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I might give Blood Origin a bash. Didn’t enjoy The Witcher due to the Bard, but will give the world another bash.

Jaskier (the bard) appears in the framing scenes, but he's not involved in the story itself.

I really enjoyed it. For me Meldof the dwarf and her hammer stole the show.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I might give Blood Origin a bash. Didn’t enjoy The Witcher due to the Bard, but will give the world another bash.

I must admit I turned on the new series and was disgusted that the Bard was in it.put up with five mins of his gak and turned it off. Turned it on again FF through it to find its about another Bard and turned it off again.

Watched the first episode. Bard doesn’t bother me at all, and he’s only in the first five minutes or so, as a sort of framing device. After that it’s all elves. Wasn’t bad. Wasn’t particularly great. Then I switched over and binged thru the new Dragon Age cartoon. Netflix’s animated high fantasy stories (also usually video game based) tend to be so much better, or at least much prettier to look at.

Bernard!!

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I saw Blood Origin has released, didn't really even notice it was being released, seems pretty divisive, anyone watched it yet?

Critics and the audience hates it. I wouldn't call that divisive.

Finished watching it.

It was OK. Popcorn high fantasy. Nothing really awesome or outstanding. But I enjoyed it for what it was. Go in with low/moderate expectations and it meets those.

It has the issue of ensemble casts and run times, where you don’t get as much character development as you’d like. But if they added a couple hours to help fill in those backstories, it would feel sluggish and bloated.

I will watch just about anything with Michelle Yeoh in it.

 Easy E wrote:
I will watch just about anything with Michelle Yeoh in it.

I was surprised, but not disappointed to see her. I don’t think I recognized any of the rest of the cast. She’s a big name for a supporting role.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I saw Blood Origin has released, didn't really even notice it was being released, seems pretty divisive, anyone watched it yet?

Critics and the audience hates it. I wouldn't call that divisive.

It seemed like it was getting review bombed due to all the stuff with Henry Cavill, but then also some people (non-critics) were giving it 4 and 5 star reviews saying it was only okay but they wanted to give it 5 stars to counter all the 1 stars, lol.

Makes it pretty hard to guess how good it actually is.

I just think about when I was a youngster, and the "best" we could hope for as Fantasy on the TV was the syndicated Beastmaster show.

We are so spoiled now!

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
It seemed like it was getting review bombed due to all the stuff with Henry Cavill, but then also some people (non-critics) were giving it 4 and 5 star reviews saying it was only okay but they wanted to give it 5 stars to counter all the 1 stars, lol

Not just Cavill, it has (GASP!) black characters in it! And women! And a black woman is one of the leads - that's recipe for rabid screeching and hatebombing no matter how good it is these days. Especially in a show set in universe certain really unpleasant parts of ""fandom"" call white/slavic fantasy (which is really sad/hilarious if you know anything about Sapkowski and what he said about slavic fantasy settings in the most shitstormy article he ever penned).

I'll agree with the above opinions, it's... Okay, I guess? I wish the story was actually written by Sapkowski, but it is what it is. IMO the writers made a mistake of setting it too far back in time making it feel less Witcher-y (only the really avid book readers will have any clue which of these characters are/will be important, and who, judging by obscurity, won't survive for long, which is surprisingly accurate even though it's a new story) but props to them for making the entire cast non-human. I can't really think of other live action fantasy shows that did this. There are also annoying details that really should have been given more screen time/less rushed, but I wouldn't call it exactly bad.

In terms of fantasy I have enjoyed greatly shows like Shadow and Bone, Shanara, Into the Badlands The Outpost which all have plenty of women and diverse cast - its pretty common to have them and they don't even have to be stupidly OP like Discovery's one woman show.

I might give it another go if the Piece of Gak bard idiot never appears again as apparenlty he only pollutes the first scene?

 Irbis wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
It seemed like it was getting review bombed due to all the stuff with Henry Cavill, but then also some people (non-critics) were giving it 4 and 5 star reviews saying it was only okay but they wanted to give it 5 stars to counter all the 1 stars, lol

Not just Cavill, it has (GASP!) black characters in it! And women! And a black woman is one of the leads - that's recipe for rabid screeching and hatebombing no matter how good it is these days. Especially in a show set in universe certain really unpleasant parts of ""fandom"" call white/slavic fantasy (which is really sad/hilarious if you know anything about Sapkowski and what he said about slavic fantasy settings in the most shitstormy article he ever penned).

Not sure I buy the review bombing narrative on this one. Its sitting well into the rotten category on Rotten Tomatoes with critics at 33%.

Just a bad product.

