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So, if they are changing Ciri, are they also changing the Emperor?

 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.

 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?

Again, you don't know their motivations. You don't know it's racist. They could, VERY easily, be trying to differentiate the various nations by race and already designated Skilliga(?) as the white guys. So whoever they get for Ciri could dictate the race they pick for her dad and that nation, and so on and so forth.

Asking for a BLAME actress isn't in and of itself racist and jumping to the conclusion of racism is a knee jerk idiotic move. Without more data your just making assumptions.


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 Yodhrin wrote:


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

To be fair, racism doesn't REQUIRE malice.

And it's also not necessarily discriminatory. None of us are privy to their plans.

 Lance845 wrote:
Again, you don't know their motivations. You don't know it's racist. They could, VERY easily, be trying to differentiate the various nations by race and already designated Skilliga(?) as the white guys. So whoever they get for Ciri could dictate the race they pick for her dad and that nation, and so on and so forth.

If you genuinely think it's not for the sake of "diversity", I have a bridge from London for sale. You're being naive in my opinion, and I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

 dogma wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Granted Polish culture isn't a hell of a lot different to the rest of the west...

Aside from the misogyny that is a hallmark of most Slavic countries

I don't really know how more misogynistic Poles are compared to the rest of the world, but there's definitely more to the cultural differences than that, it comes across in how Poles behave and I think how The Witcher is written and portrayed as well.

there's a reason CDPR thought the sex cards in the first game were cool.

I suppose you could focus on that, or you could focus on the wide range of uniquely strong and influential female characters in the video game series.

One thing the The Witcher does well is it has female characters without them being cookie cutter token female characters or characters that could be just as equally female or male. They exist in a tough and sexist universe which can make their strengths (or their failings) more profound and meaningful.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

...but I think it's different enough that it gives The Witcher its own flavour, I think it adds to the somewhat unique grittiness of the world and of Geralt himself.

But HBO still aged up all the creepily underage girls for Game of Thrones, and that world is plenty gritty.

I don't really see how that relates to casting minorities in Witcher. Not having read the GoT books I don't know which characters were aged up, but I imagine it was done because they didn't want to be on the disturbing side of provocative or wanted to show nudity and while it might have been appropriate to do that in text in the books it's not appropriate (or legal) to do with real actors.

A bit of a Pole perspective here:

If one thinks, that Poles in general are misogynistic, he most certainly never met our women Large group of those women would feel offended by the very notion, that mere nude playing cards could or should offend them and such whiteknighting would be vastly more offending than said cards.

On a more serious note though: you cannot apply western racial/class/gender logic to a country with completely different history. Few of the many important facts that most of you probably don't know:
- we did not have prohibitive inheritance laws, so throughout history our women did not have problems like English women did, "Pride and Prejudice" is an exotic novel from our point of view,
- The First Polish Republic was a multicultural state which resulted in a very tight mix of traditions, religions and ethnicities (e.g. see history of so called "cities of three cultures" like Białystok and Włodawa). This mixed heritage is a key to understand modern Poland, as it was pronounced heavily later by partitions, which added another layer of deep and prevailing differences between regions. We basically have couple of distinct polish ethnicities.
- our women gained voting rights in 1918 without a fight, those were granted to them by Piłsudski within months of reestablishing Polish independence
- after IIWW we had real socialism here, which not only equalled everyone in poverty, but also in rights and responsibilities, work stations etc and making a carrer by both sexes was limited strictly by political and personal connections. During that time women also had universal right to abort pregnancy on demand. We did not have anything resembling sexism or racism of american '50s, '50s in Poland are very dark times of Stalin era political repressions.
- after transformations of 1989 there was no structural sexism in making careers, which resulted in a well described generation of "disappointed businesswomen", who were so eager to mindlessly adapt western models of life and career that a lot of them ended depressed and without families and children, which in turn resulted in a total shift of both desired lifestyle and fertility rates within later generations of polish women.
- we have one of the lowest gender pay gaps in Europe, resulting mostly and directly from career choices and maternity leaves culture, not from any structural discrimination.

