YMMV / The Hexer

• Anti-Climax Boss: The final clash between Geralt and Falwick may be seen as a disappointment, given the latter's status as a former witcher and Geralt's nemesis in the series' continuity.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation:
  • On meta level, the utter failure of the film and the quality of special effects used in it made Polish players really snarky toward the sole concept of the first video game when it was still in development. They've been wrong. Boy, they've been wrong.
  • Ask the average Witcher fan from Poland what Dandelion looks like. The most likely description you will get will be that of Zbigniew Zamachowski, who looks nothing like the book counterpart. The game adaptation changed that slightly, but it's still there.
  • The series managed to portray Zerrikania with heavy steppe and Far East influences, mixed with other bits, creating the classic "weird fantasy" typical for early '90s Polish fantasy. It migrated to the tabletop game (which went further and made it into Lady Land) and was such a prevailing interpretation that many fans found the Qurac version from video games to be unacceptable and just plain wrong. What's important for the case is there is not a single description of Zerrikanian culture in the books aside from the fact dragons are treated there as deities.
• Awesome Music: While the movie was a flop, both critics and viewers praised the soundtrack composed by Grzegorz Ciechowski who was posthumously awarded the Polish Academy Award "Orzeł" for Best Film Score.
• Broken Base: The quality of the adaptation itself aside, the concept of using aikido moves for choreography and Geralt's combat training is a divisive subjest, to say the least. Part of the fandom mocks it as taking the "machine" part of witchers' behaviour too literally and against existing descriptions from the books, the other considers the fluid moves that never drop momentum what really sells Geralt as an absolutely awesome combatant.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • As always, Dandelion. In a pool made by Heritage Films (one of the co-producers), he went from a generally negative reaction when the casting choice of Zamachowski was announced to overwhelming positive reaction when the film was released. And since there is even more of him in the series, he firmly secured the status of fan favourite.
  • The nameless old witcher is probably the only thing changed for the adaptation that doesn't suck and managed to secure his place in the fandom. A lot of it is related with being Cool Old Guy and being the closest character to the book's Vesemir.
• Growing the Beard: Happens quite literally. In the first three episodes, Geralt is either still a kid and then clean shaven. Those episodes are coincidently considered the weakest, as they are almost entirely made out of original content and suffer from a minor case of Romantic Plot Tumor. The series starts for real by the fourth episode, where Geralt emerges from a dungeon - bloodied, bearded, scarred and as a hardened witcher with some serious experience behind his belt.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When Netflix announced its own adaptation of the Witcher short stories, it was a running joke in Poland that people will end up re-evaluating The Hexer and treating it in an endearing way, mostly intended as a jab that something so outlandish just can't happen. Fast forward to the contentious reception of the second season of the Netflix series (along with voices raising up already during first season) over its Broad Strokes approach to the material and The Hexer indeed got re-evaluated as, ironically, Truer to the Text. In particular, Torque the devil was almost traditionally torn apart for being just an actor in basic make-up in The Hexer. On announcement that The Witcher is going to have him started the jokes about people talking praises about the make-up from The Hexer... which happened once the version from The Witcher turned out to be crappy CGI (further made worse due to the fact it was added in post over impressive make-up).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Miecz przeznaczenia ma dwa ostrza – jedno z nich zostało wyszczerbione" ^{direct translation} "The sword of destiny has two edges – one of them has been chipped" is a paraphrase of the saying taken from the book series: "the sword of destiny has two edges - one of them is you" and an untranslatable pun on Michał Szczerbic's (the screenwriter) last name. This phrase circulated throughout Polish Usenet groups and mailing lists in the early '00s.
  • "Witcher is real-life medieval history" - a meme started in the early 2010s. It is based on the fact that TVP Historia, a sub-channel of Polish public TV dedicated to historical fiction and documentaries, was not only airing The Hexer (and still has regular reruns), but the most popular bootleg version was ripped with their logo in it.
• Mis-blamed: While the script prepared by Michał Szczerbic is far from perfect, most people openly ignore (or don't even know) he was forced to write around copyrights, since Sapkowski only sold rights to specific short stories and even bits of them, as he was not satisfied with the offered money. This obviously made filming them as they are in text impossible, forcing a lot of creative changes to still keep the basic premise and, most importantly, fill the contracted 13 episodes with something. For example, that's how the two Origins Episodes came into existence. In the first draft, they've existed as a few minute long sequence of young Geralt being taken away from his parents, itself told as a Nightmare Sequence, and that was it. Szczerbic also created an original script for Rose which is widely acclaimed as one of the best movies made in post-commie Poland and his script won an entire collection of awards, so it's not him being an incompetent writer.
