Netflix working on 'The Witcher' series

Cafe Society
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Closed captions for the win. Actually, I’m using them more and more these days because my ears are aging and don’t work as well as they used to, but any show with accents it comes in handy.

Girls not good enough to be real mages are turned into magic eels to help power the school. Hence, Yennifer saying they’re “conduits”. They channel chaotic energy to the school.

I’m not entirely clear (I have a feeling it’s a distant historical thing in reference to the setting) but I gather it was some sort of event that brought “men and monsters” into a world that previously had been the domain of elves (and maybe other critters).

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Yeah, but you might have noticed it’s a crapsack world. Later on Geralt mentions that only 30% of Witcher candidates survive the training and process to make them into Witchers. Not to mention all the killing and raping and such that goes on, the talk of plague, starvation, etc.

It’s not a kind world.

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no - they usually stab you with them.

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Which is why they say “where there is an eel, there is a way.”

105

This was a fun show for me. I didn’t know anything about the books or the game. My daughter has played the game so she had an idea of the characters at least. We binged on it in two or three days and I didn’t want to stop. I loved the little Game of Thrones references and seeing Maggy the Frog again. All the Game of Thrones vloggers have taken on this show too.

106

I find it ironic that all sorts of people are claiming this is a Game of Thrones knock-off when in reality the Witcher stories/books pre-date the novel Game of Thrones by ten years.

If only Sapkowski had written in English they’d be saying G.R.R. Martin ripped off him…

Although if some of GOT’s success can bring some interest to this franchise I’m all for it. The fact it’s chock-full of slavic folklore makes it a bit more interesting to me than yet another Tolkein wannabe effort.

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I, for one, LOVE that the show doesn’t spoonfeed viewers and leaves you to figure some stuff out for yourself - I’ve not played the games or read the books, and I’m doing just fine.

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I have not seen these claims that this is a GoT knock-off but there were several tributes to GoT on the show itself, plus there was Maggy the Frog in all her glory. There’s also supposedly an Easter egg in The Witcher 3 game. I do see some similarities though in the themes of the shows. But really this show is more like Beastmaster. It’s silly and fun for the most part.

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The Witcher was made because of HBO’s success with GoT, which spawned from the success of TLotR movies. Had TLotR not been successful, HBO might not have given GoT the budget and support it received, and had GoT not been successful, The Witcher rights would likely still be sitting in someone’s safe. So while the books are not knock-offs, and while I wouldn’t call the live-action series a knock-off, Netflix’s The Witcher owes a debt of gratitude to HBO and GoT.

110

Don’t make the books into something they’re not. They’re good, but other than their Slavic morbidity, they’re fairly typical fantasy books for their era - better than Weiss & Hickman or R.A. Salvatore, not as good as Guy Gavirel Kay, Glen Cook or Stephen R. Donaldson. About the same level as Raymond Feist, IMHO.

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Quite true.

I object to the people who call The Witcher a knock-off. Not to people who point out that, as a fantasy series, they have things in common.

Although my totally unscientific observation is that those who call it a knock-off frequently haven’t actually watched the series/played the games/read the books at all.

112

I binged the series Sunday and I really liked it. Cavill was great and I liked the dialogue. The SFX were pretty damn good for a Netflix series, too. Looking forward to season two, though I wish it wasn’t going to be all the way till 2021.

113

We finished it this morning since we were out of town for the holidays and I didn’t want to watch it on a sketchy 15" laptop screen. Enjoyed it all of the way through. I wouldn’t go to bat for it as “Best Ever” and it had moments where the budget showed but I was always happy to go on to the next episode. It has enough seriousness to stay invested in the story and enough pulp to keep it fun.

Minor complaint: In a series with some nifty Slavic-inspired monsters, we still had faux-Scottish-accent dwarfs. Boooo…

114

I didn’t really like the Netflix series at first, but it grew on me. It kind of reminded me of the goofy fun of those cheesey Sinbad movies. I thought the Atlantic put it best:

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I apologize if this has already been covered, but there’s a lot of posts to scan to see if the answer is even here…

Started watching with Little and we’re on Ep. 4. I have all 3 games in my Steam library, but haven’t gotten around to committing to them yet.

