The Witcher season 3 is kind of a confusing mess but I still have thoughts I want to share

So, I finished watching The Witcher season 3 on Netflix. This season had a lot of content from the books (which I read). We got to see the formation of the Scoia'tael, guerrilla warriors allied with Nilfgaard, who were helping to hunt the Cintran princess named Ciri (who is the main protagonist in "the Witcher" books). Although the elves were present in other seasons, this is the first time I remember seeing them inserting themselves into the messy network of alliances and the realm of human politics. We also got to see Vilgefortz's betrayal and how powerful he actually was. I knew from the books that he was the big bad, but you never got that impression with him being in the background for the past two seasons. But he spanked Geralt like it wasn't any effort at all, and that payoff (to see that on screen) was a lot of fun.

We also got to bid farewell to Tissaia de Vries who was arguably the most powerful of the magic using women in Aretuza. She underestimated Vilgefortz and cast Alzur's Thunder, "a spell only of last resort" that ends up really not doing all that much. I think she killed herself over the guilt of trusting Vilgefortz and basically failing the girls that she was there to teach and nurture. This then opens the door for Yennefer to become headmistress of Aretuza. And I know from the books that Yennefer is a badass so this is a good "passing of the torch" even if it is done somewhat clumsily via a suicide and a letter of explanation, "I would love to see you through the next leg of your journey. I know you will do great things, my daughter, but I'm afraid I cannot." And so it goes.

This was also Henry Cavill's last outing as "Geralt." From what I understand, he left the role because he was going to be reprising his Superman role in the DC extended universe due to promises that Dwayne Johnson had made. But then Black Adam crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion (it was a box office bomb), and the whole DC Universe (which was on life-support anyway) just imploded and all of the actors got fired for a complete reboot. But Cavill had already quit his role as Geralt and there was no going back because Netflix had already hired Liam Hemsworth. But we shouldn't feel sorry for Henry Cavill because he's got a movie coming out called Argyle that looks fun and he's been put in charge of a Warhammer 40K production, which is his true love.

But his exit did seem a bit awkward in The Witcher season 3. After the Vilgefortz battle where Geralt was almost killed, he needed time to recover. This is where Netflix made a strange choice. In the books, he was in a thing called convalescence for like a year since he basically got every bone in his body broken. This would have been a great opportunity to justify why he looks and moves different going forward: the man was in bed for a year and needed facial reconstruction magic. But instead they just had him get better and recover, and this was a bad choice. My thoughts on this were that they wanted to give Cavill's Geralt an action/compassion sequence to go out on, to give him a send-off worthy of what he put into the character, and a good wrap of the character development up to that point in his last scene. Anyway, I think that's what happened.

One of the problems I have in watching The Witcher is that it is difficult to remember the weirdish names of people and places. There's also a lot of conspiracies going on. The conspiracy of the mages, the conspiracy of the kingdom with the spymaster, the Nilfgaard conspiracy, and the conspiracy with the elves. It's difficult to keep track of them all, and I think it's just the way in which it is filmed. I had absolutely no issue keeping track of the various factions in Game of Thrones. But Netflix's The Witcher has so many characters I frequently ask myself, "okay...who is this and why are they saying stuff?" The monster fighting that showed up was a little worse than back in season 1. How the season ends with Ciri is kind of frustrating. At least what leads to it. Yes, the world she lives in is a shitty place. Everybody wants her for her powers or wants to kill her because of it. She has a right to feel jaded and cynical of the world. And yet, Geralt and Yennefer are always there for her. It's fun to watch the three of them. So Netflix breaks from this and Ciri ends up in a desert area far away from the only people who are her support group (Geralt and Yennefer). This kinda/sorta happens in the books too, and I remember not liking that part of the books. Also, the show is called The Witcher and yet he really has many moments where he feels irrelevant to the show that bears his name.

I will continue to watch this show. After three seasons, I feel like I'm invested. But I do wish it was easier for me to follow (or that my brain grabbed onto things a lot better).

