The Witcher: Blood Origin is the opening to Netflix’s fantasy series and tells the story of some of the most important events in its universe, or at least it should be. Combination of spheres is one of the storylines appearing in this miniseries, but the most important and perhaps most disappointing is the origin of the series’ most important order: witch.
blood origin shows us the first transformation of witches (or at least we think so?) but it also changes the lore of Witches in a big way that raises questions for the entire universe of witches. Netflix show — and it’s not even clear what the retcon’s purpose is.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for The Witcher: Blood Origin.]
blood origin tells the story of Fjall (Laurence O’Fuarain), an elf warrior who lives just before the Conjunction of the Spheres. Along with Éile (Sophia Brown) and several other elves, including witch and general magic user Zacaré (Lizzie Annis), try to stop the evil wizard Balor (Lenny Henry) from exploiting Magic. Chaos to conquer other worlds. But when Balor unleashes a monster from one of these other worlds, Fjall must undergo his first sorcerer transformation to defeat the creature and save his friends.
This is quite a big difference from history of the series. Even though blood origin deal with a major (but not completely) unexplored period of the Witcher universe and taking place inside the Netflix universe and not in books or games, the prequel series still manages to make a puzzling lore twist that seems to rewrite Who is a witch at all.
Based on what we know about the creation and origin of the witchers, they are a separate and unique order of humanity. The mutant hunters provided a way for the expanding human world to protect themselves and their small villages and settlements in the newly incorporated worlds. Equally important, their creation was a long and arduous process of people desperate to find a way to protect themselves from the monsters that lurked in the dark. These early human witches were tragic figures, part monsters, hated by humans and often lacking the anger control needed to live safely among them. But their enhanced abilities still make them important defenders of their haters.
This makes the circumstances create the first witcher in blood origin Too disappointing to say more. Sure, there’s an impending monster threat, and sure enough, our group of merry goblins will no doubt need more than their usual fighting prowess to take it down, but the details and The risk of the transformation, or even where it comes from, is at best ambiguous.
Instead of an arduous new process, or a dangerous combination of several different spells in a desperate attempt to protect those living in fear of monsters, it simply felt like Zacaré. Combine a variety of famous herbs and roots to create her special superhero monster. – killer serum. And if we believe that this is only the first seed of the idea of witchcraft that people will later absorb, then blood origin never made the difference obvious.
The first witch was an elf and the whole thing being an elf creation certainly feels like it’s going to say something new and important about the world in Netflix’s Witcher universe. But after two seasons of the show, it’s unclear if it means much, given the human level of the organization in Geralt and Ciri’s day. Which begs the question: If these are not important to the larger story, and if Fjall’s transfiguration is not more important to witchers in general, then why? blood origin does it exist?
