Personally I do mind and think adaptations should be faithful to their source material and not change things that don’t need changing. I wouldn’t want asian Blade, white Major Motoko or black Geralt or arab Ciri.
This news being unconfirmed, I will leave my pitchforks in the barn. If it gets confirmed, I’ll just ignore the show.
Will it? I thought she was adopted/taken into the Witchers. Why couldn’t she be non-white?
Yea, I do not see the problem. Source or not afaik her skin colour was never important.
Normally, this sort of thing seems fine with me. Showrunners/ directors have a right to insert their own creative vision. Also, diversity in casting may be a commercial necessity, or at least an advantage in the modern marketplace.
The one hesitation is that Ciri is not just a random witcher-in-training: she’s a princess of Nilfgaard. Changing her ethnicity suggests you have to change the entire nation. That’s a pretty big alteration from the original.
I’ll watch in any case, as deviations from lore just don’t bother me.
My recollection as well. Even if not, that could be the TV canon version of the story. Seems a nothingburger of an issue.
I don’t understand the issue. I thought the racism in the books was literal. Like, dwarves suck and elves are assholes, etc. Was racism based on skin color a thing in the books?
If Nilfgaard’s king is black, what impact would it have, presuming the showrunners fill the land with a diverse cast?
I get that you really don’t care. I don’t, either. But we both know some fans expect shows to reflect the lore they know and love. This is a bigger change than most characters would be, perhaps more than any save Geralt himself. And that will cause more controversy.
Speaking for myself, I’d be OK with Zoe Bell as Geralt.
Why are some folks seemingly okay with the visual changes and (more important, one would think) changes in characterization found in the games, but this is their line that shouldn’t be crossed? Genuinely curious.
Only played the games, haven’t read the books–
But I wouldn’t mind if they gave the Nilfgaardians and the elves each a distinct, non-European ethnicity. It would change the look of the world but wouldn’t really change the story at all. If you were to do that you’d want Ciri to match.
I am not a fan of Triss behaving more like Yennefer in the first game either. But at least the sequels are much more faithful to the books.
Make Ciri Nigerian or Korean and you are not portraying Ciri anymore. Not the way she was written, not the way I imagined her while reading or saw her when playing.
If you want to have some melanin-level diversity, create awesome new characters and nobody will bat an eye. Change established ones, and the die-hard fans - particularly slavs like me who grew up with these books - are gonna be pissed.
However I think it’s a moot point for now, since nothing is confirmed.
I get that. Since the books represent (and are largely based on) Slavic culture, I can understand that perspective. Hopefully, since they’re fantastical, not historical, nor fictional-about-real-places, if they understand, respect, and retain significant Slavic influence in other areas, you’ll give it a shot even if they make changes such as this. I think the impact of that would be greater in setting, mythology, and tone.
It reminds me of the fracas around KC:D (which has the key difference, of course, in that KC:D was based on something real).
I guess we’ll find out!
Imagine what Hollywood would do if LoTR was made today…l
Nothing beyond changing the race of an entire culture. Let me again be clear - I have no issues with this - but it is a substantial change and the effort to cast Ciri as a particular race will also require other changes to the story including other’s reactions to her and casting of other actors/actresses. Personally I would love to see something like all elves be cast as Mongolian or something like that. It would provide some great visual context of the race hatred that takes place in the Witcher series.
Eh, I don’t think it’s something to be concerned with, provided the adaptation contained internal consistency. Let’s face it, generally authors write what they know, and what’s around them. Since so much of the popular media that’s entered the Western zeitgeist comes from authors in the same sphere, we see a lot of whites-only fantasy, as that’s the culture those authors are coming from, and from a historical representation perspective (which is generally where fantasy is drawing from), that’s what we see. It’s not always the actual truth of the matter, but it’s how history is presented to us, so it’s how it gets recreated and reinvented, even when translated to the medium of fantasy. It also provides for easy shortcuts (hey, this fantasy race is a stand in for Spaniards, this one for Asians, etc.).
Where I’ve seen character visual appearance actually matter in fantasy, it usually has to do with a narrative purpose, and not the actual appearance for its own sake. For example, in LotR (books, not films), Aragorn and Boromir look alike, because they are men from the same stock. It doesn’t actually matter that they’re white, with dark hair and gray eyes. It matters that they look like the same people. Same with some of the appearances in Game of Thrones (again books), but not all. There, it’s important (to some degree) that the Lannisters are blond, because of the gold obsession that people attribute to their people. It’s important that the Targaryens have silver hair because it’s “alien” to most humans. But for the rest where appearance matters (for example, the Stark children favoring Tully blood except for Arya and Jon, or the fact that Robert’s trueborn children look like Baratheons), only consistency with the narrative requirements is important, not necessarily the racial composition underlying that consistency.
In other words - what is the purpose beneath the visual representation, and does that purpose enable broadening the inclusion of varying races when adapting? Because again - most authors write what they know and see, and that’s not a knock against them, but it does mean that representation in classic media is not exactly representation in reality, or representation that will be inclusive.
At least, that’s how I approach it.
Yes, they might pretty much add completely a female character and embiggen the roles of other women in the story just to diversify the cast while meanwhile writing out one major male character completely.
Oh, wait.
I don’t see how it’s a “substantial” change. If she acts like Ciri, and all the other characters act like you’d expect, what does it matter? Even if the royal family of Nilfgaard is cast as POC, how does that impact the rest of the story?
I get @Paul_cze’s objection since The Witcher is near and dear to his cultural heart, but the general sentiment that Ciri being non-white would impact the story seems to depend on The Witcher’s universe having our reality’s baked-in racial prejudices. I don’t think that’s actually true.
I would think a bigger hurdle, as far as matching audience expectations, is that the show won’t look or sound like the game. I believe more people are familiar with the game than the books.
I have to admit that after reading about Nilfgaard in the codex entries as the Southern kingdom from dryer lands, or whatever, I was really surprised when I encountered them in the game, and they were not based on Spanish or Arab or African or Mongolian looking people. But then I remembered that the Witcher was a fictional universe, their desert kingdom doesn’t have to be analogous to this world’s.
But I don’t see how it would change much if they were from one of those analogous tribes.
There was more to the “fracas” than that. Clearly the message was lost. I’ll let Paul speak for himself and his culture.
Oh, I know that one was particularly complicated. I didn’t use the word “fracas” to be dismissive. I just like the word. It reminded me of it because Slavic culture is something that hasn’t really been given a lot of exposure in big Hollywood fashion (gaming or film). These adaptations and big budget representations recently must be a huge point of pride, so I know there must be some definite feelings of “getting it right” instead of Hollywood’ing it up.