On Monday, I'll be writing about Echo, which is a new series on Disney+ that I just finished watching. And on Wednesday, I want to talk about Percy Jackson which is also on Disney+.

By the end of season 2 of The Witcher I liked Triss Merigold way better than Yennefer of Vengerberg.

Yes, I'm still talking about all the things that premiered in December of 2021 that I watched. This time, it's about the second season of The Witcher, which premiered just in time for me to start watching after I got done with Lost in Space in its final season. I think that between The Witcher and Amazon's Wheel of Time, the heir apparent to Game of Thrones appears to be The Witcher. It's second season was strong and full of intrigue, frightening monsters, and interesting characters. Plus they really leveled up their special effects budget. Two characters in particular I've thought deeply about are Yennefer of Vengerberg, and Triss Merigold. Here is your <<SPOILER ALERT>> if you intend to watch season 2 of The Witcher and you haven't done so yet.

Season 2 when it started rolling was more of a grayish and wintry world than season one. A lot of the action was set in Kaer Morhen, which is the chilly abode of the world's last line of witchers. They don't appear to have a lot of architecture or engineering experience, and they have channeled all of their energy and time into defeating monsters. So that's what they are good at doing. But this is to the detriment of the actual castle they live in, so the place is run-down and falling into ruin. It's kind of the stereotypical "man cave" or messy bedroom of the alpha male loner, and I guess no one repairs anything. The modern world equivalent is a kind of fraternity where everyone works out and no one actually cleans or fixes broken things. However, the run-down set pieces look fantastic.

The head Witcher (and most experienced) is Vesemir, who worries about what is going to happen to his younger brothers even as another wave of monsters comes at them. Triss Merigold appears and helps Vesemir solve a problem: making more Witchers, and it involves getting blood from Ciri (who has "Elder blood" and which can be turned into a mutagen by Triss's potion knowhow). Meanwhile (and for most of the show), Yennefer has no magic, having sacrificed herself in the season one finale at the Battle of Sodden Hill by channeling forbidden fire. She gets it back by the end of the season, but before that she pretty much burns every bridge she made with characters like Geralt of Rivia, and no one really trusts her all that much (for good reasons).

Geralt and Yen's relationship in season 1 felt kind of toxic, and it does collapse when Yen endangers Ciri's life by almost giving Ciri to a powerful hag clearly inspired by the old folklore of Baba Yaga. In the books I've read, Yen was unambiguously the villain the first time she appeared, and then she was given a long, hard redemption story. The show being written toward that redemption from the start has to struggle with those same actions not instantly turning people off, and it doesn't always nail it. So I get that.

As for Triss Merigold, well I think she would be a more supportive partner for Geralt (I wonder if they are going to go there? A love triangle seems kind of young adult so they might not). In the books, she is one of Geralt's sexual partners, and she has a crush on him (I mean...Henry Cavill so who wouldn't?). All this aside though, she seems to be more cheerful, warm-hearted, and helpful. She's also a gifted healer, which has got to be a plus for someone who is out killing monsters all the time.

There were also things that I didn't like about season 2, and that I think continue to plague The Witcher as a series. The first of these is that the sense of time, scale, and geography are baffling. Apart from "North" and "Cintra" I frequently don't understand where people are supposed to be on the continent or how long it should take to travel to different places. A second point of confusion is that sometimes it feels too much like decisions or events are made for the plot to progress, and not because they are logical or fitting within context. Yennefer's reason for saving Cahir seemed weak. And then there's the whole scene with Jaskier getting on the boat and the 4th wall break with the guard being the voice of season 1 criticisms. In my opinion, this show desperately needs a map (like the Game of Thrones intro). But overall, I really liked it despite these criticisms. And as the title of this post says, I liked Triss way more than Yennefer, and I hope that Triss becomes more of a major character in the next season. That would be really cool.