I found a good ~50 minute run down of the books and I and II on YouTube, and watching it it seems like the show is following the books, which were prequels to I and II. I was wanting to start the games.

So two questions, really:

  • Chronologically, it seems like watching the series, then starting with the first Witcher could be the correct order, yes?
  • Should I just watch summaries of I and II and just play 3…
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The game play from the previous titles is a lot clunkier and just, you know, older in mechanics and graphics. You might want to try starting from the first but then not feel guilty if it’s not grabbing you and move on to the next. One & Two were sort of niche products whereas Three got all sorts of praise and awards and actually became a Big Deal so I’d make sure to actually play the third and not beat yourself up if you decide to skip ahead to it.

Note that there’s considerable nudity and “adult themes” in the game (Three basically opens with nudity) which I’m sure doesn’t bother you personally but if you have kids or nuns wandering around your computer room, consider yourself warned.

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So I just finished the final episode. Not really spoilery, but just in case:

[spoiler]I got the time-jumping from when it was revealed that Stregobor’s hunting for young girls born during an eclipse, the precise relation to the plot of which I couldn’t really figure out, was decades in the past of the sacking of Cintra, but overall, the whole series had a weirdly disjointed feel to it. I checked on more than one occasion whether I accidentally had skipped an episode.

In particular, I didn’t think the character relationships were well-handled. The time-jumping was sorta used as an excuse not to have to actually develop them, but just to have them be the way they need to be for that particular episode, which made the whole thing feel like a loosely connected series of vignettes, despite the overall arc. Jaskier was… there, then he… wasn’t. You got a hint of complexity with the relationship between Yennefer and Geralt, but that, too, wasn’t really explored so much as just presented.

Geralt seems to have a knack for binding himself to people, considering he’s ostensibly such a loner. Linked to Ciri by Destiny, to Yennefer by Djinn… Or was his wish just a manifestation of Destiny?

Also, there’s a bit too much reliance on the overall plot-driving force of Destiny. Two characters need to meet, without there really be a plot-driven reason for them? Those linked by Destiny always find each other!

I did, however, enjoy every episode quite a bit, on its own, perhaps because the show doesn’t really strive to be something extra super special, but rather, isn’t afraid to openly serve up genre tropes without constantly attempting to subvert them.[/spoiler]

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One thing I wasn’t really happy with was the eelification at Aretuza. It didn’t really work as a scene (choosing eels in a pond as a ‘battery’ is just without any connection to anything else, and thus, comes off random), but moreover, it tried to portray cruelty, while kinda dodging it at the last second. It would have had more impact if the acolytes had either been killed, thus ‘liberating’ their energy, or enslaved as human beings, perhaps Matrix-style living batteries.

As eels, they’re merely transformed—a terrible fate to be sure, but one that has the comforts of keeping them alive, and perhaps not exposing them to the full horror of their existence (one presumes the eels are less aware of their fate than humans in captivity would have been). You remove the human face from the cruelty, quite literally; the viewer doesn’t empathize with the eels as much as they would’ve with tortured girls. Plus, the transformed may be made human again, perhaps—after all, this is a world where curses are routinely lifted—thus leaving us some sort of hope, even if we can be pretty sure it won’t ever be realized.

I think one possible way to play this might’ve been to essentially put the girls into a coma, perpetually siphoning their magical energy away; this would avoid the randomness of eels, while, if that was the intent, preserving some option for hope and perhaps sparing them knowledge of their fate. Plus, you could’ve had an interesting exchange between Yennefer and Tissaia – “Tell me, rectoress, do they dream?” – “I believe so, why?” – “Then how do you know you’re not dreaming?” (because, you know, in a manner of speaking, from Yennefer’s perspective, one could hold that all of the mages really just exist to channel their power into the service of Aretuza and the existing power structures, or something like that). Only, of course, as written by somebody who knows how to write dialogue.

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That disjointed feeling’s easily explained by the series so far being based off short stories, not whole novels.

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For those who are still confused by the time jumps and intersecting timelines, Netflix has released an interactive map showing locations and major events, all the way back to the Conjunction of the Spheres. For instance, I’ve just learned that Geralt is older than Yennifer.