Alright... It's Time to Rant About the Witcher
This isn’t a subject I want to talk about so much as one I have to talk about—an exorcism, a purging, a dragging of demons into the sunlight so I can move on with my life, step into greener pastures, and finally walk toward that far green country Gandalf so eloquently spoke of as he pondered the quiet mercy of what awaits us after death.
Because this subject has not merely annoyed me. It has besieged me.
For months now, it’s felt like I’ve been holed up in my great hall, the fires guttering low, while enemies—faceless, merciless—pound at my gates with the thunderous rhythm of war drums. Every strike of their steel is an omen. A warning. A reminder that my end draws near if I do not rise and speak. If I do not pick up the sword and name the offense.
That is how FUCKING MUCH I feel for this subject.
That is the gravity of the violation.
And that is why I’m writing this today—because if I don’t, I’m genuinely afraid the enemy will win. They will break down the doors, they will drag me out screaming, and I will be forced to watch everything I love burned, razed, and left in ruin behind them.
So let me be absolutely clear:
This is YOUR FUCKING FAULT, NETFLIX.
Not mine.
Not the fans’.
Not Henry Cavill’s.
YOURS.
You did this.
And the tragedy—the insult, the galling cosmic joke—is that it would have been easy to get right. Painfully easy. A gift-wrapped franchise handed to you on a silver platter by a fandom begging you, pleading with you, to just follow the map. To honor the characters. To respect the tone. To actually read the fucking books.
Instead?
You chose to bastardize nearly every single aspect of something millions of us hold dear.
You chose to carve it apart like you were gutting a fish.
You chose to mutate it, dilute it, strip it of meaning and soul and heart.
And the worst part?
You didn’t care.
Not one fucking bit.
Not when we warned you.
Not when we begged you.
Not when Cavill tried to guide you.
Not when the fans revolted.
Not when the ratings sank.
Not when the writing crumbled.
At no point—not once—did you pause and ask yourselves the simplest, most obvious question any storyteller worth a grain of salt would ask:
“Do we actually love this world enough to do it justice?”
Your actions answered that question for you.
You didn’t love it.
You didn’t respect it.
You didn’t even like it.
And the result is a hollow corpse wearing the Witcher’s skin like a poor disguise.
It was an early November night—cold, quiet, the kind of night where the world feels like it’s holding its breath. I was sitting in the waiting room of an Evansville, Indiana hospital, waiting for my little brother to be born.
I was twenty years old.
My girlfriend at the time was curled up beside me, half-asleep under a blanket.
My mother—forty years old—was a hallway away, bringing a new life into the world.
And I?
I was nowhere near any of it.
Physically present, spiritually gone. Lost in another realm entirely.
Because in my hands was The Last Wish—a tiny red pocketbook that might as well have been a doorway. And Geralt of Rivia, with every page, was quickly becoming one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. The world Sapkowski painted felt impossibly real. His prose was elegant without pretension, snappy without losing depth, verbose in the way only true literary fantasy can be—beautiful when it needed to be, brutal when it had to be.
I’d written things before—Tolkien-inspired high fantasy, Clavell-inspired epics, and after reading Brian Keene’s The Rising a year earlier, some horror that still clung to me. But nothing hit me the way The Last Wish did. Nothing peeled open the ribcage of my imagination the way Sapkowski’s writing did.
Yes, it was fantasy—monsters, magic, prophecies, the whole feast.
But it felt modern in its morality.
Characters weren’t black and white.
The world wasn’t idealized.
It was gritty, muddy, flawed—just like the real world.
Geralt wasn’t some shining knight on horseback.
He wasn’t a myth.
He wasn’t a symbol.
He felt like a real man who had been thrown into a world that demanded too much of him, and he met it with weary pragmatism, razor wit, and reluctant compassion.
And then the games came along—adaptations that didn’t just honor the books, but expanded them. They felt canon, not because someone said they were, but because they fit. Seamlessly. Effortlessly. Respectfully. You could go from book to game, game to book, without the world ever breaking or the characters ever warping.
That kind of reverence is rare.
That kind of consistency is sacred.
That kind of love for source material is what every adaptation should strive for.
So that night, in that dim waiting room, that little red pocketbook became more than entertainment. It became a portal, a threshold, a point of no return. I stepped into that world—and I didn’t come back the same person.
