feel free to ignore this if you don't have the spoons, but would you recommend the new Witcher show to someone who hasn't played the games/read the books? I keep seeing lots of cool stuff, but most of the people I see talking about it were already fans of the series so I'm a little worried about going in blind. (Also it sucks that the holidays are so draining for you and I hope you feel better soon).
So one big thing I will say, is that the thing they are doing with the timeline? It’s really confusing, even to those of us who have read the books and played the games. I think they’re trying to do something clever with it, given that one of the character’s main abilities is later found out to be time travel, but it kinda falls flat and just comes across as confusing. I hope they will do something to clarify this in season 2, or just, stop doing it cause it doesn’t work well on screen like this. Not without a lot of visual cues or heavy narrative exposition which is what they seem to be trying to avoid for the sake of *spoilers*.
As for the rest of it, I think they explain the world fairly well? It’s very heavily “ye olde European inspired fantasy” so the world itself isn’t that unique or hard to grasp. You’ve seen one big-budget generic fantasy renfaire you’ve seen ‘em all :P
Some of the magic scenes with Yen can be a bit “wait what” but they do a fairly good job of clarifying things imo.
I really am not a fan of how they portrayed Yen’s disabilities, (ie: the true disability is how she looks and not say, the debilitating curve in her spine which apparently does not affect her beyond making her look “ugly”, but that’s able-bodied people writing disabled characters for you) and how she “overcomes” them, but that’s true to the canon source so I wasn’t expecting much. Geralt is really well done, and I will say they seem to have toned down the sexism of the games quite a lot. There was nothing that jumped out at me that made me go “yikes” like some of the games did. So that was a good improvement.
So no, I don’t think you need to have read the books or played the games to understand it.Mostly it just feels like it’s trying to have fun while not taking itself too seriously. It’s certainly not trying to be GoT which I was worried it would, but mercifully the writers seem self aware enough to realize that’s not what Witcher fans truly enjoy about the franchise. The timeline thing though is just not that well done, sadly, and I could see why some people might be put off by it.
