Review and Meta: Netflix's The Witcher
Dec. 26th, 2019 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caitri This discussion is going to include spoilers for Netflix's adaptation of The Witcher as well as Sapkowski's novels. Read at your own risk.
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When I heard Netflix was adapting The Witcher, I tried to keep my expectations low. For one thing, the books are pretty complicated; for another, they almost immediately announced that Henry Cavill was the lead. I wish I liked Cavill more than I do; as near as I can tell, he's an awkward himbo who has a dog and plays a lot of video games and that's it. So I went in with low expectations, and...wow.
Without exaggeration, I say that this show has some of the most satisfying writing and storytelling I have seen in years.
The first episode is entitled "The End's Beginning" and it does an awful lot of set-up. This is a grimdark fantasy world with nudity and violence and blah blah blah. The Witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is a brooding hero. Princess Ciri is a damsel in distress. Burning cities, blah blah blah. And then: There's a plot where Geralt is put between a man in power, and the woman, Renfri, he wronged. It's a he-said, she-said situation.
Geralt believes the woman.
Now this is a small detail, but keep in mind that it's 20fucking19 and MeToo and all that, and also...this particular story was written in 1986. So we're dealing with some retro material that is also heckin relevant.
Geralt has a quote in this episode that appears in the source material and is also a key to a lot of the plots we go into:
“Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.”
In other texts this would be chivalry. In this text, it's about institutional oppression, which becomes one of the threads of season 1. Anyway, back to the plot: Renfri won't give up on her vengeance, and she ends up taking an innocent village girl as a hostage. Geralt called bullshit until the kid was threatened, so he intervened. The situation goes poorly. In not choosing, Geralt made a choice, and it's one that haunts him and follows him around the rest of the season.
Now, one of the things the show does that has garnered a lot of complaints is how the action shown in different plot threads takes place in different time periods, but you can't tell because Geralt doesn't age. (He's something like 250 in the books.) So what you think is concurrent actually isn't; this becomes clear in episode 4 when we see one character, Yennefer, in a scene with a child who is shown as an old man with Geralt. These choices have an excellent pay-off in the show itself, and it's going to have an even bigger pay-off down the line, but what really struck me about responses was viewers--and critics--reluctance to trust the writers on this.
Which, to be fair, we've had a rough year with writers. The ending of Game of Thrones did not pay off as many would have had it, and even though I found the conclusion acceptable I thought they dropped way too many balls; similarly, The Avengers closed with a couple of write-offs that undid way too much, and it irked me, to say nothing of the nonsense that is Star Wars. To quote Supernatural, "Writers lie." HOWEVER: These writers....didn't. In fact, they did a brilliant job of dropping a tidbit here and there and then following up on it in the next episode or two, and frankly they do very well with an economy of scale: They don't over-explain, and what you need to know you'll find in good time. And in fact, there's a lot of pleasure to be had in watching the stories literally unfold because you can see how they fit together in the end. They do a great visualization of this in the episode titles, with each chapter given an illustrative sigil. In the final episode, they show all eight sigils which then unfold and join together in a new configuration, that of a Wolf for Geralt and a Swallow for Ciri.
Now let's go back again. In episode 2, we pick up the story of Yennefer, who is an abused and deformed girl who can do magic and ends up getting sold/rescued into mage school.
Remember when I mentioned institutional oppression is a theme? That's Yennefer's story all over. Okay, so she joins the Brotherhood of Mages, and goes to Aretuza which is a big pretty glowy stronghold on the sea. Magic has a cost which means that you make flowers die to levitate rocks and stuff. Or in another way, you watch your less-talented fellow-students get turned into eels so their power can run the building. Basically, you opt-in to a system of abuse.
Now, another thing about magehood is that secretly all mages are ugly af. (Although something I appreciated in the tv show is that even with a twisted spine and skull, Yennefer was bamf enough to have a sweet and sexual romance.) In the books this is a glamour they keep casting, until one of the stories when it becomes permanent for reasons. In the show the initiation/graduation is when a mage gets their hottiness solidified, but the womenfolks have to sacrifice their wombs for it. (I forget how that's dealt with in the books, but I think it was just more "if you do magic you go sterile" vs. a surgical thing, but I'd have to reread.) A number of complaints from viewers have centered on Yennefer knowingly giving up her womb, and then later really wanting to have a baby. However, I think this is kind of a misreading, because what Yennefer keeps saying is that she "wants everything" and that she "wants a choice." And we come back to that institutional oppression which inherently limits women's choices.
And again, it being 2019: Women STILL have to choose between work and families, y'all. Can we not act like we've never heard of this before? When our economy functionally requires two people to have stable incomes but also the entire healthcare and childcare industries assume one person is just magically going to take a fuckton of time off anyhow? Yahuh.
