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Reviews
The Witcher: Dear Friend... (2021)
This is a retelling advertised as an adaptation
I'm trying to enjoy this and failing at every attempt. Don't get me wrong, this is solid entertaining mainstream tv. With that comes your typical lack of attention to details, plot conveniences, upped drama & visually pleasing action. As someone who read the incredible source material of the witcher though, I can by now clearly say that this is a mainstream retelling falsely advertised as a faithful adaptation.
The differences are not in any way, shape or form subtle. Yennefer, one of the 3 main characters of the series, has a widely different arc throughout this season than in the books and her arcs' climax in this episode is a betrayal to her character and her relationship with both Ciri & Geralt. Ciri can apparently open portals before training & learning how to control her chaos. And let's not start on Vesemir. The changes extend to the very lore of the continent with elves being able to reproduce now which would render some of the future conflicts with Ciri meaningless. That's just a small portion of the changes. Plot, lore & characters changes.
They had a perfectly apt source material with a huge fan base ready to love & support it. They advertised it as a faithful adaptation and spread stories on how henry cavill is making sure they're staying true to the books, which sounds ridiculous now. Then they either failed to follow up with their intentions or straight up decided the story wasn't good enough and needed their interference. Beyond disappointed.
The Witcher: Kaer Morhen (2021)
This has gone south so fast
It's one thing to take the liberty of diverging from the source material in ways that serve the visual medium. It's another to tell different stories than the ones told in the source material and deliver widely different interpretations of our characters.
The only faithful part to the books at this point is that ciri & geralt are in Kaer Morhen and ciri is training, that's it. Kaer Morhen itself was stripped of its secluded aura. Instead, its a place where witchers bring girls to from town for entertainment purposes. Vesemir's reaction to that alone is so out of character that it's enough for me to claim these writers either think they can write better characters than those of the novels or seriously have problems interpreting them. As for the Eskel controversy, well that's quite simply wasn't Eskel. The writers took the liberty of creating a new character and giving him Eskel's name. Or at least that's what I told myself while watching. It makes it less bothersome.
In the meantime, there's another storyline going on that was extremely confusing, reductive to the political intrigue of the continent and has nothing to do with anything that ever happened in the books. And again it's not just the plot. I can live with plot changes. It's the characters interpretations I have issues with. Fringilla, Cahir & Francesca are very widely different from their source material characters that I already have troubles seeing how can they take these characters to where the novels took them by the end.
Needless to say, I'm disappointed. The show did improve in most its technical aspects. You can also tell how much effort the actors are putting into this. But the negatives surrounding the writing are outweighing it all, at least for me as a book reader. I'm sure most non book readers people will enjoy watching this because the quality of the production & the fun factor are undoubtedly there. But as a fan of the books, this has already gone so deep into the wrong direction for me I don't know if it can be fixed anymore. And it's disappointing.