While HBO is trying to recapture the magic of Game of Thrones by developing a prequel spinoff series, Netflix is looking to capitalize on the popularity of its own blockbuster fantasy show The Witcher in the exact same way. The streaming service announced Monday that series showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and Declan de Barra, who wrote The Witcher episode ”Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials,” are developing a six-part live-action prequel show called The Witcher: Blood Origin.
[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/07/27/the-witcher-blood-origin-netflix-spin-off-series-announced”]
What Is The Witcher: Blood Origin About?
The series will depict the origins of the first Witcher and explore what the Elven world was like before humans arrived and largely wiped out their civilizations. Blood Origin is set 1,200 years before the events of The Witcher, a period of time that hasn’t been explored in any real depth in the novels and short stories by Andrzej Sapkowski that inspired both the Netflix show and The Witcher video games. But there are plenty of hints in those written works that might give viewers an idea of what to expect from Blood Origin.
The unnamed world of The Witcher is part of a multiverse similar to the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology or the planes of Dungeons & Dragons. Both elves and dwarves are said to have arrived in the world of The Witcher from somewhere else, and a different world of elves inspired in part by the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is referenced in both The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and the novel The Lady in the Lake. Since the Netflix series is not holding anything in the games as canon, only lore from The Witcher books is likely to be relevant in the prequel series.
[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/09/07/netflixs-the-witcher-books-reading-order”]
When Does The Witcher: Blood Origin Take Place?
When it comes to The Witcher timeline, Blood Origin will be set around the time of the Conjunction of Spheres, a cataclysmic event when many of the different realms collided. This destroyed some worlds, created new ones, and caused others to merge. In the world of The Witcher, it led to the arrival of many of the monsters that Witchers fight as well as that most persistent monster of all, humans.
Expect the tone of this series to land somewhere between Syfy’s Krypton and the most recent Planet of the Apes film series, as it tells the story of a civilization doomed to fall. By the time Geralt of Rivia is born, all nonhuman races have been relegated to second-class citizens viewed with hatred and suspicion by the humans who rule the world. Humans have built their greatest cities, like Cintra, on the ruins of the wonders the elves constructed. Some elves destroyed their own works rather than see them fall into the hands of the conquerors.
The elves underestimated the threat that humans posed since the new arrivals seemed primitive by comparison, but humans had two big advantages. The first is that while elves are very long-lived, they are only fertile while they are relatively young. Young elves don’t have the best impulse control and they are the most likely to start fights with humans, meaning their casualties also reduced the species’ future fertility while humans continued to outbreed them.
[widget path=”global/article/imagegallery” parameters=”albumSlug=every-monster-in-season-1-of-netflixs-the-witcher&captions=true”]
The second big edge is magic. The Conjunction of the Spheres brought with it an influx in Chaos, the kind of magic harnessed to great effect by mages like Yennefer and Triss Merigold. Humans proved better able to harness its dangerous power than elves. The elves focused their magical efforts on a breeding program meant to produce children who would be particularly capable mages. Unfortunately, that didn’t go quite as they planned.
The Witcher: Blood Origin Story and the Conjunction of the Spheres
Blood Origin’s name is likely a reference to the origin of the elder blood, the magical bloodline that produced the exceptional abilities demonstrated by Ciri and her mother Pavetta, who are called Sources. The last elven carrier of the bloodline was the sorceress Lara Dorren, but she fell in love with the human mage Cregennan of Lod and they had a half-elf child. Lara died shortly after giving birth, ending the full elven version of the line.
While that romance takes place well after the Conjunction of the Spheres, the fact that both human mages and elves live for a very long time makes it a topic rife with potential for the series to focus on. Neither civilization approved of the relationship between Lara and Cregennan, so it also makes for a perfect way to tell the tragic story through the lens of two people who wished to see their species come together rather than fight. Thankfully, Netflix has promised that all of the action will be taking place in a single timeline for this series, so their story should be easier to follow than Season 1 of The Witcher was, even if it does span the centuries.
[widget path=”global/article/imagegallery” parameters=”albumSlug=netflixs-the-witcher-cast-vs-video-game-characters&captions=true”]
Genetics also played a role in the creation of the first witchers, with human mages inventing a mutagenic mixture dubbed the Trial of the Grasses to instil warriors with the power to better fight monsters. The secret to making the formula is closely guarded by the mages in order to control the witchers, who are sterile and hence can’t pass the traits down normally.
This is a whole lot of mythology to cram into six episodes, so hopefully the show’s writers will find a way to do it more elegantly than they did in the often confusing main series. There’s no release date set yet for The Witcher: Blood Origin, so it will likely be some time before we find out.