The Witcher Demonstrates the Danger of Dangerously Powerful Women
With the recent release of season two of The Witcher, we see the character Ciri, the innocent sheltered princess of Cintra, become a much more powerful girl than she was before. She trains as a witcher in Kaer Morhen in an exceedingly difficult and painful obstacle course, is galvanized by her life-threatening experiences, and learns how to conjure portals as she is taught magic by Yennefer.
Then she gets possessed.
In episode eight of the second season, Yennefer, a powerful sorceress who has temporarily lost her magic, is tasked with bringing Ciri to the Deathless Mother, a rider of the Wild Hunt who seek Ciri for her Elder Blood power. The Deathless Mother, or Voleth Meir, possesses Ciri and it is revealed that the girl’s Black Canary scream ability essentially opened a portal used by various monsters coming after her. Ciri’s great power essentially makes her a magnet for doom, and she even tells Yennefer, “You controlled the Chaos. But it controls me.” This echoes something she told Geralt in the first episode of the season, “I think there’s something wrong with me. Everywhere I go, people die. Sometimes, I feel like I could burn the whole world. I wouldn’t mean to. It just makes me feel so afraid. All the time.”
It has been pointed out that a plot involving a powerful woman being a danger to the world is rife with some shitty implications. It has an underlying suggestion that women cannot handle strength or power of any kind.
While that interpretation may seem like a reach, the idea is influenced by actual arguments used in the 19th and 20th centuries to deny women the vote. Working under the assumption that the human body had a limited amount of energy, it was thought that women needed to focus theirs primarily on babymaking. Such straining activities like going to college, working at an office, and yes, voting, would compromise their health via the level of exertion brought on by thinking. And a woman on her period? Forget it. Menstruation only destabilized women’s addled little brains more. Allowing them the right to vote wouldn’t just be bad for her, it would be bad for society.
Power like what Ciri has is not the same as political power. Yet it does make her a force to be reckoned with, potentially providing her a leg up in a harsh patriarchal society that looks for any way it can to exploit her. It makes her hunted, yes, but it is also what got her out of the grasp of Cahir, the Nilfgaardian soldier attempting to capture her as she uses it to fell a tree and creates a giant chasm between the two, allowing her to flee. She can weaponize her power, and that gives her some autonomy in a world insisting on denying it to her.
That’s typically the draw of providing women with such abilities in fantasy. When we are surrounded by messages telling us how weak we are and reminding us of our constant vulnerability, it’s empowering to entertain the idea of having something extra to equip us to fight back.
We see this with Carrie White of Stephen King’s Carrie. When the shy and ruthlessly bullied Carrie discovers her telekinetic abilities, it coincides with her overcoming her shyness and asserting herself. The first time she does this is when she’s in the principal’s office after being tormented by her classmates and she’s told she can go home for the day. The principal keeps getting her name wrong, and after calling her Cassie one too many times she shouts, “It’s Carrie!” before storming out. As she declares this, the ashtray on the desk flips over, moved by her newfound telekinesis.
Her power is tied to her fury and of course, this escalates throughout the story. She sets the high school gym on fire after that whole pig’s blood prank, killing everyone at her prom in a rage. While the original 1974 book and the 2013 film adaptation have her actively seeking revenge against well, everybody, the 1976 and 2002 versions have her go into some kind of trance with apparently little or no real control over her actions. It’s difficult to decide which is more troubling, the idea of a powerful woman using her abilities to deliberately hurt others, or the idea of said woman losing all her agency as her power essentially takes over her mind.
Shelley Stamp Lindsey notes that Carrie is ultimately about “the failure of repression to contain the monstrous feminine.” Carrie White discovers her powers at the same time her period occurs, a time that is considered to be when girls stop being innocent, sexless children and become women, with all of the implications that comes with. Her powers manifest when she is particularly emotional, tying her feelings to her destructive potential.
The theme of a woman becoming dangerously powerful also carries over into the 2000 Canadian horror film Ginger Snaps. Like Carrie, Ginger Fitzgerald is an outcast at odds with the more conventionally feminine popular girls. She rejects femininity and sex until she is attacked by a werewolf on the night her period starts and infected with the virus.
Her transformation is gradual, and it coincides with her embracing her sexuality by wearing more revealing clothing and enjoying the attention she receives from the boys at her school, attention that used to repulse her. She even has sex for the first time. In the act, Ginger is aggressive and dominant, and it goes hand in hand with the progression of her transformation as she starts to lose control of herself.
Her sister Bridgette, who throughout the movie remains as dissociated from femininity as Ginger used to be, takes this behavior as a sign that something is wrong with Ginger, that she is turning into a monster. And she proves right. Ginger’s period and the start of womanhood brought a horror down on her and turned her into one and the evidence was in her newly found confidence in her body and exploration of sex. In the end, the power her femininity led to corrupted her and she had to be killed.
