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The Witcher TV Show Writers 'Actively Disliked the Books and Games' - aka why the fuck do these Writers get these kinda jobs?

EDMIX

Writes a lot, says very little
There are very few parallels to illustration
True, but it still remains that the skill, ability and craft still comes first in both regardless of what the reference is or ones opinion of the reference.
Deep knowledge and understanding of the material is an integral part of the process
I agree, but liking or loving that material doesn't need to be part of any of that for them to have knowledge and understanding of that though.

even for the original author, and that requirement carries over to working with it effectively in an adaptation.

I agree that the need to have knowledge of that, but this idea of "love" is not a requirement. One can have a great deal of knowledge and understanding of many things they don't personally, subjectively like or love.
 

Moneal

Member
True, but it still remains that the skill, ability and craft still comes first in both regardless of what the reference is or ones opinion of the reference.

I agree, but liking or loving that material doesn't need to be part of any of that for them to have knowledge and understanding of that though.



I agree that the need to have knowledge of that, but this idea of "love" is not a requirement. One can have a great deal of knowledge and understanding of many things they don't personally, subjectively like or love.
I would say respect is a better word to use than love. If there is no respect for the source material, the outcome will fail. Even parody requires the respect and understanding of the source to poke at the inconsistencies and honor the core.
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
I didn't care for s2 nearly as much as s1, but I -hope- a lot of the convoluted issues were due to setting up that prequel show (when is that coming out, anyway?) and now that that bitter pill has been swallowed we can get back on track. I don't know why these shows have such hard time establishing space and geography, but they really need to show more maps and get the geopolitical framework set up.

I have my issues with the desexualization of the show post s1, particularly removing a lot of the vanity and preening of the sorceresses. They are far less nuanced and multi-dimensional if they are just 100% laser focused on their internal struggles.

I also agree that the fights have been a bit lackluster, hopefully by now the Ciri actress has a few years of martial arts and sword work under her belt, or they at least cast a very acrobatic stuntwoman to fill in because if we don't get Ciri the killing machine then what is the point?
 

EDMIX

Writes a lot, says very little
I would say respect is a better word to use than love. If there is no respect for the source material, the outcome will fail. Even parody requires the respect and understanding of the source to poke at the inconsistencies and honor the core.

I some what agree, but you can respect the source material and still get a flop regardless.

Even the creators of the original stuff have some flops under their belts. So being exact, accurate, precise from the source material i feel is a given that one should aim to do that outside of some artistic liberties, but I feel many put waaaaay to much focus and stress on this idea as if that alone will determine a success or fail type thing as if those original sources didn't flop themselves.
 

EverydayBeast

ChatGPT 0.1
Game games are built for tv a lot of the time they struggle because of writers developers unlock the games that are designed to be games first. You gotta respect the genre, tv is different.
 

Kimahri

Banned
I some what agree, but you can respect the source material and still get a flop regardless.

Even the creators of the original stuff have some flops under their belts. So being exact, accurate, precise from the source material i feel is a given that one should aim to do that outside of some artistic liberties, but I feel many put waaaaay to much focus and stress on this idea as if that alone will determine a success or fail type thing as if those original sources didn't flop themselves.
I get the feeling you've dug yourself into a hole you refuse to crawl out of.

I get what you're saying, and sure, you can make something good without liking source material, but is that something to aim for?

If you could choose between two very talented, skilled and experienced writers to write thr screenplay for the movie based on your favorite book, would you choose the one who read and loved the book, or the one who disliked it?

Both could do a good job as professionals, but I'd have more faith in one over the other.

It seems like studios will hire just about anyone these days. So arguing about talented people being ablr to do anything is kinda pointless when talentless hacks seem to get most of the jobs.
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
While there is certainly an element of "this is a job, the source IP is secondary to my ability to craft compelling scenes and narrative under the direction of the show runner" where I don't expect the writers to be fans of the source, bit they should not be DISMISSIVE of it. Hiring writers and giving them the direction (or leeway) to "fix or disregard" aspects of the source IP they don't like should be a carefully weighed decision.

