A tavern brawl puts Éile on a collision course with destiny…

The Witcher is a fascinating world that has spawned several games, six novels and fifteen short stories.

It is also a strangely Euro-focused landscape in which there are literally no hints of people existing outside white Europeans. The television show has rectified that for a modern international audience but many of the other tropes remain untouched.

Into that comes the new Witcher series from Netflix, Blood Origin. It is set before the arrival of humans to the world of the Witcher and is, in many ways, a classic tabletop RPG story put onto the screen.

In that it shares a lot with Willow.

What it also shares with Willow is that Saturday morning feel that takes its own absurdity seriously and thoroughly enjoys the ludicrous nature of most fantasy story telling.

The show is so aware of its own nature that the preamble, featuring everyone’s favourite bard, addresses the trope-heavy structure of the story head on.

I can see the same group of people who don’t like Willow hating this too. It’s not gritty enough, it doesn’t foreground men as hard bitten, struggling, monosyllabic heroes and isn’t primarily a series about the horrors of war. In other words, it’s not Andor (which is rapidly becoming the new Malazan of the genre).

This is so much water off a duck’s back for me. I enjoyed this trope heavy show – it is fun. It’s also inclusive, silly, violent and interesting while also being snarky, self-knowing and completely full of itself. Things can be bad and still enjoyable and, honestly, Blood Origin falls neatly into that category.

Shows like this aren’t going to change the world – they’re not addressing burning social issues or challenging perceptions even if the representation is making racists and sexists everywhere look for ways of saying they don’t like it without making their prejudices completely obvious.

The source material is pulp. It’s great pulp but it is what it is. The show has stuck close to that formula in a knowing post-modern kind of way and that’s fine for me.

More interestingly – the rest of the family enjoyed this and it’s fairly rare that we sit down and all come away having enjoyed something. On that basis I can only say we’re off to a promising start.

Verdict: If it can keep the fun then a lot can be forgiven.

Rating? 6 fantasy tropes out of 10.

Stewart Hotston