As a result, we now have three major flavors of feminism here. First and most numerous is catholic feminism, renewed passionately by neocatechumenate movements - this group embraces traditional women roles in society and cherish them fully. Second group is commonsense feminism, a spiritual continuation of experiences of women during interwar, soviet occupation and post-soviet transformation era - a group of well educated and/or successful or just complex-free women, who will laugh at the very notion, that there is any structural discrimination or inequality of women in Poland. Third group is "imported feminism", a very vocal and medial group that emerged during "cultural import era" of polish '90s, when everything foreign was deemed better/of more value - they try to directly utilize western feminism narratives and philosophies, but because historical differences listed above they are viewed as hilarious or sometimes even insane by first two groups. The third group tried to establish various political entities during the last 20 years with miserable effects (around 1-3% of votes).

In turn, polish men do not really play any important role in "wars" between those different feminisms, those wars are perfectly self-sustainable. One can pretty much map geographical and media densities and probabilities of occurrence of those three kinds of feminisms. Even more so, there is no such thing as a single "desired male behavior model" as those three groups have completely different relationship goals/stereotypes, so calling any male in Poland "misogynistic" on sight or making sweeping generalizations is ignorant at minimum and straight up culturally imperialistic at maximum.

As to this whole BAME thing - many perks of characters in The Witcher series (e.g. those naturally and indisputably strong female characters AllSeingSkink mentions above) are directly tied to polish realities of the '90s projected on fantasy setting and were/are one of the reasons why Witcher games gained so much popularity. They simply weren't a typical western culture product (including CDPR production strategies/realities resulting in loads and loads of content). Pushing BAME philosophy, which is deeply western in nature and based on solely western complexes and problems would IMHO shallow this production instead of enriching it. From Central European perspective it is pushing cultural homogenization based on "wester cookie cutter", not cherishing cultural diversity... We (audience, fans and western sensibilities) have already been here, discussing nipples in Witcher games.

That being said, large internationally popular series based on Polish novel will be cherished in Poland nonetheless. Of course unless it will prove a total disaster - we already had a very, very, very, very bad Witcher TV series and latest Netflix originals aren't really award winning materials...

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.

 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?

It’s kind of like replacing English nobles with lions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Yodhrin wrote:

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?

If the race has no bearing on the character, then no.

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.

The race can be meaningless as far as the story and need of the character is concerned. Which is separate from what the people involved in the production would like to have.

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.

Sometimes you might even have a case of people not giving a gak what critics say, and decide to hire people because they want to hire people.

They could have any number of reasons for wanting to cast a character a certain way: creative reasons, wanting to differentiate different social classes by race, create additional tensions in the story line, wanting to be more inclusive, wanting to piss off random people on the internet.

Is there any part of her background story that requires her to be white? Other than "she was white in the game", is there any part of her background that would be invalidated because she may be a different race?

It is an adaptation. Netflix believes that the people who will watch the Witcher will not mind that it is not an all-white cast. I'm sure that they will make other changes as well.

We will see how it goes.

Edited, to change my mind:

 Yodhrin wrote:

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?

I've decided that I'm just going to fully embrace a double standard and go with the following:

Minorities are so underrepresented, that if some successful minority focused franchise actually makes it into the mainstream we should just leave it the hell alone and let minority people enjoy seeing other minority people in the limelight for once.

If a franchise full of white folks who are just white folks because that's the "normal" makes it to the mainstream, then I have no issue with inconsequential changes to a characters race to get some damn diversity going.

I'm sure the elves that settled a continent full of gnomes and dwarfes will understand that the people casting the roles in the movie about their fictional land where ghettos full of second-class citizens based on race already exists might throw in some added races to top it all off.

People normally does not like when they change the source material for whatever reason.

For example, in the movie adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, they changed the japanese-like Fire Nation with Indian actors and actresses, and then they changed the Inuit-like Water Tribe with... two white kids.
The only character properly represented was Aang. The movie was a failure for many reasons, of course, but those changes where stupid and make the movie even worse.

The example of The Lion King is very different. If this wasn't "The Witcher TV Series" but "The Witcher but it is in Africa and based in African folklore and monsters TV series" then it would make sense to all characters to be black people, even Geralt, etc...

But I don't know. If they want Ciri to be of an specific ethnicity, and then change all the people from the Empire of is father to be of the same ethnicity, then it is good. I don't know why would they do that but whatever.

Dreadwinter wrote:So, if they are changing Ciri, are they also changing the Emperor?

Maybe? Maybe she ends up not being his daughter at all.

For all we know the changes to her race may or may not be plot relevant.

