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Tag: Ciri

  • ‘The Witcher’ Showrunner & Freya Allan Talk Ciri’s Season 4 Story

    Throughout Netflix’s The Witcher, Freya Allan’s Ciri has grown into her power and become a monster hunter like her adopted father Geralt. In the newly released fourth season, she’s been separated from Geralt and Yennefer and now goes by the name Falka. She’s also hanging out with an outlaw band called the Rats and finds herself hunted by Sharlto Copley’s Bonhart, who wants to make some money by delivering her to her father Emhyr.

    In a pair spoiler-heavy interviews, Allan and showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich discussed the hero’s season-long arc and what’s next for the young Witcher.

     

    During the season premiere, Ciri enters a romance with her fellow Rat Mistle, who saves her from Kayleigh, another Rat, trying to sexually asssault her. The show slightly diverges by having Ciri consent to Mistle kissing her after the ordeal, but like in the Witcher books, this kicks off a pairing longtime fans have complicated feelings about.

    Complication is what Allan wanted: she told TVLine she didn’t want a “fluffy little romance” for her character similar to what’s found in the source material. To her, Mistle “lets see parts of Ciri we haven’t seen and really shows a different kind of vulnerability in her. There’s a big part of her saying goodbye to her childhood—a push and pull [where] we really get to see how desperate Ciri is to not be alone. Mistle confronts her about trying to run from her past…and says you can’t just run away from who you truly are.”

    Separately to Variety, Hissrich said the romance give Cirii “a vulnerability that we’d never been able to see before. She’s been a princess, the most powerful person on the Continent, someone’s daughter, someone’s granddaughter. What starts to happen when she lives life for herself?”

    Well, the answer to that is nothing good: after rushing off to save a young boy the Rats sold off, Ciri learns it’s a trap and returns to her friends just in time to watch Bonhart decapitate them all, Mistle included. The pair confessed their love to each other before Ciri left, despite Mistle begging her to stay, and to make matters worse, she ends the season defeated and captured by Bonhart.

    This being the penultimate Witcher season and shot back-to-back with season five, Hissrich said the writers wanted it to end with characters brought to their low points. When we next see Ciri, she’ll face a “baptism by fire” that sees her “touch those deepest, darkest places within herself that she’s always pushed away. She worries that death follows her, and once she deals with the heartbreak and loss of the Rats, we get to see her start to access that for a while.”

    The Witcher will return with its final season presumably in 2026, where we’ll see how Ciri gets out of this mess and whether she gets a good ending.

    Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

    Justin Carter

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  • Liam Hemsworth’s Witcher Sure Looks a Lot Like Henry Cavill’s Witcher

    Liam Hemsworth’s Witcher Sure Looks a Lot Like Henry Cavill’s Witcher

    Liam Hemsworth as Gerald of Rivia
    Screenshot: Netflix YouTube

    In real life, if you look at them side by side, Liam Hemsworth and Henry Cavill don’t really resemble each other. But put them in White Wolf wig and costume, and turn the brightness way down, and… man, The Witcher’s continuity problem isn’t seeming so dire now.

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    After on-set photos of Hemsworth in his Geralt of Rivia ensemble leaked earlier this week, Netflix released a very short video revealing the first official glimpse of him in character. It’s gloomy, sure, but who else reacted by muttering “I can’t believe it’s not Cavill?”

    The Witcher: Season 4 | First Look | Netflix

    Season four of The Witcher—as previously announced, the show will end after its fifth installment, with seasons four and five filming back to back—is now in production, so don’t hold your breath for a trailer anytime soon. The fourth season of the adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher novels will be the first without Cavill as the titular monster-hunter, but it will feature the return of Anya Chalotra, Freya Allan, and Joey Batey as Yennefer, Ciri, and Jaskier the bard—plus a few more new faces, including Laurence Fishburne and Sharlto Copley.

    You can watch the previous three seasons of The Witcher on Netflix now.

    Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

    Cheryl Eddy

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  • The Witcher Book Series Is Getting A New Addition 10 Years Later

    The Witcher Book Series Is Getting A New Addition 10 Years Later

    The author of The Witcher books, which inspired both the CD Projekt Red game series and the Netflix show of the same name, confirmed that he’s working on a new addition to the novels that tell the story of Geralt of Rivia, Cirilla of Cintria, and Yennefer of Vengerberg. It’ll be the first new Witcher book in 10 years—the last was 2013’s Season of Storms—but it likely won’t feature any of those beloved characters.

    The Witcher 3 Meets Tense Roguelike PvE Card-Battling In Rogue Mage

    Read More: The Witcher Season Three Ended As It Began—Messily

    According to fansite Redanian Intelligence, Andrzej Sapkowski was on a Ukrainian podcast called Fantastic Talk(s) and was asked what he was working on. Perhaps the man is preternaturally disposed to knowing when The Witcher discourse machine is chugging along, or maybe he has a special witcher sense, because he decided to just flat-out say that he’s “quite diligently” working on “a new book about witcher.”

    “I never say these things with me because you never know,” he reportedly said (Redanian Intelligence does not detail how the interview was translated to English). “Maybe I’ll do something, maybe I won’t. And so far, when I said that I would write something, and then I didn’t write it, people complained as if I had deceived them and as if I had lied.”

    “That’s why I don’t like to talk about what I’m doing until I finish doing it. Because until I finish it, I don’t think it exists. But since I always make exceptions for Ukrainians, I will do it this time too,” he continued.

    Sapkowski then said that the next book in the Witcher universe could “take a year, but no longer” to finish. Geralt fans who are mourning the loss of Henry Cavill as the White Wolf in the Netflix series (he’s leaving for unknown reasons and being replaced by Liam Hemsworth), shouldn’t get too excited for more Geralt content, however, as Sapkowski has made it clear before that Geralt and Ciri’s story is over and done with.

    Could the next book be a prequel, like the upcoming TV series based on Ciri’s crew of violent teenagers, The Rats, that’s currently in development at Netflix? Could it tell the story of another conjunction, another joining of different worlds like that one that kicked off the events of The Witcher, with elves and humans forced to share a continent together? More importantly: Is Sapkowski keeping the CDPR team in the loop? The studio is working on a new Witcher trilogy, after all….

    Alyssa Mercante

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  • Can The Witcher Survive Henry Cavill’s Departure?

    Can The Witcher Survive Henry Cavill’s Departure?

    The first episode of The Witcher season 3 begins with a lengthy recap of the previous two seasons: flashes of Henry Cavill in that initial, questionable Geralt wig, Freya Allen as a much-younger, more eyebrow-less Ciri, everyone’s shittier eye contacts, sword fights, magic, and a bit of sex. While watching, I was viscerally reminded of how much ground the series has covered since its 2019 debut—how much better the makeup and styling got, how impressively legible the sword fights are, the undeniable sexiness of most of the cast, and how utterly perfect Cavill is as the eponymous witcher, Geralt of Rivia.

    The Witcher 3 Meets Tense Roguelike PvE Card-Battling In Rogue Mage

    Netflix’s The Witcher pulls from Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novel series of the same name (which inspired CD Projekt Red’s game franchise), though there are many creative liberties taken with the twisting, turning, time-traveling books. The show can sometimes be a bit of a mess when it comes to plot, getting mired in the political goings-on instead of laser-focusing on the core trio of Geralt, Ciri, and mage Yennefer, but it shines whenever it gives those three center stage. It’s then that you remember: Cavill was made to play Geralt.

    With Cavill leaving after this season and The Hunger Games’ Liam Hemsworth set to take his place (the reason is still unclear, though rumors relating to Cavill’s frustration with the show’s writers and his potential other filming commitments have been swirling for months), it’s hard to watch the current season and not wonder: How will The Witcher go on in Cavill’s absence?

    Henry Cavill is a dream Geralt

    Cavill’s physicality and familiarity with Sapkowski’s universe shine in every moment he’s on screen—he perfectly captures the quiet kindness and probing philosophical mind that Geralt displays so often in the books. Geralt can kill you with his bare hands, but he can also have a riveting debate with you about war and race relations, and Cavill embodies that perfectly. I don’t know if I’d call Cavill an excellent actor, but he is an excellent Geralt.

