The first season of Netflix's The Witcher is one of the best adaptations I had watched up until 2021. I had never played the games or read the books, yet the show struck me as a genuinely singular piece of work, good enough that it eventually sent me to the Sapkowski novels the show was based on. This engagement with the actual books came long after the first couple of seasons, at the time, I did what any self proclaimed fan does now and perused the threads, looking for a verdict from the people who had been supporters of the games and author. What I found was closer to relief than criticism, readers of the novels and veterans of the games, communities whose personality is territorial as a norm, agreeing that producers of the show hadn't betrayed them. It felt like a historic moment for the literary and gaming communities alike, a story accurately and successfully translated from page to screen, something both the gaming and film industries had long struggled to do. Much of that success loaned itself to Henry Cavill, who plays Geralt of Rivia. Cavill, a devoted fan of the books and games, was by every account determined to honor the material Andrzej Sapkowski had written, the one person on set who considered himself answerable to the author, a asset not seen on prior attempts to adapt other works. So when Season 2 arrived a few months after I'd picked up the first, I was genuinely excited. Two years earlier I had watched the final seasons of Game of Thrones collapse, the largest modern blight on television history and, in my opinion, still the clearest single example of our culture's breakdown in storytelling principles.
Season 2 tripped an intuition I had grown all too familiar with, the same one triggered by countless modern works across every major format and platform: YouTube, TikTok, books, shows, films. The plague of watering down and the idealization of nearly everything newly published: source material adapted too often and too fast, new work arriving lackluster and played out, and the newer platforms mechanized outright through algorithmic exploitation. MrBeast, the most successful creator on YouTube, has toured the podcast circuit openly explaining his formulaic approach to content, the result being factory like mirroring of content at scale across every niche, creators and audiences alike forced down a tunnel guided by programmed judges, which is recommendation code researched to the tune of billions of dollars. On The Witcher, the same infection was masquerading through a different delivery method. The show drifted from its own lead, shifting focus to side characters regardless of what the story needed, elevating or out right rewriting characters for representational reasons leading to screen time decoupled from narrative structure, a creative instinct that seems to have invaded much of the industry. I was not alone in noticing, the near cult-like audience the first season had garnered noticed too. Murmurs rang from behind the scenes that Cavill and the producers were at odds over the show's direction, later reporting suggested the writers' room had come to see the success as its own, some staffers reportedly being dismissive of the source material itself, while Cavill's homage to Sapkowski was pushed steadily aside. By Season 2 the difference in approach was visible on screen: Geralt increasingly a guest in his own story, the unresolvable moral tight rope that define Sapkowski's writing replaced with cleaner, pre-judged conflicts, and invented arcs the novels never carried.
Season 2 had been a chewy piece of meat to swallow. By the time Season 3 rolled around, the break from the source material was undeniable, tough tallow from the audience's perspective. The show felt rushed, and worse than rushed: the moral complexity, the bluntness of the characters, the mood that had made the first season singular were simply gone. Cavill, by then visibly at odds with the show's direction, stepped down following Season 3. No specific reason was ever given, though he would end up announcing his return as Superman with a cameo in Black Adam around the same time, a return that itself fell through when new DC Studios leadership restructured the franchise, by the time Season 3 rolled around, it had already left a breadcrumb trail of creative failure behind it. Season 4 arrived with an attached announcement: Liam Hemsworth taking on the role of Geralt. I never watched it. Nor the various expansion pieces Netflix greenlit over the years, which I did attempt and found to be plastic. Reporting and social media chatter framed accounts of a writers' room dismissive of the source material, Cavill's well-documented devotion to those books and games, and the wreckage of Season 3 were together enough to end my faith in the storyline's continuation. But what matters to me about this behind-the-scenes drama is not who plays what character, or the brand names involved, especially since superhero movies are not included in my palate. What matters to me is what the arc revealed about our culture's ability to tell stories and the evidence of breakdown. To see the scope of this breakdown, you have to go back further than Netflix, further than film, further than writing itself, to the biological necessity of principled storytelling, the psychology of cultural pendulums and the incentive structures that dictate which stories get told.
