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The Witcher: Evil is Evil


AncalagonTheBlack

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Flavor and personalities have always been the strong point of the Witcher from the books and games. Plots not so much as they’re a bit overly elaborate and kinda full of holes. Not a surprise the tv show is kinda just rewriting things as they see fit.

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@Maia to summarise:

Spoiler

Emhyr's original plan was to come back to Nilfgaard to reclaim the throne as the rightful heir. In order to do that he had to kill off the Duny character. He needed Ciri because of the prophesy that her child (or maybe it was grandchild?) would rule the world and also save it from doom. We don't know the wording of the prophesy but he was convinced he needed to be the father of that child. He was going to kill them off officialy in the storm (while hiding himself, Pavetta and Ciri in the magic cabin) but realised Pavetta left Ciri behind in Cintra. They started fighting and Pavetta fell overboard. He was going to jump after her but Vilgefortz teleported the ship at that point. He admitted he didn't love Pavetta but wasn't going to kill her, but send her to live somewhere remote. No one else would know he was Ciri's father. It's not clear who she was supposed to be in the original plan, but "Cirilla of Cintra" would have been dead, so I suppose he would give her some alternative identity in order to marry her. But since she got left in Cintra and Pavetta was dead, he decided to conquer Cintra to regain her.

As Apache said, in the end he decided not to go ahead with the marriage and incest.

 

