The show is a sad demonstration on how not to create a successor of Game of Thrones.

The show had everything it needed to become something magical: great actors, amazing source material, stories that can captivate and are relevant to us today. This potential was sadly wasted, mainly due to exeptionally bad writing and character development. Just two examples to explain my argument:

1. Gerald being the hero, literally all the time, knowing the best possible outcome and way forward, which makes him pretty boring and stagnant. I thing that the showrunners wanted to give this hero stereotyp to the fans, to make them like the show, demonstrating their misunderstanding of why Gerald is loved by fans. It's rather his searching and his learning to navigate a complex and grey world, learning from his mistakes which makes him relatable, which opens up the world of the witcher in its maturity, mirroring a complex and mature world we live in as human beings in complex societies.

In the show one thing he never does is doing something wrong, he is always the hero and the worst thing he always knows and does the right thing removing all ambiguity since everything that goes wrong, is the fault of the "stupid" people around him. In that regard he becomes the worst possible main charakter to open up a world of ambiguity.

2. Yennefer losing her powers reducing a strong-willed and intelligent woman to just another damsel in distress that needs to be rescued by Gerald, by both his bodily strengh but also his moralcompass, which, weirdly, also goes contrary against empowerment ideals of the showrunners. In the source material you'll find a much more nuanced relationship between those charakters, in which Yennefer is the one, leading and Gerald the one following, because he is not a particular smart guy that has all the answers and learns throughout his journeys.

This dynamic is repeated througout the show with most charakters being butchered and reduced to sad stereotypes, in order to develop a plot that is significantly weaker than the one that is developed in the source material.

I believe this is the main reason why the show received such a backlash from fans that know what a great story this could have been. Even for stories around empowerment and race the show is doing a disservice to viewers, because these stories are not integrated into the plot in a believeable, interesting or relatable way - look example 2.

A show like "The last of us" demonstrates how it's done much better.