It can be both.

 nels1031 wrote:

 Irbis wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
It seemed like it was getting review bombed due to all the stuff with Henry Cavill, but then also some people (non-critics) were giving it 4 and 5 star reviews saying it was only okay but they wanted to give it 5 stars to counter all the 1 stars, lol

Not just Cavill, it has (GASP!) black characters in it! And women! And a black woman is one of the leads - that's recipe for rabid screeching and hatebombing no matter how good it is these days. Especially in a show set in universe certain really unpleasant parts of ""fandom"" call white/slavic fantasy (which is really sad/hilarious if you know anything about Sapkowski and what he said about slavic fantasy settings in the most shitstormy article he ever penned).

Not sure I buy the review bombing narrative on this one. Its sitting well into the rotten category on Rotten Tomatoes with critics at 33%.

Just a bad product.

It seems to me that if something is mediocre or below mediocre, squeezing in a diverse cast will draw criticism that they put that stuff higher on the list of importance than actually having a good story, and then it'll get scrutinised for bad writing even more.

I still haven't watched it yet, but I was watching a review that was critical of the characters not having any depth or realism to their decision making and scenes progressing in a way that came across as being written like amatuerish fan fiction where they had an idea of a visual element and wrote a scene around it rather than putting a character in the scene and thinking about how they should behave based on their personality and whatnot.

That sort of thing seems like a criticism in many book adaptions where the screen writers aren't putting in as much time, effort and expertise to develop scenes and dialogue/action around those scenes as the original author might have put in when writing the books.

I'll watch it eventually, and usually I don't mind generic fantasy stuff just for some mild entertainment, but there is a part of me that likes The Witcher universe and thinks the show could have been something great instead of "mediocre generic fantasy"... but that's probably just my own fan bias

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
... thinks the show could have been something great instead of "mediocre generic fantasy"... but that's probably just my own fan bias

Well, in order for it to have been that it would have needed a writing staff that didn't have open disdain for the source material.

I don't understand how Blood Origin is being literally eviscerated on r/TheWitcher and r/TheWitcherNetflix, but somehow on DakkaDakka people are like, "Yeah, this show is decent, pretty solid, not bad." Are y'all somehow pounding the Rite-Aid harder than Reddit? The trailers alone are offensively awful.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Irbis wrote:

Not just Cavill, it has (GASP!) black characters in it! And women! And a black woman is one of the leads - that's recipe for rabid screeching and hatebombing no matter how good it is these days.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
... thinks the show could have been something great instead of "mediocre generic fantasy"... but that's probably just my own fan bias

Well, in order for it to have been that it would have needed a writing staff that didn't have open disdain for the source material.

Exactly. They really went mask off with how much they're explicitly using the Witcher for nothing except to exploit its existing brand and not because of any interest in properly adapting or expanding on the source material. It's funny because they got exactly what they wanted with Blood Origins, no Geralt for them to worry about having to follow in terms of characterization and the supporting characters, far enough in the past in a general mythical event that they have effective carte blanche to do what they wanted and they came up with this joke of a show? Pacing being terrible and having a constant "tell don't show" for exposition alongside forgettable and lots of redundant characters makes you wonder what the heck they were thinking when they were writing up the framework for the show.

Feels more like someone wrote down a generic horribly run DnD session that somehow got translated to the big screen. So they ended up proving a lot of people right that Cavill was likely one of the few, people that tried to keep them on task for the first 2 seasons of the Witcher and if the writers had their way with what they wanted completely with Geralt's story and depiction, we would end up with something like Blood Origins, and it really does show they're talentless hacks that can't even write their way out of a paper bag.

I found this quite an interesting take on the new show.

Thing is this situation with the Witcher is honestly nothing new. If anything its very standard practice that adaptations of books/other media in the US (especially but not exclusively) media gets - messed around

It's actually the norm and often as not it seems it only works because enough of the new fanbase are fresh to the media and thus don't come pre-loaded with as many demands/expectations. So the studio can mess around with their statistics of viewer feedback, theories of market potential and target market and all and if they play those cards right they get a new market with an established brand name and all.


Witcher is being different because it started out well and then fell and then the lead actor left; which is the new thing. Most times the actors just stick with it until the production stops being made. So this gives a new angle and I think its increased the whiplash reaction from not just established fans, but also the newfanbase the series had grown for itself.



In the end will it really change anything? I'd like to think that the number of times a book/game has been badly adapted and has backfired on the studio might be a lesson; coupled with how many times a faithful adaptation works. Heck Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are prime examples of a good followed by a bad adaptation; and that's even with LotR getting changed and chopped around a lot.

The audience is also different.

Generationally, the people who played the Witcher Games have a lot of overlap with Netflix and streaming users. Witcher isn't on network TV. You have to go out and get a subscription to watch it.

