Please, stop saying that the Witcher is Slavic.
There’s one thing I keep hearing about Witcher, that always infuriates me: that it’s based on Slavic myths and culture. It’s a lie, an illusion crafted by CD Projekt Red, that warped both the world and it’s characters. The Netflix series doesn’t perpetuate that lie but does very little to actually combat it.
In late-nineties, Poland The Witcher stories, and then the saga were the thing to read. Most of the storytellers in the Polish fandom were conservative and so inward-looking that they were bordering on xenophobia.
Meanwhile, Andrzej Sapkowski crafted a gritty world filled with hatred, prejudice, infighting, and monsters, that sometimes even looked scary. His metaphors were quite easy to grasp: the elves were basically all mistreated real-life minorities. Dwarves, with their banking and trading, obviously carried the characteristics of Jews (at least from the standpoint of ill-informed, brought up in the post-Soviet Poland).
Geralt offered a POV that most of us could stand behind: a gritty, manly man, who fought evil with bost muscles and smarts. The strength of the books wasn’t derived from those metaphors, though (which is good, since some of them really didn’t age well) — it was built on diversity, and realistic, believable characters.
Add to that the fairytale flavor of basically the whole of Europe, and you end up with the Witcher. It was a set of stories about a guy who is supposed to murder monsters but ends up mostly killing people. He gets a nice drug trip during Beltane. Our white-haired badass sleeps with and then slays Snow White. He finds out that Beast is really into friends-with-benefits arrangements. He conducts negotiations between the Mermaid and the Prince, during which she demands that her lover gives up his feet to be with her. It’s a world of wonder, but a multicultural one. It is rich because adopting stories from different people makes it rich.
From that perspective, the world of CDPRs Witcher is bland. It’s a monochrome world of black-and-white relationships and of culture that is so nondescript, you can only guess it was meant to be Slavic. Throw in some pseudo-Vikings for good measure, weirdly German invaders and squint, and you’ll end up with faux-Poland in faux-medieval times. In that vision, the most exotic place you can visit is fairytale France, Touissant. The valley of Witcher 3 is missing plenty.
Looking at the books in 2019, it is clear that The Witcher was eurocentric because Sapkowski knew mainly European myths and legends. It had Slavic elements, but also Germanic, Romance, Nordic, and other influences, and that made it what it was.
Many have contested Netflix’s version of the world, protesting the presence of POCs in a world built by a white author, living in a very white corner of the Earth. To them, I can only say: Netflix didn’t go far enough. Sapkowski’s vision has always been about taking myths and making them gritty and adult. He didn’t bother checking where the legends came from.