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He's also apparently a ridiculous slobbering fanboy(I mean that in a good way), so there's every chance he'll bring some energy to this role rather than his "traffic bollard in a cape" style from the DC films.

 Lance845 wrote:

 Turnip Jedi wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Well that didn't take long.

Still not 100% confirmed, but are we really shocked?

Inb4TheLock for being "Political".

This is the reason I said the show is going to suck earlier. The writers are the usual crowd of "We're Bigots but it's ok when we do it". I'm not a fan of The Witcher and all it's plagiarised glory to begin with but this is just the final nail in the coffin for me.

Not sure its the final nail, remember they cqn still mess up Triss and Ynne

Ciris real world ethnicity has nothing to do with her character so its pretty much fine for her to be whatever. Same goes for every character in the show. It could be a 100% hispanic cast and it would have no bearing on the characters. Nationality was an issue in the world of witcher. Race in terms of humans vs non humans. But skin color? Its hard to be upset about skin color when there are literal vampires and were wolves and trolls killing people.

I think this point would be more valid if we were talking strictly about an adaptation of a book because of the popularity of the book, and people were getting pissy because they'd imagined the character in one way and they had chosen to cast differently. But the issue is we're not - the show is nominally an adaptation of the books, but the plain simple fact is it only exists because of the games and the popularity of those, and lots of people are going to feel it should reflect the previous adaptation of the story to a visual medium which has already firmly established what these characters are "supposed" to look like for many. Especially when it seems to have been a deliberate conscious choice to be "right on", in that the casting call is specifically for a BAME actor, rather than an open audition where a BAME actor happened to be the best person to put themselves forward.

And just to preempt the inevitable - I'm not upset by it, I have no feelings on it at all really since The Witcher is not one of the settings I'm particularly invested in. But I can see why someone who was invested as a result of the games would be annoyed, and I can also already see the legions of torch & pitchfork wielders mustering to declare anyone who did feel that way a monstrous racist.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
First prove someone is being racist. Then direct your hate at the people who were actually doing it. Not the actress who went in for an audition and won.

Did you not see the literally racist casting call?

It's not really racist though is it, racism requires malice, it's merely discriminatory.

 d-usa wrote:
It's an adaptation. Unless there is a specific reason a character HAS to be a certain race, there is no difference between having a buff Superman playing a wiry character and an Asian actor playing a white character.

Que? So if an author from an African country without a significant post-colonial presence were to write a novel drawing heavily from their local history & folklore, a very successful videogame was made based on that setting that stuck closely to that milieu, and then a TV adaptation came along to trade on the success of said game and they announced they were putting out a casting call for a character asking specifically for a white actor, you'd have no issue with that?

Besides which, again, if this was merely a case of the character's race being meaningless it would be an open call, not a specific request for a non-white actor. I think rather that it's the opposite - the show's creators are well aware that sticking to the source material does imply that the main cast would be white, and they're very conscious of how that will be received in the US so are acting to preempt critics.


EDIT: Jeebus what's up with the server today?

"Intentions shouldn't matter"? Errr, no that's not how it works.

If you tell your employee "Make some sandwiches for our meeting later" and they poison everyone, they are the ones responsible for that, not you because you asked them to make sandwiches.

So with all the stooshie a while back about the show's creators supposedly giving the baddies ballsack-textured armour because Men Bad and so looking like manbits reinforces that Baddies Bad, does the end result actually end up like the first year sociology student fanfic that sort of nonsense would lead you to expect, or did they keep a lid on it and come out with something decent?

 djones520 wrote:
The Nilfgardian armor is a bit... weird... but I'm not buying it's because the show designers hate men.

Is there a lot of anti-man talk? Sure. There is also a lot of anti-human. Anti-elf. Anti-dwarf. Anti-everything. They're painting that the world is just a hateful place.

It was an actual thing that some of the people making the show reportedly said during production, I'm paraphrasing obviously since I can't be bothered to go and find the article, but it boiled down to "we made them look like ballsacks because they're Bad Men who are Men, which are Bad", and I was just wondering if any of that ludicrous kind of sentiment actually made it through to the final content of the show. I can no longer be arsed getting halfway into a new show before the cringey stuff reveals itself and sours things, so if I see any cringe-adjacent stuff prior to release I wait to watch until I've confirmed a lack of cringeitude.

It seems either they were talking gak or someone with more sense stepped in and filtered out the cringe, so I'll give it a look.

Sterling191 wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

BUT, can someone answer me, how much of the books does the season cover?

My understanding is that they cover most of the short stories that serve as the "prequel" to the main novels, with only limited coverage of the books themselves.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Either way, really looking forward to season 2, although I do fear that eventually they will run out of story and won't move onto the plotlines from the games as the dude who invented The Witcher has a real problem with the games.

I think that has more to do with his first agreement with CDPR being less than stellar. They just announced a new agreement to continue the license for CDPR, alongside a tidbit that makes me think Sapkowski got a muuuuuuuch better deal this time around, with a non-zero chance of some historical acknowledgement for how well the franchise has done.

The bolded would be a shame if true. The reason his previous deal was "less than stellar" was his own disdain for games as a medium, he thought he was taking CDPR for a ride and the games would go nowhere, and when they became a huge financial and critical success while the vast majority of the world didn't have a clue who he was, he acted like a bitter, juvenile wee gak for years. If he wants to demand more now to renew the license, fine, but he shouldn't be rewarded for his own snobbery and bile last time around.

Got around to watching yesterday, speaking as a previously uninvested person, overall pretty excellent. The ballsack armour and a couple of small cringe moments belies the generally pretty well executed "show, don't tell" approach to female characters. I'm not 100% sure, but I think I'd have preferred if they just stuck with chronological order rather than flitting about to try and hold back stuff for "big reveals".

Really looking forward to season 2.