Summary
While most fans seem to agree that Ciri taking the mantle from Geralt inThe Witcher 4is a natural progression for the series, others have slammed CDPR for going ‘woke’, even claiming thatCiri has been made ‘ugly’.
Geralt actor Doug Cockle put it best:“If you think it’s woke, read the damn books”.
The underlying argument behind a lot of the backlash is that women cannot undergo the mutations, so Ciri being made into a witcher doesn’t make sense and is only being done to tick boxes (or, as YouTube comments put it, to turn the “Woke meter to 100%"). But that’s a complete myth — series author and creator Andrzej Sapkowski said as much.
“CDPR sometimes write or call with a question, I don’t know why,” Sapkowski said at the Opole Book Festival in Poland (as reported byRedanian Intelligenceand translated byu/NoWishbone8247). “They are fans, they know the books better than me. Mutations? I never wrote that adult women can’t go through them, maybe someone did, but it wasn’t me. I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”
The Witcher Books Never Said Girls Can’t Become Witchers
Just That The Trials And Mutations Might Be Riskier
The novels never claim that women can’t become witchers.They only state that, because the death rate for boys is already so high, it was assumed that it would be harder for girls. In fact, this implies womencanbecome witchers; it’s just that nobody is willing to risk it.
Alzur, who is credited with creating the witchers, experimented on 38 “girls and boys”, but only five boys survived.
Fans have run with ‘it must be harder for girls’ (which was an assumption made in-universe by a patriarchal society), and the fact that we see no women witchers in the games or novels (which makes sense considering that nobody is willing to risk putting them through the trials), as proof that it’s impossible and can’t be done.
So, if you see anyone boldly claiming that ‘women can’t be witchers’, citing the novels, it’s only based on flimsy evidence and in-universe guesswork. Some of the first experiments involved girls, and the Polish tabletop RPG, which was released in 2001, even introduced a female witcher from the School of the Cat called Dragonfly. Women can become witchers, it’s just that very few have been allowed to try.
It’s not far-fetched to imagine that in desperate times, with another conjunction and witcher numbers dwindling, that witcher schools would be more open-minded to who gets to undergo the trials. Especially with a character like Ciri, who was raised as a witcher already and has elder blood coursing through her veins. If anyone could survive the trials and mutations, it would be her.
