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The Witcher: Evil is Evil


AncalagonTheBlack

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On 12/16/2021 at 7:36 PM, Ran said:

@Zorral

Sapkowski has written a historical series set in 15th century Poland, and I'm sure is very aware and familiar with the history of the region. I'm not sure how far it expresses itself in The Witcher, though this article at Polygon draws a lot of assumed connections between the material and Polish history.

Good article. Would like to add that it seems quite obvious that the nilfgaard empire is inspired by the Ottoman Empire. Even if it never really was in the focus of Western Historians, Eastern/South Eastern Europe had been basically in a state of perpetual war for over 400 years, with vast areas either devastated (wild fields) or  battle grounds (everything between Vienna/Budapest and Belgrade), from the 14th till 18th century. That goes deep in the national psyche. 

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12 minutes ago, Arakan said:

the Ottoman Empire. Even if it never really was in the focus of Western Historians, Eastern/South Eastern Europe had been basically in a state of perpetual war for over 400 years, with vast areas either devastated (wild fields) or  battle grounds (everything between Vienna/Budapest and Belgrade), from the 14th till 18th century. That goes deep in the national psyche. 

I did say that -- though not the bit about elves being Turks. :lol:

While being no expert in the history of the Ottomans and their later empire I am familiar with the broader strokes from beginning to its end with WWI, and how much eastern and central Europe were affected, for centuries, for better, sometimes, and often for worse.  Huns, Tartars, other warrior nomadic peoples provided further miseries, as did the religious wars of the 16th and 17th Century.  And before that, they were so often the battlegrounds for Persians and Byzantines, the Germans and the Western Empire. Mongolians and Seljuks -- you name it, enserfed, enslaved, murdered and raided. And don't forget the battles over religion all ongoing: Greek Orthodox vs. the Catholic Church; Christian vs. Muslim; and Protestant against everybody else -- despite Sulieman and Martin Luther's mutual influence on their political thinjing.

The politics were extremely complicated, even in in Western Europe, so there it was even more so.

Vienna was Istanbul's foe, while France was Istanbul's friend. So was Venice, Genoa and Pisa -- while they were all foes of each other.  And everybody was slaving the region; Genoa was the central slave market in Europe.

Hopefully I start watching season 2 tonight sometime.

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7 hours ago, sifth said:

@Werthead

They're similar lengths to the Expanse novels and that show does a really good job of managing it's story, without adding too much filler. I honestly think it's a case of Netflix wanting at least one major action scene in each episode, which the books just don't have.

I think the answer is much simpler.

The books just aren't that good and their story has several problems that would always lead to major changes in the story. So I am pretty glad that they are being very liberal in adapting the books.

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46 minutes ago, divica said:

I have no idea why yen lost her magic or how she got it back. So I think that aspect of her story was a huge fail

I think that’s very obvious. That’s how magic in the story works. To take you have something to give. And the more you take (i.e. performing magic) the more you have to give. The rogue fire mage even said it out loud: when you perform fire magic you piece by piece give up your soul. 
 

by the way: very good concept of magic because of it having a price. And one has to be careful „what one wishes for“. A bit similar to the transmutation concept in FMA. Or let’s say Bakker (perform magic and you shall win the world but the price is eternal damnation of your soul in hell). 

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46 minutes ago, Arakan said:

I think that’s very obvious. That’s how magic in the story works. To take you have something to give. And the more you take (i.e. performing magic) the more you have to give. The rogue fire mage even said it out loud: when you perform fire magic you piece by piece give up your soul. 
 

by the way: very good concept of magic because of it having a price. And one has to be careful „what one wishes for“. A bit similar to the transmutation concept in FMA. Or let’s say Bakker (perform magic and you shall win the world but the price is eternal damnation of your soul in hell). 

The problem is that it isn't how magic works. 

And you can see that no mage pays any price while performing magic.

What they imply is that magic fire consumes unless you are very skiled and it consumed her ability to cast. 

