The Witcher Author Confirms What Fans Have Been Saying All This Time
The Witcher franchise owes most of its popularity, at least in the West, to the game trilogy by CD Project Red.
The original books by Andrzej Sapkowski remain relatively obscure, compared to the games, in part thanks to their mediocre translations. And so Sapkowski himself remains relatively uninvolved in arguments and controversies around the franchise, and specifically its TV series part.
However, sometimes he still gets question regarding his opinion on the series. For example, he recently got asked about that during the Taipei International Book Exhibition. His answer, as relayed by a Twitter user who has been in the audience, was:
"I've seen better. I've seen worse."
Which is about what you would say if your opinion was negative, but you didn't want to issue an open challenge.
To be fair, Sapkowski is on poor terms with CD Project Red too, but that seems to be related to selling them the rights too cheaply, not expecting that their Witcher games would explode in popularity as they did, rather than to creative differences.
Certainly, devoted fans of the franchise, those who not just casually play the games, but pick up the original books, tend to look very negatively upon the Netflix ' series. The most notable example is the very lead actor of that series, Henry Cavill, who took up the role of Geralt of Rivia specifically because he was a fan, and left the series after Season 3 most likely because as a fan he disagreed with the showrunners' decisions regarding the story.
Notably, Sapkowski liked Cavill as the lead, practically confirming what The Witcher fans have been saying all along: there's just no series without Cavill.
"I was more than happy with Henry Cavill's appearance as The Witcher. He's a real professional. Just as Viggo Mortensen gave his face to Aragorn [in The Lord of the Rings], so Henry gave his to Geralt — and it shall be forever so."
But apparently his happiness did not extend to the rest of the series. The same can be said about a lot of fans, who even started a petition on Change.org to keep Cavill as the lead and fire the writers. That petition by now has over 300 thousands of signatures.
Of course, petitions on Change.org hardly ever result in any actual change, but at least they let fandoms to voice their frustrations.