It was transformative.
It changed my relationship to storytelling.
It set the bar for what characters and worlds could be—what they should be.
Because the world of The Witcher felt intrinsically complete—so well-defined, so carefully constructed, so deeply lived-in—that the idea of altering it felt like sacrilege. And from that moment forward, I made myself a promise. A vow. A creative creed:
Character assassination is a sin.
World assassination is a sin.
And both deserve punishment.
As such, let the lashings begin...
The Witcher, much like Resident Evil (which I also love—and which has likewise been mercilessly butchered by people who apparently learned storytelling from a cereal box), should have been the simplest, most effortless slam-dunk Hollywood has seen in decades. A one-sheet masterclass in “Here’s how to adapt something beloved and make absurd amounts of money while doing literally the bare minimum.”
It could have been the next Game of Thrones. It genuinely could have been the next Harry Potter, the next Lord of the Rings. It could have defined a generation of fantasy television.
The people in charge could be making bazillions—that’s not an exaggeration—bazillions of dollars. They could have their faces plastered on billboards, they could have fans lining up at conventions to have their tits signed, they could have been ushered into the pop-culture pantheon alongside the creators of Star Wars, Shogun, and the entire modern fantasy canon.
They had the keys to the kingdom.
They had the golden goose.
They had a fandom begging—begging—to be pleased.
And they still fucked it up.
The amount of could’ve, should’ve, would’ve with this show is staggering enough to fill an entire library wing. And the number of wouldn’ts, couldn’ts, and didn’ts? Even higher. A tragic monument to incompetence.
But before I start detailing the catastrophic failures—and there are many—let me actually give credit where it’s due.
I love Henry Cavill.
I would not have cast him as Geralt.
Not initially.
But am I glad he was cast?
Absolutely.
Unequivocally.
Without question.
He became the one redeeming element in an otherwise floundering cast assembled via diversity checkboxes rather than quality of performance. More importantly, he was the only person in the entire production—writers, directors, executives, producers included—who gave a GODDAMN FUCKING SHIT about Geralt, about the Witcher, and about the world Sapkowski built.
We’ll talk more about that powder keg later.
Set design? Great.
Production quality? Solid.
Costumes? Strong work all around.
Some of the CGI dipped into Saturday-morning-cartoon territory—especially that dragon, which looked like it wandered in from an early Dreamcast tech demo—but fine, I’m not picky there. I liked The Flash movie, for God’s sake, and that CGI often looked like someone smeared Vaseline on the screen and called it a spell effect.
But aside from Henry Cavill and the art department?
Did they get anything else right? Anything at all?
Even by accident?
Because fuck me sideways and call me Dagon’s butler—this show misses so spectacularly, so consistently, so aggressively that you’d think they were aiming for failure on purpose.
And look, I’m going to try—really try—to write this entire blog without diving into the race-swapping disaster. Not because I don’t think it’s an issue. I do. I absolutely do. But there are so many other problems, so much more egregious narrative vandalism, that I refuse to dilute the deeper analysis by talking about the most surface-level symptom.
We’ve already discussed that in one of our Youtube videos.
For now, we begin with Lashing Number One—the single most important violation. The wound from which all others bleed.
This show hasn't a SINGLE FUCKING CLUE who Geralt is...
Not one.
And it’s almost impressive how thoroughly and repeatedly it proves that. You’d think—just maybe—the people adapting one of the biggest fantasy IPs of the last twenty years would have cracked open a book or even booted up The Witcher 3 on easy mode before deciding they knew better. He’s only the main character of an entire global franchise, the face on every game cover, every book reprint, every piece of merch, a Funko Pop, a statue, a meme, a cultural anchor.
But no—apparently that level of notoriety doesn’t warrant effort. Or research. Or the slightest understanding of the man behind the swords.
Because here’s the part that sets my balls on fire: Geralt, as Sapkowski wrote him, is dry, sardonic, weary, frighteningly perceptive, and philosophical to the point of self-harm. He’s a moral negotiator navigating a world that punishes morality. He’s the guy who kills monsters because someone has to, then spends three days thinking about whether killing them was a failure of compassion.
His entire identity is built on nuance—on questioning evil, neutrality, destiny, humanity, cruelty, and the pointlessness of picking a side in a war where both leaders are assholes.
You know, a character.
