youve been reblogging things with the tag "reblogging to cope with netflix" since last night for me, i woke up and now ive had lunch and youre still reblogging posts and tagging them as such... is the netlfix adaptation really THAT bad?? whats happening in there???
spoilers
let’s summarize the simply worst things to me personally. specifically, about geralt’s company, because that’s what i’m personally coping about on this blog rn
regis intentionally gets the company drunk to find out their secrets, treats geralt of a wound and then smells the bloody bandage, shoves the priest in the camp, attacks vissegerd causing him to give a blood-curdled scream, has no subtlety, no eloquence, and no intelligence. no enigmatic aura. all cards are laid on the table and there is no suspense or intrigue about his character. once, he turns into a bat (regular sized bat) and this has no narrative or character significance, it’s just a way to end a scene.
he straight up tells the ferryman: “im a vampire.” his is how subtle netflix regis is.
his backstory was changed so that he did not die from his own choices, his struggle with addiction. instead, a human woman saves him and taught him everything she knows about herbalism. then she was killed by other vampires in his “coven.” regis kills all the vampires. THEN peasants kill regis. he does not push his friends away, his vampire girlfriend does not walk out on him, he does not die from his own misery and alcoholism. nah, just a random human woman.
there is no plot about the peasants imagining a vampire in fen carn. which means there is nothing to do with regis hiding his identity from the company. which means there is no reason for him to be tied to the girl in the camp accused of being a witch who cavorted with a vampire. and they never meet the girl again, because they cut that scene. so he never heals her of her burns from the fire.
however, in fen carn, there is a wraith. yes. a random wraith. in fen carn. which was supposed to be a cemetery devoid of monsters and danger (the only thing in it was regis, who is, might i say, neither)
milva has no complicated relationship with womanhood, nor any worry or shame about her pregnancy. her backstory as a peasant woman might as well be nonexistent, she never makes a single uneducated remark and there is never any linguistic joke.
her killing for brokilon is never a moral question, the blood on her hands is not even questioned. she’s ~quirky~ for killing. (disclaimer: i agree that killing dryad scalpers is based. but in the books, milva has guilt over this killing of a hundred men)
her backstory was changed to an enthusiastic elven orgy, instead of an experience that she describes as “fear, real fear”. she is barely emotionally vulnerable with geralt, she never sheds a tear. the entire performance is “go girl, give us nothing”
geralt does not push his friends away, insisting that he must go alone, he doesn’t want them suffering for him. he barely even has any issue with regis or cahir. what he must instead come to accept is that he is a father… which he should have already accepted in “something more,” several years ago. again, nothingburger.
jaskier is netflix jaskier. i.e., not a tenor, a castrato. an annoying theatre kid who interrupts every single dramatic line with the equivalent of “so that just happened!” absolutely useless and, unlike dandelion, with no reason to be there.
cahir has been reversed, so that instead of a killer for nilfgaard, he’s now a killer for the north. he and geralt and milva and jaskier do not exchange any dialogue about him following them, he just rides up and shows that he’s alive. there are no scenes with him and milva hiding from the battle together. when with the company, he mouths off to geralt and never remains “tactfully silent.” his backstory is revealed now, and it is so stupid i cannot even speak it. but it has nothing to do with matters of nationalism. this battle of the bridge had cahir leaping in to enthusiastically slaughter his countrymen without a second thought.
the battle of the bridge was absolutely idiotic, presented in a superhero movie style, it said nothing about anything and was sheer killing for entertainment
they cut 90% of dialogue from the entire book (as expected, nihil novi) and all possible complexity and depth. they use some lines from the books without understanding a lick of the delivery or intention behind them. this leads to some really weird things, like:
what “a baptism of fire” is, is never explained, because regis’s dialogue about this was cut
geralt and regis do not have any aside dialogue exchanges together from the books, they have one original scene that netflix made up. it’s never shown that geralt starts to trust regis and accept his advice… but it’s also never shown that he didn’t accept his advice… because regis barely advises him anything at all!
milva, regis, cahir, and jaskier have no chemistry (to be clear: platonic chemistry). their banter is godawful and without a lick of intelligent jokes.
they changed the dynamic by removing zoltan’s dwarven company, save for percival, and adding yarpen fucking zigrin in?
they interrupted the knighting scene with quirky dialogue from jaskier. and geralt. does not. bitterly smile. guess what he does? he says “fuck.” i actually wanted to cry at this point.
sihill is not engraved with „na pohybel skursynom” but with some random fucking sentences percival put on at the last second?!
and even worse than all of this, the worst things of this season, but not geralt’s company, so it’s not my cope:
1. mistle and ciri are entirely consensual, and mistle even teaches ciri about healthy relationships and becomes worried about her when she acts evil
2. yennefer founds the lodge of sorceresses, who unite to save ciri for her own best interests. they defend montecalvo castle from vilgefortz’s army
3. this is supposed to be a rusalka (no ł. but it is a massive L)
and if you really want to know ALL the details…
i spent 21 hours on livestream watching and reacting to it. VODs are up now on twitch.tv/inisvitrelive
i had a counter, which i clicked for every time there was a “book inaccuracy” … there were 351 (which i counted)
we also had a bingo sheet, your typical 5x5, with predictions of stupid stuff that might happen in this season… only 3 were not marked by the end
i drank about 16 oz cranberry juice, since, on day 1, i dressed as regis and took a sip every time something cringey happened
the one good thing i will mention from this season is bonhart killing the rats. bur bonhart is a sadist with no depth. the only thing they could get mostly right was a murder bloodbath.
(also, they did not get this entirely right—just mostly, with the dialogue and killing. jealousy (birka) is unrecognizable, and kayleigh uses magic exploding hexgems, straight out of arcane, except they’re green, not blue. and the rats were treated sympathetically instead of the little monsters they are)
