Thursday, July 30, 2020

Oh toss a break to your witcher...

That sound your hearing? That's just the soft scraping noise of me rolling my cynical eyes at the news of a Witcher spin-off series.
Sorry, a spin-off of the TV adaptation of the English-language
version of some Polish novels that were popularized by a series of
video games of which most of us only noticed the third one.
Pictured: Novelist, train conductor and
mall Santa, George R. R. Martin, seen
here not working on book six.
And I don't know, maybe it'll be great. I don't like, review things on this blog because who cares what I think? But I enjoyed the Henry Cavill series. The inevitable and probably too obvious comparison was Game of Thrones since they are both grim/dark fantasies based on novels with built in fandoms and lots graphic violence and nudity to make us adults feel like we're not watching nonsense for babies. But unlike the unrelenting self-importance of GOT, The Witcher didn't feel like it took itself so goddamn seriously all the time.

Look, if you want to drive to Colonial
Williamsburg and ask, be my guest,
but I'm pretty sure I'm right on this one.
Ok, but if The Witcher was good, then more Witcher should also be good, right? Weeelll...no. Not necessarily. For one thing, we've seen exactly one season of the show so cranking out another, separate series seems a bit premature. There's striking while the iron is hot and then there's starting on another horseshoe before you've even dunked your first horseshoe in the water-or whatever. I'm not great at blacksmithing metaphors, but I guess my point is that maybe give it a minute?

Thank God. I assume. I've never
seen it, but I hate everything.
And another thing: it's a prequel. Because of course it's a prequel. And I suppose that tracks since there's also going to be a Game of Thrones prequel. Oh, and don't expect this to be the Young Witcher Chronicles, this prequel is going to be set way before the Henry Cavill series. So it's not like Deep Space Nine where characters could cross over because again and it's not even like Young Sheldon where actors play younger versions of the characters we're familiar with. This is set twelve hundred years before The Witcher.

Above: Idiots and goons. Yes, I'm
making it about him. Everything is about
him until he's out of office and in jail.
Again, maybe The Witcher: Chronicles of the Rise of the Origins of Whatever will be great. Who knows? Maybe all we've been needing to get us through the never-ending horror that is America's decline and inevitable balkanization at the hands of idiots and goons is a second TV show about characters who existed hundreds of years before the characters we found tentatively interesting in that one season of one show we all watched because George R. R. Martin's heart warming tale of incest and ice zombies ended.

Still though, I can't help but wonder why this is a prequel and not an original thing. I mean, twelve hundred years? That's a prequel to The Witcher in the same way that the Middle Ages were a prequel to Katy Perry. They both happened in the same world but are separated by so much time, what's even the point? Oh, right, brand recognition...
What? Don't give me that look. You know it's true.

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