Anyway.
So Geralt and Yennefer collide: The guy who refuses to choose, and the woman who wants choice. And it goes about as well as you'd expect.
Meanwhile, Ciri is running around trying to survive. Humans are assholes, there's monsters everywhere. For a while she gets a black elf friend and for a while I was straight up expecting him to die protecting her, and then he's just like, "Everyone says you're so special, but all I see is people around you dying, and I'm not going to be one of them." And I was like, Hell yeah, speak to that white girl privilege, black elf kid!
In particular, with Ciri's plot you end up revisiting the scenes from episode 1; in fact, episode 7 shows a lot of the same scenes from a different frame of reference, showing parts of conversations that Ciri didn't see or here back in 1. It shows us that Geralt and Ciri are in the same time and place now, and also underscores how some of her beloved family members are...problematic, to be put it nicely.
Which, one of the big Questions of the show is "What is a monster?" And the answer is almost always, Humans are monsters. Humans have genocide and racism and sexism and shit. "Monsters" are usually just critters that people are afraid of because people are assholes. And this is something that is going to keep getting underscored the farther we go along (the show got renewed for S2, and I'm hoping it gets enough seasons to do all of the books, because OMG Lady of the Lake is one of the most gorgeous books I've ever read and I want to see it onscreen SO. MUCH.) because the novels heavily reference WW2, and so you see concentration camps and pogroms and resistance fighters and everything is very grim BUT with an undercurrent of "fighting back is the right thing to do even if we all die doing it" that just speaks to, again, 20fucking19.
And finally, there's the inevitable comparisons to Game of Thrones, which really irks me because the novels predate that series significantly, even though the English translations only finished in 2017. But I want to point out a few things I particularly like, especially with the TV adaptation:
1) All the sex and nudity, especially on the tv show, are consensual. There's no rape scenes or plots. So it goes to show you CAN be grimdark without sexually abusing people.
2) Queerness. Spoiler for later on, but Ciri gets a girlfriend. Which is even more impressive considering that that happened in Poland in like 1997 or whatever.
3) Humans are monsters, but monsters are people. (Also, wait til you see the redemption arc of one big character. Wow. That's gonna be awesome.)
TL:DR I like this show a lot. If you are on the fence about it, give it a shot. If you like the show, please read the books. I need to geek more with people, because right now I just have Scott and Todd--and by the way, if all three of US agree on something, that there is a helluva spectrum!
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When I heard Netflix was adapting The Witcher, I tried to keep my expectations low. For one thing, the books are pretty complicated; for another, they almost immediately announced that Henry Cavill was the lead. I wish I liked Cavill more than I do; as near as I can tell, he's an awkward himbo who has a dog and plays a lot of video games and that's it. So I went in with low expectations, and...wow.
Without exaggeration, I say that this show has some of the most satisfying writing and storytelling I have seen in years.
The first episode is entitled "The End's Beginning" and it does an awful lot of set-up. This is a grimdark fantasy world with nudity and violence and blah blah blah. The Witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is a brooding hero. Princess Ciri is a damsel in distress. Burning cities, blah blah blah. And then: There's a plot where Geralt is put between a man in power, and the woman, Renfri, he wronged. It's a he-said, she-said situation.
Geralt believes the woman.
Now this is a small detail, but keep in mind that it's 20fucking19 and MeToo and all that, and also...this particular story was written in 1986. So we're dealing with some retro material that is also heckin relevant.
Geralt has a quote in this episode that appears in the source material and is also a key to a lot of the plots we go into:
“Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.”
In other texts this would be chivalry. In this text, it's about institutional oppression, which becomes one of the threads of season 1. Anyway, back to the plot: Renfri won't give up on her vengeance, and she ends up taking an innocent village girl as a hostage. Geralt called bullshit until the kid was threatened, so he intervened. The situation goes poorly. In not choosing, Geralt made a choice, and it's one that haunts him and follows him around the rest of the season.
Now, one of the things the show does that has garnered a lot of complaints is how the action shown in different plot threads takes place in different time periods, but you can't tell because Geralt doesn't age. (He's something like 250 in the books.) So what you think is concurrent actually isn't; this becomes clear in episode 4 when we see one character, Yennefer, in a scene with a child who is shown as an old man with Geralt. These choices have an excellent pay-off in the show itself, and it's going to have an even bigger pay-off down the line, but what really struck me about responses was viewers--and critics--reluctance to trust the writers on this.