Netflix Geralt, by contrast, communicates like someone who suffered a traumatic brain injury during Witcher training. He grunts. He scowls. He mutters one-liners like he’s allergic to syllables. They nailed the voice Henry Cavill insisted on, but stripped it of every idea, every thought, every shred of introspection that voice was supposed to carry. Henry tried to inject depth into a script that treated introspection like a scheduling conflict, but the writing drags him down into a caricature.
This isn’t Geralt of Rivia. This is a fantasy John Wick with medieval creatine and a wig.
Geralt is supposed to think. To wrestle with ethical dilemmas. To argue with priests. To talk Nenneke out of strangling him. To debate with kings and sorceresses about right and wrong because someone in the room has to have a functioning moral compass.
Sapkowski’s Geralt uses silence strategically, sarcasm philosophically, and humor like an emotional pressure valve. Netflix’s Geralt uses silence because the writers genuinely seem unsure what he should say. They took the outline of a brilliant character, erased the center, and filled the shape with gravel and sweat.
And the tragedy is that Geralt is not meant to be cool. He’s meant to be true. He’s a tragic figure trapped in a profession that robs him of both belonging and absolution. He cares too much in a world that doesn’t care at all. Netflix cuts all of that depth away and leaves us with an action figure—poseable elbows, removable swords, limited vocabulary. They did not adapt the internal conflict, the ethical weight, the emotional restraint, the poetry buried under the profanity.
They adapted the poster.
They stripped a philosopher and gave us a grunt machine.
And then they had the nerve to act like this was Geralt—the Geralt—the one readers spent decades dissecting and gamers spent hundreds of hours embodying. The version people fell in love with. The version whose quiet pain gives the entire saga its tonal gravity. If you’re going to make a Witcher show and you don’t understand Geralt, you don’t understand anything.
And Netflix proved that with stunning, relentless efficiency. Not just by assassinating his character, but relegating him to being a side character in the show LITERALLY named for him...
Cavill did his best. Read the books, played the games, approached the role like someone who cared about it and was kicked to the curb and labeled "difficult" because he wanted the source material to be at the forefront.
They cared so little about Geralt as a character that they made sure to remove the one person who cared about him from the production, just to ensure he didn't have a voice. That alone should be enough...
VERDICT: TEN LASHES
My dearest Yennefer, what did they do to you, my love...
To say that Yennefer—the real Yennefer—is important to me is a slight to the truth of it. She’s not just a character I enjoyed; she’s foundational bedrock. She’s the reason I know how to write women with teeth, women with contradictions, women who can be cruel and vulnerable in the same breath. She’s the spark that inspired Abigail Alden in the Wicker Anthology—my protagonist born from Yen’s fire, Yen’s independence, Yen’s impossible blend of brokenness and control.
The way Yen pushes Geralt away and pulls him close, the elastic tension of their romance, the storms they weather through love and fury and longing—that rhythm shaped the way I write relationships. She isn’t inspiration.
She’s a muse in the most ferocious, mythic sense of the word.
And that’s before we even touch on her visual identity in The Witcher 3, which remains—still—the perfect translation of book-Yen into visual form. Intelligent eyes, intimidating posture, elegance sharpened like a blade, beauty that feels earned through force of will. When I saw her on screen in that game, she was exactly the woman I’d built in my mind years earlier. It was as if CD Projekt RED reached into my skull and pulled out the image I already carried.
They understood her. They respected her. They didn’t soften her, simplify her, sanitize her, or repackage her into something convenient. They delivered her exactly as she is.
Which is why Netflix’s version of Yennefer hits me like an insult.
Yen in Sapkowski’s world is a fully-formed tempest from the moment she steps onto the page. Ambition, trauma, brilliance, ruthlessness, tenderness—she contains all of it at once, and that complexity is the point. She is intimidating because she knows what she wants, seductive because she understands the power she wields, inscrutable because she chooses to be. She controls every room she enters. She bends fate out of sheer spite.
Her history is revealed through action, sharp dialogue, and emotional contradiction—not through a tragic hunchback montage begging for pity. Her mystique comes from the fact that she’s already paid the price for her power, and she doesn’t owe anyone the story.
