Editing The Witcher (section)

==The TV Series==
Just like with tabletop RPG, two exists: one done by Poles in 2001, the other by Netflix from 2019. They are ''significantly'' different, both in terms of technical aspects, but also plot and way of adapting the source material. They both share, however, poralizing reception, just about different aspects.

===The Hexer===
First of all, while in Poland it is simply titled "Wiedźmin", the international release was under "Hexer", as the "Witcher" term wasn't coined yet (and Sapkowski himself preferred "Hexer"). This ended up being a good thing, since you can easily tell it apart from the Netflix one, which is under "The Witcher" title.

It's a mixed bag: some things are great, other are terrible and some are just incredibly corny. Being a big budget (of course for Polish standards - so you are still in a B-movie territory) production, it at least secured good location shots and quite an impressive cast of Polish A-listers and hired an acclaimed music composer to deliver epic-tier soundtrack, so at least they approach the material serious enough. In the same time, it uses god-awful rubber puppets and early, turn-of-the-millenium CGI, which looked bad even when the thing was brand new, while sets range wildly from great location shots to the basement under the film studio.

But the most important aspect is the level of adaptation. During pre-production, Sapkowski suddenly went 180 degrees and from big supporter became the most vocal enemy of the series. Rumor has it he tried to renegotiate his contract (something he's kind of infamous for), and the studio executives just laugh in his face. Since not all legal agreements were signed with him prior, this allowed him to walk out of production and not provide full copyright to his short stories. As a result, the planned 13 episodes, adopting each of the Witcher short stories, ended up with barely half the needed material secured. As a result, the script writer had to get rather... creative, to fill up the contracted length of the show. This in turn lead to a whole lot of things created specifically for the series and that had nothing to do with the source material. And as you can guess, those things were viciously picked apart by the fandom. Then the costuming and prop departments added their own, treating it as just a throw-away production and half-assing their effort.

In the end, 13 hour-long episodes have been made, tracking more or less the plot of stories from "The Last Wish" and "Sword of Destiny" along with semi-canon and outright made-up elements of Geralt's backstory. The rule of thumb being that if the episode is original content, it's shit, and if it's following a short story, then it's genuinely good.

To wit, the good, the bad and the ugly:
* Music is awesome. If you are the kind of fag that plays background music for your games, you have an hour of combat music ready to steal.
* Despite being infamous in Poland for being a very weak adaptation, it is significantly more faithful to the stories than Netflix ever bothered to.
* Michał Żebrowski, who played Geralt, became so synonymous with the character, he coloured video game adaptations, which are closer to his performance than who Geralt is in the books.
* The original content is pure skub for the most part, and the changes in the "canon" are often pointless, needessly complicating things rather than making them easier to film.
* The performances are all over the place, depending from actor to actor. Some of them clearly cared, others did not, and some were fresh out of acting school. This makes certain scenes where all three groups perform at once pure comedy gold.
* Since it was made by Poles for Polish market, nobody had any issues with nudity.
* Do you like katanas? Because witchers carry one to fight with non-monsters. And they use aikido, too.
* The special effects aged like milk. A 20 yo milk. Either roll with it, or at least get drunk before watching.
* There is no official international release of the series. There is however bunch of bootlegs floating around the net, accessible with English, German, Swedish and Russian subtitles.

Oh, and one more thing - there is a "film". It's not an actual movie, but a crudely cobbled together 120 minutes of nonsense made out of the material of the TV series. It is infamously terrible and even if you know the source material, you will be hard pressed to grasp the plot of it. The fact majority of people involved in making the series asked for their names to be removed from the credits of this shitpile should tell you more than enough. The legacy of this monstrosity is so strong, just mentioning "Hexer" to any adult Pole will instantly trigger PTSD and a 2d6 minutes long rant on how awful the ''film'' was, completely missing the memo you want to dicuss the series.

===The Witcher===
{{skubby}}
{{flamewar}}

An attempt was made.

One day, Netflix was bored and wondered how could he ruin everybody's fun again. [[One Piece|Perhaps by making another unnecesary live adaptation of an anime franchise?]] [[The Dark Crystal|Or by cancelling yet another of their beloved shows that deserved a bit more moments in the spotlight?]] That day, Netflix decided to adapt a beloved series of novels and video games, and it happened to be the Witcher. 

As it was announced, people were very skeptical of what Netflix could do with it as they claimed that their one and only goal is to be as faithful to the source material. A rare promise in an industry that has long stopped caring about the fans (see more below), so the most optimistic people out there were sort of thrilled. A series made on a franchise that deserve more recognition and a solid budget to film it all, what could possibly go wrong?