Though look at what most adaptations end up like. Many are just a few names, maybe just the title. Witcher is way more book accurate than we have any right to expect.
 

hussar16

Member
Oh yeah, slavic cultures are mostly known for their wokeness. Don't be ridiculous.
The show was so anit Slavic that as a slav I was mostly not into it.felt like a worse rehash of game of thrones with a good actor as lead but doing absolutely nothing interesting at all in the plot.like all I wanted was good pace storylines of Gerald not this action bs story
 
No its not. Its got more deep cut references than any casual star wars fan would ever be privy too. In fact its quite obvious by watching it how much of a star wars nerd he is. References to obscure books published in the past and more.
"Rian Johnson cares about star wars" is such an absurd position that I feel sorry for you trying to insist on it. JJ's stuff is bad because of his whole "string people along with mystery boxes" writing philosophy, but at least I could believe he likes star wars because of how he made his star trek movie feel more like star wars and how angry he was when Johnson pissed all over the plot threads set up in The Force Awakens. (Which, by the way, is not something you do when you really care about the project.) But RJ has just the kind of hatred of the past, hatred of the giants whose shoulders he's standing on attitude that is the topic of this witcher thread and that is so common with these corpos nowadays. You know the books aren't as obscure as you think, they were popular. That expanded universe the books exist in, that Disney lovingly and respectfully killed off had a following. Han was a good dad in them, and Luke was a heroic Jedi. But now Luke is a murder attempting loser and the Jedi suck, because RJ just loves star wars that much.

Then you don't know much about feminism. That same character uses her own chains to kill her captor.

A character being sexy or wearing skimpy attire is not anti feminist lol.
And neither do feminists I guess. I suppose Mai Shiranui and Tifa Lockhart are feminist icons now, since they're sexy babes who beat up the bad guys that capture them. You can be the one to tell the feminists, not me. Relax, they're not known to get mad about sexy girl characters in games, and they're very kind and reasonable, it'll go well.

No? Because what people like about the thing doesn't make a thing good in and of itself either. It being good does that. Hugo weaving has hated a lot of projects he was in but he still did good. Mark Hamill wasn't feeling lukes treatment on TLJ but he still put in the work and delivered a great performance. It happens all the time.

Look no further than the prequel trilogy to see this. That was George Lucas own brainchild and most of it is nigh unwatchable at this point. Sure it has stuff we like about star wars in it but ultimately those movies fall flat because those things are just surface level additions with little depth facilitated by the story.
YES. I don't know how people are being so willfully obstinate about this point. But at least you gave some examples to show how much you aren't understanding the premise of the thread.

Yeah, Hugo weaving did hate projects he was in, usually because of exhausting make up or prosthetics he had to put on, and of course Hamill hated TLJ with RJ's "loving" treatment of the star wars universe lol. But these people are ACTORS. They're not in charge of adaptation or the messaging of the story. We're talking about writers, directors, showrunners, not people who aren't deciding how to approach the source material. Otherwise it's sophism.

I agree with you that the prequel trilogy is bad. I'd say it exposes how much Lucas was dependent on other talented people around him for the original trilogy, but was surrounded by Yes-men who couldn't give critical feedback when he was a powerful famous old out of touch man many years later. But I'm not saying people who care about the source material are always going to make something good, it's still hard to make something good even in those advantageous circumstances. I'm saying people who hate the source material and seek to use it for their own ends, in the manner of modern politically minded hollywood types, will never be able to reproduce what makes that source material great in the first place.

