The Witcher Is Wonderfully Unafraid to Be High Fantasy
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I’ve been all over the map when it comes to Netflix’s The Witcher. My first impression of the show was that it was entertaining and I loved that it didn’t take itself too seriously, but I found it to be bogged down by exposition-heavy dialogue and the tangle of its timelines. Yet as I’ve learned more about the world of The Witcher and rewatched episodes, I more deeply appreciate what we saw. And the element that I adored from the start is how all-in The Witcher is on being completely unapologetic high fantasy. I’ve never seen more fantastical tropes brought to life so vividly on television.
During the scenes when Yennefer is trying to help Queen Kalis and her baby escape from a sorcerous assassin and his deadly giant crab scorpion (these are the sort of sentences you only get to write about The Witcher), I turned to my friend and said, “They’re really going for it. This is actual magic.” I meant the sort of no-holds-barred sorcery we experience far more on page (or in tabletop games, or video games) than screen. To my recollection, there was nothing quite like this on TV before.
Yennefer opens up magical portal after magical portal, flinging her and her charges into varied landscapes while also staving off the assassin with yet more magic. It’s the first time we witness what Yennefer is truly capable of, as previously most of the sorcery was via basic lessons with her mentor Tissaia at Aretuza academy or her ability to quietly transport herself.
But Yennefer vs. crab scorpion was a fever-dream of magic and mayhem, and all of a sudden I felt like a kid again. That kid read dozens of fantasy novels to pass the time and would have wept with joy to watch The Witcher.
Fantasy and science fiction are more mainstream in pop culture today than I could have envisioned when I first picked up Mercedes Lackey’s Arrows of the Queen and never climbed back out of the fantasy well in the early ’90s. I grew up with movies like The Princess Bride, Willow, The NeverEnding Story and Labyrinth, but these were cult classics, not blockbusters in their time. To be a fantasy fan when I was young meant lurking around in a singular aisle of shelves in the bookstore, keenly aware of each new arrival and hoping it was to your taste.
Then Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won the best picture Oscar in 2004, in actuality an award for the accomplishment of the whole trilogy—especially Fellowship of the Ring, which created a new generation of movie-fantasy fans (and brought many more to J.R.R. Tolkien’s books). It was the first “high fantasy” movie to win a best picture award. While high fantasy at least had a foothold in movies—if not industry awards until LoTR—its incarnations on TV were far rarer.
Enter Game of Thrones, which became, for the last decade, the biggest television show in the world. It astonished me to see so many people who would never claim to be genre fans absolutely rabid about Starks, Targaryens, dragons, and direwolves. Game of Thrones demonstrated to a wider audience what fantasy fans have long known: the backdrop hardly matters if the story at the heart is compelling, but a fantastical setting also adds escapism and a welcome distance from reality. Anything can happen in a world where dragons are standard, and that’s endlessly exciting.
Yet on television before and after GoT, high fantasy—which is generally defined as being set in a fictional, alternative world not our own—remains underrepresented. I struggle to come up with more than a handful of live-action series. There’s The Witcher, The Shannara Chronicles, the upcoming Wheel of Time. Merlin, His Dark Materials, Once Upon a Time, and Carnival Row likely qualify. The Magicians half-qualifies with Fillory. There are old standards like Xena: Warrior Princess that loom large, but she was theoretically travelling around in an Ancient Greece that just happened to be overrun with gods and monsters. Even Game of Thrones, while definitely high fantasy, often seemed to be eschewing traditional markers. Magic and dragons are around, but they’re an exception in that world, not the rule.
On The Witcher, the high fantasy sky is the limit. With Henry Cavill’s Geralt of Rivia, we have an amalgamation of many themes familiar to book and gaming fans—a knightly mutant warrior who can work both sword and sorcery. His on-again, off-again love Yennefer is a powerful sorceress who also gets to be a multi-layered female character. In Calanthe we have a warrior-queen, in Ciri an anointed special magical child. Elves, wizards, and monsters out of legend abound. A cutthroat magic school plays a part and sorcerous societies hold sway. Even the “regular human” Jaskier feels right at home in this realm of fantasy, as the witty bard is a type we’ve seen in everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Gabrielle on Xena to Wheel of Time’s Thom Merrilin to videogames for decades (say, The Bard’s Tale, or Jaskier/Dandelion right there in The Witcher’s video game incarnations).
The evocative costumes and the show’s set designs also feed into creating a spot-on world of high fantasy novels brought to life. Can you envision a more fitting tavern?
Making all of this even more fun, The Witcher is self-aware of where and what it is, with lines for Geralt like, “Wizards are all the same. You talk nonsense while making wise and meaningful faces.” Or, about a mysterious prophecy, “It doesn’t rhyme. All decent predictions rhyme.” The Witcher exists in a high fantasy world that can also rib high fantasy. It feels like the perfect incarnation of these tropes for our meme-times.
As this user on tumblr pointed out, some of the disconnect between how audiences have embraced The Witcher versus the reaction of professional critics can likely be traced to how deeply, unrepentantly high fantasy The Witcher is. If this wasn’t your cup of tea, you might find it harder to accept assassin scorpion-crabs. If your only real reference for a fantastical TV world going in was Game of Thrones, and The Witcher is decidedly not Game of Thrones, you emerge scratching your head.
But many of us have waited a long time to see some of these concepts given flesh with unflinching regard. It’s wondrous when our hero, wielding two swords, can also fling back a monster with a burst of magic, deliver a quip, fall in love with the sorceress, and defend a dragon.
That The Witcher has become as big of a hit as it has shows that Game of Thrones wasn’t a one-off or a lark in terms of connecting with audiences. The two properties are vastly different and hopefully will stop being mentioned as often together as they are as The Witcher goes forward into its season 2 production. Are there elements of this show I would change if I could? Sure, same as any show. But it hits home with all of the facets of entertainment that are still closest to my heart. And the popularity of Netflix’s unabashed high fantasy proves that these themes have wide-ranging appeal beyond those of us who grew up in bookstores.
I hope that The Witcher’s success will inspire more studios to take a chance on fantastical properties and less comparisons with Game of Thrones. In worlds where anything can happen, we’d do better not to emulate what came before, and instead look to how we can one-up giant crab scorpions the next time around.
(images: Netflix)
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