"Streaming stuff" thread

[Doppleganger]

I guess there's no general thread for streaming material, so I'm creating this to vent on The Witcher, which I don't think merits its own thread.

The story is fudge-nuts and non-linear, and I barely understood what was going on. It's also very confusing, so much so that when a literal doppelganger appears, I can't recognize him as my own reflection.

I never saw Man of Steel but Henry Cavill here is channeling Christopher Nolan's Christian Bale. It's horrid.

[Loki]

I had thought the thread was going to be about you streaming stuff on Twitch/Mixer, not about watching streaming shows.

I thought The Witcher was fine. I do understand the confusion of the non-linear episodes, but once I was able to confirm it by episode 4, I understood everything. Effectively, there's three storylines that eventually coincide. Then you can kind of map out the proper timeline. I don't think it's all that different from the Haruhi Suzumiya series in terms of how they jumped the story back and forth. It kept things less dull when things slowly revealed themselves.

In the books, each character was given their own chapters in the book, but that doesn't translate well into a show. Instead we're given two or three plotlines per episode and eventually everything merges together by the last episode.

The series is in the dark fantasy genre, so everything is pretty fucked up. Geralt is trying to do the right thing, but because the world is so fucked up, everything is a bad path of sorts.

7/10

[Doppleganger]

Originally Posted by Loki

I don't think it's all that different from the Haruhi Suzumiya series in terms of how they jumped the story back and forth. It kept things less dull when things slowly revealed themselves.

There are some key differences, though. The Haruhi stories were episodic so even though you were watching them out of order, you could understand what was going on from start to end of the episode. The plots were self-contained. What Witcher is doing here is interrupting those self-contained storylines, like swapping between Mikuru's perspective in Snow Mountain Syndrome and Kyon's perspective in Endless Eight. I think this did happen in Book 10, the one with the parallel worlds, BUT it was also clearly labeled.

Also, for the DVD release IIRC the show was put in chronological order.

The story regarding Geralt and Ciri were the easiest to follow because obviously Ciri being adult takes place in the future, and once we saw the Geralt Law of Surprise thing we already know what's happening.

But the Yennefer stuff is totally disorienting. And even with the Gerad stuff, because he and Yennefer don't age, that adds to the confusion.

Originally Posted by Loki

In the books, each character was given their own chapters in the book, but that doesn't translate well into a show. Instead we're given two or three plotlines per episode and eventually everything merges together by the last episode.

I didn't even know this was a book series. I thought it was based off a video game.

[Ironthunder]

There's a book series and a videogame series. The book series is canon. The videogames are not.

read all the books so I look at everything in an abstract way .. I'm not a fan of Sapkowski to defend all the little things ..

[Charizad]

With The Witcher, the problem is they wanted to fit too many short stories into a few episodes and mash them into one and logical storyline. That didn't work out quite well. If someone read the books it would be easier to understand what was going on. Notice, that I said 'easier' and not clear as a day. It was still a mess. It is not a bad show, not at all but they wanted to show too much too soon and it got pretty confusing. Now, Geralt himself as portrayed by Henry Cavill is a nod towards the third part of computer games where our character also grunted and murmured a lot. I think Cavill is fine!