The audience is narrower, more specifically interested, and more nerdy.

You never feth with the source material with nerds. Not unless you do really really well, because nerds are going to rip it to shreds.

And to be clear: I've read Witcher now. I think it's profoundly mah. I have an extremely high opinion of the Last Wish. The rest? Bargain bin general high fantasy. Not bad. Not very memorable. Maybe it's better in its native polish.

And the tv show sucks. I was a hard sell in S1 because I thought the writers used bad gimmicks. After I read the Last Wish I was my opinion of it lowered further because the Last Wish is easily adaptable right out of the book into a series and instead they employed a lot of bad gimmicks.

And S2 sucked so I don't even care about S3.

I am not a fan of the Witcher generally. And I think the show sucks.

Now the fans not only think the show sucks, but they actively hate it.

So does this show even have an audience anymore?

 LordofHats wrote:
Now the fans not only think the show sucks, but they actively hate it.

Much like the writers actively hate the source material.

So it all worked out in the end.

Started watching the new show/prequel last night. Done before the band got together. They made elves and dwarves the native inhabitants of the world I guess.

But also, it was just fething boring.

Forget all the other stuff that people don't like. It was just boring.

A story about the first Witchers being created doesn't need to start with a bunch of nonsense. It should be starting right in the middle of the conjunction of the spheres. Portals tore open. Realities bled together. Monsters poured in from other worlds and it was chaos.

Let's see that. Let's look at the, basically, extinction level event that was TCotS and then let's see some wizards get together with some warriors to form the foundation of the witcher schools before they really knew what worked and were still figuring things out.

feth do I not care about a Bard named Lark.

I started watching it, it's pretty poor, but I'll probably keep watching it because I'm a sucker for wanting to find out how things end (or maybe I could just read a synopsis, lol).

 Lance845 wrote:
Started watching the new show/prequel last night. Done before the band got together. They made elves and dwarves the native inhabitants of the world I guess.

But also, it was just fething boring.

Forget all the other stuff that people don't like. It was just boring.

A story about the first Witchers being created doesn't need to start with a bunch of nonsense.

I don't think that's the problem, I just think it's written poorly. Great stories can and do often start slow, it lets you establish the characters and see how they develop

But all the other stuff.... that's why (IMO) it feels boring. The pacing doesn't feel right, the dialogue isn't great, you don't feel like the characters are having real conversations, there's no sense of scale to the world, the characters teleport around with no concept of time or distance related to the viewer. I feel like the backing music didn't do a good job of conveying feeling, it seemed like it was always there when most of the time it wasn't needed (that was just my perception as a casual viewer anyway, I didn't go through and count the minutes a backing track was playing, lol), but then when background music and audio effects were needed it didn't rouse any emotion. The main bard chick lacks presence, she just feels like some random modern average young woman if that makes sense, she lacked personality whether that personality was gritty or light hearted or whatever, she just felt flat and boring to me, I dunno how much it's bad acting or bad dialogue. For example...



Nothing feels impactful because it's not grounded in good writing. It feels like fan fiction by someone who doesn't understand how to build that foundation. I think that's why it's getting so many criticisms as "generic fantasy", in this context "generic" just means "written by a mediocre writer". So you have these scenes that are big spectacles, but they're not impactful. For example...



I tend to watch TV on my PC, and this show failed to ensnare my interests to the point where I was occasionally minimising Netflix to check my email or facebook or whatever, lol.

Who the hell cast Lenny Henry in a serious role, the dude can't not be a comedian, the way he talks, the intonation, the pacing of his speech, the dude is a natural comedian.

I don't have a problem with the diversity hires in the cast, but I can see why some people do. It makes it feel like a modern big western city, like London or LA or something (the accents make it lean toward feeling like London ). I think the way to do racial diversity well is to use it like how it is in the real world. Different races come from different places and have different cultures, there can be places where diverse peoples combine (like an in-world version of a London) but it just feels weird to have a clan that, if I understood correctly, membership is hereditary, but then it is made up of a mixture of European caucasians, East Asians, South Asians, Africans, etc. It just doesn't feel real, it's like someone's idea of racial diversity equals modern London, lol.

Let's see that. Let's look at the, basically, extinction level event that was TCotS and then let's see some wizards get together with some warriors to form the foundation of the witcher schools before they really knew what worked and were still figuring things out.

Although I like The Witcher universe, I don't have a great knowledge of the lore, but I think Witchers were created by humans some time after the Conjunction?

feth do I not care about a Bard named Lark.

Yeah I agree, but I think that's just bad writing. I cared about a Hobbit named Sam. Tolkien took the most insignificant of people and made them the people you care about most.