While I can accept that the dude was more skilled than yen in fire magic I have no idea why her trying to sacrifice herself would cure her...

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2 episodes in now. It's really hard not to hear Ciri as Siri  which at a party way back in July Laurie Anderson told us Siri is the only person she believes in, and who we should all want to be, and interacted only with Siri via her phone and nobody else.  This was .. weird, and now I can't stop remembering this while watching season 2.

 

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Just finished, I would say it was a significant upgrade from the first season, in no small part because the story felt a lot more coherent without all the various timelines making things feel disjointed. Glad to see they fixed the Nilfgaard armor, not a huge fan of the masks rather than just a full visor, but at least they don't look like scrotums any more.

Spoiler

There were some small details I liked, Kaer Morhen was pretty dope, and the medallion tree was a nice touch. Don't know if that was in the books, but I thought it looked great on screen.

Seeing the owl one moment and then Phillipa the next was fun. I kept thinking they were gonna do the reveal a lot sooner, but while most people probably figured it out fairly quickly, and some people probably thought it went on for too long, but I think they did a good job timing it.

I feel like the naming conventions for the Elves are annoying, I don't get how you go from Filavandril, a good ol' fantasy elf name and then he is chilling with a dude named Gage? Gage is a high school bully from a early 2000s coming of age movie, not an elvish warrior.

I wonder how people who are coming in blind reacted to the reveal that Emhyr is actually Ciri's father, but I think eagle eyed viewers (or maybe just viewers who aren't looking at their phone half the time) might have noticed that in Ciri's weird dream sequence, when all of her dead loved ones were disintegrating, Emhyr never actually started disintegrating. Cute bit of foreshadowing. That said, I don't know why they blew their load so soon. From what I understand, it is not a well known fact until later in the series, and I feel that it would have been pretty simple to hide his identity with shadows or something like that.

Overall, I would give it a solid B. Not game changing by any means, but it is fun to watch and there is nothing particularly offensive about it (though I've seen some fans of the books who are big mad).

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Fourth episode lost the pacing plot altogether, which is something I wondered would happen. The first two books are, by a light-year, the best because they are punchy and episodic and well-paced, and then the novel series (the archetypal trilogy dragged out to five books due to poor self-editing) drags like a motherfucker at times, especially when the very dull politics come up. It feels like this season, which is largely drawing on the first proper novel, Blood of Elves, and bits of the second, is starting to hit the same problem, even with the changes to make it more episodic and introduce a lot more actual Witchering (the degree to which Geralt doesn't actually do his job after the third book is remarkable).

Good to see Jaskier again, and Graham McTavish is excellent as Dijkstra, though the video game version was a bit truer to the books: someone who looks like a total brainless street thug but is actually intelligent, erudite, cultured and learned, just ruthless; McTavish plays him like that immediately. But McTavish is excellent in everything.

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On 12/18/2021 at 3:27 PM, Corvinus85 said:

By the way, what's up with these Elven names? So we had Filavandrel (did they recast?) and now we have Francesca and Gage. lol 

Peter Jackson was the only one who managed to make Elves look more otherworldly. The rest are generally very pedestrian, just guys with pointy ears.

I don’t think Filavandrel was recast. Gage is… going to make a handy plot device when his time comes I assume, and I think they didn’t want any confusion with having two names for Francesca as it’s done in the books. I am a happy with her casting (so far) because they actually managed to make her more beautiful than the rest of the pretty female cast. (It usually comes off as awfully silly and clumsy when a “famously beautiful” character blends in with the extras/supporting characters and is noticeably plainer than the main protagonist) - I don’t know if I’m allowed to say all this, actually, I’m a woman so maybe? Who knows. All the cast is pretty, Francesca actress was a good pick because she’s more pretty, that’s all I’m saying. I kinda miss that ethereal Galadriel like vibe, though she may have a Cinderella moment when they get Dol Blathanna? 

