, I really regret patting Sapkowski on the back for the creation of this two-deminsional caricature. Yennefer could have been so much more.
Sapkowski has a very old-fashioned view of women and what a "good woman" is. It's because he thinks of women in terms of his idea of what a woman should be. Women aren't people. We're a collection of prejudices: feminine, matronly, caring, nurturing, broodmares who all want children, so of course our doctors have the right to withhold a hysterectomy in case we fickle grownass women change our minds!
In Sapkowski's world, women aren't allowed to be human. For a world that's supposed to be so gray, its women must conform to a black and white dichtomy: good women are straight and matronly, while bad women are queer and childless. And if they aren't queer, childless, and evil, then they are queer, childless, and bitterly unhappy: Yennefer's single, older, and likely queer female mentor committs SUICIDE.
As for Ciri . . . as I said in an older post, Ciri is only "good" again in the novels (as in, she's no longer a naughty teen rebel doing drugs) when she embraces the prophecy that predicts motherhood for her, and in the end, winds up with a male knight, while Mistle is was just a passing fancy and a regretful encounter.
Yeah. It's actually a shame that women were treated that way in the Witcher novels when the rest of it is actually a pretty great story.
One of the greatest things about the Ghostbusters reboot -- and the thing that scares spineless, insecure, self-loathing men the most -- is the fact that the female cast got to be three dimensional human beings and not stereotypes or caricatures (again, with the exception of Leslie's unfortunate role as a yet another black comedian sidekick).
The women in Ghostbusters got to be funny, overweight, queer, tough, weak, strong, good, bad. They were nuanced and alive. They were not cardboard cutout blow up dolls, archetypes, or some man's idea of a woman should be like and look like.
They were fucking HUMAN BEINGS.
