The Witcher: 8 differences between the show and the books, explained

Image: The Witcher/Netflix

Yennefer’s Past

The show chose to bring Yennefer’s past into the forefront of the story, which was a welcome change. More often than not in the Witcher books, especially the early ones, more often than not we see things through Geralt’s point of view. But on the TV show, Hissrich wanted to have multiple plot threads running at once, which meant that we were seeing what Yennefer and Ciri were up to while Geralt was having adventures.

Most of the scenes dealing with Yennefer’s early life were created for the show, and they’re very entertaining. We see her go from an abused orphan to one of the most powerful members of The Brotherhood Of Sorcerers. This takes up much of the first few episodes, so fans might be surprised to learn that much of this isn’t shown in the books, although some of it is alluded to. For example, Geralt surmises that she was born with a physical deformity she used sorcery to get ride of, but on the show, we actually see what she looked like and the lengths she was willing to go to change.

When we meet Yen in the books, she’s already pushing 100 years old, with lots of experience under her belt. She’s done virtually everything she wanted to do, except have a child. After that, we learn very little about her past; Yen is not the kind of person to talk openly about herself, so if the Netflix show hadn’t taken the initiative and filled in some of those gaps, they likely would have just remained open. Instead, the show makes Yennefer into a fully developed character even before she crosses paths with Geralt, whereas in the books she comes across at first as selfish or cruel, and we slowly learn there’s more to her.

In an interview with BGR, Hissrich explained why she wanted to highlight Yennefer’s past:

"One of the biggest storytelling shifts that I made was — we actually meet Yennefer and Ciri before they meet Geralt. In the books, Geralt is our lens through which all the rest of the world is filtered. So, you’re on Geralt’s journeys, and Yennefer sort of comes in from the side; to me, I wanted to know who she was before she met Geralt. And there’s a lot of things in the books that alluded to this. We culled together a lot of those instances in the books, and then we made that story the present day. As opposed to just a character waxing poetic about something that has happened to them in the deep past."

Yennefer’s behavior in the first season of the show mirrors how she acted in the books; the difference is our perspective. Hopefully we get even more of her backstory moving forward. More Yennefer can only be a good thing.