Netflix Makes Falka, the Witcher’s Hitler, Good Because Wahmen

Television

Further bastardization of The Witcher canon has been announced from Blood Origin. It’s as if Netflix is endeavoring to cram as many announcements about their lore breaks as possible in the final five days before the show’s release. The newest addition in this long string of canonical travesties is the reveal that Falka has been cast for both Blood Origin and the main Witcher show. While there is a justifiable reason for Falka’s inclusion in Witcher season 3, there is none for Falka to be in the prequel series. In Time of Contempt, the book that season 3 will be covering, Ciri has a vision that could reasonably feature Falka, as it’s soon after this that Ciri decides to call herself Falka during her time with the Rats.

Falka is another race-swapped character who will be played by Hiftu Quasem of Killing Eve. Falka lived 100 years before the events of the main show and 1000 years after Blood Origin’s made-up events. There is no reason that Falka should be in the prequel series unless she’s another victim of the timeline compressing that this show is committing. It appears that the writers for Blood Origin looked at bullet points of the events which transpired before the main series and decided that they should all occur within a single month. This show will have nothing in common with the lore’s true history besides the occasional name.

For those unaware, Falka is the equivalent of The Witcher’s Hitler. She’s the most violent and bloody revolutionary in the Continent’s history. She gleefully murdered her father and stepbrothers with her bare hands, reveling in their blood. She is often depicted in cascades of entrails and surrounded by corpses. Philippa Eilhart is the only character in the books who believes that Falka was more innocent than history portrays her. Phillippa claims that Falka merely lost control of a mob. The rest of the Continent, including all of its historians, believe that she was a monster of untold proportions, which is supported by the facts. Even if she was merely the instigator of the violence and not its perpetrator, she is still responsible for the most bloody and deadly era in human history. None, not even the Wild Hunt or Emyr, can hope to compare to her kill count.

Not only has Netflix decided to race-swap this character, but it will include all the customary characteristics of their other race swaps, meaning Falka is no longer a villain and is, at worst, misunderstood. In an entry on the main Netflix Witcher website about Ciri, they claim:

“[Ciri] is the key to the destruction of the old world and the birth of the new, the descendant of Lara Dorren and Falka: fierce, remarkable women who were swallowed up by the men afraid of their power. Women whom Ciri is destined to avenge.”

First of all, Ciri is not descended from Falka at all. Anyone who has read the third novel, Baptism of Fire, would know this. For a breakdown of Ciri’s canonical lineage and how Falka interacted with her ancestors, check out “The Lore and Histories of the Witcher Novels Part 3: The Death of Lara Dorren.” Netflix is bastardizing both Falka and Lara Dorren’s stories because of feminism. Neither of these women was destroyed because men feared their power. That is a complete misunderstanding of the events. Lara was created specifically by men hoping to increase her powerful abilities to save the Aen Elle from the devolution they saw within their brethren, the Aen Seidhe. These men wanted to make her more powerful; they were not afraid of her because of it. Lara’s eventual death came down to humans not wanting race mixing. Lara fell in love with a human, and they were both killed for it, her lover by the blade and her by the blizzard she was driven into. There’s nothing to do with sexism or fear of feminine power there.

For Falka, the only thing men ever did to her came when she was an infant. Her father wished to remarry, and that required him to send away his former wife and their daughter back to their kingdom of origin. While that is a terrible thing to do to your infant child, it has nothing to do with a fear of Falka’s powers, as she has none, and the violence she incurred was of her own decisions. The feminist narrative surrounding these women and Ciri’s conjured “destiny” are antithetical to the true history. Ciri has bigger problems than avenging her ancestors’ imagined slights against the long-dead.

Of Netflix’s many horrific lore changes, the ones surrounding Falka are most clearly inspired by political motivations. Netflix decided not only to race-swap The Witcher’s Hitler but make her a good person and a victim. That is utterly impossible based on the lore. Even if Beau DeMayo lied in saying that the writers vocally mocked the source material, decisions like this are actively mocking it by disregarding the lore for cheap virtue signaling.