Well LOTR elves are basically the posh, super sophisticated intellectual demographic of Middle Earth, whereas Witcher elves are a group of angry thugs in exile? :dunno: 
 

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As a non-reader who only played a part of the first Witcher game, I mostly liked the season, though Ciri is quickly becoming way too much of a super-special girl who is is just brilliant at everything she tries and whom all the non-evil people can't help but adore. It is also funny how after all her training she doesn't carry as much as a beltknife to defend herself.

Also, if she is supposed to be an elven throwback, ditto her mother, why do actual elves mostly look like completely normal humans with pointy ears? And not just younger elves, who, for some reason, are all supposed to be partly human now, but Filavendel who is allegedly older than the advent of humans too? If Yennefer's and Ciri's oddly colored eyes hint at their elven ancestry, why is Francesca the only actual elf who has them? Additionally, I  read somewhere that older elves are supposed to be sterile, so why was Filavendel a father?

Or and speaking of him and Franceska, they were dumb as a load of bricks to put themselves in Nilfgaard's power and then to try to renege on their part of the agreement. With such leadership, it is no wonder that the elves are as badly off as they are. I kinda felt bad for Fringilla, who tried to do something decent and clever for a change, only to be betrayed. Also, it seems that the suicidal cultist thing from the first season stemmed from her and other Nilfgaardian mages having been imprisoned and abused by the previous ruler? Somewhat unclear what happened there. 

The show certainly improved visually and in fight choreography, but they  didn't try to make clothes "lived in" did they? Did the reviewers and watchers moan about, I wonder? In particular Ciri travels for long time stretches in pristine white dresses and Yennefer's fabulous outfits don't look any worse for the wear either.

Speaking of Yennefer, I didn't understand why she decided to save Cahir. How would beheading him with an ax have  confirmed that she was too cold-hearted/dangerous, when all the mages are quite ruthless and ready to kill if they feel it is warranted? And widely known to be such? That was some very contrived reasoning. Also, them easily escaping while riding double was just LoL. Ditto her successfully holding off a rider with a stick later.

I also don't see how we are supposed to feel sympathetic to Vesimir's desire to re-start the Witchers, knowing that they horribly abused and killed most of the little kids that ended up in their care, though my feelings are probably strongly colored by having seen "The Nightmare of the Wolf", which was fairly good, BTW. Oh, and it turns out that more people than the Witchers can do Signs, since the priests of Melitele are the ones who actually teach them?

On the whole it all felt a little disjointed, with the first episode clearly coming from a self-contained short story, while the rest do a lot of  name and location-checking in an effort to build up a larger narrative, but it was entertaining.

 

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2 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

Well LOTR elves are basically the posh, super sophisticated intellectual demographic of Middle Earth, whereas Witcher elves are a group of angry thugs in exile? :dunno: 

And mostly it was silly in LOTR as well.  To pull that „ethereal“ Elven thing of you need some actors with a gigantic aura. Thranduil in The Hobbit was perfect for example. 

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Most epic scenes from season 2?

for me:
- flyover in the aftermath of the Battle of Sodden, fascinating in a disturbing manner (that is what a battlefield with 30.000 deaths looks like)
- The Last Supper with Fringilla. Woah
- Elves on revenge path. That series really has some WTF Old Testament dark moments 
- the Arrival of the Emperor, finally and you could feel how two hardcore Charakters shit their pants

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1 hour ago, Maia said:

As a non-reader who only played a part of the first Witcher game, I mostly liked the season, though Ciri is quickly becoming way too much of a super-special girl who is is just brilliant at everything she tries and whom all the non-evil people can't help but adore. It is also funny how after all her training she doesn't carry as much as a beltknife to defend herself.

Also, if she is supposed to be an elven throwback, ditto her mother, why do actual elves mostly look like completely normal humans with pointy ears? And not just younger elves, who, for some reason, are all supposed to be partly human now, but Filavendel who is allegedly older than the advent of humans too? If Yennefer's and Ciri's oddly colored eyes hint at their elven ancestry, why is Francesca the only actual elf who has them? Additionally, I  read somewhere that older elves are supposed to be sterile, so why was Filavendel a father?

