Shadow and Bone does a poor job with maps and geography, despite having a cartographer main character

Esquire

On Monday, three days after the Grishaverse series was released, Netflix tweeted out a map to help Shadow and Bone viewers. But watching the show itself, it's hard to know where everybody is without consulting an external map. "This is exactly what makes Shadow and Bone—Netflix's new epic fantasy series—so frustrating," says Matt Miller. "It's a show where the plot is literally defined by geography. It's a show where the protagonist is a cartographer. And yet, the show does a very poor job of actually giving the viewer a sense of place. In this world, a mysterious magical anomaly called the Fold cuts the country of Ravka in half. There are multitudes of geo-political issues that come from this major magical inconvenience, which the show either hints at, or expects the viewer to already know. In terms of actually showing what this world looks like, the viewer only gets insanely brief glimpses at actual maps, along with hilariously vague descriptions of the forces and issues driving this story."

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