Why witchers are hated for their mutagens and the life of Kaer Morhen explained

In the world of The Witcher, Witcher monster slayers are the best there is. Raised by children to be killing machines, they are brutally trained, complemented by mutations and have an intimate knowledge of all possible beasts. Geralt of Rivia is legendary, but he’s just one of many, something we’ll see when we meet more of his brothers in arms The witcher Season.

While Netflix The witcher has frequently mentioned the difficulty of becoming a sorcerer, and the hostilities they face, Season 2 puts their trials first. Here’s the backstory on what non-book readers might miss about the Witcher story.

How witchers are made

Photo: Jay Maidment / Netflix

In season 1, we heard Geralt allude to the painful process of becoming a witcher. In this season we see glimpses of the dangerous regime the witchers go through as children in order to hone their skills.

In addition to sword training, they have deadly obstacle courses and gadgets like the pendulum to get witches to train their balance and reflexes at the same time. But the key to their skills is mutations that emerged as part of a process called the Trial of Grasses, a process that few of the children survived and that is as painful as it is deadly.

The Trial of Grasses was the first of many unique attempts, each of which gives them a part of their special arsenal of powers. He used a mixture of chemicals obtained from a special “mutagen” to give these children superhuman strength, speed, reflexes and eyesight. Geralt is the result of his exposure to further mutations due to his unique tolerance to the Trial of Grasses; This extended process left his hair free of pigment and possibly made him even stronger and faster than his brothers.

How this process was developed is a mystery even to sorcerers. But Season 2 claims that they were created a long time ago by experimenting magicians under the guidance of the kings of the Northern Realms who wanted magical warriors to help them conquer the continent. Though dissatisfied with the resulting mutants, these wizards would find use as monster slayers trying to protect the people of the continent through the creatures left behind by the conjunction of the spheres.

While this makes them powerful, the mutations also make witchers sterile and unable to have children, so their most common method of recruiting trainees is the “law of surprise,” a tradition they invoke when payment cannot be made , and claim that the person is claiming something in their debt they don’t know. Your hope is that this surprise will be a child that a tired traveler will not know about. But at the time of the series, the key to creating new Witcher mutations has been lost and their number has shrunk to a tiny number.

Why witchers aren’t always popular

Photo: Jay Maidment / The Witcher

Sometime before the series, when Geralt was a child, public opinion turned against witchers thanks to a book called Monstrum, excerpts of which are shown for the first time in the third book of Witcher. The blood of the elvesdepicting witchers as evil, manipulative killers who wanted to exploit everyone else.

There are many rumors about the source of the book and the spreading anti-sorcerer sentiment of the time, with many believing it to be the work of magicians concerned about the growing influence of the monster slayers. Netflix Wolf’s nightmare Offers a more concrete take on the event, showing how Vesemir and other sorcerers were attached and accused of creating new monsters on the continent to work at by the daughter of a sorceress who was once wrongly killed by a sorcerer to keep. (The film is immaterial to the show, but it is part of a growing and larger vision for The Witcher universe.)

Whatever the reason for these rumors, they resulted in people storming the wizarding stronghold of Kaer Morhen in a violent riot when Geralt was a boy, reducing the number of wizards and reducing their homes to rubble. During this attack, the secret of creating the sorcerer mutagen that enabled them to create new sorcerers was lost, and so there have been no new sorcerers since.

As part of the trend for new material that explains and expands the books’ vague backstory, the Netflix spin-off show, The Witcher: Blood Origin, is expected to explore the creation of the witchers. While the release date for this show has not yet been announced, it will come at a time when the future of the Witcher Order is in the air, with Season 2 of The witcher To find Vesemir facing an opportunity to create a new mutagen – something that will prove too tempting to ignore.