Okay so I was asked WHY is Netflix’s the Witcher so offensive and so outrageous to so many polish fans, so I decided to try and put it into perspective, because some of you just honestly don’t know most of this stuff.
Well let me start by saying - it's mostly because of how culturally important The Witcher is for us as a people. Because it drew a lot from polish culture and there can be found themes and parallels and symbols for actual polish history and events that actually happened.
Like the fall of Cintra can be viewed as a symbol for the first partition of Poland after which we disappeared off the map for over 100 years and were slaves forbidden from speaking polish or teaching children how to write or read polish. It's because the Witcher has many common points with romanticism which is an era in polish literature that covers that period of 100 years of non-existance where our poets and artists created often on exile and in prison for even daring to speak polish. These books were called books "towards the comfort of hearts" and were meant to give hope to those who were losing it, the hope that our homeland will one day be restored and that it's worth fighting for.
And while not written in this period, the Witcher seems to me to be taking a lot of these values and translating them into a fantasy setting. Ciri's journey is very similar to the journey of some of the big heroes from that era, Ciri is in my opinion, in every way that matters, a romantic hero.
Here is a brief description of what a romantic hero is:
“A romantic hero is a literary character, prominent especially in the era of Romanticism. Most often it's a person very young, a seer, a leader to a nation, that is led by strong emotions. A person weak mentally or, quite opposite, very strong - that leads other people towards better future. That person often balances at the edge of insanity, life and death. In their fate you can find tragedy. Romantic hero is an individualist, who puts their own feelings above all else. It's important to note, that while all romantic heroes created by writers had common traits, they often end up taking completely different stances. Ones fall into nihilism and depression, others stand to fight for love and homeland. They feel fiery love not only towards people, but towards their home country. Such heroes were most often created by polish writers.“
Bottom line is, to many of us the Witcher is a second Bible. And we were promised that it will be respected and shown properly and portrayed accordingly and it. Just isn't.
We were promised a faithful book adaptation and instead we got some scraps and vague bullet points from the books and 0 slavic or polish spirit in any of it. Which is why the entire Poland boycotts the show. And why there is currently 2 polish people left working on it, counting Baginski.
I know it can be hard to understand for someone who never studied polish history or polish literature but for some of us these themes and parallels are very, very obvious and equally important.
