Oh, Holidays! Parties, Gatherings, and all that glitz!

Not for me. While I could do some writing, believe you me there’s a backlog of writing I need to get to do, I decided to get through my to-watch list. Hey, I did get to update King Wolf so I wasn’t that inattentive to my writing duties.

I’ve been reading a lot of good things on The Witcher from my friends, so I decided to finish it before more spoiler-y content gets into my feed. As always, I will try to not spoil anything.

Multiple Timelines Woven In

Suffice to say, my friend telling me that there are separate timelines in the narrative helped make sure that I was aware of it going in. I have another friend who finished watching it without knowing this and said that she’d like to re-watch the entire thing to have a better understanding of what’s going on.

It’s no longer unusual to find a non-linear approach to the timeline in telling a story. But as the story progresses, it seems to me the right approach and it was beautifully executed.

It can be a bit confusing with characters living extremely long lives without aging, but there are visual and dialogue cues if you know to spot them.

The White Wolf

Henry Cavill portrays Geralt of Rivia, a witcher which is this world’s term for a mutated being. He’s a monster hunter who does jobs for coins. As the bard richly played it, “throw a coin to this witcher, oh valley of plenty.”

Geralt doesn’t always take the jobs offered him like a freelancer who has enough dignity about himself and chooses the jobs to take. But sometimes, he still does it anyway because it aligns with what he believes in (it never is quite that clear what he really believes in tbh).

Henry plays the role well. He is also rocking that long white hair and yellow eyes! He’s a fine male specimen, and I’m pretty sure a lot of people agree with me on this one (my twitter feed says so).

The Chaotic Sorceress

Anya Chalotra is Yennefer of Vengerberg. She was born with magic, but not the good looks which she eventually gains but at a big cost. Well, she was willing to pay that cost. Until many many many years after when she regrets that decision and tries to regain that which she gave up. Yes, I’m being really vague.

I like Yennefer and enjoyed her story. She ends up being a very jaded and angry with the world sorceress. But deep inside she just wants to be recognized and loved. Awww. She’s a force to reckon with! And she has great lines too.

The Princess

There are a number of princesses in this story. But the most important one is princess of Cintra named Cirilla/Ciri played by Freya Allan. Early on, we are introduced to her having powers that she does not know of. And as the story progresses, we get to see her efforts to escape people who want her. We also find out about her parents and her grandparents.

As a sheltered princess, she is rather naive but sometimes it’s good to see the world with fresh eyes. However, there’s still a lot of mystery about her. She’s young so her character hasn’t had adventures like Geralt and Yennefer.

I don’t know if she’s going to be a power for good or evil. Or maybe, the sorceress Fringilla was right that the world is more complicated to see it in good-evil binary. But personally, slaying of innocent is evil in my book.

Destiny

There’s a thread of destiny woven to intertwine these three characters. Every person and various events lead up to them meeting. It becomes a recurring theme drilled into the dialogue during the last half of the series that if you still don’t get it at the end, you probably weren’t paying attention.

Conclusion

I definitely liked it and would recommend it to friends. The dialogues are fun. My favorite being “you with all the magical talent of shoe leather?” The visuals are great and enhanced through CGI. The actors played their parts well and are believable. If you like watching fantasy epics with magic and battles, this one is for you.

After finding out that it’s based on an RPG video game and a series of books, I’m rather curious about these. Not having a console gaming device anymore, I’m giving up wanting to play it. But I’ll probably try to acquire the books and learn more about these characters.