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"Take a Look at the Inspirations Behind ‘The Witcher’
The showrunner of the wildly popular Netflix fantasy series offers a tour through the images and themes that have guided her."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/arts/television/witcher-netflix-lauren-schmidt-hissrich.html

~~~~~~~~~~~

Nothing about this show makes any sense to me.  Nor does anything the bookers post to illuminate the nonbookers' confusion.  It's all bonkers -- not to mention those gowns in which Yen was running around the place, particularly the places that were clearly so cold, yet there she is, sashaying about in sparkles and acres of bare shoulders!  But evidently in a creative way -- something! -- because otherwise why do I watch, and why do I keep paying attention to Things Show Witcher?  :wideeyed: :cheers: :lol:
 

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Spoiler

Why didn't Duny just go back to Cintra and say hey I'm not dead?  But I'm going to take the throne of Nilfgaard, wanna help?

 

8 hours ago, Filippa Eilhart said:

@Maia to summarise:

  Hide contents

Emhyr's original plan was to come back to Nilfgaard to reclaim the throne as the rightful heir. In order to do that he had to kill off the Duny character. He needed Ciri because of the prophesy that her child (or maybe it was grandchild?) would rule the world and also save it from doom. We don't know the wording of the prophesy but he was convinced he needed to be the father of that child. He was going to kill them off officialy in the storm (while hiding himself, Pavetta and Ciri in the magic cabin) but realised Pavetta left Ciri behind in Cintra. They started fighting and Pavetta fell overboard. He was going to jump after her but Vilgefortz teleported the ship at that point. He admitted he didn't love Pavetta but wasn't going to kill her, but send her to live somewhere remote. No one else would know he was Ciri's father. It's not clear who she was supposed to be in the original plan, but "Cirilla of Cintra" would have been dead, so I suppose he would give her some alternative identity in order to marry her. But since she got left in Cintra and Pavetta was dead, he decided to conquer Cintra to regain her.

As Apache said, in the end he decided not to go ahead with the marriage and incest.

 

 

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26 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:
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Why didn't Duny just go back to Cintra and say hey I'm not dead?  But I'm going to take the throne of Nilfgaard, wanna help?

Spoiler

Because Calanthe would never let him marry his daughter and her grand-daughter? And that's exactly what he was planning to do, because of the aforementioned prophecy. Plus, she would probably kill him just because he wasn't able to keep Pavetta safe.

 

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6 hours ago, aceluby said:

Just popping in to say that Jaskier makes this show for me. He’s hilarious and writes absolute bangers. Burn Butcher Burn is an amazing follow up to Toss a Coin.

That is all, continue….

For me, Whoreson Prison Blues is Jaskier's best.

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Wow, thanks for your help, all!

 

On 1/6/2022 at 12:12 PM, Filippa Eilhart said:

 

  Hide contents

Emhyr's original plan was to come back to Nilfgaard to reclaim the throne as the rightful heir. In order to do that he had to kill off the Duny character. He needed Ciri because of the prophesy that her child (or maybe it was grandchild?) would rule the world and also save it from doom.

OK... I guess that the prophecy was never fully revealed in the books? Because it is such a deeply weird interpretation on his part. Or was it just  that he just couldn't imagine that

Spoiler

a mere girl could be all that and a bag of chips, so it didn't occur to him that Ciri already was that child?.

 

On 1/6/2022 at 12:12 PM, Filippa Eilhart said:
Spoiler

He admitted he didn't love Pavetta but wasn't going to kill her, but send her to live somewhere remote. No one else would know he was Ciri's father.

 

 

Wow, poor woman!

Spoiler

So, was it all a set-up? Did he stage his rescue of her father because he somehow knew in advance that Calanthe was pregnant with a very special girl? But how could he think that he would be able to safely confine an angry, betrayed woman with the Elder powers for life? Not to mention that he was giving up a potentially very powerful tool in the process. The whole need to "kill" Duny was due to his intention to marry his own daughter, right? So, he basically screwed himself out of a valuable helper _and_ out of potential heirs in the pursuit of a particularly insane prophecy or his particularly insane interpretation of it. Huh.   

 

On 1/6/2022 at 12:12 PM, Filippa Eilhart said:

But since she got left in Cintra and Pavetta was dead, he decided to conquer Cintra to regain her.

 

But if he knew that Ciri had powers, didn't it occur to him that making her hate him wouldn't help him accomplish his goals? In any case, since he openly announced his paternity in the show, I hope that this book plot gets dropped. OTOH, now his reasons for conquering Cintra are even less understandable, because he destroyed any possibility of good relationship with his very powerful daughter for nothing. He could have just kidnapped her or something. Or even had Calanthe quietly assassinated and then showed up to rescue his daughter from the ensuing turmoil. Oh, well.

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On 1/6/2022 at 6:12 AM, Filippa Eilhart said:

@Maia to summarise:

  Hide contents

in the end he decided not to go ahead with the marriage and incest.

 

Spoiler

To go through all that just to change his mind at the end is a terrible plot.  Hope they change it for the show.

 

19 hours ago, 3CityApache said:
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Because Calanthe would never let him marry his daughter and her grand-daughter? And that's exactly what he was planning to do, because of the aforementioned prophecy. Plus, she would probably kill him just because he wasn't able to keep Pavetta safe.

 

Spoiler

Stop trying to make prophesy happen.  Trying to make it happen means its never going to happen!  Since it apparently turns on him saying "oh never mind!" then it's lousy driver for the plot.

 

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2 hours ago, 3CityApache said:

Interesting piece, which pretty much nails all my objections to the show. 

I can't speak to the The Witcher adaptation and this article made me not want to read the books even more just so I don't get pissed off at another show. :P 

But the article was overly generous with WoT and I disagree that it manages to capture the spirit of the books. It got close a few times, but ultimately fell short. Honestly, I don't think even GoT captured the spirit of the books even when it was doing a good job adapting the plot.

Edit: Question for you and other book readers: the Deathless Mother plot was a show invention, but does it feel like it could have belonged in the book universe? If so, then I would say The Witcher managed to capture at least some of the spirit of the books.

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22 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

I can't speak to the The Witcher adaptation and this article made me not want to read the books even more just so I don't get pissed off at another show. :P 

