Now that both Netflix’s The Witcher (TW) and Amazon’s The Wheel of Time (WOT) have wrapped up their current seasons thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast the two series.
As fantasy stories, they share a number of common themes but are also very distinctly different shows. So, let’s break these two shows down and help you decide if one or both should be on your watch list.
Novel Adaptations
Both The Witcher and The Wheel of Time are adaptations of popular fantasy novel series. The Wheel of Time comes from the 14-novel series of the same name by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, while The Witcher is comprised of 6 novels and 15 short stories by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.
So, in each case, there is already a well-established story that many fans are extremely familiar with.
As a disclaimer, I should note that I have read the Wheel of Time series, but have not read the Witcher novels.
The Productions
Both of these shows have significant budgets, as Netflix and Amazon have invested heavily in the franchises. The Witcher boats a budget of about $15 million per episode, while WOT looks to be about $10 million per episode.
As a point of reference, Game of Thrones had a budget of around $6-8 million per episode. In each case, you can see the budget being used on special effects, the cast, and what appear to be a variety of interesting locations.
Each show was shot largely in eastern Europe, with WOT being filmed in the Czech Republic in and around Prague. TW filmed its first season mostly in Hungary, but also Poland and Gran Canaria, while moving production to the UK for its second season.
Each show also boasts one highly paid star (WOT - Rosamund Pike, TW - Henry Cavill) with a large cast of mostly lesser-known actors.
From a production standpoint, I think you can see the extra $5 million per episode showing up in both the special effects, sets, and overall look and feel of TW. To me, the cities feel more real and detailed and there appear to be more elaborate set designs.
Magic Systems and Structures
Getting into the stories themselves, we continue to have numerous parallels. In each story, magic plays a central role in the narrative. I
n WOT, magic comes from the One Power, a source of magic that people born with the ability to channel can harness for a wide range of uses. This magic is split into male and female halves, but the male half has been tainted by the series villain, The Dark One. So, any man who channels the One Power in WOT eventually goes mad. This is a major part of the plot.
In TW, magic comes from Chaos and certain people are able to learn how to draw on their Chaos to create magic. The power is the same for men and women, and there are about an equal number of male and female sorcerers in the series, all with varying levels of power. But, gender plays no real role in a character’s magic power.
In each story, there is an organization that effectively manages the use of magic. In TW, it is the Brotherhood, where sorcerers are trained and eventually sent out into the world to do the work of the Brotherhood (largely exerting its influence in politics).
There are sorcerers who are not part of the Brotherhood as well, but it seems like that is the most common path for a person to learn to use magic.
In WOT, the Aes Sedai are a group of women channelers who theoretically all work together to fight the Dark One and also quickly neutralize any male channelers that appear before they go insane and do too much damage.
Both organizations are filled with political machinations, backstabbing, and have questionable motivations. But the main difference is that the Aes Sedai have a mission to stand against the Dark One. The Brotherhood has no ultimate evil to fight and therefore is a bit freer to focus more on what’s good for the order itself than what’s good for the world.
So far, based on the magic we have seen in both shows (2 seasons of TW and 1 season of WOT) I’m more intrigued by what I see in TW. But, it isn’t a huge difference and both offer plenty of intrigue and interesting use of magic.
Warriors and Monsters
Both worlds have plenty of warriors with swords and axes and monsters to fight. But, the monsters in WOT are all servants of the Dark One. In TW, monsters are just monsters. They may or may not have an agenda, other than eating people to survive.
It creates a bit of a different feeling about those monsters for viewers. All are terrifying, but in TW they are often depicted more as animals following their instincts rather than as distinctly evil. There are also a LOT more monsters in TW. Different kinds, with different powers. In WOT, we’ve essentially seen Trollocs (basically an update on Tolkien’s orcs) and Fades (smarter and more powerful, a bit like Tolkien’s Nazgul).
From a warrior standpoint, we’ve seen a few different varieties in TW, with Witchers being the solo bounty hunter/monster killers and then numerous types of medieval warriors. In WOT, we’ve mainly met the Warders, the Whitecloaks (evil, but still warriors), and the army of Fal Dara.
Both stories offer a variety of rich potential stories around the fighters. I will say that the battles in TW are bloodier and more visceral than in WOT, but I’m not making any real judgment on which is better.
The Settings - Medieval Kingdoms
Both stories are set in medieval worlds. In WOT, we learn there was a time perhaps a thousand years earlier that was far more advanced, with flying vehicles and broader use of magic, since men were not yet driven mad by using the One Power.
But, the world in the series has fallen backward, with a great deal of that knowledge being forgotten. We see remnants of the former age, but only pieces. The current world is made up of various kingdoms and city-states spread out over the continent. We never really get a sense of the geography in either show, as they don’t show us maps to get our bearings.
In TW, we also have a very medieval world, where the kingdom of the elves was once powerful but has been defeated by the human armies. But, we don’t get a sense that there was a prior golden age. Rather this world has simply been evolving as a feudal medieval society. In the WOT books, we got more of a sense of the politics, as the series spends a good amount of time on world-building. That is largely missing from the show, thus far.
Both shows give us slowly more of a view of the metaphorical map as we go. So, they are quite similar in this sense.
The Narrative Structure
The first season of TW was told out of chronological order and it wasn’t explained to viewers that this is what was happening, so it took most of us a few episodes to get a handle on what the heck was going on.
Season 2 did away with this narrative structure and delivered a more traditional timeline story. WOT also follows a standard chronological timeline, with occasional flashbacks that are fairly obvious, even if they aren’t always explained exactly (20 years ago…).
Both tell the story from the viewpoint of more than one main character, so we find ourselves splitting time watching different characters as they separate from each other in the shows.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the weird timeline in WT season 1, so I was glad to see they set that aside in season 2. From that standpoint, both are now fairly similar in structure.
Character Development
TW has had an extra season to develop characters, so it may be unfair to really compare the two shows at this point. However, both have attempted to let viewers learn more about the characters along the way. Some characters haven’t changed a great deal, while others have evolved more than a bit (Geralt and Yennefer in TW and perhaps Rand in WOT). It may make more sense to look more closely at this after WOT has a second season under its belt.
The Villains
In WOT, we have an ultimate enemy in the Dark One, along with his various henchmen. We also have one or two other evil forces in the world (The Red Ajah, Shadar Logoth, Whitecloaks), but there is no question who the ultimate bad guy is.
In TW, we are presented with any number of characters with dubious motivations. Some we can put on the evil side, but often it’s more than they are politically motivated and simply don’t have the best interests of anyone but themselves at heart.
They aren’t looking to rule the world or destroy it in most cases. We do have evil like the Deathless Mother, but as of yet, we don’t have a true ultimate evil
Which is Better?
So, after all, that, which is better? I have to say at this point that I like The Witcher better. But, give Wheel of Time another season and perhaps it will catch up.