Take into consideration how long a story can stay alive. The Epic of Gilgamesh has survived roughly four thousand years, with academic research suggesting circulation through oral practices long before anyone took time to record it. The Hebrew Bible carries material that lived for centuries, if not thousands of years as spoken tradition, including genealogies, floods, and laws all translated mouth to ear across generations from people who couldn't even read. Evidence of this tradition goes beyond western interpretations, with some of the richest examples going back further, including Aboriginal Australian oral traditions describing coastlines, islands, and landmarks that geologists have confirmed existed, swallowed by floods after the ice age, these floods being recorded in almost every culture, meaning the Aboriginal communities passed down accurate geographic memory of events that happened more than two hundred generations ago, with nothing but narrative to carry it. No other medium of technology in human history has had a track record quite like it. A fact on its own can easily decay in a couple years let alone a single generation, but information wrapped in characters and myth can outlast entire civilizations or languages. At the most foundational level stories are a peoples bank of memory, a file compression mechanism our species curated before we discovered writing or computers, linguistic engineering through sifted survival pressure to be carried in the mind and portable enough to cross a millennium.
This capacity, more than a tool or even language itself, is where humans break from every other animal. Plenty of species have mechanisms for communication, such as bees dancing for the location of pollen, some monkeys having distinct alarm calls for birds of prey or leopards, and whales leveraging frequencies in water. But one major limitation circles these forms of communication, time, language structures that store information consistently over generations. No other animal has ever been shown to package information in story format. Some marine mammals appear to have the ability of passing learned behavior across generations, but nothing in animal communication has ever been shown to take narrative form. Suggesting humans are the only living form of life on earth to be able to propose what might happen tomorrow, and invent a character who never existed, in order to pass down morality, principals or truth. Storytelling requires a laundry list of complex abilities that have only appeared together in us. Data not limited to the present form, and information able to share attention and intention. Children reveal how deep these biological traits are wired with their ability to narrate, pretend, and invent characters spontaneously, without instruction through imagination, in every culture on earth, at roughly the same ages. We do not teach humans the ability to tell stories any more than we teach them the capability of walking. Every culture ever documented tells them, and a behavior that universally displays, is a mechanism to take with weight. It is a geometrically assembled chemical structure equipped talent, encoded by the same evolutionary process that shaped the hand and the eye, and we are descended, without exception, from the people who shared and listened.
What the equipped talent carries is the question Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning sets out to answer. Scavenging myth across cultures, the same territory Joseph Campbell charted as the hero's journey, Peterson found a repeating architecture that manages to flow under wherever humans tell stories: the known world of order, the unknown world of chaos, and the individual who voluntarily confronts the chaos and returns with something that renews the order. This pattern repeats across cultures, even those who never interacted with one another, because stories are not records of what the world is or was; they are libraries of action, reaction, and result, maps charting out how to act. A myth retold for a hundred generations is a behavioral experiment run at civilizational scale, every retelling testing the map against lived experience, every generation sanding away what fails and keeping what works until the surviving story carries more compressed wisdom about human conduct than any of its individual tellers ever possessed. This is why old stories either historical or mythological are simultaneously ancient and relevant, and why Peterson's conclusion echoes throughout our modern day stories: fiction is a simulator for moral and principled life, and myth is the accumulated database. Stories are how humans encode value, transmit it across time, and train each new generation to navigate a slightly different world from their parents.
So what happens when the mechanism of story telling is altered and the inserted variables change? If stories are the instrument our species uses to encode value and carry it across generations, then what I have observed happen to The Witcher was never really about content. The show did not fail randomly in one moment, it failed in a specific direction over the course of years. Geralt of Rivia exists in Sapkowski's novels for one reason: he is the man who refuses the lesser evil, built to stand inside moral qualms that will not resolve or do so leaving the audience unsure of themselves and the character. What the adaptation did, season over season, was dilute that juxtaposition, assigning answers to the ambiguities, pre-judging the conflicts, telling the audience where to stand before the scene began. It reached into the structure of the story designed around the questioning of morality, carving it out and replacing it with dressed-up narrative.
