In the mid-aughts, The Witcher franchise was then successfully adapted into a whopping three video games, based on the short stories.Īs good as it is to have so many built-in fanbases, that meant Netflix had three distinct groups to please: the short story lovers, the novel fans, and gamers who expect a lot of gravelly voice work and monster-on-Witcher action.įurther Reading Mad Max meets Ferris Bueller in boldly outrageous Netflix series DaybreakThis meant the show couldn't just start at the beginning and go in order. Those stories centered on Geralt but also expanded to put a spotlight on Princess Cirilla of Cintra and the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg. These were gathered into two collections, The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny, which were followed by full-length novels in the mid-1990s. During a time when male-centric, battle-heavy stories dominated the genre, Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski began The Witcher as a series of short stories centered on Geralt of Rivia, a mutated human trained to serve as one of the Continent's monster exterminators. The Witcher straddles three real-world eras of fantasy storytelling, beginning in the late 1980s. This decision was likely borne of necessity because of the franchise's history. But by pulling out those undercurrents and making them text, the show gets to fill in and shade the Continent's history in a way that many straightforward adaptations lose in bringing their stories to screen. Much of Yennefer and Ciri's stories are more indirectly alluded to in the subtext than directly adapted from the page.
It covers nearly a century of history of the land known only as "the Continent," from the flashbacks to main character Geralt's childhood in the Season 1 finale to the fall of Cintra in its premiere. It gives the show a sense of sprawling narrative-not across continents, but across time. That's why The Witcher's "three timelines" format matters. But maybe a full-source remix doesn't have to be such a scary option.
We've seen other creative ways around this expected narrative allegiance, particularly HBO's Watchmen jumping 30 years into its original story's future. When the show added scenes out of order, such as Cersei and Jaime's scene over Jon Arryn's body in the pilot, they too were lifted directly from other parts of the novels.Ī decade later, this direct transposing of what's on the page to the screen is par for the course, a been-there-done-that, as His Dark Materials is learning to its detriment. Major plot points came in the same order as they did in the books, including Ned Stark's death before the season finale. Entire segments of dialogue were lifted directly from the page. When Game of Thrones arrived in 2011, one of the ways it reeled in fans was its almost slavish allegiance to the source material. But Cavill does a great job working alongside his fellow leads.
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