AFTER a decade, a new addition to The Witcher series is being written. Andrej Sapkowski, author of the The Witcher books that inspired the game series by CD Projekt Red and a Netflix series, recently confirmed that he is working on an addition to the existing novels on the Ukrainian podcast Fantastic Talk(s).
“I never say these things to you because you never know. Maybe I’ll do something, maybe I won’t. And so far, when I said that I would write something, and then I didn’t write it, people complained as if I had deceived them and as if I had lied,” Sapkowski allegedly said, with the interview being translated by The Witcher fan site, Redanian Intelligence.
“That’s why I don’t like to talk about what I’m doing until I finish doing it. Because until I finish it, I don’t think it exists. But since I always make exceptions for Ukrainians, I will do it this time too,” he continued, revealing that he is “quite diligently” working on the new book.
“It may take a year, but no longer”.
Going down with the ship
In related news, and in what is yet another moment from The Simpsons brought to real life, an executive producer on Netflix’s The Witcher has chimed in on the series’ low viewership and simplified politics.
Basically The Simpsons’s “Am I So Out Of Touch?” meme brought to life, Tomek Baginski has laid the blame squarely on American audiences in a recent interview with Polish news site Wyborcza, which was then translated by Redanian Intelligence.
“When a series is made for a huge mass of viewers with different experiences, from different parts of the world, and a large part of them are Americans, these simplifications not only make sense, they are necessary,” Baginski says in the interview.
Attempting to justify the Netflix series’ oversimplification of the plot and expansive geopolitics from Sapkowski’s books, Baginski says that it had to be done because “when a series is made for a huge mass of viewers, with different experiences, from different parts of the world, and a large part of them are Americans, these simplifications not only make sense, they are necessary”.
He also said that these simplifications were just as hard for the writers, but the “dumbing down” of everything was necessary, as it would allow the show to reach a bigger audience.
Part of the online discourse among the fans after Henry Cavill was announced to be leaving the series’ lead role, with Liam Hemsworth replacing him, was speculation that Cavill, a longtime fan of Sapkowski’s book, did not like the direction of the Netflix series.
A blame game
Towards the end of 2021, in a different interview, Baginski blamed The Witcher’s second season’s low viewership on the younger viewers that frequent sites such as Youtube and TikTok for having short attention spans.
In a roundabout way, Netflix’s The Witcher was dumbed down because most Americans would not understand the complexity, younger audiences have the attention span of a goldfish, and so that the show can reach the maximum number of audiences.
But now that the show is failing for these exact reasons, a producer is blaming the target audience instead.
As the entire third season is finally available on Netflix, one can only imagine the blame game continuing until Hemsworth steps into the boots once worn by Cavill for the fourth season.