Edit: Question for you and other book readers: the Deathless Mother plot was a show invention, but does it feel like it could have belonged in the book universe? If so, then I would say The Witcher managed to capture at least some of the spirit of the books.

And I can't speak for WoT as I haven't read the books, all I can say is I pretty liked the show. 

As for your question, I can't help the feeling, that even if the deathless mother (aka Baba Yaga) plot may seem like it could have belonged to the universe, it was just poorly executed. Books managed these fairy tales references with much more subtlety. 

Also, these new plots just messed up the character development I felt was needed to understand their further actions and motivations. 

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I enjoyed The Witcher Season 2 - and this is coming from someone who thought season 1 was pretty bad all around. It wasn't perfect, or prestige drama quality - in particular, everything involving the deathless mother, especially in episodes 2 and 7, was cheesy and difficult to follow. There were many great possible big bads for the season - I'm not sure why you need to throw in a cackling witch. As a reader of the books, I'm not bothered by most changes, though I'm still not sure why they killed Eskel so quickly - if you're going to kill him off, do it at the end of the season, when we've formed some attachment to him. But Blood of Elves really is a difficult novel to adapt - it's nowhere near the best of the Witcher books, and I think they did a good job of getting at the core of the book while making an exciting television adaptation.

Comparing it to Wheel of Time Season 1 (as the article a couple posts above me does), I can see why I enjoyed the Witcher so much more; I disagree with that article in just about every way. The season succeeds at getting you invested in the central characters and their relationships, especially Geralt and Ciri - but even Yennefer and the elves, despite the less than stellar beginning to both plotlines. It can be a serious show, but it's also fun and funny, especially whenever Dandelion shows up. From a technical point of view, it's also just better made - better directed, better cinematography, better costuming, etc... And as an adaptation, I felt like they got the spirit of the books right.

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I think it’s better made for sure, season two was a big step up from season one and it’s clear WoT has production issues. So for me Witcher 2 is a better show than WoT 1, because the production differences are so huge. But as adapting source material goes WoT both has a harder job and did it better. Witcher just didn’t bother. Which is fine the show is going on Henry and great production and that’s fine. The spirit of the show is the spirit of the games. Geralt is a badass. Everything else is secondary. And that is a fine premise for a show.

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The Witcher looks better than WoT -- miuch better, whether forests filled with monsters, human or otherwise, to costuming (though really don't believe that Yen would be running around half naked in a gown of spangles and beads, but the dress itself was stunning)  and the interiors of edifaces such the Witcher Bros' frat house, yanno?  It's also more fun. 

As far as attempting to put the two shows in ranking opposition to each other based only on success of adaptation -- that's the wrong end of the stick for comparison, when we are talking about what must work on the screen.

Most of all, why must they be considered at all as rival shows?  I was very happy to have had both of them -- at least until the last two episodes of WoT. Beyond that, what I enjoyed about WoT had nothing at all to with the story of four crazy kids who might be dragons or something.  I felt nothing about any of them, who are supposedly the focus.  

Article's writer is myopic and prejudiced (for WoT), and it shows in every sentence.

OTOH, both shows have the obvious difficulty in terms of 'adaptation' of multiple of multiples of books, characters, locations and plots, all so saggy, baggy and all over the place.  If one wishes to discuss these works critically only through adaptation, the writers of both are at equal disadvantage.  So it's how and whether what the writers did actually works on the screen, for bookers and nonbookers alike that is the operative critical criteria, not whether it recreates a scene from the books in accurate detail.  Or so it seems to me. :cheers:

 

 

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4 hours ago, Zorral said:

The Witcher looks better than WoT -- miuch better, whether forests filled with monsters, human or otherwise, to costuming (though really don't believe that Yen would be running around half naked in a gown of spangles and beads, but the dress itself was stunning)  and the interiors of edifaces such the Witcher Bros' frat house, yanno?  It's also more fun.

I think The Witcher's second season was better than WoT in terms of most costumes, armour and the CG monsters, I think WoT won out in a very major way: it actually did proper location filming in the arse-end of nowhere and made you feel like you were in the middle of a remote forest or plain, because they genuinely were. They also did a great job with several key locations, like the Two Rivers and Fal Dara, of combining a real location with real sets and CG elements based on real-life locations. I don't think reusing the same stretches of street for Tar Valon and Shadar Logoth was entirely successful, but then The Witcher did feel it did have the same bit of village/town that was standing in for Cintra and Oxenfurt and Tretogor and every small village anyone visited.

The Witcher Season 1 had a few moments of really good location filming, although bizarrely not as much as I'd hoped given they were also filming in Eastern Europe and that's the #1 reason you go over there. But they also used way too much, painfully obvious greenscreen digital locations. The Battle of Cintra looked horrendous, all shiny digital, video-game-cut-scene-from-2010. Some of the mountain stuff (in the otherwise awful PS2 dragon episode) was quite good and the Battle of Sodden Hill, for which they used a genuine Polish medieval castle, was pretty decent, but it felt few and far between.

It is bizarre that they then moved shooting from Hungary, Slovakia and Poland for Season 1 to the UK for Season 2. In Eastern Europe there's still plenty of places you can set up shop with a camera and not see a single piece of evidence of modern civilisation in any direction (The Last Kingdom, which shoots mostly in Hungary, is another great example of that). In the UK that's flat out impossible apart from some areas of the Scottish Highlands, maybe some bits of the Yorkshire Moors and some bits of Northern Ireland (if you can find any area that's not been over-used from Game of Thrones). That reduced almost all of their location shooting to forests, which we do have a reasonable surfeit of, and I believe a bit of Yorkshire for those shots outside Cintra.

I liked Kaer Morhen in design (lifted mostly from the video game) but it was very obviously a greenscreen studio location with lots of fake snow around. I get they needed to control the environment, especially given the lack of snow in the UK these days, but it did feel fairly fake (and it's a bit odd so many companies are moving away from location shooting to indoor shooting when in a COVID situation, shooting outdoors is preferable). They did stylise Kaer Morhen enough so that it kind of worked, though.

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