#genfri

[wayhauxht]

Geralt and Renfri sword fight pt.1

[zelvinah]

he f**k her. he kill her. he love her.

S1E1

S1E3

S1E8

When he was dying, she was always the first one in his mind. And her brooch is also integrated with his sword.

if you love them, you can watch my video.

Geralt & Renfri - Flowers Of Evil

[bettsfic]

renfri lives au where geralt keeps running into her for years until they finally (begrudgingly) agree to hunt together and across decades (she lives as long as him bc mutations) they very slowly fall in love after developing a fierce and loyal partnership wherein they learn to have unwavering trust in one another that turns into devotion, and in a gesture of long-term commitment (ie, marriage) renfri gives him her brooch and he mounts it to his sword. enemies to friends to lovers. mutual pining. slowburn. explicit. 150k, 27/27 chapters, complete. please, i need it.

[bettsfic]

wait is renfri also implying that calanthe was born during the eclipse? or is she just comparing what she could be if she herself hadn't been born under the eclipse

i don’t think we have enough evidence to say for certain that calanthe was born during the eclipse but you could def make that argument, or even argue that stregobor made up the entire thing just to keep women from attaining power. 

i agree more with the latter, that renfri is explaining everything she could have done if a man hadn’t been threatened by her and tried to kill her at a young age. it’s a really meaningful moment and a great episode in all that it says about women with huge potential who are destroyed by men at an early age, in this case physically but clearly also metaphorically.

[bettsfic]

I don't think it's so much "renfri wasn't fridged" as "renfri was fridged but I'm not mad about it because a) she doesn't go away and it doesn't lessen her importance to the story and b) there are many other female characters who are alive and have tons of agency." just my 2 cents! sometimes characters /need/ to die to further the protagonist's development, it's only Bad when the fridging is part of a wider trend of sidelining female characters (ymmv on whether the word "fridge" still applies.)

def agree anon! one of the many things i appreciate the show is that it doesn’t shrink away from its problematic elements but leans into and distorts them, so at least they’re something to notice, to interpret and discuss. geralt kills renfri, but he wouldn’t have been put in that position if she hadn’t been thrown out by her family and hunted by stregobor’s men because he was terrified of her power. she became a monster product of what happened to her.

i agree that things like fridging happen when, as you say, it’s part of a wider trend, and a writer is completely unaware of the hegemony in which they’re writing. women become plot devices and objectified by the story. but when a writer understands greater context and acknowledges that there’s systemic power play happening not only in the text but in the real world as well, it seems like the work is trying to speak to those trends, not necessarily be complicit in them.

thanks so much for your insight! great discussion.