“[I] tried to explain: There was an uprising against Germany, but the Russians were across the river, and on the German side there were also soldiers from Hungary or Ukraine,” he said. "For Americans, it was completely incomprehensible, too complicated, because they grew up in a different historical context, where everything was arranged: America is always good, the rest are the bad guys. And there are no complications
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i think this show had the potential to be a bit like GoT, which was successful in the US despite not being so shallow (at least until about halfway into its course)
that said i support any jab against amerikkkans especially given how a lot of this specific audience is made of
si support any jab against amerikkkans
Vax conspiracy real!
Euros are worse than americans
americans are the dumbest audience in the world hands down and have a very limited range of sensibilities. if something isn’t blunt and calculating it goes over peoples heads or they just can’t connect with it. if something strays too far from how american entertainment is scripted/shot/etc then it’s automatically bad. this also extends to the cinephile and critical sphere. but the insulting thing is that this disconnect is considered an issue of quality because there’s a layer of american cultural exceptionalism over all discourse.
if americans like X foreign movie or band then it’s quality, and if they don’t like something then it has no value whatsoever, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. on letterboxd they actually changed the algorithm recently to favor american reviewers under the guise of fairness because a south american film that americans don’t like made it into the top 100. it was like the most offensive thing to people that someone had different opinions on art.
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if something strays too far from how american entertainment is scripted/shot/etc then it’s automatically bad.
This even extends to reality TV slop. Look at the difference between Gordon Ramsay’s American and British shows. It’s night and day.
american reality tv is very narrative/drama based and barely shows people doing shit. i had such a low opinion of reality TV until i watched stuff from asia like hyori’s bed and breakfast.
but that’s kinda american culture in general. we love to build up phony narratives and megadramas and bask in scandal and whatever else. a million serial killer movies and documentaries and county jail shows. the trump saga. following dumb trials. nobody acts real on anything or says anything real. can’t even go on a talent show without them giving people character arcs. then youtube is mostly the same shit.
The show is just bad from the perspective of fans of the setting and from the perspective of people completely new to the setting. Not the audience’s fault they’re so bad at writing that they couldn’t even keep Hollywood’s biggest fan of the setting as the main character lol
and from the perspective of people completely new to the setting
Disagree. I like the show and never had any interest in the games or books until I watched it. I think its mostly fine personally. I have only listened to the first book on tape though so I’m not enough of a nerd to “well ackshually” every tiny canon mishap.
Edit: I won’t be watching it if they continue past season 3 though it is pointless to replace Cavil nobody can do it.
Edit2: Also I like show Geralt much more than book Geralt. Book Geralt has smug reddit energy sometimes.
Edit2: Also I like show Geralt much more than book Geralt. Book Geralt has smug reddit energy sometimes.
I think that’s the point, in the books Geralt starts off as a cynical centrist completely opposed to taking a side in any conflict. Over the course of the books as his character develops, he learns to care about more than just what immediately affects him.
He starts off that way in the show too but he’s less of a smug redditor about it.
You’re in the minority even of people who don’t know about the setting. And it’s not “tiny canon mishaps” they basically went completely off-script as if they ran out of book material like game of thrones except in this case the books were already done so it’s just bizarre
I mean are there important things that were left out? Nobody seems to be able to vocalize it except “Lady character got too much story - more angry sword man”
Everything from book 1 made it into the show almost verbatim - but things were swapped around to different parts in the narrative. They didn’t happen at the same times but they happened.
I don’t need a full breakdown but it would be nice if someone could explain what was missing so I have an idea.
idk what impatient young people have to do with it but dumbing shit down for americans is certainly a real thing in media
I still blame the capitalist class.
They have… notions about workers that just aren’t true. And in a way, dumbing down things becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as it leads to people themselves being “dumbed down.”
They’d prefer us dumber too.
Yes.
People don’t want to watch an intellectual show but they want to feel like they are. This demands writers take the subject matter of non-intellectual things very serious and treat it with great reverence.
People don’t want that because the only providers of media don’t want to create it. Creating intellectual media is risky and often not-profitable. So they want to provide simple subject matter and some have been smart enough to dress it up as highly intellectual (A24). I am not dissing A24, I like their movies, but intellectual movies that aren’t actually intellectual is definitely a brand. That’s literally Nolan’s whole shtick.
Writers/Directors/Actors don’t want the baby media, they want to create their own stuff. But they aren’t allowed to do that if they want a job. They don’t want to throw away their lives making baby media so they’re also forced into playing this role of elevating simple shit to intellectualism. Some elevate it by taking the subject really serious (The Dark Knight, The Batman), and some try to elevate it by making it political. So they take a story about a polish wizard who fights monsters and tries to make it about the struggles of a secondary character. It starts to get messy here because we’re leaving the pure materialist underpinning of why this stuff happens and going into a bunch of cultural stuff around politics and expression. Mainly because most political action in the US has been reduced only to artistic expression.