Which, to be fair, we've had a rough year with writers. The ending of Game of Thrones did not pay off as many would have had it, and even though I found the conclusion acceptable I thought they dropped way too many balls; similarly, The Avengers closed with a couple of write-offs that undid way too much, and it irked me, to say nothing of the nonsense that is Star Wars. To quote Supernatural, "Writers lie." HOWEVER: These writers....didn't. In fact, they did a brilliant job of dropping a tidbit here and there and then following up on it in the next episode or two, and frankly they do very well with an economy of scale: They don't over-explain, and what you need to know you'll find in good time. And in fact, there's a lot of pleasure to be had in watching the stories literally unfold because you can see how they fit together in the end. They do a great visualization of this in the episode titles, with each chapter given an illustrative sigil. In the final episode, they show all eight sigils which then unfold and join together in a new configuration, that of a Wolf for Geralt and a Swallow for Ciri.
Now let's go back again. In episode 2, we pick up the story of Yennefer, who is an abused and deformed girl who can do magic and ends up getting sold/rescued into mage school.
Remember when I mentioned institutional oppression is a theme? That's Yennefer's story all over. Okay, so she joins the Brotherhood of Mages, and goes to Aretuza which is a big pretty glowy stronghold on the sea. Magic has a cost which means that you make flowers die to levitate rocks and stuff. Or in another way, you watch your less-talented fellow-students get turned into eels so their power can run the building. Basically, you opt-in to a system of abuse.
Now, another thing about magehood is that secretly all mages are ugly af. (Although something I appreciated in the tv show is that even with a twisted spine and skull, Yennefer was bamf enough to have a sweet and sexual romance.) In the books this is a glamour they keep casting, until one of the stories when it becomes permanent for reasons. In the show the initiation/graduation is when a mage gets their hottiness solidified, but the womenfolks have to sacrifice their wombs for it. (I forget how that's dealt with in the books, but I think it was just more "if you do magic you go sterile" vs. a surgical thing, but I'd have to reread.) A number of complaints from viewers have centered on Yennefer knowingly giving up her womb, and then later really wanting to have a baby. However, I think this is kind of a misreading, because what Yennefer keeps saying is that she "wants everything" and that she "wants a choice." And we come back to that institutional oppression which inherently limits women's choices.
And again, it being 2019: Women STILL have to choose between work and families, y'all. Can we not act like we've never heard of this before? When our economy functionally requires two people to have stable incomes but also the entire healthcare and childcare industries assume one person is just magically going to take a fuckton of time off anyhow? Yahuh.
Anyway.
So Geralt and Yennefer collide: The guy who refuses to choose, and the woman who wants choice. And it goes about as well as you'd expect.
Meanwhile, Ciri is running around trying to survive. Humans are assholes, there's monsters everywhere. For a while she gets a black elf friend and for a while I was straight up expecting him to die protecting her, and then he's just like, "Everyone says you're so special, but all I see is people around you dying, and I'm not going to be one of them." And I was like, Hell yeah, speak to that white girl privilege, black elf kid!
In particular, with Ciri's plot you end up revisiting the scenes from episode 1; in fact, episode 7 shows a lot of the same scenes from a different frame of reference, showing parts of conversations that Ciri didn't see or here back in 1. It shows us that Geralt and Ciri are in the same time and place now, and also underscores how some of her beloved family members are...problematic, to be put it nicely.
Which, one of the big Questions of the show is "What is a monster?" And the answer is almost always, Humans are monsters. Humans have genocide and racism and sexism and shit. "Monsters" are usually just critters that people are afraid of because people are assholes. And this is something that is going to keep getting underscored the farther we go along (the show got renewed for S2, and I'm hoping it gets enough seasons to do all of the books, because OMG Lady of the Lake is one of the most gorgeous books I've ever read and I want to see it onscreen SO. MUCH.) because the novels heavily reference WW2, and so you see concentration camps and pogroms and resistance fighters and everything is very grim BUT with an undercurrent of "fighting back is the right thing to do even if we all die doing it" that just speaks to, again, 20fucking19.
And finally, there's the inevitable comparisons to Game of Thrones, which really irks me because the novels predate that series significantly, even though the English translations only finished in 2017. But I want to point out a few things I particularly like, especially with the TV adaptation:
1) All the sex and nudity, especially on the tv show, are consensual. There's no rape scenes or plots. So it goes to show you CAN be grimdark without sexually abusing people.
2) Queerness. Spoiler for later on, but Ciri gets a girlfriend. Which is even more impressive considering that that happened in Poland in like 1997 or whatever.
3) Humans are monsters, but monsters are people. (Also, wait til you see the redemption arc of one big character. Wow. That's gonna be awesome.)
TL:DR I like this show a lot. If you are on the fence about it, give it a shot. If you like the show, please read the books. I need to geek more with people, because right now I just have Scott and Todd--and by the way, if all three of US agree on something, that there is a helluva spectrum!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-12-27 08:58 pm (UTC)