'The Witcher' has made sex and nudity disappear from the series

After a first season similar to that criticized in 'Game of thrones' it seems that self-censorship has also reached the Netflix series.

Sex, like anything else, is never free. Of course, it is an expression that is used in film and television when nudity is added for the sheer fact of adorning the images with sexual content in order to entertain the viewer with boobs, filling in an empty script. Having said that, sex and nudity can bring countless things to the narrative, and yes, one can be eroticism. Another, too, can be a more adult and raw character of the narrative. Even give more realism to a world that if we see it self-censored.

Game of Thrones sought the second so much that, although it was successful many times, it also fell a lot in the first. The number of female nudes was highly criticized, and although it would have to be done on a case-by-case basis, it is a seed that remained there. Then came The Witcher season 1, a series that was inevitably going to be compared to Game of Thrones. Both the books and the video games are full of sex, and the truth is that the first season brought it to the screen.

We saw the orgies, created by magic, of Stregebor or Yennefer, Geralt's nights with prostitutes and, above all, the naked body of the femme fatale of the saga, Yennefer of Vengerberg. This last aspect was fundamental for the character that she embodies, not with little criticism from the casting, Anya Chalotra. For many, the young British woman of Indian descent, only 25 years old, did not fit Yennefer's mature, confident and exultantly charismatic appearance. However, season 1 told us about her beginnings, and in these her body is fundamental. Yennefer begins as a deformed hunchback with no self-confidence to be transformed, by magic, into an exultant sorceress. It is through showing her body, both in her hunchbacked form and in her supposedly exultant attractiveness, that the series conveyed this fundamental change in the character.

Beyond all that, we have to say that The Witcher universe is raw and adult, full of deaths, wars, killings, rapes and prostitution. Both warlocks like Geralt and sorceresses like Yennefer live for centuries, which makes them quite prone to no-strings-attached sex after a few dozen years of silly crushes. Geralt, for example, it is rare that he does not finish a job in each town in the bed of a prostitute after collecting the reward, nor is it unusual that he sleeps with almost all the sorceresses he meets, or that the latter use his body with the purpose for which it was perfected, to be the sexual desire of the powerful of the Continent and handle them at will through their crotch.

Sex in The Witcher, in short, has a function, it is part of the identity of the world and of the characters. The nudes, although the masculine should be balanced with the feminine, are a fundamental part of that stark and adult narration of sex as blood is of violence. However, we reach season 2 and we see a radical turn, a change to notable puritanism that is noticeable in every cut and in every minimally sexual scene.

We see, for example, how the sorcerers take a group of prostitutes to Kaer Morhen in a kind of celebratory orgy. All of them wear the camisole unbuttoned, but despite their movements, it remains fixed without showing a single nipple like a heart-stopping neckline on a red carpet. The same goes for the lamia, the sensual vampire from episode 1 who doesn't lose her nightgown until she becomes a monster. In video games, for example, these humanoids don't wear anything when they embrace their monstrous character to fight...

We also have that gathering of sorceresses in the Aretusa baths. Sabrina, Yennefer and Triss get together for more than just a bath, they do it to talk about their psychological and physical traumas after the battle of Sodden. We will know from Yennefer's mouth that Sabrina's body is full of bruises, and we hear several times that Triss's body is full of burns and scars. The Witcher of season 1, The Witcher with a certain courage to maintain the arid spirit of his universe, the one who showed Yennefer naked while her hump disappeared between screams, would have shown something of those wounded bodies in that scene, but here it is. What we see are cuts even before the dresses descend from the neck. This would have been, for example, a good scene to remember why nudes can be more narrative than erotic. With their disappearance, the weight of the aftermath of the battle of Sodden in the perfect bodies of the sorceresses is lost, and with it the value and importance of such valuable women sacrificing themselves in the struggles of the common man.