I first encountered Geralt of Rivia when I bought The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for my boyfriend as a thank you gift when he’d looked after me while I was sick. I knew he’d been wanting it for a while and was waiting for the right moment to buy it. He completed it to approximately 90%, a lot of with me sitting on the couch next to him while I was doing other things, and then the PS4 had the indecency to crash. The hard drive was beyond saving, and the cloud backup of the save files hadn’t worked. Days’ worth of playtime was gone (a similar fate befell Fallout 4).
In the years since this personal tragedy, my darling boyfriend was too embittered to start all the way over again, but we happily found a gaming groove (I recommend all couples find one); we will actually share games, tagging out and handing the controller over to the other when one of us gets fatigued. I always said that I’d play The Witcher so that we could finally finish it, but the scale of the game was simply too big, and other games were too shiny and interesting.
And then it was made into an English-language Netflix series. I was deeply skeptical about it; was Henry Cavill really the right man for the job? Was this really necessary – it is after all, a series of books. In a world of remakes and seemingly unending franchises, surely this is yet another nail in the coffin of original thought and content and thus should be bemoaned rather than celebrated?
I am happy to admit that I was wrong. On effectively every count.
Geralt seems the role Cavill was born to play, a fact of which I am only more certain since discovering that he loved the games so much he was compelled to lobby for the role. My admiration has only increased upon learning that he dehydrated for three days before his shirtless scenes, and that his biceps were so huge he actually ripped costumes. That’s a man who’s dedicated to his role.
What has emerged as particularly interesting about the Witcher phenomenon is the way the story, characters, and setting, has been so effectively and successfully transposed across different mediums. Making video games from preexisting stories (be it from screen or books) has a long history – several superhero movies, The Lord of the Rings (those camera angles really were abominable in two player mode), and of course, many of the Star Wars games. Interestingly, it is more common for books and films to be expanded out of videogames, although with varying quality (see Pokémon which was a game for the OG Nintendo Game Boy a year before the classic TV show came out, Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia, Resident Evil, Lara Croft Tomb Raider…should we perhaps cross our fingers a hope for a Mass Effect film?).
Yet The Witcher is arguably distinct among these example because of the way it has so successfully straddled the three mediums with such a distinct yet successful versions of the world that uses the same characters and the same basic storyline, but with variances that mean they could be enjoyed independently and without reference or knowledge to the others. They all portray Geralt, and examine the experience of being a Witcher in a world beset by monsters and with a highly complex and changing political landscape. And they all examine Geralt’s relationship with Ciri and Yennefer (although it’s only by the third game, that Geralt’s relationship with Ciri and Yennefer is thoroughly explored as a core part of his identity). But they do so in their own fashion and take the necessary deviations from each other in order to serve the medium and the facet of the story they want to tell.
The book series are the obvious source material as they came first. And the world in its intricacy and cleverness is created by Andrzej Sapkowski. But the games do something interesting with the characters and the world – they tell the continuation of the story after the books end while providing a remarkably visual rendering of the world Sapkowski has created. This alone is an interesting diversion from the Netflix series, as the makers were limited by the landscapes that exist in the real world. The makers did a great job of finding locations, primarily across Central and Eastern Europe (Sapkowski is Polish, so it’s a lovely homage to the landscape and culture which inspired the story), but they invariably differ from the landscapes in a game or a book, as they can be freely rendered from the imagination. However, the rest of the lore is almost entirely pulled straight from the books, rather than created to fit the storylines that are generated by the game.
This is unusual because whereas lore for universes such as Mass Effect and Star Wars were created after the original material was produced by both official and unofficial channels, the world of The Witcher is almost purely derived from a single cohesive canon. The only instance where the world was really added to was in the games where they created a map which was not in the original versions of the books and only partially added by a Czech translation. The most comprehensive maps of the continent were made by the videogames, which is subsequently the one that the Netflix series’ map is based off. The interactive demonstration of the geography and the timelines is interesting as well, as can be see in this excellent piece of bonus content from Netflix.
In part, this is because the focus of all three narratives is on the same characters, but at different points in time. But it’s nevertheless fascinating because Sapkowski, while cooperating with the creators of both the games and the series, only did so to a limited extent. As a result, we also see three different portrayals of the same person at different points in their narrative – in the books, in the games which have created a narrative set after the books, and in the series which has taken the prequel anthology of short stories and spun them into something more cohesive. However, all of these versions pull from the same worldbuilding.
So within the context of the multiple formats, viewers receive something that is fresh, yet contains the same basic components of the storyline. With each new version, a new way of examining the story is made possible, which arguably then offers scope to refine the story or spin it in a few way. Indeed, the directors of the Netflix series noted that they diverged from the books in order to make a better end result.
With the recent announcement of an animated Witcher film to tide viewers over before the arrival of season 2 in 2021, this only confirms the unusual and dynamic nature of the world, characters, and storyline. An interview with one of the people behind the series and film noted:
“literal decades of the Witcher timeline [are] left tantalisingly blank. A film, animated or otherwise, would be the perfect opportunity to fill in those gaps to see what the monster hunter has been getting up to away from his time with Yennefer and Jaskier.”
The fact that Geralt has lived a hundred years even before the beginning of the series, and that it follows his timeline across a decade, checking in with him as his narrative intertwines with other main characters certainly leaves much to be explored and depicted without stepping on the toes of the ‘main’ storyline.
At its core, The Witcher is a really good story, set in a detailed and brilliantly crafted world. But the fact that the series has spawned a successful videogame franchise, a series, and soon, an animated film, puts it in a very special league that marks it as a spectacular narrative phenomenon. I for one, can’t wait to see how it progresses.
