Blood Origin: Geralt-less Witcher Spinoff Flops Hard
The Witcher fandom is looking forward to the release of the original Netflix show's prequel The Witcher: Blood Origin, but will they get what they really want?
The spin-off tells the story of the Continent before the Conjunction of the Spheres. It follows the ancient elven civilization some 1,200 years before the time of Geralt of Rivia and before the first witcher was born.
And this is exactly what raises questions, because it is the witcher or fellow witchers like Vesemir who piece the franchise together in first place.
We will not see anything like that in The Witcher: Blood Origin. It is less than two weeks before the December 25 premiere and it is only getting worse.
The like-dislike ratio of the spin-off's trailer posted on YouTube a month ago is clearly a bad sign. While YouTube switched off the number of dislikes under the video, the "Return YouTube Dislikes" web tool shows 41k likes against 166k dislikes in total.
If the number is to be believed, the showrunners have failed miserably. While you can't 100% base your predictions of the show on how well this or that trailer has been received by the fans this is something you have to worry about.
"Not a single goddamn monster in the teaser," one of the series' fans joked because as we know there were no monsters 12 centuries before Geralt.
Reddit fans seem to echo the sentiment on YouTube. One of the users says that no one ever asked for this spin-off, especially the people that enjoy the show only because they want to see Geralt of Rivia (played by Henry Cavill of course!) kill cool and scary monsters.
Others agree, saying that they wanted to skip to the Geralt parts because the rest of the show's S2 was as "boring as hell."
"Let's make a witcher show without any witchers!" another angry comment reads in reference to the witcher-less Blood Origin. For such kind of fans it is Geralt who matters most but Geralt is nowhere to be seen in the prequel series.
Once again the fandom accused Netflix of trying to capitalize on the original show – 'milk the show' as they've been calling it – and it is not about the lore or telling prequel stories but about the money. The fans are angry that the showrunners put "The Witcher" in the name of the show just to catch more viewers because it is outright lies. There'll be no witchers!
One of the commenters argue that the only thing, which could possibly make the network change it approach towards the series is if The Witcher: Blood Origin and the upcoming Season 3 will be an absolute flop. But this, they fear, may put the existence of the whole franchise into question. This does not seem like the outcome the fans would like to have.
The Witcher: Blood Origin will debut on December 25. Season 3 of the original series, the last to star Henry Cavill as Geralt, is to be released in summer of 2023.