Netflix apparently looked at that masterpiece of character design and decided what she really needed was a melodramatic origin story ripped from a CW fever dream. They reduced her to a tragedy-porn project: the bullied hunchback, the abused apprentice, the “chosen” victim who gets a magical makeover so she can finally be pretty and powerful enough for the plot. It’s embarrassing. It’s reductive. And it’s utterly incompatible with the Yennefer who shaped my writing and my imagination.
Instead of the razor-edged, whip-smart enchantress who commands fear and desire simultaneously, the show’s Yen wanders through her storyline like she’s trying on different character archetypes every time the script changes hands. Her motivations swing wildly from episode to episode—power, love, motherhood, freedom, destiny, self-destruction—with no coherent thread. This isn’t mystery or depth; it’s narrative vertigo. She doesn’t feel enigmatic. She feels lost. She doesn’t feel dangerous. She feels directionless. She doesn’t feel like the volcanic force I know. She feels like a trope searching for a personality.
And the worst part: they stripped away her ruthless composure and replaced it with cheap melodrama. Book-Yen is sharp, biting, emotionally layered in ways that never beg for sympathy. Show-Yen cries, panics, throws tantrums, screams at the sky, and exists in a perpetual state of “somebody please tell me what my arc is supposed to be.” They turned one of the most iconic, complex women in fantasy into a prestige-TV stereotype with purple contacts.
They didn’t misunderstand Yennefer. They erased her.
And because she isn’t just a character to me—because she’s the root system beneath so much of the writing I cherish, the female characters I create, the relationships I build on the page—seeing her flattened, simplified, and torn apart by writers who clearly didn’t respect the source isn’t just disappointing. It’s personal.
They adapted the idea of Yennefer as imagined by someone who never met her.
VERDICT: TEN LASHES
The world and the tone of it are completely dismantled...
If you’ve read The Last Wish, do you remember the moral dilemma surrounding Princess Adda—the Striga Geralt wasn't meant to kill, the monster who was a child who was a curse who was a victim? Do you remember how heavy that felt? How wrong it felt? How right it felt? How torn you were? Geralt wasn’t hacking at a creature; he was trying to save a girl buried inside teeth and fury, praying the world hadn’t already decided she didn’t deserve saving.
If you’ve played The Witcher 3, do you remember helping the Bloody Baron find his abused wife, only to discover the rot in his soul had created a botchling—an aborted, cursed infant that whimpered and clawed at the earth? Do you remember how it forced you to decide whether to soothe it or slay it? Do you remember how sickening and human it was? That is The Witcher. That sick, tender, awful, empathetic feeling where there are no clean answers and doing the “right” thing still tastes like blood.
Do you remember the moment on the mountain with Yennefer as the Djinn approached—when the “true last wish” finally hung in the air like a blade over both their throats? Do you remember that mix of love and terror, the fear that their bond might be destiny’s cage instead of free will’s kiss? That scene wasn’t romance. It was vulnerability weaponized by fate.
Where is it in the show?
Where is any of that?
Because Netflix’s Witcher has the moral weight of a damp fucking napkin in a windstorm. The show doesn’t even attempt to reach for the emotional gravity that defines Sapkowski’s world. There are no gut-wrenching dilemmas. No fairy tales rotting under the surface. No ethical knots you can’t untangle. The world doesn’t feel lived in; it feels storyboarded. The people don’t feel wounded; they feel written. The pain doesn’t feel inherited; it feels performative.
The tone of the books—and the games, which absorbed Sapkowski’s soul so thoroughly it practically became canon—was folklore dipped in sadness, a moral swamp where every path ends in regret, compassion, or catastrophe. Monsters were metaphors. Humans were worse. Every choice had teeth.
Netflix wipes all of that away like it’s smudges on a prop mirror.
Instead of grappling with moral rot, the show opts for spectacle without meaning. The monsters are generic, the politics are shallow, the losses are weightless, and the emotions are telegraphed rather than earned. The Continent feels sanitized, like a convention hall dressed up for a fantasy expo—flashy, overlit, and hollow. There’s no grime in the corners. No superstition in the bones. No ghost stories whispered by peasants who lost relatives to the woods.
The Witcher is defined by moments where your heart clenches, where you question humanity, where you ache for monsters, where your morals get dragged screaming into the mud. It’s defined by scenes that make you sit back and stare at the wall because the game or the book just punched you in the soul.
They didn’t just lighten the tone—they amputated it.