Actually it makes me wonder what the implications are for humanity in the setting at large. As I understand it, humans arrived with the conjunction of the spheres and their present populations are the descendants of refugees from a destroyed world. So the presence of diverse races in the makeup of the Dauk or Wozgor people would in turn be reflected in their descendants 1500 years later.

Or (and I kind of like this one), if no one else in the world looks that way, Ciri having those traits would prove someone in her family line had the means to cross over to other worlds, serving as proof she has the elder blood.

 d-usa wrote:
Edited, to change my mind:

 Yodhrin wrote:

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?

I've decided that I'm just going to fully embrace a double standard and go with the following:

Minorities are so underrepresented, that if some successful minority focused franchise actually makes it into the mainstream we should just leave it the hell alone and let minority people enjoy seeing other minority people in the limelight for once.

If a franchise full of white folks who are just white folks because that's the "normal" makes it to the mainstream, then I have no issue with inconsequential changes to a characters race to get some damn diversity going.

I'm sure the elves that settled a continent full of gnomes and dwarfes will understand that the people casting the roles in the movie about their fictional land where ghettos full of second-class citizens based on race already exists might throw in some added races to top it all off.

And what you described above is pretty much the case here - a story built on subtleties of central european slavic (broadly speaking) country with hell of messed up history is gaining enough popularity to spark "big players" attention and what you suggest is "so let's change it here and there to improve the compatibility of this product with a completely different culture, just because we can apply our own racial logic to it and arbitrarily judge that it looks culturally indiverse otherwise"... Literally the only reason for changing any character to non-white race here is western colonial complex and internal issues with minorities. It has nothing to do with diversity - "white folks" being the same everywhere so "there is enough material about white folks already so let in some damn diversity" is just so ignorant I don't really know how to comment it. World culture does not simply divide under neat white, yellow, red, tan, brown and black labels, you have multitudes of completely different culture codes under each and every label. The major problem with your perspective is that ultimately all you see is the most outer layer of skin colour and not ever dig deeper into religious differences, cultural differences, traditions differences or group identities that do not share any clearly distinct visual feature.


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 d-usa wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Yodhrin wrote:

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?

If the race has no bearing on the character, then no.

And here lies a huge can of worms - in a racially uniform society any person with a clearly different race will experience life in totally different way, resulting in totally different character. So when you write "if the race has no bearing on the character" as it was a simple "color swap" you already assume US-like society structure where the mix of races is high enough so that every growing up experience is possible, thus making any character traits plausible for any skin colour. Black Ciri if not followed by black Emperor and black society it grew from makes Ciri either unbelievable or a kind of "clearly unique freak" by the in-world standards. And that is my main gripe with this - you are willing to forfeit integrity of the author's work and background in the name of totally foreign perspective.

To be honest, changing stuff to make it appeal more to the target audience is something that has been done forever. Just look at The Simpsons, and how in islamic countries Homer does not drinks beer, or characters like Apu are just erased.

 Galas wrote:

Spoiler:

nou wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
Edited, to change my mind:

 Yodhrin wrote:

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?

I've decided that I'm just going to fully embrace a double standard and go with the following:

Minorities are so underrepresented, that if some successful minority focused franchise actually makes it into the mainstream we should just leave it the hell alone and let minority people enjoy seeing other minority people in the limelight for once.

If a franchise full of white folks who are just white folks because that's the "normal" makes it to the mainstream, then I have no issue with inconsequential changes to a characters race to get some damn diversity going.

I'm sure the elves that settled a continent full of gnomes and dwarfes will understand that the people casting the roles in the movie about their fictional land where ghettos full of second-class citizens based on race already exists might throw in some added races to top it all off.

And what you described above is pretty much the case here - a story built on subtleties of central european slavic (broadly speaking) country with hell of messed up history is gaining enough popularity to spark "big players" attention and what you suggest is "so let's change it here and there to improve the compatibility of this product with a completely different culture, just because we can apply our own racial logic to it and arbitrarily judge that it looks culturally indiverse otherwise"... Literally the only reason for changing any character to non-white race here is western colonial complex and internal issues with minorities. It has nothing to do with diversity - "white folks" being the same everywhere so "there is enough material about white folks already so let in some damn diversity" is just so ignorant I don't really know how to comment it. World culture does not simply divide under neat white, yellow, red, tan, brown and black labels, you have multitudes of completely different culture codes under each and every label. The major problem with your perspective is that ultimately all you see is the most outer layer of skin colour and not ever dig deeper into religious differences, cultural differences, traditions differences or group identities that do not share any clearly distinct visual feature.