Carrie’s influence is also seen in the character of Sydney Novak in Netflix’s 2020 series I Am Not Okay with This. Sydney’s very similar telekinetic powers don’t accompany her period, but their discovery happens at the same time she starts exploring her sexuality. She has sex with her neighbor Stan, yes, but it’s her feelings towards her best friend Dina that have the strongest connection to her abilities.
One of the first times they are most obviously demonstrated is when Sydney is sitting in a diner with Dina and Dina’s obnoxious cliché jock of a boyfriend, Brad. Sydney’s jealousy over their relationship leads to her accidentally causing Brad’s nose to bleed with her mind. In the last episode during their prom, right after Dina suggests she may reciprocate Sydney’s feelings, Brad gets on stage and takes the mic to out Sydney as gay to her peers. He then goes on to try to reveal her notes about her powers in her diary, and in her distress, Sydney accidentally blows his head up.
Specifically, her powers are connected to her heightened emotional state. When she is angry, or scared, or sad, her power activates and causes destruction. It doesn’t particularly empower her in any way. When she tries to do good with them, such as when she attempts to use them against a kid bullying her younger brother, it doesn’t work, because she can’t control them that way, with intent. She can only ever use them to cause damage when she’s experiencing intense emotions. She acknowledges that the only way to cope with her abilities is to distance herself from her feelings as she states, “The less of a fuck I give, the less likely I am to break shit.”
The comic the show is based on makes this even worse. It is explicitly stated that she cannot even have sex or masturbate because she will lose control of her powers. What could be a source of strength for her only works to deny Sydney her humanity. In the end, she decides her abilities make her too dangerous and she uses them to kill herself.
Terra’s story from the 2003 animated series Teen Titans is similar to Sydney’s and Carrie’s, as she is a young woman with telekinetic adjacent abilities that allow her to cause immense destruction. While the comics had Terra as more of a malicious, straightforward villain who had been spying on the Teen Titans for their nemesis Deathstroke, AKA Slade Wilson, the entire time, the show humanizes her. It turns her into a troubled young woman who wants to do good with her powers but who severely lacks control of them.
Like Carrie and Sydney, Terra’s powers are connected to her isolation. She goes on the run and eventually meets the Titans, but also encounters Slade. He exploits her desperation for control and promises to teach her how to achieve it if she works for him as an apprentice. He successfully turns her against the Titans and weaponizes her abilities. While the Titan’s powers are tools for heroism, hers are tools for catastrophe.
In the end, Slade’s abuse of Terra causes her to turn on him and she uses her powers to kill him, but it leads to her turning into stone, essentially killing her. Her power and inability to handle them led to her vulnerability which allowed her to be corrupted and turned her into a threat needing to be eliminated. The only redemption she is allowed is through her death.
Terra is an example of what Raven, one of the Teen Titans with psychic powers of her own, could turn into. Raven is often stoic and emotionally distant because she has to be. The episode “Switched” in season one demonstrates this; when her and the more conventionally feminine Starfire switch bodies, it is made clear that Raven cannot indulge in her emotions the way Starfire does. If she does, it can cause her to lose control of her powers, leading to calamity.
There are times when we get women who do embrace their power, and the devastation it causes forces the men in their lives to clean up after them. More famously, we’ve seen this recently with Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen, who Ciri has the potential to imitate in her trajectory. When we talk about the dangers of women becoming destructively powerful, the downfall of Daenerys often acts as an example of the issues with this.
When Daenerys reaches the height of her power by finally claiming the Iron Throne, she does so in a state of madness, using the primary tool of her power, her dragon, to burn down the very place she intended to rule, King’s Landing. The narrative treats her ascent to power as the cause of the revelation of her madness and suggests she had always been corrupt and that her ambition was always evil. Her freeing the slaves of Meereen and killing the slave masters and warlords are thus retroactively tainted by her newly revealed insanity, making everything about her attainment of power bad, essentially.
And the ones blessed with such clarity of the situation were the men in her life. Of those she’s supposed to be allied with, Sansa and Arya are suspicious of her yes, but it is Varys who actively works against her first and then Tyrion who implores Jon Snow to murder her. Jon’s dealing with Daenerys echoes the Logan/ Jean Grey as Dark Phoenix scene of X-Men: The Last Stand, focusing on the angst of the male love interest of the powerful woman, who is burdened with having to stop his power-drunk lover and save her from herself.
The trope this falls under, the Unstable Powered Woman, illustrates that it isn’t necessarily bad to have power as a corrupting force, even for female characters, but that it is so often done in a way that ties her inevitable mental breakdown and unleashing of destructive capabilities to her womanhood. Connecting magical powers to a person’s emotions isn’t inherently a problem, but with female characters, the emotions in question are often extreme and out of control, hearkening back to the hysterical woman stereotype.
In The Witcher, Ciri’s powers have the potential to cause a lot of harm, yes, but they also have the potential to empower her against those who wish to objectify and use her. Hopefully, she’ll avoid going down the path Daenerys did, and learn to control her Chaos.
