Fynn's Guide to All Things Witcher

[Fynn]

Chances are you've seen or at least been made aware of a little fantasy Netflix original series that came out exactly a month ago. Chances are you've heard of this little 2015 open world RPG by some weird European game studio that's been lauded as the best GOAT all throughout the latter half of this past decade. Chances are you've read one of the books or at least heard some very polarizing opinions on the other. Or maybe you've just been around our Discord channel, where me rambling incoherently about this series has become a meme all its own.

But it's time to get a bit more coherent. Following in the footsteps of my betters, I now bring to my fellow EoFFers a retrospective on a transmedia franchise that's near and dear to my heart. I'll be doing some explaining on the history behind these works, as well as some convincing, because God damn, even though this got huge still more people need to know about this. Finally, I'll be giving some tips on where to start depending on what you want out of this series, if any of what I talk about sounds good to you.

WARNING! I'll be keeping spoilers to a minimum, though I will be giving some minor unmarked details that will probably mean nothing to you without context but make it easier to make this whole write-up just make more sense. Unmarked minor spoilers ahead, then in case you're hyper sensitive to spoilers.

So what even is a Witcher?

So before I move on to any specific posts on any of the entries, the Witcher (knwon in its native, oh-so-exotic land as Wiedźmin) is currently a transmedia franchise spanning books, games, TV shows (yes, that is a plural, sadly), comics, etc. On the surface, it's your edgy dark fantasy about a brooding anti-hero who kills monsters. That surface is very soon stripped away, since after about two dark deconstructions of classicl fairy tales something new begins to surface. Something postmodern, avant-garde even. Something very... human.

A Witcher is a genetically modified monster hunter for hire, with the one we follow in particular being Geralt of Rivia. Despite that, there's very little actual witchering happening in the books themselves, with themes of humanity, the true meaning of good and evil, destiny, and family being much more at the forefront. Conceived in the late 1980s, during which Poland was still under the communist regime, the Witcher is a brainchild of Andrzej Sapkowski, an economist who spent his free time writing columns for a fishing magazine. A lover of all kinds of literature, and the fantasy and horror genres in particular, Sapkowski is not really preoccupied with things like drawing maps and hard magic systems. Instead, The Witcher is a fantasy story that's much more concerned with what makes us tick as human beings. And it's actually pretty damn funny most of the time (not that you can tell from the artwork for any of its incarnations).

So let me take you down this exciting, surprising rabbithole. I'll be covering all of the books in the next post, then the games in one post each, and then move on to a post about the Netflix series. At the end, I'll leave a post about various other works (game spin-offs, comics, etc.), finishing off with my final recommendations on how to best digest all this. Hope you stick around and have as much fun reading this as I have had experiencing this series.

Part one: "The Sword of Destiny has two edges. You are one of them. The other is death." - The books
Part two: "Evil is evil, Stregobor. Lesser, greater, middling - it's all the same." - The games: The Witcher