The Witcher is around halfway through the second season of Netflix. In the biggest sense, you like it. It feels much more like witchery than it did in the first season. It moves rapidly. One thing that gets me frustrated is that series have very recollectiond how much we all know about the Witcher universe. I have no idea how much money this was in the first, but after a few episodes this kind of stories begin to move around. On foot, on horseback, on ships, on portals, they are zooling around the entire continent at speed, at the edge of the world Kaer Morhan, the next in Cintra. Neither of them was on The Witcher 3’s map. The story being told consists of where these characters lie, where they have gone and how far they have come. When Yennefer says she spent more than one month looking for answers, it helps to know precisely where she’s been. If it is so dangerous to get aboard a ship from Oxenfurt to Cintra, it’s important to understand what the journey really means. And for that trek to Triss, Kaer Morhan would have been great to know how far it was going to be. I don’t know anybody. We never showed a useful map, or even told where events are happening on the screen by some text, and that was killing me. Even when I played Over 140 hours of The Witcher 3, I is not really helping. My poor wife, who hasn’t just dropped out of the game, because she doesn’t know that she doesn’t play Witcher or read witcher books. I wouldn’t say that the show should bring up an animated Indiana Jones-style map every time someone goes anywhere, but an update or refresher would be nice. Even a subtitle flashing over a cityscape shot would help, telling/reminding us what this place being shown is, because we cannot be recognising all of the classic fantasy castles from memory every damn time, especially when the lighting and the time and time of day and the angle of the shot always change. Because of the TV creators, this is frustratingly common mistake in fantasy and sci-fi televized shows, and a problem that goes beyond The Witcher. Perhaps it’s hopeless that fans either know a land region already or they’re keen enough to look it up on the internet, so that the characters can talk about places and fill in the blanks. This would leave writers off to sometimes add another aspect to the fact that something would be north or west or on the sea would suffice to place more seasons for action in context. It’s not. I know that I’m not the only one who’s annoyed by this, because some of the teammen have been out of their way to make sure they avoided the same shit. Having only put a map scene in Two Towers, Peter Jackson did that to stop the trilogy and show us precisely what was happening the last two hours and what had been scheduled the hours to come. It was a few seconds long, but to a nine-hour trilogy of enormous importance was built. It was so important that he added after principal filming had ended (the finger is Jacksons, even though it was supposed to be Faramirs) when he realized how badly it was needed. And, of the opening credits to Game of Thrones, the real-time, no longer exist to show us some gears, as a map that was continually added and expanded across the course of the series, was invaluable in putting the conquests and travels of the shows character in context. Even scenes and movies set in our real world, the ones that we realistically be expected to know already can be used maps! Imagine how many stories from Second World War have opened, with maps showing German advances or adventure epics that show ships and caravans inching on a painted map. Maps are the essential inventions of ours because they anchor us and serve to collect our treasures in the world. They’re the best way to illustrate where we are, where we have been, how far we can take, and then frame them. They will save us a lot. And it also applies to TV shows.
