Yennefer deserves a lot better than The Witcher ever gives her

polygon.com:

Netflix’s The Witcher has always taken liberties with the source material, changing things up as its creators saw fit to make their preferred version of the story for their adaptation. Bits and pieces of the short stories were altered in the first season, and a slightly new timeline was invented; a whole history was created in Blood Origin, and Geralt is a little more heroic than his book counterpart. But for all the positive and negative impacts of those changes, one change has been consistently frustrating the entire series: Yennefer.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for season 3 volume 1 of The Witcher.]

The Yennefer of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels is a rare talent, even among mages. She is exceedingly powerful, always independent and resolute, standing beside her vision of how to make the world better — or at least a little more to her liking. She is a smart and cunning actor in a world that’s full of them. While she may occasionally be wrong, or misguided, she’s never anyone’s fool or pawn, and she doesn’t put the people she loves in danger (at least, not excessive danger).

Netflix’s Yennefer, on the other hand, has few of these traits. She has a massive chip on her shoulder and is desperate to prove herself to everyone around her, Geralt and Ciri included, at every turn. She is a powerful mage, but one who rarely gets the chance to use her powers for anything more than cursory blows against nameless hordes of random foot soldiers.

Even more frustrating, though, is the fact that Yen is so often turned into the show’s foolish wild card. For two seasons in a row now, Yennefer has been shoehorned into making baffling decisions, to calamitous effect.

First, and worst, is her attempt to kidnap Ciri near the end