NKD wrote on Dec 22, 2019, 21:58:
The Witcher series is waaaay better than I expected. Henry Cavill is just an amazing Geralt. He channels Witcher 3 Geralt almost perfectly. Yennefer and Ciri are great, and the rest of the cast is pretty solid as well. I especially liked Tissaia and Stregobor (Myanna Buring and Lars Mikkelson respectively)

Jaskier/Dandelion is an absolute treasure. Great songs too.

Agreed on all points. Toss a coin to your Witcher, oh Valley of Plenty!

I got so used to ginger Triss though that I forgot that she isn't actually a redhead in the books, so seeing her without her red hair was strange.

I know. Triss should just be a redhead.

I'm not sure how it's anything like Game of Thrones. More happens in 8 episodes of The Witcher than happens in the first 30 episodes of Game of Thrones.

I also don't really know why people thought it was going to be just like Game of Thrones. Netflix said they wanted a show with as much success / presence as Game of Thrones, not an actual GoT clone.

If anything, the quick pacing and jumping between the time periods seems to have confused a lot of viewers.

This is my MAIN complaint against it. It's EXTREMELY poorly explained when things take place. You can figure it out if you are extremely observant (they basically scale everything against Calanthe, time-wise, and every episode will have some comment towards Calanthe / Cintra that lets you figure out roughly how this particular event fits in the time-frame, but you have to be very observant to catch these moments, and you have to be aware of their significance to begin with.)

I've read the books multiple times, played all the games, and even I had trouble remembering that "Oh yeah, this takes place like 30 years before". They should have put SOMETHING in there to help viewers who are not familiar with this world to figure out that most of the stuff being told has happened in the past.

I think the only things that are happening in present tense, so to speak, is the stuff that happens to Ciri. Everything else is in the past.

It's also very, very sparse with regards to useless expository dialogue. It demands a lot in terms of being able to piece things together yourself.

Yes, and while on the one hand that's very good, on the other hand, it's extremely unfriendly to new viewers. My wife knows nothing of the Witcher world other than the few times she's watched me play some of the games, so I had to explain things to her quite often for them to make sense to her. If another viewer doesn't have someone available to explain all this shit, they just get confused and stop watching. This is extremely poor treatment of new viewers. In fact, I hope they just go in and fix that. Just a simple year overlay on stories would help people out immensely.

My other big complaint is that they didn't tell The Last Wish right. (Spoilers!!) in the book, the Djinn is about to kill Yennefer. It's too powerful for her. And the ONLY way for Geralt to save her is to tie his destiny to hers, so that if the Djinn kills her, he also kills Geralt, which it didn't want to / couldn't do on account of Geralt being its master. In the show, that sense of imminent death is not present AT ALL, so Geralt's wish makes little sense. Why didn't he just wish the thing he originally wanted (to be freed of the shackles of Destiny vis a vis Ciri), thereby finishing his third wish, freeing the Djinn, and Yennefer would still have been fine. They really should have done that better.

My final nitpick was that the dragons weren't anywhere near as large as I remember the books making them out to be, which was a shame.

But other than that, this is a GREAT fucking show.