To be honest, changing stuff to make it appeal more to the target audience is something that has been done forever. Just look at The Simpsons, and how in islamic countries Homer does not drinks beer, or characters like Apu are just erased.

That would be fine analogues to the case of multitude versions of The Witcher series existing that cater to different audiences. The notion that global web streaming platform is/should be somehow exclusively or even majorly US audience oriented is... dubious.

Are you surprised that modern "global" culture is basically all cut by US standards?

nou wrote:

. The notion that global web streaming platform is/should be somehow exclusively or even majorly US audience oriented is... dubious.

That's usually what happens when a US company with a vast majority of subscribers in North America and Central European countries where diversity is seen as a plus markets themselves, and the programs they produce, to the majority of their audience.

Maybe PolandFlix can produce a version that is more ethnocentric to Poland.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galas wrote:
Are you surprised that modern "global" culture is basically all cut by US standards?

It depends on who is producing it and who they are targeting.

If there is money in catering to "US standards", people who want to make money will cater to "US standards".

 Galas wrote:
Are you surprised that modern "global" culture is basically all cut by US standards?

No, I'm surprised that some people find it natural, that it should be while also being vocal about cultural diversity. Those two standpoints just don't add up from non-US perspective. And I would be cautious about what exactly "modern global culture" looks like - the biggest film industry in the world is Bollywood simply by the size of native audience and a shift to far east oriented audiences is already visible in major Hollywood productions (and global Box Office results, see Warcraft success in China), so I think that times of uncontended US culture domination are fading away. Europe is still very much under combined US/UK influence, Poland even more so than e.g. Czech Republic is, but there is already visible shift caused by global streaming platforms - HBO co-funds a lot of local productions that are then distributed worldwide and I think that is exactly because over homogenization of content is not healthy for them financially. And both German and France film industries are still quite present, at least here in Europe. On top of that, overly US centric construction of Netflix productions is already sparking a lot of discussion, be it this thread about The Witcher or as it was with Netflix's Marvel series, which have decreasing audience here in Poland after focusing too much on unrelatable, US exclusive problems. There was A LOT of hype for first Daredevil and it was a steady decline from there, except for Punisher spike.

And the biggest surprise (at least for me personally) on how exactly "global" Western culture is not at all that global comes from Asia, where Hitler is actually a pop icon. Just go google about "Nazi Chic" style.

 Captain Joystick wrote:

Dreadwinter wrote:So, if they are changing Ciri, are they also changing the Emperor?

Maybe? Maybe she ends up not being his daughter at all.

I'm curious as to how they'll address The White Flame Dancing on the Graves of His Enemies's relationship to her. It was a big moment in the books. Are they just going to hope nobody will notice it's the same actor? Or just play it straight and accept that it won't be a surprise for the audience?

Some US movies have already starting catering to the Chinese audience. Like D-USA said, they go where the money is. For the US audience, diversity sells.

Netflix believes that more people that will not care about Ciri's race than people who will be upset about it.

 d-usa wrote:

nou wrote:


That's usually what happens when a US company with a vast majority of subscribers in North America and Central European countries where diversity is seen as a plus markets themselves, and the programs they produce, to the majority of their audience.

Do separate Netflix distribution and Netflix production here. At least here in polish part of Central Europe, Netflix is popular mostly for affordable legal distribution of blockbuster movies, not for it's own productions (except for few major ones like Daredevil mentioned above or Stranger Things) and most certainly not for their pushed diversity and inclusiveness. It's just becoming more and more unrelatable, and one of the best examples to be made here is that even Star Trek fans couldn't stand all that forced PC in STiscovery. We do like diversity, read back all my posts again - we just don't narrowly define diversity by skin color and actually pay more attention to "diversity in details" of character construction or real cultural background (nicely summed up by AllSeeingSkink above in case of female characters in The Witcher).

But now I'm starting to go in circles, so it's high time I end my involvement in this thread, as I'm not even particularily fond of Sapkowski and his works to discuss them at such lenghts and I don't really want this thread to be "politics locked".

I personally love the argument that its a polish source material with polish influences who are upset that ciri will probably be not white while exactly zero polish actors have been mentioned.

But hey, henry cavil is close enough or something? Right?