[[skub|Well...]];
* Netflix, like all major TV Networks these days, seems to be convinced that if you want to adapt a beloved franchise as a TV series, then you should [[What|hire people who know nothing or care little about the universe of said franchise]] or [[FAIL|people who legitimately hate the source material and will do everything it their power to deconstruct in every way imaginable on top of hamfisting his current political agenda in a manner that would make Tommy Wiseau look like the most subtle man on the planet]]. In the case of the Witcher, the later turned out to be the case.
* The series tone is very reminescent of [[Game of Thrones|another very popular fantasy TV show with a gritty and realistic tone]]. Some fans were displeased by the similarities, but what can we say? We'll let you be the judge of it. It's a very different interpretation of Sapkowski's work and we can definetly approve of this fresh vision of his world. It might not be up to everyone's taste, but at least the sets are admirable.
* Henry Cavill as Geralt; without the shadow of a doubt the best thing about this series. He loves his role and he never phones it. He's giving himself at his maximum to give us one of the most solid interpretation of Geralt's character.  What's more, remember how we said there were people who knew nothing or cared little about the setting?  That's doesn't apply to Henry.  He's a Witcher fan who knows and loves the setting well.  Hell, he even managed to generate fan clubs of girls who... Never read the books or played the games but hey, still a feat of its own.
** Cavill is also a massive Warhammer nerd. Too bad <s>the rest</s> most (Dandelion/Jaskier played Necrons to try it out) of the cast taunted him over his hobby. HE'S ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
*** This all came to bite them in the ass, as Cavill decided to quit the show in late 2022 due to the mistreatment of himself and the franchise... and declined a proposal to return to the [[DC Comics|DCEU]] films to broker a deal with Games Workshop themselves on some new show, which he would be in charge of.
* To be fair, the supernatural contrasts really well if the overall realistic approach of the series. It looks out of place, outside of this world and just plain old weird.
* The combat, while well choregraphed, was apparently shot by [[Meme|Barry the drunken intern]], because it keeps changing shots and switches from normal speed to slow-mo in a flash (no pun intended). The action is good, but its just too bad the camera isn't there to assist it.
* Although many praised the first season for being somewhat good on its own and admired its effort to introduce new story elements to these new interpretations of the character while somewhat retaining the original spirit of the books, the second season was... [[skub|divisive, to say the least]]. The main complaints being about the changes made to the characters and the added "lore" that didn't please a lot of people. This season also adopted a new episodic structure, with each being its own little story instead of a long list of episodes following one and only story as the first season did, which is closer to what the books were in some cases, but to a lot of people in the audience, the change was just jarring.
* The first season wasn't perfect either, as people complained it kept on jumping between different moments in time as it tells the story of its three main characters; Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer. While Big G and Yenn's stories were set in the past, Ciri's was set in the present, and the jumps in time between each scene were difficult to notice and made the series harder to follow for some casual spectators. A bold choice of direction for some, encouraging people to really focus on what's going on and catch any of the serie's details, but a poor decision for others, who think this makes the series more jarring to watch.

And just so that we address in the two elephants in the room:

1. The <s>blackwashing</s> racebending. Let's make this clear, as stated above, the worldbuilding of the Witcher never clearly states that The Witcher is set in a "slavic" world despite european/slavic folk tales and fantasy being the main inspiration for its universe, the author not caring all that much about deep lore and just wanting to give the bare minimum. Also, it should be noted that there are no divine laws telling artists to not represent elves as just white all the time. 

That being said; the diverse cast of the series raised a lot of eyebrows. And we do mean, a lot. On one hand, yes, the Witcher is based on European/Slavic mythologies and there have been mentions of countries far beyond where Geralt usually dwells in, and as far as we know, the populace that he usually speaks with, particularly humans, isn't known for its wild diversity. At least not in the "Hollywood" sense of the term. As in, it may have a lot of different ethnic groups here and there, but it's not New York or Los Angeles either. So now we have Black Elves (again, nothing wrong, [[Elfquest]] did it and nobody complained), but we also have humans who are... Various shades of white and black. And we're supposed to believe that humans only have a problem with non-humans, including said elves. Bare in the mind that the people Geralt meets in his quest, especially the common folk, are all ''stupidly bigoted''. So it's kind of weird to think that they have a problem with elves, but not their neighbor who just so happen to have the '''exact same skin color''' as the elves they love to hate.

As for Triss and Yennefer being race lifted... It's as much of an issue as it is a non-issue. Of course there's nothing wrong with that, but having a race-mixed Triss and an Indian Yennefer doesn't bring anything new to the table, so why even change them in the first place? You might say it was all for representation and the likes, but then again, might as well create new characters? It wasn't like the producers weren't going to add their own little changes to the whole thing. Some might say it was a case of "Ability over Appearance" and for that we have to call for bullshit, because there are just as many actors who could ''at least resemble'' the characters. See below for a better explanation.

2. Lauren Hissrich. The main, or at least most influent producer of the entire series. She's even skubbier than [[Matt Ward|the Ultramarine fanboy himself]]. What can we say about her? She's behind most of the most severe changes to the "universe" and the stories told in the show, brought many of her femen friends to discuss the potential retouches that could be made to make the series more progressive or more political, people actively tried to go against her wishes and try to stick to the source material just a tad more than what was originally conceptualized, and [https://twitter.com/lhissrich/status/1154899649955860485 she turned out to be an extremely intolerant person towards gingers, too]. She's also a very sloppy liar, because she was the first one to tell everybody that they were going to be extremely faithful to the books by not changing the ethnicities of the characters just to appeal to minorities or fill quotas, [[FAIL|and then she proceeded to post an ad saying that the studio was looking for BAME actresses to play Triss, a character known for her pale skin and chestnut red hair]] She could've said she wanted a BAME Triss and Yennefer. She could've. But she didn't. She baited everyone and pulled the race card against her critics when called out on that.

Seriously. The whole reason why the guards wear dick shaped armors and why the main cast is so diverse in the first place is simply because she wanted to fuck with the fans themselves and "subvert our expectations" while challenging the patriarchy and fighting racial injustice and the usual type of Hollywood nonsense. Needless to say, her slacktivism is showing. It's fine and dandy to revolt against the status quo and have a diverse cast of characters, but the thing is that if you cast several BAME actresses just for the sake of filling your own personal quotas and make unsubtle references to toxic masculinity (whatever that means for her specifically) to criticize it as it stands in the current year, your work is gonna get dated very fast. 


[[Category: Literature]]