• Narm Charm: Over the years, people have become far more forgiving to the technical quality of a shoe-string budget fantasy series, rolling with the crappy special effects and hamtastic delivery of certain cast members.
• Questionable Casting: Marek Walczewski, a well-established drama actor was offered a role of Eyck of Denesle, a no-nonsense knight on a quest to slay a dragon. Thing is, it was right after Walczewski was affected by Leslie Nielsen Syndrome, playing a nearly-blind alcoholic police officer in 13. Precinct sitcom. This turned all his serious and pompous lines into unintentional comedy gold, since vast majority of viewers were simply unable to think about him as anything else than Stępień. What makes the whole thing even weirder is the fact Heritage Films, a co-producer of The Hexer, was the company behind 13. Precinct, so one would expect for them to realise the problem.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Zbigniew Zamachowski proved to everyone that the choice to cast him as Dandelion was the best thing imaginable, even if he managed to gain haters just for the fact he was picked to play the role.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Monsters. While the golden dragon has something of a memetic status due to the CGI ageing badly (further aggrevated due to younger viewers no longer knowing the general state of the typical CGI from that era), the actual issue is with all the animatronics and rubber dolls used for various monsters. They were all done on a very tight budget and with not much real care put into filming them "convincingly". The only exception would be the basilisk from the opening of episode four, but it is dead by then and the carcass is simply dragged by Geralt, making it much easier to film. But other than that, you can instantly tell every other monster is a rubber doll. The most egregious case is the creature Dandelion scared off by throwing silver coins at it, for you can see the strings moving the puppet.
  • When filming started, the original contact lenses used for Geralt's cat eyes proved to be a monumental hassle to work with, making Michał Żebrowski half-blind when wearing them. Not only did the idea of him wearing them constantly have to be scrapped, but even for the scenes requiring visible "cat eyes", more workable, but also more obvious, replacements were used. Meanwhile, the black eye lenses used for scenes when Geralt is dosed up on elixirs worked out perfectly fine, creating a very glaring contrast if both are used in the same episode.
  • Adda in her striga form, which is very obviously very male Zbigniew Modej, the stunt double inside the costume. Further contrasted with the "mostly human" make-up on Magdalena Górska, who played Adda in her human form.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Aside from wooden acting of certain members of the cast and Special Effect Failure, this is one of the reasons why fans hate the movie and TV series - sweeping changes toward the source material, for no apparent reason. The issue subdued when all the Troubled Production issues started to surface few years later, but the legacy left by the first impression still lingers within Witcher fandom.
• Values Dissonance: A double-whammy, both in Poland and internationally. When aired in Poland, the series and its ratings are an inversion of an American-style rating system: swearing is a total non-issue and scenes with sex and nudity (which is never covered) are usually 12+, rarely 16+... but scenes of graphic violence routinely are either flagged as 16+ or even "adult-only". Upon first airing, the entire series got a uniform "parental supervision" rating, which is nowadays equal with 12+ - and on top of that, it was aired during Sunday afternoons, aka the most safe and sanitised hours in Polish TV^note In fact, it was aired directly after a highly-popular... medical soap opera, creating quite a dissonance with all the violence and nudity. This might lead to some confusion when watching any of the bootleg copies, as they will be clearly displaying the age-restriction icon on screen. On top of that, the original Sunday time slot would be illegal just 3 years after the first airing, since anything containing even a single scene with a 16+ rating can't be aired before 8 PM from 2005 onward.
• Vocal Minority: The fandom of the books toward the TV series, all things considered. Professional critics enjoyed it, fully understanding the technical difficulties of such production, budget restrains and the concept of Broad Strokes. The series never went below 2.5 million viewers per episode (with some reaching close to 4 million mark) during premiere run, making it one of the most viewed TV series of 2002 and 2003, no matter how loud book fans were booing. To put that into perspective - that's the viewership rate you can expect in Poland from a prime time foreign TV series at peak of its popularity. Specifically, there was a self-appointed fan committee to "protect the true spirit of The Witcher", organised during the late phase of the production. Despite making a lot of fuss about everything being completely wrong about the incoming film and series, it consisted of 86 people, being ridiculed even within the fandom itself for their over-the-top reaction.

---