I’ve got about halfway through the second season of The witcher on Netflix, and for the most part, I am loving it. It feels a lot more witchcraft than the first season and moves at a refreshingly brisk pace. One thing that really annoys me, however, is that the series seems to have wild overestimated how much we all know about the geography of the world Witcher Universe.
I can’t remember it being such a big deal in the first series, but after a couple of episodes of that the characters were out Yes, really begin to move. On foot, on horseback, in carriages, on ships, in portals, they race at high speed around the entire continent, one second on the edge of the world Kaer Morhan, the next in Cintra, a city in the far south, it is not even on The Witcher 3 Map.
Where these characters are, where they are going and how far they have come enormously Consequences for the story told. When Yennefer says she spent a month looking for answers, it helps to know where she has been. If it is so dangerous to take a boat from Oxenfurt to Cintra, it helps to know what the journey actually looks like. And if Kaer Morhan were such a trek for Triss, it would be great to know how far she had to travel.
But I have no idea! We are never shown a useful map or even told by text on the screen where events are taking place, and that is killing me. Even the fact that I played for over 140 hours The Witcher 3 doesn’t really help. My poor wife who didn’t play either Witcher Play or read a Witcher Book is easy lost.
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I’m not saying the show has to be animated Indiana Jones-style card every time someone goes somewhere, but an occasional refresh or update would be nice. Even a subtitle flashing over a cityscape would help us tell / remember what that location shown actually is, because we can’t all expect to recognize generic fantasy castles from memory every damn time, especially if the one Lighting and the time of day and angle of the shot are constantly changing.
To be fair to the show’s creators, this is a frustratingly common misstep in fantasy and science fiction television shows, an issue that goes way beyond the pure The witcher. Perhaps it is hoped / believed that fans either already know the geography of a country or are interested in looking it up online so viewers know enough to fill in the blanks when characters start talking about places. This would leave it up to the authors to occasionally drop a reference to something that is “north” or “west” or “on the sea” and think that this is enough to turn the worth of the plot into one To provide context.
It is not! I to know I’m not the only one to piss me off because some of the titans of the field went out of their way to make sure they avoid the same pitfall. Peter Jackson added a map scene Two towers just to slow down the trilogy and show us exactly what had happened in the last six hours and what was being prepared for the hours to come. It was only a few seconds long, but it was immensely important in a nine hour trilogy. So important that it was something he added after the main filming ended (the finger is Jacksons even though it’s supposed to be Faramir) when he realized how badly it was needed.
And the iconic opening credits too game of Thrones weren’t just there to show us a few courses; As a map, which has been continually added and expanded throughout the series, it has been invaluable for putting the conquests and journeys of the characters in the series into context.
Even shows and movies that take place in our real world that we could more realistically already know use cards! Think how many stories about WWII opened with maps showing the German advances or adventure episodes showing ships or caravans moving along a dotted line on a painted map.
Maps are one of our most important inventions because they anchor us and help us find our place in the world. They are the best way to illustrate where we are, where we have been, and how far we can go, and then shape those movements so that we can relate to them.
Without it we are lost. And that goes for television shows too.
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