Anyone else a fan of The Witcher? Any particular things you want to say about the first two seasons?

The Witcher is an enjoyable mess of a show but it doesn't reinvent anything.

The Witcher is an enjoyable mess of a show. I finished watching the Netflix fantasy series in December, and even having read the books, I got a bit lost with all of the time jumps. It was nice to see real life versions of Yennefer and Dandelion (you may know him as Jaskier), Marigold, Ciri, and Geralt. However, there were times when the computer generated graphics did remind me of Xena (the gold dragons were one of these sections, although I may have been comparing them to how good the Game of Thrones dragons looked, which is clearly a mistake on my part).

And regarding the books, there are a lot of reviews out there that say that the author, Andrzej Sapkowski, reinvented the genre for many readers. To be honest, I don't really see this when I read the books. Surprisingly, the majority of the narrative seems to be taking place either through Ciri's eyes or through events that have to do with Ciri, and maybe this is what they mean. Here we are finally presented with a story that is "epic fantasy" in flavor wherein the main character is a woman? Possibly, but I'm not sure. It could also be that the reviewers who are saying this aren't actually as well-read in the genre as they claim to be.

But what about "the Witcher?" What about "Geralt?" Geralt is there, yes, but he's less than 40% of the story...maybe he's even down to 30% in parts. It's weird that there's so much emphasis in the title of these stories (and the cover art) to really pin the story to Geralt (a specific Witcher), when his only real purpose is to serve as a vehicle for a story, kind of like Indiana Jones in Raider's of the Lost Ark.

The translation from Polish also presents its difficulties. I didn't realize until I watched the show that the bard's name was Jaskier as "Jaskier" literally means "Dandelion." So the translation refers to the character as Dandelion in all the dialogue. I was confused and at one point I was like, "This character has to be Dandelion, but I don't know why they aren't calling him that." There are also descriptive sentences that don't quite make sense, because I wouldn't have expressed myself in that same manner. Translating a thing from Polish to English has got to be challenging, so I don't fault the translator. At the end of the day, I still understood what was going on, but on occasion, it felt weird.

As far as reinventions go, however, I don't see that the Witcher is blazing any real new ground. There are monsters being killed by a person with fantastical strengths, there's an overarching story of a school of magic-users manipulating governments, and there are multiple worlds from which all of these monsters originate. In the books I read, I saw no incredible insights into the psychology of humans. An example of what I'm talking about is the phrase, "History is written by the victors." This was a profoundly deep observation that George R.R. Martin made regarding the human psyche that I've seen reproduced nowhere else. As you no doubt know, this one thing resulted in the greatest mystery of modern fantasy fiction: Who is Jon Snow? When I sit back and think about this singular aspect to Martin's fantasy epic, I'm kind of left in awe that he pulled it off so well. So yeah...there's none of that in Sapkowski's work.

But what the hell does reinventing something even mean these days? It seems like a buzzword to try and market something, and I'm not even sure that it's necessary or means that something is better. Reinventing the wheel is more than likely just trying to push you into using something that is less efficient than the wheel. In capitalism, they call this kind of thinking "disruption," and there are lots of things that "disrupt" the way services are provided, but I don't necessarily believe it leaves any of us in a better place. Yes, we now have Uber and Lyft, but we always had taxi's. How is it any different other than taxi drivers don't make any money these days, and now...they can't support a family?

The closest thing to a reinvention that I've read (recently) is with Michael J. Sullivan's Legends of the First Empire books. The reason these fantasy epics seem like a reinvention to me is because they take place during the Stone Age of a civilization instead of the Medieval European Age of civilization. So you have magicians and fighters inventing things like the wheel, the bow and arrow, and pockets. I've been finding the reading of these things to be very interesting and refreshing in a way that I didn't (at first) expect. Oh and the main characters are pretty much all female...so there's that too. It seems odd to say that the Stone Age is breaking new ground, but it is. I think there's an irony in there somewhere.