It’s been an interesting week for Netflix’s monster-hunting fantasy show The Witcher. The announcement that series lead Henry Cavill is stepping down from the role of Geralt of Rivia after season 3 and will be replaced by Liam Hemsworth in the show’s fourth season has knocked fans back on their heels. Cavill’s performance was the most universally praised aspect of The Witcher, and fans of the franchise have been going through the various stages of grief since learning he’ll be leaving. It seems the stage we’re at now is…well, it’s still denial. We’ll get through it eventually.
CRB.com reports that some Witcher fans have even gone so far as to start a petition to keep Cavill on as Geralt, and fire the show’s writers instead. Thought it started out with a goal of only 7,500 signatures, the petition has fast climbed to over 48,000 signatures as of this writing. That’s an increase of over 41,000 people in the single day since CBR.com first shared the story.
Why are fans blaming The Witcher writers for Henry Cavill’s departure?
These sorts of petitions pretty much never actually amount to anything, but crop up on a fairly regular basis. Just a few weeks ago, there was a petition to remove writer Sara Hess from House of the Dragon after some fans didn’t like an episode she got a writing credit on, regardless of the fact that TV shows are put together by a roomful of writers and everything is approved by the showrunner. Saying this kind of a response is entitled and cruel feels almost redundant, but here we are.
On the flip side, the reason that The Witcher writers are being picked on in particular is that there are a lot of stories about Henry Cavill clashing with them over the direction of the show. Cavill, a superfan of The Witcher, wanted the show to stay more faithful to its source material; meanwhile, one former writer on The Witcher has claimed that some people in the writer’s room “actively disliked” the source material, mocking it and lowering morale.
I’m not saying I agree with the petition — in general, inciting mobs of people on the Internet over something trivial like who’s writing on a television show isn’t a good look, and it’s important to remember that those people you’re hating on are actual human beings just trying to do their job. But this situation is slightly less one-sided than normal, because there actually does seem to be a grain of truth to the stories about there being behind-the-scenes issues on The Witcher set.
We’ll know more about what’s going on with The Witcher in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, let’s try to remember we have one more season with Cavill left to enjoy, and that being kind is never the wrong choice.
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