Here's a very simplified example to illustrate the issue. There's 2 writers making a superman movie. Let's say they're both very talented and they both don't care about superman. The first guy is humble about it, researches it, tries to get who superman is and put that in a movie, even though superman isn't his cup of tea. His Superman has black hair and a red cape, he flies around and says and does superman like things. Since the guy is such a good writer and things come together well it ends up being a good superman movie. The 2nd guy hates superman, hates people that like superman, hates things associated with superman like America or superheroes... he's a current year type of privileged writer like the witcher show staff, rings of power creators, that type of mentality. He gives superman blond hair, a green cape and since what he's really into is antique cars, superman never flies. The writer just changes the show to be about his personal obsessions and superman drives everywhere in antique cars. People who hate superman and what he stands for, or who care more about antique cars might say it's a good superman movie. But everyone else would say it's a failure because it scarcely has anything to do with superman.

Thats ridiculous.

For starters, calling 1 or 2 token black guys in a sea of other characters is not "diversity" lol. For two, if you're criticizing newer surface simply because they use minoritiy character and attaching the quality to that, then that IS pretty toxic considering I doubt most would like the project better if they had just cast mor white people.
Come on. You can't seriously be saying that 2 black actors in a good old star wars movie 40 years ago are meaningless tokens but when a modern day film like the last Jedi has 2 black actors it's like "omg so diverse thank you disney!" lol. The thing about characters like Lando and Darth Vader is they got to be cool characters that people liked. If you want to see what it's like when a diversity hire is pushed to the side and their story goes nowhere and they have nothing meaningful to do because the creators don't care then look no further than Finn. Set up as the most intriguing and interesting character - a storm trooper who turns good - as things progress he's a space janitor whose role is increasingly diminished to being around to fall over in slapstick moments of b-plots everyone hated.

And you say companies use it as a shield but that doesn't really happen. There is no "shield" but there is dismissal of criticism that tries to implicate the diversity of rhe cast with the drop in quality. Anyone should be able to see through that nonsense.

In a world where Rian Johnson cares a lot about star wars it doesn't really happen, but here on earth Amazon just made a Lord of the Rings show with dialogue like "do you know why a boat floats but a rock sinks?" It also has "Elves" that are not just race swapped but are unlike the source material in every possible way. They don't have a mysterious aura or almost angelic characteristics like in the source material or the older films that revere the source material. They're just exactly like humans with $2 halloween costume pointy vulcan ears attached...in a massively high budget tv show. And would you believe tolkien enthusiasts are critical of this trash from some reason? Then when they do criticize it the all too predictable modern day response in corporate media is the same as it is with everything else. It's not the corpos that are evil, like Amazon with unethical worker treatment and agenda driven programming, but the showrunners said in the hollywood reporter that their "patently evil" critics were racist and sexist.

Fans that liked minority and female characters in star wars before but weren't too happy with "content" like Kenobi, which carries on the modern trend of hatefully sidelining traditional male heroes in a similar manner to the witcher tv series were of course portrayed as toxic racists by disney through social and access media. They ran many posts and articles deflecting fan criticism by falsely equating it with some mean tweets mocking actress Moses Ingram's "girl vader but better" character or calling her out for saying dumb stuff like implying she was the first black person in star wars. It couldn't possibly be that fans of kenobi want kenobi to be like kenobi in the show called "kenobi." It's gotta be racism that selectively rears its head only when disney make their awful star wars output.

As stated, diverse and female characters have existed before the current era of hatred toward the source material and the fanbases of said material were not "toxic and racist" about it. What's changed is the hatefulness of elite types towards ordinary people and popular stories that don't express the radical political ideas of the hollywood hivemind. It's not that the "diversity shield" happens, it's that it's become typical. The whole reason I posted in this thread was I wanted reasonable people who somehow hadn't noticed to be aware. Disney just put out an amusingly bad man-hating Black Panther sequel. In the coming weeks when fans roast it and it under-performs compared to the previous black panther movie, do you really think hollywood types and corpo media won't try to gaslight people in to thinking that fans who liked that previous black panther movie are now sexist and racist for disliking the new one?

