This Honest Trailer for The Witcher Is the Only Funny Thing in the World Right Now

With anxieties emerging from too many directions this week, it’s a delight to turn off your brain for a whole five minutes. Bless the folks at Honest Trailers for the gift they’ve given by way of The Witcher’s hilarious and accurate honest trailer.

“Based on the books you’ve been meaning to read, that got spun off into the video games you’ve been meaning to finish, comes a series that’s meant to be the next Game of Thrones but ended up more like the next Xena: Warrior Princess. I ain’t mad at it,” begins the Honest Trailer, and honestly, I cannot imagine a more fitting or accurate introduction to Netflix’s take on Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy series.

Honest Trailers also notes that the “sprawling fantasy world” boils down to a “vaguely Polish Tolkien … with swears!” Cut to a supercut of the liberal amounts of cursing peppered throughout the episodes. But that’s nothing compared to the compilation of Geralt’s now-infamous “Hmms” that the voiceover explains thusly: “Henry Cavill mean mugs his way through the continent, searching for the minimal number of syllables required to carry a series.”

As for Geralt, “his destiny will be tied to Ciri, a Baby Yoda with the power of screamo,” Yennefer, “a girl who left the Hogwarts to deep state mage pipeline to go live by her own rules … selling boner weed,” and “tagging along is the foppish bard character who everyone hates, with a song or two that everyone admits is actually pretty good. Huh. I guess even fantasy realms have to deal with their own version of John Mayer.” These descriptions are just so spot-on that I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep from calling Ciri “Baby Yoda” in the future, or that I should even try.

And here’s how they describe, well, the plot progression of every single episode: “Geralt comes across a problem he doesn’t want to get involved with, then totally gets involved with it.” And … scene. Oh no, wait, there’s more: “… while Ciri runs through some woods boringly, Yennefer’s dress comes off, then we switch timelines, only you don’t realize it, since half of the characters don’t age. So just enjoy an awesome sword fight.” Were truer words ever spoken about The Witcher? Is it possible to boil it down to a greater essence than that?

Watching this made me appreciate all of the time and energy that went into stitching together the many “Hmms” across eight episodes. But my favorite part may be the assembling of how many times people talk about coin and say the word “destiny.” Honest Trailers’ video editors deserve a medal. This is great.

Even The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich is a fan.

(via Honest Trailers, image: Netflix)

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Kaila Hale-Stern

Kaila Hale-Stern (she/her) is a content director, editor, and writer who has been working in digital media for more than fifteen years. She started at TMS in 2016. She loves to write about TV—especially science fiction, fantasy, and mystery shows—and movies, with an emphasis on Marvel. Talk to her about fandom, queer representation, and Captain Kirk. Kaila has written for io9, Gizmodo, New York Magazine, The Awl, Wired, Cosmopolitan, and once published a Harlequin novel you'll never find.

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