The Witcher boss reveals why Jaskier never ages: “It was a mistake”

The Witcher showrunner Lauren Hissrich responds to fan theories. Is Jaskier non-human? Did Yennefer used to be a witcher? What’s the deal with those eels?

The Witcher showrunner Lauren Hissrich is currently busy shooting the second season of Netflix’s hit fantasy drama, but she took some minute off to talk to TV Guide about some of the wildest fan theories out there. She addressed a lot of topics, but one stood out to me: Why does the bard Jaskier (Joey Batey) never seem to age? The first season of The Witcher spans a good many years, but Jaskier looks the exact same when he meets Geralt at the age of 18…

Image: The Witcher/Netflix

…as he does during the dragon hunt episode, when he’s 40:

Image: The Witcher/Netflix

Naturally, some fans have wondered if this means Jaskier isn’t human, but Hissrich is here to shoot those theories down. “No, that was just a mistake,” she laughed. “We have this enormous timeline in our writers’ room that takes up, like, two whiteboards and it’s how we laid out the stories from Season 1, sort of tracking to make sure that everyone fits in. Jaskier was always the outlier because Jaskier would have aged a lot in that season. No, he just had great genes, you know, clearly.”

For the record, according to the timeline, Jaskier is 51 around the time when Ciri and Geralt meet up at the end of the season, so either Joey Batey is going to need some middle-aged man makeup for season 2 or Hissrich and company will have to reconsider this “he’s just a normal human” thing.

Hissrich responded to a lot of other fan theories, including:

Ciri is actually Geralt’s mother

“Wow,” Hissrich said. “Nope, that just blows my mind. I can’t even wrap my head around that one…I mean, it’s funny because as you step back and you’re like, ‘Well, she would be capable…’ But then that just — it literally makes my mind explode.”

Obviously, Ciri is a good deal younger than Geralt, so this theory would require some kind of time travel scenario, which Hissrich is not willing to entertain; she had enough of that when she worked on the first season of The Umbrella Academy. “I will never again work on a show with time travel because it makes you want to put your head through a wall.”

Ciri predicted climate change

Sticking with Ciri, she is clearly a magically gifted young woman, which is part of the reason Geralt becomes her adoptive father at the end of the season. Before they meet up officially, Ciri loses control of her powers and speaks a prophecy: “Verily, I say unto you the era of the sword and the ax is nigh, the era of the Wolf’s Blizzard. The Time of the White Chill and the White Light is nigh, the Time of Madness and the Time of Contempt.”

Those lines are taken pretty directly from Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books, but some fans heard them and thought the bits about a “blizzard” and a “chill” sounded pretty pertinent to our world, where climate change is a major problem. Hissrich said they didn’t talk about climate change in the writers room, but if that’s how you interpret it, that’s up to you. “I mean, like all fantasy … you can see it as an analogy for anything that’s happening in our world right now,” Hissrich said. “The best fantasy … is kind of like horoscopes; you should be able to read them and apply them to yourself.”

Ciri will use her powers to fuel the magic school of Aretuza

One of the weirder moments of the season came when Yennefer was being trained as a sorceress at the magical school of Aretuza. She did well in her studies and became very powerful, but some of her classmates got turned into eels. Apparently, the whole school runs on the power they generate, which…okay…

This detail wasn’t in the books and inspired some consternation among fans, and some think that Ciri will eventually power the school and eliminate the need for it. “You know, that theory comes from people who hate the eels,” Hissrich said. “‘Let us never see the eels again!’ I like eels, personally.”

"That came from the brain of Jenny Klein, one of the writers. You know, I have two kids. They’re huge fans of Harry Potter. So I have read, seen, done everything about magic schooling. And it was like, what’s different about Aretuza? How do we not make it just become this beautiful place where you go and you get powers and you get anything you want, because that takes conflict out of it. So it was fun to sort of watch all of these young women come together and join and feel like, ‘Oh, this is our family.’ And then some of them are, as we said in the room, eels at the end."

So…there’s that answer.

Yennefer used to be a witcher

Here’s another one that threw Hissrich. “How would that work?” she asked. After all, in the first season, we saw a lot of Yennefer’s long life accounted for. There’s also the witcher prohibition on women to grapple with.

“It’s hard because, of course, once you have the books in your head and so much of witcher lore is about ‘women can’t be witchers’ and how does Ciri start to factor into that?” Hissrich said, teasing what’s going to happen with Ciri in the second season. “So yeah, that one’s hard for me to wrap my head around.”

Image: The Witcher/Netflix

The Witcher season 2 is filming now and will hopefully be out next year!

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