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A critic said Netflix’s The Witcher was unrealistic because women can’t sword fight and was cut to shreds

John Plunkett. Updated January 6th, 2020

New Netflix fantasy drama The Witcher is proving popular with lots of viewers, especially those who are missing Game of Thrones.

Indeed, the eight-part series featuring a sorceress, a princess, and a medieval mutant monster hunter with supernatural abilities (played by Henry Cavill), is so popular that its Netflix’s highest-rated original programme on IMDb.

But someone isn’t happy. Specifically, US Conservative commentator Andrew Klavan – he’s got his own podcast on the right-wing website The Daily Wire and everything – isn’t happy.

Why? Because there’s a woman in it who fights with a sword (he’s talking about the character of Queen Calanthe) and women can’t fight with swords. She’s not even ladylike, for goodness sake!

This is what he had to say (feel free to skip straight to the takedowns, because it’s worth it).

‘Immediately I was put off by the fact that there’s a queen in this who fights like a man. There’s a couple of scenes where women fight with swords.

‘And I just hate these scenes, because no women can fight with swords. Zero women can fight with a sword.

‘What I mean by that is in a situation where you are fighting men who are used to fighting with swords, you are going to get killed if you are a woman fighting with a sword 100 percent of the time.

‘A woman with a sword could kill somebody who doesn’t know how to fight with a sword. But in a war situation, where you are swinging this five to ten pound sword again and again and again, against much, much, much stronger men, they are going to kill you.

‘They should have made the character a man. She’s a man. She’s gross. She swaggers around and she rips into the meat and tears it with her teeth and curses people.

‘It was a feminist statement and I was like ‘please, give me a break.’ I don’t if that is in the book but this is not the way that any woman behaves.’

And it’s fair to say he was cut to shreds.

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He later came back to say this …

… But we’re not sure it was helping much.

Now that would be a TV show worth watching.

H/T Indy100