You either want all the polish everything to stay in tact and pure and want an all polish cast or it just doesnt fething mater.

Now all I see is this as the new Ciri.

 Lance845 wrote:
But hey, henry cavil is close enough or something? Right?

The same people who think that casting for diversity is an inherent good are the same types of people who believe that all white people are the same (and evil).

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The same people who think that casting for diversity is an inherent good are the same types of people who believe that all white people are the same (and evil).

What a load of gak.

I think diversity is fine as long as race isn't actually a part of the character.

For instance..

This...



is a white guy who was cast to do the native american version of this...



Thats not okay.

But this guy...



playing this guy...



was great casting.

I never said all white people were the same. But I don't see anyone in here arguing about the polish basis for the Witcher looking for a polish cast. I see them looking for a WHITE cast.

@Lance: There are two perfectly valid reasons why no one in Poland is fighting for polish based cast. One is that our film industry/actor base is tiny and there are no good and proven candidates for any of the lead characters that would fit. You can google memes with Karolak or Szyc as Geralt, because we have so reiterative casts in Polish films... The second one I hinted above - we had one attempt already at producing The Witcher TV series and it was miserable embarassment with rubber dragon. No modern Polish actor has any experience in playing fantasy or sci-fi characters, because our film industry stopped producing such films after 1989. We had exactly one reasonable costume movie of adequate period in the last 20 years (Ogniem i Mieczem) and guess what - exactly same actors (Żebrowski and Zamachowski) were responsible for terrible, terrible Geralt and Jaskier... So next time you don't understand why nobody is doing what you imagine they should, you might first ask why.

And FYI, I personally think Mads Mikkelsen would be much better Geralt than Cavil, because of his nordic origin being closer and more adequate for this role portrayal, but impossibly at the age he was when he played in King Arthur...

And yes, we have absolutely no problem whatsoever here in Poland with all white cast in a series based on Slavic, Celtic and Nordic cultural heritage. Forced racial diversity is simply that much western thing, that we have exactly zero complexes about it. As I said earlier, for us the devil lies in details of plausible portrayal, not in skin colour. When casting Ogniem i Mieczem mentioned above, we had eastern actor casted as Bohun for believable main Cossack character, because the lack of proper accent would spoil nuances of the story.

On the last note - a rumour emerged today, that one (obviously and dreadfully white) polish actress will in fact be audienced for Ciri, so this whole "BAME only call" thing sounds like fake news.

I would love to see some good Polish actors in it... that said I don’t know of any good Polish actors and what minimal Polish cinema I’ve seen hasn’t been overly impressive. Maybe I’m just being horribly culture-ist and nou can correct me if this is miles off, but I don’t think Poles would place a high emphasis on acting (unlike many other places, like most of the west, where actors are idolized and many kids grow up wanting to be in movies/TV).

But in the end I want them to make stuff as close to the source material as possible because the further they stray from it the greater the chance of them fething it up. If they have to change the essence of the story, characters, world and so on because they’re scared western audiences won’t be able to cope, at that point I’d rather they just make another fantasy series inspired by but not attempting to be The Witcher.

It’ll be funny if the “minority” actress they cast to play Ciri is actually a Pole, though.

 Lance845 wrote:
I think diversity is fine as long as race isn't actually a part of the character.

But diversity for the sake of diversity - under which this would fall - is just dressed up tokenism. Tokenism serves no one.

 Lance845 wrote:
For instance..

This...

is a white guy who was cast to do the native american version of this...

Thats not okay.

One thing people often miss is the "Hollywood" of it all.

Depp was hired because he was popular with Disney and they wanted him to his "Weirdo Jack Sparrow" routine that they thought was still popular. Scarlet Johansson, so use a different film, was hired for Ghost in the Shell not because of some anti-Japanese bent on the half of the movie makers, but because she's Scarlet Johansson, one of the most bankable and well known movies stars in the world. Michael B. Jordan, to use yet another example, was cast as Jonny Storm in Fan4stic because he was up and coming and "so hot right now"* and not, as many might thing, because he was black and therefore "diversity".

Hollywood is risk averse. They will do what they can to get the best return with as little outlay as possible. Depp was hired because he's popular, not to insult Native Americans or be, for lack of a better term, a white guy in 'Red Face'. It may have been stupid - hell, from what I've heard the entire movie was stupid and was another rockblock in Armie Hammer having an actual career - but it was done because Hollywood saw $$$ in Depp and went for it.


