I find this whole thing a little dubious. I like reading, and sometimes I enjoy fantasy. Not uncritically, I’m aware of its tropes and problems, but there’s some really quality stories told in that medium all the same.
I read some oh The Witcher series and it was well above average. The characters were complicated, and the contentious nature between human colonizers and native civilizations wasn’t handled with kid gloves. Hell, the entire world is intertwined with magic and the impact of industrialization and expansion of human society causes the monsters themselves to mutate into more horrific and industrial waste appropriate beasts. It’s a good story.
The show’s second season was genuinely bad, and that was very disappointing. It broke its own rationale, it turned beloved fan favorite characters into unlikable brutes, and it greatly diminished the quality of the relationships as the characters grow, learn, experience trauma and cope/thrive/recreate it with others. It was just… Bad, even if you weren’t a book reader but ESPECIALLY if you were.
I don’t have some reddit hard on for Henry Cavill, but he seems like someone who loved the books and games and was excited to bring that world to life for others. To have it sideswiped and turned into a shallow and generic feeling fantasy is a disappointment to any fan - and I don’t doubt someone that close to the process would become more jaded and cold as the program shifted without them. To read into that as sexism doesn’t seem like the easiest explanation, rather it sounds like the project shifted and the lead didn’t like it. That’s naturally going to create strife in teams and professional respect breaks down the longer diverging views of a project are in contention.
the showrunner has to sign off on every miniscule detail, down to the buttons on a costume.
I wouldn’t respect a person who signed off on the Nilfgaardian scrotum armor for the show, regardless of gender.
Same, I watched all of S1 and enjoyed it (despite the confusing time jumps in the narrative) but bounced off hard from S2.
despite the confusing time jumps in the narrative
What was the deal with this? were they just showing events from the future without making it clear and then going back in time?
I was putting it on at bedtime, sometimes falling asleep, and I was so confused about characters seemingly coming back to life or events seeming to have been undone. I thought I accidentally restarted the show from the beginning or something at one point