The Witcher: Blood Origin Teaser Offers Nothing

Television

Netflix’s prequel to their bastardization of The Witcher, The Witcher: Blood Origin, has released another teaser trailer with just over a month left until its premiere. The fact that not even a full trailer is out yet implies studio concern with the product; the longer trailers and promos are withheld, the more likely it is that there was a problem with production. Blood Origin hits Netflix on December 25th, and nothing beyond speculation is known about its plot, as this highly stylized teaser offers no substance.

Nothing new is revealed in this teaser. All we get are stylized action shots with dramatic music. No story is evident, partially because it’s a teaser. Is the studio afraid of what fans will think when the story is revealed?

The previous speculation that this prequel series will feature the compression of 1,500 years’ worth of history into a single time frame has not been contradicted by this teaser. Blood Origin will still likely cover the events of the Conjunction of the Spheres, set 1,500 years before the main Witcher series, and Lara Dorren, an elven ancestor of Ciri and the originator of Ciri’s Elder Blood in humans who died roughly 100 to 200 years before the man story. The show has been confirmed to take place 1,200 years before the events of the show – a convenient in-between point. That is a lot of history to compress into so short a span. All the primary characters of Blood Origin are original, so a completely removed story from the larger events of the universe would have been a better choice. This may still be the case for Blood Origin, but the revelations which caused this speculation are compelling.

In an effort to hamper total nihilism toward Netflix’s approach to this franchise, the anime, Nightmare of the Wolf, was surprisingly well done. Perhaps a divorce from the source material into less-explored areas in spinoffs will once again deliver a competent product. Blood Origin must not adapt the points of history that speculation supports, or there is little chance of success. If it is just a random spinoff about cool characters and an amorphous past, there is a chance it will be good. So far, none of these teasers imply this. Blood Origin is still a massive question mark that only a full trailer or the show’s release can answer.