Get ready for The Witcher season 2 with The A.V. Club’s character guide

Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) is both The Witcher and a witcher, i.e., a professional monster hunter rendered sterile and extremely good at fighting by rituals performed on him when he was a child. A wanderer and loner by trade and inclination, Geralt nevertheless spends the show’s first season forging a number of important connections with others, most notably to the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg, who Geralt unwittingly binds to himself through a desperate encounter with a djinn, and Princess Ciri of Cintra, who he (also not intentionally) claims as a sort of destined ward after saving her father’s life from both a curse and potentially murderous in-laws. For most of the season, Geralt is fairly secondary to the rising war with hostile country Nilfgaard that features strongly in Ciri and Yennefer’s narratives. He spends most of his time doing what witchers do best, i.e., enduring bigotry and monster attacks in exchange for coin. But the season’s final episodes see Geralt finally give in to his destiny, first by attempting, unsuccessfully, to save Ciri from the sack of Cintra, and then by encountering her at long last in the care of a merchant he coincidentally aided. [William Hughes]