That ess overblown. Look up the poster for the second movie and he features prominently on there even in China. Sure, they may have capitulated to Chinese censors originally bu they didn't stick with that. I'll take omprofnenr over perfection.
I would say this evidence illustrates very strongly the opposite point. The first movie poster shows the real disney and what they do when they think they can get away with it without being noticed, and the second movie poster shows what disney is forced to do when the "toxic fans" hold them accountable for their evil and hypocrisy by exposing, mocking and memeing on them. Could it be any more obvious that the virtue signalling corpos that no longer make entertainment that stimulates thought, but instead produce content that tells people what to think, are the evil galactic empire, and the fans they smear as toxic are the plucky rebel alliance? This wasn't even a unique example, disney also covered up black panther's face with a mask only for the chinese version of the black panther poster, years after that star wars poster.

What has happened is that audience has changed. Not only has it changed to involve a much more diverse swath of people(which also increases capitalist potential) but a portion of it has also changed to be vocally and virulent opposed to even the normal levels of diversity we've gotten before. Those people need to be pushed away regardless. They don't belong anymore.

Opinions on the indivudal shoes and whatever is all well and good but trying to reduce all media down to some simple ideological warfare is juvenile. Thrrrd for more nuance to the discussion than that.

"All of what seems like extreme political messaging from elites is really just capitalism expanding the audience bro" is something you just can't gaslight people with at this late date. Yes, the audience has changed - by shrinking more and more as activists double down on their hatred of regular people and popular stories that don't express the elite's radical ideas. Disney had their biggest single day stock loss in 2 decades recently, and Amazon is trying all sorts of trickery to desperately fudge Rings of Power viewership numbers as they dropped massively after the first episode and kept going down the longer the show went on. Meanwhile The House of the Dragon, which also had race swapped characters but was generally respectful towards its source material, had its ratings go up as its audience kept growing every week. The notion you put forward here that nothing malicious is going on with all these shows but their fans changed to become racist is just...silly. And I'm embarrassed for you that you would say that. And wow at rhetoric like "those people don't belong" lol. You sound like you're a writer in charge of adapting a beloved tale of heroism for netflix or disney and you're "updating it for modern audiences" or something.

Sorry about the late response/thread bump. I wanted to reply when I read this a few weeks ago but I got really busy and that ain't changing anytime soon.
 
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tkscz

Member
RE welcome to raccon City Director said he is a huge fan of the games and delivered shit.

So it seems that someone who hates the books and games delivers a better experience.

I am ok with that.
The director could be a huge fan while the writers still hate the source material.
 

NotMyProblemAnymoreCunt

Biggest Trails Stan
The books sucked like the show does. The books are just more feminazi pandering. I'll say this when it comes to the books, I did like the short story collections. But that's it when it comes to the None game stuff. The only Witcher stuff I like is the Game Trilogy.
 
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Lasha

Member
The books sucked like the show does. The books are just more feminazi pandering. I'll say this when it comes to the books, I did like the short story collections. But that's it when it comes to the None game stuff. The only Witcher stuff I like is the Game Trilogy.

Which book contains femnazi pandering?
 

Lasha

Member
None of em. There's no way this guy read them all, sounds like he was triggered at the introduction of female characters that served as more than fuck dolls in Ciri's saga.
Oh I know. I was being polite and allowing him a chance to explain himself. Being a woman sucks in the books with all the casual rape and murder.
 

BadBurger

Many “Whelps”! Handle It!
One of the last things I'd ever accuse these stories (books) of being is feminist. That's a new one for me.
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
One of the last things I'd ever accuse these stories (books) of being is feminist. That's a new one for me.
I'd say they are quite feminist.

Women hold power in several kingdoms, the sorceresses have a distinct misandry vibe to their little council, ciris band is very gender agnostic. Hell, there is even an androgynous character.

Buuuut the books ALSO gives female characters numerous flaws and recognizes that men have a penis and women a womb, thus all the sex, impregnation plots, etc.
 

BadBurger

Many “Whelps”! Handle It!
I'd say they are quite feminist.

Women hold power in several kingdoms, the sorceresses have a distinct misandry vibe to their little council, ciris band is very gender agnostic. Hell, there is even an androgynous character.