    There’s also a special kind of physicality that Cavill brings to the role that’s largely rooted in his ability to do many of his own stunts. While watching this season, I found myself wondering: “Did Cavill take notes from Tom Cruise while on the set of Mission Impossible: Fallout?” Cruise famously does almost all of his own stunts, continuously pushing the limits of what a Hollywood actor can pull off on-screen, and the payoff is obvious: the Mission Impossible films are the best modern action movies by a country mile.

    Netflix

    Cavill has been working with stunt coordinator Wolfgang Stegemann since Fallout—the two worked together to choreograph the iconic one-shot fight scene from The Witcher season 1, so the connection isn’t all that far-fetched. And Stegemann told GamesRadar that “it’s beautiful to see an actor who’s doing all the stunts themselves. I have a great stunt team but I don’t need a stunt double for him. [This means] I’m able to shoot special camera positions that I would never be able to do without him.”

    Will Hemsworth have that kind of dedication to his role? The Witcher series often falters in plot progression and occasionally in character development, but whenever Cavill is fighting in a scene, you can’t look away. And in Season 3, he gets fight scenes and emotionally deep moments in spades, reminding us time and time again that he’s an excellent Geralt of Rivia.

    The Witcher without Cavill

    Bizarrely, even Netflix seems determined to reassure viewers that yes, Cavill is still in this season of The Witcher. A recent marketing campaign projected the words “Yes, he’s still Geralt in season 3 of The Witcher” on buildings and cliff faces around the world. Sadly he won’t be Geralt in season 4 of The Witcher, and that’s what I’m most worried about.

    The Witcher Season 3 is split into two parts with the second set of episodes coming later this month. The first set of episodes ended on a cliffhanger, making the wait for those new episodes feel just a bit longer. Spoilers below for the books, but the second half of the season will likely kick off with the Thanedd coup, an infamous battle that horrifically injures Geralt. He carries that injury with him for the rest of the series, and the aftermath of the coup has major reverberations throughout the entire continent: It dissolves the mages’ Brotherhood, it separates Ciri from Geralt, it crowns an elven queen, it imprisons Yennefer.

    The Thanedd coup will drastically shift the series’ pace—expect it to move rapidly, expect the stakes to be upped tenfold, expect your heart to be broken over and over again. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Cavill shouldering the exciting future of The Witcher, but I’ll keep an open mind. Maybe Hemsworth has got the chops, and his Geralt of Rivia will be one for the ages. The Witcher showrunners have promised a “flawless” and “meta” transition from Cavill to Hemsworth, so I’m at least looking forward to seeing how they pull that one off.

    The Witcher Season 3 Volume 1 is streaming now on Netflix; Volume 2 is due out on July 27.

    Alyssa Mercante

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  • The Ladies Of The Witcher Are Storming Fortnite

    The Ladies Of The Witcher Are Storming Fortnite

    Epic Games’ battle royale shooter Fortnite has some new characters joining in on the quest for the W: The Witcher 3’s Ciri, Geralt of Rivia’s adopted daughter, and his love interest Yennefer of Vengerberg are now available in the game’s item shop.

    The Witcher 3 Meets Tense Roguelike PvE Card-Battling In Rogue Mage

    The popular ladies of The Witcher franchise storm Fortnite with two islands of their own: Ciri’s Escape and Yennefer’s Battleground, both of which can be accessed through the game’s Discover tab. Or, if you’d rather land on the islands immediately, you can enter code 2776-4034-8400 for Ciri’s and 2862-9616-5689 for Yennefer’s. Completing either Ciri’s or Yennefer’s islands will net you emoticons of each, while finishing both of them will reward you with a fancy banner to show off. The two islands will be live until July 4.

