Reading the Witcher
Jan. 3rd, 2023 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI just finished Blood of Elves, the third Witcher book by Andzrej Sapkowski. (Or the first depending on how you count--the first two are short story collections, this is the first novel.)
I picked this up because at the rate Netflix is going it will be a decade or never before they get to the end of the story, and it's based on already published books, so I figured I'd read those. And in a way the Netflix series is very faithful to the books--most elements that appear in the books are in the series. And in another way, they are very not faithful.
Cause here's the thing. I say this with love, but Blood of Elves is structured like a bad fanfic. It has no structure. It is a thing and another thing and another thing. The last fifty pages are a long discussion on the nature of magic and then the book ends. He loves fifty-page long dialogue scenes with no dialogue tags. He jumps around in both chronology and location with no rhyme or reason. Very major plot points that you infer must have happened, happen off screen. The book just jumps forward and you appear on the other side of them.
For example--this book has no map in the frontispiece. There is a part of the story where the characters literally roll out a map of the world and discuss the geopolitics, pointing out different kingdoms and cities on the map. Naturally I would like to follow along on a map. I google a bit and you can find maps--this was a video game. Of course there's a world map. But Sapkowski has deliberately not endorsed any map of the Northern Kingdoms, even one drawn by a collaborator, because things move around for him.
He's a pantser. I've never read epic fantasy by a pantser before. (True, I don't read a ton of epic fantasy, but still, there are genre expectations.) If he wants to spent fifty pages on a crowd heckling Jaskier's performance, that's what he'll do. If he wants to ignore the character that the book is ostensibly about for two hundred pages and follow Geralt taking piece work protecting a convoy, that's what he'll do. The plot, as such, starts on page three hundred of this book. I'm not kidding.
It's all pleasant enough, don't get me wrong. I'll keep going. But the main thing I'm seeing the adaptation doing is that Sapkowski did not have a plan for where he was going and the show runners do. So they have structure and foreshadowing and stuff and very important world events are actually shown rather than being off screen.
For example, the following events in the show can be inferred from the books but are not shown:
- Yennefer's training as a mage
- Ciri's escape from Cintra and meeting Geralt (This is literally referenced in one para where she tells Yennefer what happens. Like, it's summarized as if it were in a previous book but it's NOT IN A PREVIOUS BOOK.)
- The fall of Cintra
- The battle of Sodden
- What happened to Yennefer after the Battle of Sodden
A few other differences from the book to the show:
- Sapkowski's sensibility is extremely juvenile. Mostly in a way I roll my eyes at. But it's all boobies all the time. Geralt fucks everyone (including someone explicitly stated to be 17, three years older than his ward Ciri at the time). Any time you land in a woman's POV, she's horny for Geralt. Sapkowski's idea of what women talk to each other about is very very focused on periods and virginity. And I'm here for a story about a manly man and his adopted daughter going through her first period, but I'd like it to be written by someone with some idea what they're talking about and that's not Sapkowski. Like, there are multiple times where women ask Ciri to strip naked and then remark upon how her breasts are growing. There's an extended sequence where Triss Merrigold is indisposed with diarrhea for no reason I can fathom. I thought at first that he had to have her around but incapacitated for reasons but the next chapter jumps forward and she's no longer there, so why did I need fifty pages of Triss getting the shits? It's all very siiiiiiiiiiigh.
- The original short stories are very clearly reskinned Grimm's fairy tales. There are quite a few things that made more sense if you understand this that were pretty confusing in the show. Like the whole Butcher of Blaviken thing--Renfri is Snow White. Her soldiers that Geralt kills are the "dwarves." There's a whole story about a wizard wanting to kill all the "special princesses" because of a prophecy, and each of these princesses are Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc. First episode of season 2, Grain of Truth, is a Beauty and the Beast retelling (and oh boy did they strip out some odious sexual politics when they adapted that one).
- The stories have very strong undercurrents of how out of touch and idiotic academia is that don't make it into the adaptation. Like the majority of the golden dragon story is about showing what a moron a scientist is for wanting to preserve all species, no matter how harmful to humans. This comes up multiple other times.
- The show also strips out some of the sexual politics that leaves these weird inexplicable things in the show. Like--why on earth would Geralt claim the Law of Surprise in Cintra? Well, in the books, that's how Witchers get new Witchers. If a Witcher saves you and you can't pay, standard practice is they'll claim Law of Surprise because it provides them a source of children. Guess they thought that was a little human traffic-y for our main character? Or Yennefer being barren--in the books it is an explicit eugenics thing that wizards not be fertile. Like there's a whole diatribe about how wizard babies are cretins. (And oh lord, if Sapkowski could stop being obsessed with wombs and menstrual cramps I'd appreciate it.)
- This is just a translation note, but in the show, the source of magic is translated as "Chaos." In the books, it's translated as "Force." Now the Polish may more properly be translated as force, but in English, there's only one "Force"-based magic system, so I find it entertaining that the show chose to translate it as "Chaos" instead.