Ray Bradbury explores this behaviour seventy years before the advent of modern artistic production. Fahrenheit 451 is generally remembered or summarized as a book about censorship, which is the one thing it is not, ironically being banned by many educational administrations. No government or society in Bradbury's world ends up banning books. Captain Beatty, the fire chief, explains the real history to the protagonist Montag, in a speech that reads now as a characterization of modern society rather than a dystopian prophecy, explaining the public's abandonment of books. People in the world experience lack of patience, resulting in attention shortened, and cultural content condensed, which leads to classic stories cut to fifteen-minute radio shows, then to two-minute columns, then to a ten-line dictionary definition. This is portrayed by example through Hamlet which survives as a one-page digest sold on the promise that audience members could finally keep up with your neighbors. Everything, in Beatty's words, boiled down to a gag and the snap ending. Nothing was politically or through governmental force censored. Everything was abridged. And this summarizes what happened to Geralt: nobody banned or burned Sapkowski's work. The novels have been adapted into a version that costs less to watch and consume in regards to thought by people who believe that they are genuinely serving the audience.
Bradbury's most heavily leveraged narrative invention is not the flamethrower, it is Mildred. Montag's wife lives inside a wall-sized television parlor with an on-screen "family" she loves more than her husband. Her character takes on the role of the satisfied customer, and that satisfaction is derived from nothing. Her mind is the meter Bradbury uses to display the temperature of the world's culture: the satisfaction she receives from her "family" shows the standard on which people both consume and judge media content. Her overdosing on pills, and not remembering her actions, is Bradbury's clearest measure of that standard, she cannot understand from a bird's-eye view that her own level of consumption is what drives her society's perspective on the necessity of radical editorial action. Though Season 1 of The Witcher was met with pleasantry for it's effort in following source material, the creators of the show both from an assumed culture and monetary pressure decide to slowly operate on the heart of the original work.
Bradbury continues this point through the imagery of when Montag finally tries to seriously read the Bible. He does so on a subway while an advertising jingle plays in the background. Montag is unable to focus and nothing holds; the words pass through his mind. To capture the feeling, Bradbury reaches for a childhood memory of a cousin promising Montag a dime if he could fill a sieve with sand. The faster he poured, the faster it ran out. This demonstrates a key misinterpretation our culture has about media consumption. Books have never been the bottleneck of information transfer, the reader is. That is the failure state of humans' ability to pass information through story, and the reason our modern culture is experiencing a collapse in sophisticated material. The ability to detect a degraded story is not innate in our evolved understanding of story. This kind of detection is a trained skill, and the only thing that trains it is exposure to stories that carry real weight. Remove the sophisticated content and you remove people's ability to detect the removal. This is why I can state, with accuracy, that our society is too dumb to understand how it became dumb. Nobody has gotten mechanically stupider; the instrument ability that allows measurement of lost principle within content has, for the last couple of decades, been slowly removed within the content we consume at large.
The psychology here is worth spelling out, because it explains why their is no clearly portrayed villain. Bradbury's world works because his culture is not fighting the law of human nature, it is actually obeying it. We are wired to prefer the certain over the ambiguous, because unresolved ambiguity means unresolved threat. We are wired for a cognitive economy, because thinking is expensive. These instincts are the reason anyone is here to read this at all, but people have been calibrated for a world where the easy path and the nourishing path ran together, and modern media is the first large scale environment engineered to pull them apart at a speed not seen. Biology has a name for what follows. A supernormal stimulus, is an artificial signal that exceeds the natural receiver evolved to help solve a problem. As an example, the nesting bird who abandons her own eggs for a larger, brighter fake. Fast food is an example for the human case, scientifically measured amounts of fat, taste, and smell that latch onto the senses. A recap delivers the story's message without the story, a formula-optimized video delivers the experience of surprise on schedule, a pre-judged conflict delivers the sensation of moral engagement while making no moral demand. Each variable is a real concept the human mind is evolved to track and the modern solution overrides the real signal. It does this along the chemical messaging our instincts measure, and our modern society has carved it hollow along the dimension that feeds our biological and psychological needs. Our biology mounts no defense for it has never, over a long enough period of time, been exposed to tell the difference.
