one thing that I don't understand about the Witcher fandom is their apparent dismissal or even hatred of the original author, Andrzej Sapkowski, painting him as a grumpy old miser who doesn’t care about his work at all
Usually, whenever there is a fandom that was originally book based the fanbase is very positive toward the author and what they have to say ( provided they are not bigots spreading a hateful message like Orson Scott Card or J. K. Rowling)
im going over a couple of reasons why I think this has happened and debunking them,
this isn’t really related to the controversy but I think these two statements likely went against the rhetoric that some fans were spreading
Creators of adaptations of literature works for other media have the right to be sovereign creators, with unrestricted right to creative freedom. However in the particular case of this adaptation, their ideas can be different than mine. And even when some of their ideas are different than mine, so what? My books are not the Bible.
That ‘slavicness’ is rather something akin to a myth, by which my works were overgrown – and I myself too. The label of the ‘Slav’ was given to me and it stayed like that. Why? That Geralt sounds more Slavic than Conan? That I worked something Slavic-alike into onomastics? My first stories strictly adhered to the canon of fantasy – I’m thinking about the world’s canon here. Well, then the translations came and the world’s fantasy industry had to accept a Pole in whose works every smarter readers could spot some ‘Polish’ or ‘Slavic’ [phrases].”
which likely rubbed the “we say accuracy and wanting it to stay “slavic” but we really mean a white supremacist dog whistle’ gamer bro crowd the wrong way
He never criticized the games, he said that he had no opinion because he had not played them and would not because he just isn’t a gamer (so Idk how you expect him to praise something he won’t play) but that he was sure that they were great. What he complained about was his editors, who used game art on his book covers against his wishes. People took it out of context and started to demonize him, probably due to the fact that the article was most likely poorly translated from Polish into English
But probably the thing that he gets the most criticism for is the “Lawsuit” against CD Projekt Red, there’s a lot of misinformation about that “lawsuit” as well.
First of all he never directly sold the rights to CDPR, he sold them to a small company with about 20 employees called Metropolis Software all the way back in 1997, before the book series was even finished, which would later be bought by CDPR, the pc gaming industry was not the multi-billion dollar industry it is now much less in Poland at the time. it is absolutely absurd to think he could have predicted how successful the franchise became in the 2010s, its like criticizing someone for not buying Apple stock in the early 80s
He also never sued anyone, his lawyers just sent a letter requiring more money based on a Polish law source explaining the law (presumably to treat his son’s cancer, who died this year) that got blown out of proportion (Sapkowski himself said so), and they resolved it out of court. CD Projekt Red’ and him are on good terms now so there is no reason to bring up old conflict