*Ignore the human torch pun possibilities there.

 Lance845 wrote:
But this guy...

playing this guy...

... doesn't matter. King Pin can be anyone. His look - outside of being enormous and bald - isn't intrinsic to the character. Michael Clarke Duncan is, or rather was, huge. And bald. Done. Easy.

 Lance845 wrote:
I never said all white people were the same. But I don't see anyone in here arguing about the polish basis for the Witcher looking for a polish cast. I see them looking for a WHITE cast.

I never said you did, but I was making a general statement.

The people who want "diversity" (ie. forced tokenism) are the same type of people who champion movies like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians as being 'diverse', when they're not (they feature near 100% single race casts... that's not diverse!).

And if we're going down the rabbit hole of "Only Polish people can play Polish people!" then we're ignoring the "Acting" aspect. This is when you see gay actor lobbies go nuts when a gay character is played by a non-gay actor (Jack Whitehall being a recent example), or, even more insane, when a gay actor plays a non-gay character (eg. people yelling at Jonathan Groff a few years back for having the temerity to play a straight character on Glee).

Lots of various groups of Asians can play other Asians. We see lots of Koreans playing Chinese, and vice versa. That's pretty normal. We don't see many Vietnameses playing Syrians though. Or BAMEs playing Poles.


My point, in all this rambling, is that there is far more to a person than just their race, gender or sexuality, but so many people see that as the single defining characteristic of a person. "But then Ciri can be black!" No, she can't. Because she isn't. She's reflective of the world she's in, and that world is very, very white.

nou wrote:@Lance: There are two perfectly valid reasons why no one in Poland is fighting for polish based cast. One is that our film industry/actor base is tiny and there are no good and proven candidates for any of the lead characters that would fit. You can google memes with Karolak or Szyc as Geralt, because we have so reiterative casts in Polish films... The second one I hinted above - we had one attempt already at producing The Witcher TV series and it was miserable embarassment with rubber dragon. No modern Polish actor has any experience in playing fantasy or sci-fi characters, because our film industry stopped producing such films after 1989. We had exactly one reasonable costume movie of adequate period in the last 20 years (Ogniem i Mieczem) and guess what - exactly same actors (Żebrowski and Zamachowski) were responsible for terrible, terrible Geralt and Jaskier... So next time you don't understand why nobody is doing what you imagine they should, you might first ask why.

And FYI, I personally think Mads Mikkelsen would be much better Geralt than Cavil, because of his nordic origin being closer and more adequate for this role portrayal, but impossibly at the age he was when he played in King Arthur...

And yes, we have absolutely no problem whatsoever here in Poland with all white cast in a series based on Slavic, Celtic and Nordic cultural heritage. Forced racial diversity is simply that much western thing, that we have exactly zero complexes about it. As I said earlier, for us the devil lies in details of plausible portrayal, not in skin colour. When casting Ogniem i Mieczem mentioned above, we had eastern actor casted as Bohun for believable main Cossack character, because the lack of proper accent would spoil nuances of the story.

On the last note - a rumour emerged today, that one (obviously and dreadfully white) polish actress will in fact be audienced for Ciri, so this whole "BAME only call" thing sounds like fake news.

Oh believe me I already knew the acting pool from which to draw from was abysmal for an all polish cast. That doesn't change my point. If you don't care whether they are polish or not then you shouldn't care if they are white or not. The stories don't take place in our world and they don't take place in Poland. It would be like being upset that Ford Prefect was played by a black guy in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie instead of a british guy. He's an alien. His race isn't a part of the character. It doesn't matter.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
I think diversity is fine as long as race isn't actually a part of the character.

But diversity for the sake of diversity - under which this would fall - is just dressed up tokenism. Tokenism serves no one.

 Lance845 wrote:
For instance..

This...

is a white guy who was cast to do the native american version of this...

Thats not okay.

One thing people often miss is the "Hollywood" of it all.

Depp was hired because he was popular with Disney and they wanted him to his "Weirdo Jack Sparrow" routine that they thought was still popular. Scarlet Johansson, so use a different film, was hired for Ghost in the Shell not because of some anti-Japanese bent on the half of the movie makers, but because she's Scarlet Johansson, one of the most bankable and well known movies stars in the world. Michael B. Jordan, to use yet another example, was cast as Jonny Storm in Fan4stic because he was up and coming and "so hot right now"* and not, as many might thing, because he was black and therefore "diversity".