All this makes the books seem worse than they are? They go down very easy. But you do get to the end and are like--what was the point of all of that? Where are we going?
I picked this up because at the rate Netflix is going it will be a decade or never before they get to the end of the story, and it's based on already published books, so I figured I'd read those. And in a way the Netflix series is very faithful to the books--most elements that appear in the books are in the series. And in another way, they are very not faithful.
Cause here's the thing. I say this with love, but Blood of Elves is structured like a bad fanfic. It has no structure. It is a thing and another thing and another thing. The last fifty pages are a long discussion on the nature of magic and then the book ends. He loves fifty-page long dialogue scenes with no dialogue tags. He jumps around in both chronology and location with no rhyme or reason. Very major plot points that you infer must have happened, happen off screen. The book just jumps forward and you appear on the other side of them.
For example--this book has no map in the frontispiece. There is a part of the story where the characters literally roll out a map of the world and discuss the geopolitics, pointing out different kingdoms and cities on the map. Naturally I would like to follow along on a map. I google a bit and you can find maps--this was a video game. Of course there's a world map. But Sapkowski has deliberately not endorsed any map of the Northern Kingdoms, even one drawn by a collaborator, because things move around for him.
He's a pantser. I've never read epic fantasy by a pantser before. (True, I don't read a ton of epic fantasy, but still, there are genre expectations.) If he wants to spent fifty pages on a crowd heckling Jaskier's performance, that's what he'll do. If he wants to ignore the character that the book is ostensibly about for two hundred pages and follow Geralt taking piece work protecting a convoy, that's what he'll do. The plot, as such, starts on page three hundred of this book. I'm not kidding.
It's all pleasant enough, don't get me wrong. I'll keep going. But the main thing I'm seeing the adaptation doing is that Sapkowski did not have a plan for where he was going and the show runners do. So they have structure and foreshadowing and stuff and very important world events are actually shown rather than being off screen.
For example, the following events in the show can be inferred from the books but are not shown:
- Yennefer's training as a mage
- Ciri's escape from Cintra and meeting Geralt (This is literally referenced in one para where she tells Yennefer what happens. Like, it's summarized as if it were in a previous book but it's NOT IN A PREVIOUS BOOK.)
- The fall of Cintra
- The battle of Sodden
- What happened to Yennefer after the Battle of Sodden
A few other differences from the book to the show:
- Sapkowski's sensibility is extremely juvenile. Mostly in a way I roll my eyes at. But it's all boobies all the time. Geralt fucks everyone (including someone explicitly stated to be 17, three years older than his ward Ciri at the time). Any time you land in a woman's POV, she's horny for Geralt. Sapkowski's idea of what women talk to each other about is very very focused on periods and virginity. And I'm here for a story about a manly man and his adopted daughter going through her first period, but I'd like it to be written by someone with some idea what they're talking about and that's not Sapkowski. Like, there are multiple times where women ask Ciri to strip naked and then remark upon how her breasts are growing. There's an extended sequence where Triss Merrigold is indisposed with diarrhea for no reason I can fathom. I thought at first that he had to have her around but incapacitated for reasons but the next chapter jumps forward and she's no longer there, so why did I need fifty pages of Triss getting the shits? It's all very siiiiiiiiiiigh.
- The original short stories are very clearly reskinned Grimm's fairy tales. There are quite a few things that made more sense if you understand this that were pretty confusing in the show. Like the whole Butcher of Blaviken thing--Renfri is Snow White. Her soldiers that Geralt kills are the "dwarves." There's a whole story about a wizard wanting to kill all the "special princesses" because of a prophecy, and each of these princesses are Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc. First episode of season 2, Grain of Truth, is a Beauty and the Beast retelling (and oh boy did they strip out some odious sexual politics when they adapted that one).
- The stories have very strong undercurrents of how out of touch and idiotic academia is that don't make it into the adaptation. Like the majority of the golden dragon story is about showing what a moron a scientist is for wanting to preserve all species, no matter how harmful to humans. This comes up multiple other times.
- The show also strips out some of the sexual politics that leaves these weird inexplicable things in the show. Like--why on earth would Geralt claim the Law of Surprise in Cintra? Well, in the books, that's how Witchers get new Witchers. If a Witcher saves you and you can't pay, standard practice is they'll claim Law of Surprise because it provides them a source of children. Guess they thought that was a little human traffic-y for our main character? Or Yennefer being barren--in the books it is an explicit eugenics thing that wizards not be fertile. Like there's a whole diatribe about how wizard babies are cretins. (And oh lord, if Sapkowski could stop being obsessed with wombs and menstrual cramps I'd appreciate it.)
- This is just a translation note, but in the show, the source of magic is translated as "Chaos." In the books, it's translated as "Force." Now the Polish may more properly be translated as force, but in English, there's only one "Force"-based magic system, so I find it entertaining that the show chose to translate it as "Chaos" instead.
All this makes the books seem worse than they are? They go down very easy. But you do get to the end and are like--what was the point of all of that? Where are we going?