The Witcher is having something of a moment right now. Late last month, Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski released his first new book in the series in more than a decade, Crossroads of Ravens. In just over a week, Netflix will follow that up with the fourth season of its TV show adaptation of Sapkowski's Witcher Saga, which will be the first to feature Liam Hemsworth as the titular monster hunter Geralt of Rivia following the departure of former star Henry Cavill.
Meanwhile, video game developer CD Projekt Red is still hard at work on The Witcher 4, the latest sequel to its video game series and the first to feature Ciri as the primary playable protagonist. The video games, especially the smash hit The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, played a huge role in The Witcher's current boom in popularity. Geralt of Rivia may have originated in Sapkowski's books, but these days it's easy to find a story featuring him no matter your medium of choice.
To commemorate the release of Crossroads of Ravens, Sapkowski did an asynchronous Reddit AMA where he fielded all sorts of questions, giving fans insights into the books, his opinions on popular culture, and more. The author has a famously dry wit and isn't afraid to use it, which is all part of his charm. He turned that wit toward the question of adaptations during the AMA, and why he believes they can never stack up to the original work.
Andrzej Sapkowski speaks on The Witcher adaptations
During the AMA, Sapkowski was asked his opinion of the Netflix show and CD Projekt Red's video games, and whether he was happy with the direction they'd taken his story.
"I'll put it this way: there's the original and then there are adaptations," he said. "Regardless of the quality of these adaptations, there are no dependencies or points of convergence between the literary original and its adaptation. The original stands alone, and every adaptation stands alone; you can't translate words into images without losing something, and there can't be any connections here."
That's a fairly neutral answer, albeit one which obviously favors the source text. Sapkowski has been asked this question many times before, and despite how flippant he can be with fan questions, he tends to stay professional when it comes to opining about adaptations of his work. According to the author, much of the reason adaptations can never stand against the books they're based on has to do with the change of medium, and how that inherently changes the material.
"Adaptations are mostly visualisations, which means transforming written words into images, and there is no need to prove the superiority of the written word over images, it is obvious," he said. "The written word always and decidedly triumphs over images, and no picture - animated or otherwise - can match the power of the written word."
Are books truly better than TV shows or video games?
Now, I can see a few different sides to this argument. While I love a good book as much as anyone else, I've also seen enough TV shows and played enough video games to know that stories of equal caliber can be told in those mediums. Is a masterful show like Breaking Bad or Black Sails inferior to books just because it's a show? How about a video game like The Last of Us? I don't think so.
The true test, to me, is whether a story makes the most of its given medium in a way that can only be achieved in that medium. Books and shows and games all have different strengths and weaknesses, and debating which is superior is nigh impossible.
That said, I can also totally get behind Sapkowski's assertion that something is usually lost in translation when bringing a written work to the screen. We've all seen enough adaptations where the movie or show fell well short of the book it was based on. So in that respect, I very much agree with his idea that adaptations must stand separately, if they are to stand at all.
We'll see how The Witcher season 4 stands when it premieres on Netflix on October 30.