VERDICT: 10 LASHES
The mistreatment of Henry Cavill...
I’m prefacing this with the obvious: we don’t know what happened behind closed doors. None of us were on the calls, in the meetings, or sitting at the table when decisions were made. But here’s what we do know—what we saw, what we heard, what we witnessed in interviews, and what the showrunners themselves publicly revealed without realizing how damning it was.
And the public throwing-under-the-bus of the only actor on the entire production—no, scratch that—the only person involved in any way who actually gave a single, solitary, burning-in-the-depths-of-Mount-Doom fuck… is still, and always will be, unforgivable.
Here is a man who: read the books multiple times, played the games, understood the lore, fought for accuracy, begged for depth, tried to keep the tone intact, tried to maintain character consistency, tried to protect Geralt from becoming a parody of himself, and approached this role with reverence bordering on religious.
Henry wasn’t just “playing Geralt”—he was the fandom’s avatar on set. He was the only one carrying the torch for Sapkowski’s world. The writers didn’t. The producers didn’t. The showrunners didn’t. The executives didn’t. But Henry did.
And how did Netflix and the showrunners repay that commitment?
By publicly disavowing him. By minimizing him. By quietly framing him as the problem.
They couldn’t call him “difficult” outright—he’s too beloved, too respected, too clean-cut for that. So they used soft-PR wording: “creative differences”, “Henry had his own vision”, “he wanted to push the show in a different direction”, “the writers room doesn’t always align with the actors.”
Then came the leaks—those oh-so-convenient whispers about him being “toxic,” “misogynistic,” “hard to work with,” “too focused on the games,” “too demanding about the lore.”
Everything about those leaks screamed damage control from a production panicking that fans would side with Cavill. Which, of course, they did—because the fandom isn’t stupid. Fans saw through that PR fog instantly.
Why? Because Cavill showed nothing but: humility, respect, enthusiasm, professionalism, and a sincere, heartfelt love for the source material.
Meanwhile the showrunners spent multiple interviews bragging about: not caring about the books, mocking the games, disregarding canon, breaking characters, and announcing changes with the smugness of people who genuinely thought they were improving the material.
They didn’t treat Henry like a collaborator. They treated him like an obstacle.
The tragedy is that if they had simply listened to him—if they had treated Henry Cavill the way Peter Jackson treated Viggo Mortensen, or the way CD Projekt treated their writers—they could’ve had a fantasy masterpiece.
VERDICT: 10 LASHES
Let This Rot, Let This Die, Let the Soil Remember Better Stories
And now we arrive at the end of this cursed autopsy, standing knee-deep in the smoking ruins of what could’ve been greatness. And here’s where I say something I wish I didn’t have to say, something that has become painfully predictable in the age of streaming adaptations:
No, I’m talking about Netflix’s Resident Evil… the “adaptation” that was Resident Evil in name only. A show that had no understanding of the horror, no love for the world, no respect for the lore, and no connection to the characters tens of millions of fans grew up with. A show so aggressively not Resident Evil that it may as well have been titled Zombie High and aired on The CW.
Two beloved franchises—The Witcher and Resident Evil—both gutted, hollowed out, scraped clean, and filled with a slurry of corporate activism, shallow messaging, surface-level “modernization,” and writing that feels like homework completed by people who openly resent the source.
They take a recognizable name, a beloved world, a passionate fandom, and then mutate it into something unrecognizable—something that preaches down to its own audience, something designed by committees and activists instead of creatives, something that uses the skin of the original story like a Halloween costume while shoving a completely different agenda inside.
And that is why these shows fail.
If the creators do not care, if they do not feel what the fans feel, if they do not breathe the world and understand its heartbeat, then what they make will not be that world. It will be a parallel universe stitched together from marketing briefs and social media trends.
And the result is always the same:
And now, tragically, The Witcher is walking the same path—limping, bleeding, staggering toward the same shallow grave. An adaptation that has no business existing under the name it stole. An adaptation devoid of the soul that made the original beloved.
And so I say this with zero hesitation:
For only when these hollow adaptations are snuffed out—truly gone—can space be made for the real thing. The thing made with love. The thing crafted with understanding. The thing built by people who actually remember why these worlds mattered to begin with.
And until then?
Let the ashes speak the truth the showrunners tried so hard to bury:
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