This exploitation of our physical system is the incentive our modern culture thrives on, and it explains why the monetary incentive compounds the problem. The currently relevant producers and creators do not need to persuade anybody of anything, they locate the supernormal version of whatever is being made and select for it, second by second, at scale. MrBeast's openly explained formula is not intentional cynicism nor is Hollywood's curated output, it is an accurate map of which stimuli survive contact with the human attention span, and recommendation algorithms researched to the tune of billions is doing nothing more than defining the specific outline of the plaster egg. The money follows the same gradient, representing energy expenditure on a specific outcome. The physical exploit is rewarded by the monetary forcing out cultures behaviour to shift with it, changing the outcome gradually.
Then there is the moral layer, which explains the people inside the industry rather than the audience's deteriorating judgement. The economist Timur Kuran calls it preference falsification: when honesty carries a social cost, people conform publicly while dissenting privately, making an orthodoxy look far stronger than it is, until the costs shift and it collapses in a cascade that appears sudden but was hollow the whole time. Kuran built the theory partially to explain why nobody predicted communism's fall in 1989. Bradbury who wrote the book during America's persecution of suspected communism, makes Beatty the most literate person in the novel, contending with Montag with the very literature he burns, and when Montag finally turns the flamethrower on to Beatty, Beatty stands there unarmed, almost wanting to die. The Witcher's writers' room reportedly mocked the books it was adapting, and the the one man on that set who refused the falsification of original material, was the one to leave. This demonstrates that biology guarantees degraded stories test well, and psychology guarantees the people who know better keep quiet. Multiply that across every desk in an industry and you get a system in which no one is lying, no one is censoring, and the dismissal of morality, principles and truth scale at large.
The title converts the temperature Bradbury states burns the paper in books to Celsius. The same heat but in different units, and that is the point. Our generation will not burn its stories, it has no need to. It converts them into highlights, compilations, content formulas, and into pre-approved product. The same destruction Bradbury describes, expressed in a unit system Americans were never taught to read, moderated by no one and protested by nobody, because the storage format to produce a well educated populace that would protest was the first thing fed to the fire. I think about Geralt of Rivia, a character invented to prove that some choices should stay hard, ironically stripped of principle with ease. A fractal depiction that summarizes our current climate.
To end this frustration-fueled rant with a silver lining: in my estimation, the momentum of the cultural pendulum seems to be shifting. The very stimuli sensors being exploited by industrial artistic factories have been burnt out. The audience is in silent revolt, and the monetary scorekeeping is starting to show it. History tends to show that the least expected and least wanted outcome is the channel energy eventually flows toward.
Sources
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 1999)
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard, 1995)
Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley, “The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3.3 (2008)
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal (2012); Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories (2009)
Patrick D. Nunn and Nicholas J. Reid, “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago,” Australian Geographer 47.1 (2016) — https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
Niko Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (1951); Deirdre Barrett, Supernormal Stimuli (Norton, 2010)
Robert M. Seyfarth et al., “Monkey Responses to Three Different Alarm Calls,” Science 210 (1980); Karl von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees (1967)
“Some of The Witcher show writers ‘actively disliked’ the books and games,” PC Gamer, 24 Oct. 2022 — https://www.pcgamer.com/some-of-the-witcher-show-writers-actively-disliked-the-books-and-games/
MrBeast, interview on The Colin and Samir Show, Dec. 2024