I haven’t seen Barbie yet but that is probably the exact same thing. A baby thing elevated by writers who struggle for an actual outlet but can only express simplistic political statements due to living under a liberal and often reactionary order.
What are some examples of actually intellectual shows/movies?
i mean yeah people are anti-intellectual to the point of madness, its not just tv and movies, its a discussion in the writing community too. anything slightly nuanced or artsy (especially around moral quandaries) is going to alienate most audience members. Ive seen small writers get pressured to make everything more black and white (especially authors talking about race or sexuality from a non mainstream perspective). it sucks, but its always been a thing and its most definitely not an American thing, anyone saying that has never traveled outside of america. people just suck honestly, and this guy should have known that. What was he gonna make a challenging and new take on THE WITCHER? lol. the real idiots are the ones who think they can make something novel out of a bloated meme of a franchise and show. just have naked woman and monsters and the smallest bit of dialogue skills the audience will go wild. anything really good never gets appreciated as much as ai generated slop. and even if you make something really smart and complex that people love they will love it for the wrong reasons like fight club or American psycho.
just have naked woman and monsters and the smallest bit of dialogue skills the audience will go wild
Case in point: first few seasons of Game of Thrones
Can’t believe they had subway surfer play picture in picture throughout the whole season
Option A: I agree burgerlanders suck and want dumb TV
Option B: go to hell bourgeois Ohioan you did a bad job
press-both-buttons.jpeg
Blaming the audience does wonders
Lol, I started watching it recently and I like it. But every episode starts off pretty normal like
“Hey we gotta go kill a thing/not die, ok that was a lil weird but we did it, we gottem”
And then the final five minutes is just brand spanking new characters doing rapid-fire random incomprehensible shit for no discernable reason that is probably explained later but certainly not during the following episode.
It’s literally not possible not to be confused because there is actually zero information of any kind
Haven’t read the books, never even finished Witcher 3 (or 2, lol), so I couldn’t give less of a shit about the faithfulness of the adaptation, or whatever. Also, I possess the European brainpan, capable of understanding complex story structures, a rare trait supposedly
It was just a bad season. Had its moments, to be fair - but overall, it was just… pretty bad. Not terrible maybe, but nothing I would recommend to a friend
I guess maybe I lowered the bar in my head over the years. It wasn’t exceptional or anything but I didn’t think it was much worse than the second season.
It’s relative for sure, I just felt there were a bunch of strange decisions on a shot by shot basis. I caught myself laughing at points where it definitely wasn’t intended… That whole desert episode was pretty weak (not because it was deserted, empty, boring, but because they didn’t commit and tried to make a desert less empty-feeling, deserted, boring through the editing alone, which didn’t work for me. Have the confidence to hold a shot goddamn)
Jaskier was great as always, stealing every scene. The dryads were great and honestly Vilgerfortz’ whole staff combat style was phenomenal. In general, the action sequences were really good, as were the costumes. It just didn’t click for me overall, I guess.
What? You didn’t find it realistic that Ciri always looked like she was in the middle of a photo shoot? And actually, I often found the costumes too good in that regard. Kept waiting for them to look at the camera, “Balenciago.”
Now that you mention it, I guess I kinda warmed up to the costumes. I found them a bit irritating from the first season, mostly having issues with the cloth fibres (which looked too synthetically shiny to my eyes, clearly giving off that modern (cheap) fabric sorta vibe) - but in general, there was just too little dirt, too few signs of use on what people were wearing. All battle armor polished to a mirror finish. And by the third season I kinda got over that, I figure, because that’s all still true lol
Lol yep. Everything always looked freshly made. Geralt looked like he had just stepped off the runway before every major battle.
The people in the comments on PC
aren’t particularly taking this well.I’m American and I was confused. Too many characters with bizarre names with no rhyme or reason to keep track of. Also like, I do not remember what happened last season either. I played 2 of the Witcher games and it was pretty much the same in those. I don’t care about all the political bullshit anyway it’s the worst part of the show. There were, what? Two monsters this season? In the show about the guy who kills monsters? Bad call. I know they’re trying to adapt the books but it makes me really uninterested in the books. If I were making a Witcher show from scratch I would just make a monster of the week show.
The games are set after the events of the books, so it’s kinda like Geralt just resumes his day job, but there’s clues and references to all the major events that happened spread throughout.
It’s not really a story about a guy who kills monsters, any more than Super Mario is a story about a plumber.
Much like Mario, he just gets caught up in a conflict between kingdoms and find himself in the midst of various political plots and webs of intrigue. But when all that is over, he just goes back to his day job.
Funny, for me the political stuff and the back stabbing is the main point of the show.