Or and speaking of him and Franceska, they were dumb as a load of bricks to put themselves in Nilfgaard's power and then to try to renege on their part of the agreement. With such leadership, it is no wonder that the elves are as badly off as they are. I kinda felt bad for Fringilla, who tried to do something decent and clever for a change, only to be betrayed. Also, it seems that the suicidal cultist thing from the first season stemmed from her and other Nilfgaardian mages having been imprisoned and abused by the previous ruler? Somewhat unclear what happened there. 

The show certainly improved visually and in fight choreography, but they  didn't try to make clothes "lived in" did they? Did the reviewers and watchers moan about, I wonder? In particular Ciri travels for long time stretches in pristine white dresses and Yennefer's fabulous outfits don't look any worse for the wear either.

Speaking of Yennefer, I didn't understand why she decided to save Cahir. How would beheading him with an ax have  confirmed that she was too cold-hearted/dangerous, when all the mages are quite ruthless and ready to kill if they feel it is warranted? And widely known to be such? That was some very contrived reasoning. Also, them easily escaping while riding double was just LoL. Ditto her successfully holding off a rider with a stick later.

I also don't see how we are supposed to feel sympathetic to Vesimir's desire to re-start the Witchers, knowing that they horribly abused and killed most of the little kids that ended up in their care, though my feelings are probably strongly colored by having seen "The Nightmare of the Wolf", which was fairly good, BTW. Oh, and it turns out that more people than the Witchers can do Signs, since the priests of Melitele are the ones who actually teach them?

On the whole it all felt a little disjointed, with the first episode clearly coming from a self-contained short story, while the rest do a lot of  name and location-checking in an effort to build up a larger narrative, but it was entertaining.

 

If I remember correctly the signs are basically a low form of magic. So al mages can use the signs.

In regards to killing the little kids that is just how witchers are made. And that is supposed to be a better life than what their parents can provide for them. It isn't like they are kidnapping kids or lying about recruitment...

About the elves. As they had a big number of elves in cintra I can understand if they decide that it is better defend the city even if nilf decides to attack them for their betrayal than attacking the norther countries. The problems for me arrise when they deicde it as the northern kings that killed the baby elf. why would they think it as them instead of nilf for punishing them for their betrayal? And ho did they take an army inside a northern city to kill all babies without anyone reacting?

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34 minutes ago, Arakan said:

And mostly it was silly in LOTR as well.  To pull that „ethereal“ Elven thing of you need some actors with a gigantic aura. Thranduil in The Hobbit was perfect for example. 

I don’t necessarily agree. Thranduil had the most flashy setting and outfits, indeed, but then they had him ride a cgi reindeer. That sorta brought back down to earth for me. And I think the LOTR actors, especially actresses, did a very good job of delivering the elven aura, or at least the cold proud superiority . Only the stand-in extras looked silly. 

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Well the new song sucks.

Spoiler

Where’s the melody, the tavern vibe and the fun? Why is it a D grade rock ballad from X factor trials? Why is Dandelion suddenly an unsuccessful rockstar? 

And I hate the Dijkstra casting and pronunciation. Yeah, it’s been too good to be true in the first two episodes. 

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5 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

Well the new song sucks.

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Where’s the melody, the tavern vibe and the fun? Why is it a D grade rock ballad from X factor trials? Why is Dandelion suddenly an unsuccessful rockstar? 

And I hate the Dijkstra casting and pronunciation. Yeah, it’s been too good to be true in the first two episodes. 

Spoiler

If you're referring to the Burn Butcher Burn song I agree, but oddly there is a much better song on the soundtrack album which for some reason is not in the show. Maybe they cut something from one of the episodes.

Why do you hate the Dijkstra casting? McTavish is a great actor. Is that not how you would pronounce the name?

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