It can be hard to get a good fantasy series these days. Not because it’s a niche genre like it used to be (thank you Peter Jackson), but because there’s so much to wade through you can’t find the gems. So in light of that, let me recommend Netflix’s 2020 series Letter for the King!
I’m a tabletop roleplaying game nerd—though Dungeons & Dragons isn’t necessarily my first choice, it’s certainly the most obvious one that non-gaming-nerds have heard of. I fell in love with epic adventures, quests to accomplish some seemingly impossible task, hurdles to face, twists and turns where you don’t know what the plot or the quirky characters will do next… finally getting some of that in this series! I’ll add that I’ve read all sorts of Chosen One/One-Hero-to-Do-It-All sorts of quests, but I find it far more interesting when there is a group of characters that all are working more or less together and succeed and fail based upon more than one person’s journey. It can be a lot harder to balance, from a writing standpoint, but when it’s well done I find it completely blows away most solo-hero stories. A D&D party of adventurers, a Fellowship of the Ring… similarly, here we’ve got a bunch of characters going this same road for good or ill. The series on Netflix does a good job of following both the primary heroic plot and the similarly important antagonistic plot, so you get a bigger sense of what is going on than if you only saw the journey through the heroes’ eyes.
I’m going to try not to spoil anything beyond what the trailers already have shared for anyone, but if you don’t want to know anything about it at all, I’ve included a “read more” link. Everything after it is directly about the series. I will say, however, that this is apparently based on a Dutch adventure novel, which was never conveyed at all in all the Netflix hype – they didn’t create it themselves, so of course it gets sidelined. It’s probably worth checking out The Letter for the King book by Tonke Dragt in your preferred language! I’m definitely going to be adding it to my own reading list, and there’s a second book in the series called Secrets of the Wild Forest. (No idea whether that’s on Netflix’s agenda or not.)
Letter for the King is a wonderful coming-of-age story that isn’t just for the young or young at heart. There’s a bigger plot, a world hanging in the balance… solid fantasy for all.
Side note: I think the last D&D-esque fantasy movie of similarly epic proportions that I really enjoyed was Mythica, and those five movies had a bit of a learning curve; the first Mythica was good, but felt low-budget or small production to me. Quality climbed quickly, though. Maybe I’ll rewatch those and review them later.
Back on topic, though, the coming-of-age fantasy series Letter for the King starts with your typical adolescent hero; Tiuri is the adopted son of a noble knight, looking with dread at the knighthood trials in his immediate future. His skillset doesn’t exactly fit in with the other martial youngsters taking part. We can already see some Reluctant Hero built right in, but more so, I think there’s a bunch of Beginner’s Luck, too; it’s not quite as blatant as I’ve seen in some Chosen One story lines (looking at you, Star Wars). Some of it is just he’s been trained for knighthood, and he has talents of his own. Doesn’t lean quite as hard into the lucky angle, though some of it does show up at particularly opportune times… but it wouldn’t be exciting if it didn’t, right?
In vaguest terms, we have an outcast protagonist amid a group that would have chosen different members if they had been given the option, and the outcast is the one with the strongest conscience, so when the plot comes calling, of course he answers. Whether the others like it or not, they’re dragged along. I felt the characters were very well designed, both from the story’s point of view and the acting of the young people portraying the characters, and each character gets a minimum of one big twist or turning point over the course of the six episodes that make up the Letter for the King arc. I will admit that not having read the book, I can’t speak to whether they were true to the plot arc of the book, or if they chose to break the season one plot somewhere other than the end. Perhaps someday I’ll update this with more information from the original story. It felt like a full plot line complete with rising action, climax, and denouement, which is really what I care about. (I’ll save the rant about modern failures of cliffhangers for later.)
So without actually spoiling any of the series, I will say I loved the worldbuilding in the show – the setting was gorgeous. I’ve no idea where they filmed the series, but it’s beautiful all the way through. It may be partly that this is from a story originally written fifty-eight years ago (first published in 1962) but there’s a very strong European civilization versus African shamanism and nomadic lifestyle built into the world. In today’s culture that feels a bit trite, but the show did pretty well with it overall in terms of balancing true-to-story and best practices. There were some oddities, like the Asian girl who is part of the Euro-themed northern society while the African adoptee kid gets all sorts of disdain, and I’m not sure whether that’s a Netflix attempt to make it diverse in spite of the setting, or what. They also did a good job not resorting to CGI, I felt, at least until there were places that required a more fantastical visual experience.
I was really pleased with the casting for the show, too. While I did recognize faces, there were no actors so well known they didn’t fit into the story. I assume people recognize Faramir from the Lord of the Rings series (David Wenham) in Sir Tiuri the Valiant, our hero’s adoptive father. I enjoy Ben Chaplin also, and he performed a very strong Destiny Calling inciting incident. Good hook, good attempt to avoid it or pass it off to someone more relevant, and strong follow-through of plot to give the hero no choice but to accept that he’s the one doing this, whether he likes it or not. Most of the actors portraying the primary characters were faces that were new to me, which helped build upon the up-and-coming theme of the story. I think I recognized many parental actors, the king and queen of the two Euro nations, but none of the kids themselves and none of the antagonists.
I hesitate to discuss the antagonist’s goals, reasons, or plot much at all because I know there wasn’t really any discussion of it in the trailers. I will say it’s a much stronger characterization of a guy doing the wrong thing for what he believes are the right reasons than I might have guessed going in. It’s not an Evil Overlord evil for evil’s sake sort of two-dimensional antagonist, which I was a little worried about from how things were given to begin with in both the trailers and the first episode or two. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the antagonist gradually built over the course of the show, and I think most of it was good acting; the CGI special effects were mostly saved for the epic moments alone.
All in all I enjoyed this series and I hope my fantasy-loving readers will, too! I highly recommend Letter for the King, and I’m cautiously optimistic about what plans Netflix may have for the series to continue onward. I also have high hopes for the novel upon which the show is based, which is now on my ever-growing reading list.
Enjoy!
~Marie
Plot Bunny Whack-a-mole 