Fans Absolutely Hate The Changes The Witcher: Blood Origin Makes To The Witcher Story
If losing Henry Cavill wasn’t enough of a loss for Witcher fans, the recent liberties the show writers of The Witcher: Blood Origin took from the critically acclaimed source material has fans in an uproar. Worse yet, the writers seem to have chosen a trope that for the longest time hasn’t resonated with fans across fictional writing at large: Heredity is destiny.
With that, the scope of especially Ciri’s story and of the story featured in the Witcher games is shown in a very different light. Fans fear that it might also not bode well for the future of the main storyline for the third season of the main Witcher show. That concern isn’t quite unfounded, given that the second season had already departed from the source material.
So What’s Different?
The miniseries The Witcher: Blood Origins launched on December 25th via Netflix with all four episodes. The story takes place more than a thousand years before the Witcher’s storyline of the TV show and video games. It features seven Elven outcasts who are set on an adventure to defeat an evil empire. Their actions have long-lasting consequences for the Witcher universe and their implications should be felt even in Geralt’s timeline.
As such, the prophecy Ciri receives (and the show’s and game’s story largely revolves around) has received a significant change. No longer is Ciri simply a girl thrown into the whirl of an inter-world conflict, Blood Origins foretells her arrival and her blood relation to the very first Witcher.
Some fans feel that this flies in the face of the very precedent of Ciri’s story. Fans of the video games and the show may recall the way Ciri became a Witcher, the stakes of her undergoing the transformation and the implied odds of their success. With this change, they now appear in a very different light.
Fans punish the writers at the rating submission
More so than any other Witcher-related media, from the critically acclaimed video games to the book and show, The Witcher: Blood Origins has been torn apart by fans in their evaluation of the show, scoring it a lousy average of 4.1 out of 10 stars on IMDB and a measly 11% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Social media comments have been equally brutal, with many fans stating that they’ve lost faith in Netflix's ability to produce a show that’s becoming of the Witcher universe. This fear has been an ongoing trend after a promising first season which had largely stuck to the source material and not least saw Cavill put on a master class in the acting of main character Geralt.
Starting in the second season, the show’s writers had also taken liberties with the show’s direction which fans were weary about. If this constitutes a trend, it is a bad omen for the third season of the Witcher which is set to launch at some undisclosed point in 2023.
