Here's Exactly How the Witcher: Blood Origin Screwed Up

Blood Origin is, without exaggeration, the worst flop of 2022, with the extraordinary audience score of 12% on Rotten Tomatoes, at the moment of this article's writing, and panned by the vast majority of critics as well.

So, as you might expect, exhaustively examining its flaws would take quite a long time.

Blood Origin had neither runtime nor budget suitable for its scope and ambition. Consequently, the story is rushed, the plot beats are generic (and often outright stupid), in addition to the plot is full of holes, and nearly everything about the series looks cheap.

Characters are unlikeable cardboard cutouts, costume and set designs are worse than they were in the main Witcher series, acting is as stilted as action, dialogue is bad, and overall calling this a poorly made cash-grab would have been an underserved complement.

But if you want just one reason why you shouldn't watch Blood Origin, then consider that this show never had any actual reason to exist.

The Witcherverse, whether you talk about books or games, is a generic DnDsque fantasy world. Well, most of the actual DnD settings have more interesting background lore and more twists on generic fantasy tropes.

Both versions of the Witcher revolved almost entirely around the main character(s), and characters were their main appeal.

Nobody cared all that much about its distant past, when witchers did not even exist… well, no one, except the Netflix crew. (And yes, the well-received Nightmare of the Wolf animated movie was a prequel, but it explained the main character's backstory, instead of delving into an age during which the world was unrecognizable).

And given the details on the shownrunners' conflict with Henry Cavill, who was apparently was the only man on set of their main Witcher series to care about the source material, or deviations from it, it is less likely that the showrunners were enchanted by scant tidbits of information about the setting's distant past, which their source material provided, and more likely that placing the show into that distant past allowed them to make whatever sort of story they actually wanted to make.

And as it happened, the sort of story they wanted to make was as bad, as their ability to recognize their limitations.