    The real draw here are the equippable skins, though you’ll have to shell out some V-Bucks for them. Currently Yennefer can be bought either on her own for 1,500 V-Bucks (approximately $12 USD) or in a bundle with her Megascope pickaxe, bird skull back bling, and Black Wings emote in which she summons her magical raven for 1,800. Ciri, meanwhile, is only available in a pack for 2,000 V-Bucks, and comes with both back bling and a pickaxe of her silver sword Zireael, as well as a basilisk glider. There are some cool touches to these skins, as well. Ciri’s hands, for example, will glow green when holding her Zireael Sword Pickaxe. And Yennefer’s just a badass. Who wouldn’t want to embody her essence?

    Unfortunately, Geralt isn’t joining Ciri and Yennefer to duke it out for the win this time around, as the White Wolf was previously an unlockable skin Battle Pass owners were able to acquire back in Chapter 4 Season 1. As a result, he probably won’t be for sale at any point, though those who unlocked him can, of course, use him any time. Ah well, if we can’t have him back, then replacing him with two of the most powerful women in The Witcher seems like a fair trade.

     

    Levi Winslow

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  • Someone Please Help This Witcher 3 Fan Who’s Being Haunted By A Hammer

    Someone Please Help This Witcher 3 Fan Who’s Being Haunted By A Hammer

    Screenshot: PaschalisG16

    When most of us experience a glitch, we can soothe our woes by simply reloading our game, or perhaps looking up a solution online. But PaschalisG16 has already tried that, and much more. No matter what this Witcher 3: Wild Hunt player does, though, their Geralt is walking around with a floating hammer stuck between his legs.

    It goes everywhere Geralt goes. Cutscene? Hammer. Tearing down a monster? Hammer. And so PaschalisG16 ended up making a Reddit thread asking what the hell was going on and more importantly, could anyone lend a helping hand? You can probably guess what happened next: an endless array of dick jokes. Oh no. Perhaps the funniest thing about it is that, buried under dozens and dozens of replies like “Tis the most mighty of all the man-mallets” and “Giggity” is the OP once more, to zero effect, pleading for people to stay on topic.

    “Does anyone wanna actually help? It’s not THAT funny,” PaschalisG16 wrote, if you scrolled down far enough to see it.

    Speaking to Kotaku, PaschalisG16 admits that the oddly persistent hammer is not that big of a deal but that “my OCD makes me hate it a little bit,” so they want to get rid of it even though it doesn’t affect gameplay at all. In fact, PaschalisG16 has gone ahead and done things like saving Dandelion from the soldiers in Novigrad with the hammer in tow. What makes this entire ordeal so amusing is just how pervasive the damn hammer has ended up being. They’ve started a new game. They’ve reloaded a new save. The hammer won’t go away. Worse, replies reveal that other players are suffering the same fate as well.

    The issue isn’t new, based on various internet threads over the years from baffled players who, much like the top picture suggests, always end up stripping Geralt naked in an effort to delete the hammer. Reading the troubleshooting is kind of hilarious: Yes, Geralt has tried meditating the hammer away. No, your suggestion isn’t going to work.

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    “Unfortunately, I could not play with him when I realized that [the hammer] was with me now forever,” reads one thread from almost four years ago. “This destroyed the atmosphere of the game, constantly following me, I could not take my eyes off [the hammer] almost all the time. I could not forget this, I began to go crazy with this hammer,” they recounted, clearly traumatized by the whole thing.

    While in-game meditating didn’t get rid of the pesky hammer, embodying its teachings did, in a roundabout way.

    “However, the time has come, and I calmed down,” the 2019 hammer sufferer went on to say, before sharing a picture of the hammer, Geralt, and Ciri sitting around a campfire like a happy family. They’d accepted their fate and were now sharing what was the equivalent of a photo album dedicated to the hammer. “I was able to complete the game, one of the DLCS. Now this is my new bro, companion, like Roach. I realized that there was no point in paying attention to him and continuing to play as if nothing had happened. And it’s good that I was able to come to this, because the game deserves passing.”

    But, uh, seriously, if anyone knows how to fix this, can you hit PaschalisG16 up?

    Patricia Hernandez

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