The Witcher: Blood Origin
I don’t understand why Netflix even bothered to make the execrable prequel series The Witcher: Blood Origin. It’s a truly atrocious mini-series that adds next to nothing to the main show, and doesn’t seem concerned in the slightest with the source material. It’s dull and makes big changes to The Witcher lore for no discernible reason.
But what I hate about it most is how the elves are portrayed in the show. Without spoiling too much, let’s just look at the first episode. The show takes place 1200 years before the events of The Witcher, before men and monsters came to the Continent. This was a time of Elves and Dwarves (and Gnomes but nobody seems to care about Gnomes—sorry, Scanlan).
Does it feel like a distant era? Do the elves live in a society that is distinctly elvish? Do we get a sense of past glory? Perhaps some understanding of what immortal beings were like before the world changed?
Goodness no! Elves here are just humans with pointy ears. That’s it. That is the entirety of Netflix’s portrayal of the elder race that came before humankind. They live in huts and drink in taverns. They have beards. There is nothing elvish about them in any meaningful way. In the first episode, a big elf mercenary guy tells a young elf barmaid that it’s time she was “deflowered” and gets rough with her—as elves do, obviously—before the Strong Female Woman bard intervenes, taking down the big burly man-elf and his compatriots with throwing daggers.
The totally not-just-humans-with-pointy-ears patrons all clap, and we—the Modern Audience that Netflix is so garishly appealing to—are now aware that said elven bard is a Total Badass.
It’s all just so tiresome and lame. Netflix has a series with established strong female characters at their disposal already. Sorceresses with insanely powerful magic. Ciri, who trains with the witchers and becomes a powerful magic user and swordfighter in her own right. But no, we must have the Badass Female Warrior Beats Up Guys In Bar trope thrown at us in the very opening scenes of Blood Origin. How original!
Perhaps, instead, we could have been treated to a society of elves that felt different from the humans of the Northern Kingdoms? The humans who would later drive them from their homes. Perhaps these elves didn’t have human-like taverns! Perhaps there weren’t big, burly bearded elves preying on young elf wenches! Oh, and maybe we don’t need this Eastern European fantasy to include such a wide array of Irish and Scottish accents!
There are plenty of other issues with the show and its portrayal of elves. But it’s the overall lack of imagination and creativity that gets to me. Why even bother making a show about elves in the first place if you just make them humans with pointy ears and beards who behave in every discernible way exactly the same as the humans? Even Rings Of Power did elves better, and I despised that show’s version of Galadriel!
But hey, who needs a decent script when you have diversity checkboxes to tick off and a constant parade of F-bombs to drop? How edgy. How modern.
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