Hollywood is risk averse. They will do what they can to get the best return with as little outlay as possible. Depp was hired because he's popular, not to insult Native Americans or be, for lack of a better term, a white guy in 'Red Face'. It may have been stupid - hell, from what I've heard the entire movie was stupid and was another rockblock in Armie Hammer having an actual career - but it was done because Hollywood saw $$$ in Depp and went for it.


*Ignore the human torch pun possibilities there.

It doesn't matter WHY Depp was hired. His portrayal as that character was racist. And it took work away from a group that rarely gets work.

Scarlet Johansson was hired to play a robot body with a japanese person brain in it. It's not the same thing. She wasn't doing "yellow face". Michael B Jordan, again, played a fine version of Johnny Storm because his race isn't a part of who he is and he's a legit good actor. Had the movie been better it could have been a better Human Torch than Chris Evan's.

Whether "hollywood" intended insult or not is meaningless. It's insulting. And whether Depp likes a paycheck or not, at a certain point a person should have enough integrity to not do "race face" on film for millions to see.

 Lance845 wrote:
But this guy...

playing this guy...

... doesn't matter. King Pin can be anyone. His look - outside of being enormous and bald - isn't intrinsic to the character. Michael Clarke Duncan is, or rather was, huge. And bald. Done. Easy.

Agreed. Thats why I made the example to compare to the one above. Ciri, Geralt, and every character in the Witcher don't need to be Polish, or Slavic, or Nordic, or White. They come from an alien fantasy world and their skin color isn't a part of their character.

 Lance845 wrote:
I never said all white people were the same. But I don't see anyone in here arguing about the polish basis for the Witcher looking for a polish cast. I see them looking for a WHITE cast.

I never said you did, but I was making a general statement.

The people who want "diversity" (ie. forced tokenism) are the same type of people who champion movies like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians as being 'diverse', when they're not (they feature near 100% single race casts... that's not diverse!).

And if we're going down the rabbit hole of "Only Polish people can play Polish people!" then we're ignoring the "Acting" aspect. This is when you see gay actor lobbies go nuts when a gay character is played by a non-gay actor (Jack Whitehall being a recent example), or, even more insane, when a gay actor plays a non-gay character (eg. people yelling at Jonathan Groff a few years back for having the temerity to play a straight character on Glee).

Lots of various groups of Asians can play other Asians. We see lots of Koreans playing Chinese, and vice versa. That's pretty normal. We don't see many Vietnameses playing Syrians though. Or BAMEs playing Poles.


My point, in all this rambling, is that there is far more to a person than just their race, gender or sexuality, but so many people see that as the single defining characteristic of a person. "But then Ciri can be black!" No, she can't. Because she isn't. She's reflective of the world she's in, and that world is very, very white.

There is a significant difference between tokenism and ensuring that diversity exists in work opportunities. I never saw or have had any interest in Crazy Rich Asians so I can't comment on that. But Black Panther IS diverse in the INDUSTRY because it's a almost entirely black cast movie that is not leaning on their Blackness as some kind of plot element or joke. It wasn't like Uncle Drew where it's just a black comedy with black people "for black people". It was JUST a super hero movie like any other movie that just so happened to have a primarily black cast. Something that is basically unheard of. It is noteworthy in it's rarity. And it's diverse in the industry because it was an opportunity for a large group of actors to play parts in a kind of movie they don't get chances to play.

Again, nothing requires the world of the Witcher to be "very very white". It doesn't define the world. It doesn't shape it's characters. It isn't needed to tell it's stories. And it's a stupid thing to hold onto when any actor could do the job regardless of skin color. It's not tokenism to open a door that is traditionally closed when you have no good reason to have it closed to begin with. The only thing needed would be ensuring that people can recognize actual family ties. (Ciri and her dad would need to be the same race) Ciri being black is no different from Michael Clark Duncan being King Pin. All they really need is a girl that can portray the attitude and energy she brings to the table and have a chemistry on screen with Geralt that conveys their relationship well. Her real world heritage beyond that point is completely inconsequential.

 AdeptSister wrote:


Netflix believes that more people that will not care about Ciri's race than people who will be upset about it.

This is the crux of this issue. It's pandering to a vocal minority that dominates entertainment media. No consideration is given to quality and authenticity.