Would the Witcher survive it in the forthcoming season?

Joel

Get your coins ready to toss! The witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is gracing a ride along with the second season on December 17th.

As a massive fan of the franchise, I would dare say season 1 was absolutely a fan-oriented artwork — as the narration was cramped and confusing enough to bang all the newcomers out of the way.

In season 1, the production team showed us their ambition to build up the grander story foundations. Not only adapted the series of fantasy novels "Last Wish" by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, but the series also added two separate additional storylines of the main characters (Ciri and Yennefer) to involve more characters than just Geralt the witcher.

But still, eight hour-long episodes are nearly impossible to bear the yearning. The idea of splitting between three plots only leaves around 20 minutes for them to describe the story. Needless to say how hard the adaptation would be, especially to the "Last Wish," a wonderfully written masterpiece without redundant segments.

The Lesser Evil

The Story Lesser Evil is an excellent example of how things are ruined...

For those of you who haven't seen the book, briefly, the storyline starts with a summon from a wizard, Stregorbor, for protecting him away from Renfri and her gang. Precisely, it is to hunt her crew down since he is absoultely safe living in an impenetrable tower. This presents the central mystery of the story of how does the gang plan to kill Stregorbor.

"Stregobor dies tomorrow, and it would be a lesser evil if he died alone," Renfri hints Geralt. Later, from the conversation with an alderman, Geralt realized Renfri might try to imitate the past massacre, coercing Stregobor to show up by killing the innocents one by one.

What's salt in the wound is that after Geralt rushed to the village and killed her men, Renfri returned from speaking to Stregobor. "Stregobor laughed in my face. He said that I could butcher villages, and he would never leave his tower." The dialogue slapped Geralt's face in "choosing the lesser evil," as if he just took the lives of her men for no reason instead of walking away.

Unfortunately, the show condensed all the incredible plots into a scene: Geralt woke up in the woods with no explanation whatsoever and said, "The market." Later on, he slaughtered Renfri and bunched gangsters.

Destiny in adaptation

What Sapkowski tries to deliver from the story is, choosing between two evils should never be done. Still, the reason why it's called the lesser evil is totally forgotten about in that adaptation. What's the point of reconstructing a fight and the characters when the main story's moral is failed to convey? Those things are the diamonds of the story, should be preserved at all costs rather than tossed into the bin.

I watched the show with my mother. Sadly but as expected, she kept scratching her head in confusion, even when Geralt ended up being reviled and stoned. The stoning is no longer a follow-up hit in the gut that leaves a bitter taste, as audiences without reading the book could never read Geralt's helplessness.

However, the horrific issues are inevitable, and it would've been just as horrible in a million alternate scenarios by a million different directors. Because today we are talking about one of the impossible missions — refreshing people's eyes by converting fonts into a visual form.

In other words, when a creator is forced to get his hands filthy and delve into the evil of adaptation. There is no lesser evil: Either sticking with the origins (As Dune 2021 does, spending 2 hours and 35 minutes just to delineate the spectacle world) or foreshadowing the explanations from the book into two words.