Buuuut the books ALSO gives female characters numerous flaws and recognizes that men have a penis and women a womb, thus all the sex, impregnation plots, etc.

None of that is feminism though. People overuse that term nowadays to describe media which merely features women in leading roles or positions in which they aren't completely meek and subjugated. It waters the term down to meaninglessness. Saying the Witcher books are feminist is like saying an old Dungeons & Dragons inspired painting of a sexpot femme fatale warrior is feminist because she's wearing armor and has a sword.


I enjoyed season 2, what's the big problem with it?

they don't follow the books?

I only made it halfway through s2, but yes, they didn't seem to bother following the books too closely in s2, and they made many key departures in plot and character for some of the supporting cast that just frankly made for bad storytelling and boring TV.
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
None of that is feminism though. People overuse that term nowadays to describe media which merely features women in leading roles or positions in which they aren't completely meek and subjugated. It waters the term down to meaninglessness. Saying the Witcher books are feminist is like saying an old Dungeons & Dragons inspired painting of a sexpot femme fatale warrior is feminist because she's wearing armor and has a sword.

100% incorrect. I'm describing classic feminism, which is equality while acknowledging sexual differences. Your analogy of a Red Sonja like figure IS classic feminism, she has EQUAL standing to Conan.

Women in the Witcher are independent, can lead if they can, have internal motivations not tied to a man, and yet also can be jealous, petty, and villains. I.e. They are complete multi dimensional characters alongside the men.

Post modern feminism (aka feminazism) is what has perverted the movement to now mean that a woman has to exist completely outside any male influence, has to be better than a mn in every respect, and in fact is basically a man in temperament, thought, and deed. A total travesty IMHO as it robs female characters of anything feminine or seperate from the male characters. This is why any "top ten best female characters" ends with the late 90's, since then there have been very few quality female characters that are FEMALE, not just men with a hint of breasts CONSTANTLY seeking to undermine all the men around them.
 

BadBurger

Many “Whelps”! Handle It!
100% incorrect. I'm describing classic feminism, which is equality while acknowledging sexual differences. Your analogy of a Red Sonja like figure IS classic feminism, she has EQUAL standing to Conan.

Women in the Witcher are independent, can lead if they can, have internal motivations not tied to a man, and yet also can be jealous, petty, and villains. I.e. They are complete multi dimensional characters alongside the men.

Post modern feminism (aka feminazism) is what has perverted the movement to now mean that a woman has to exist completely outside any male influence, has to be better than a mn in every respect, and in fact is basically a man in temperament, thought, and deed. A total travesty IMHO as it robs female characters of anything feminine or seperate from the male characters. This is why any "top ten best female characters" ends with the late 90's, since then there have been very few quality female characters that are FEMALE, not just men with a hint of breasts CONSTANTLY seeking to undermine all the men around them.

None of that is feminism. It's just women being women. Again, you make it sound as if women aren't depicted in a very specific kind of controlled manner it's feminism, and that is simply not what it is. We aren't discussing the kinds of really early works or essays (from say the 1700's) that contributed to what we now acknowledge as feminism.

And you completely lose me when you start using terms like "feminazism". I'm not even taking a step down that angry path.
 

Darkmakaimura

Can You Imagine What SureAI Is Going To Do With Garfield?
Okay just by going from the first post, is this some kind of trend of people working on franchises they hate or something?

I keep hearing about people who work on something that they really don't like to begin with. Or at least don't like whatever medium it originated on or was popular on. Case in point would be that person who was writing for the Knights of the Old Republic video game remake and apparently they did not like the original at all.

Why is this person writing for a game they didn't like to begin with?

Sorry but I'm kind of on the logic that you should be a fan, even if casually, of the stuff you're working on. So if you're working on a piece of Lovecraft fiction you should be a fan of lovecraft's work. Of course I'm not saying being a fan of the man himself especially due to his rather nasty views of people but at least his work.
 
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