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HoloDust on 13 September 2018
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sundin13 said:
HoloDust said:

I've just explained that in few posts above - she doesn't have to be white. But if you change her skin, you're changing whole Cintra, which changes lore. Which could be sort of fine, in theory...except, Cintra is located where it is and there's about zero logical sense for that. Technically, you can start changing kingdoms south of Cintra as well, changing the lore even more...until you get all the way to Nilfgaard...which is white...so you have to change them as well, breaking the lore even more. Now, as a side effect, you have main evil guys in Witcher being non-white...oh dear.

As I said already, there is reason why you don't pull shit like this - Witcher is based on Medieval Europe, with rich lore taken from it:

Nilfgaard mostly resembles Holy Roman Empire under Habsburgs.
Redania is most likely Prussia.
Temeria is argued to be Polland itself.
Novigrad is Gdansk/Danzig.
Toussaint resembles Southern France mixed with Tuscany.
Skellige is mix of Nordic and Celtic culture (it is located across the sea northwest of Cintra).

Then you have:
Zerrikania (to the southeast of Temeria, long way across Korath Desert) seems most likely as mix of Persia and India.
Ofir (way south of Nilfgaard) which mostly resembles Ottomans mixed with Northern Africa.

Personally, I don't think it matters what all of these places are based on. As I said before, fantasy is about creation of culture. If a change in skin color destroys your story, the problem likely lies in your story.

That said, the overall geography of the land is a fair point to make. I would be interested to see how this would be handled overall, but I don't think having a few regions being a bit more tan would shatter the coherency of the story. Even if a geneticist or geneologist would insist that there would be more gene flow between groups causing skin colors to not diverge so much, I think that would hardly be a very large issue with the story. It is a bit hard for me to argue the specifics of this not knowing the lore of the Witcher very well, but to liken things to Game of Thrones, I wouldn't think anything of it if the Ironborn were non-white. I don't think it is very hard to write different regions of your map to be physically different in a way which would make sense to the viewer.

Now, I would agree that this may cause some issues with the interplay between the books and the adaptation, but I don't think it is the job of an adaptation to follow the source material religiously. It is their job to make a good show. I mean, take The Walking Dead for instance. From my understanding of fan reactions, its best season was season one , which was largely original material, not following the comics and its best character has pretty much always been Daryl who isn't in the comics.

It all comes down to execution.

Reason why I listed different kingdoms is mostly because of Nilfgaard, them being main bad guys and geographical relation to others - it's maybe easier for us from Europe to relate to what kingdom represent what, since it is, after all, our continent and history that was inspiration for it, but if you look at map of world of Witcher you might understand why I mentioned changing Ciri would make chain reaction all the way from Cintra to Nilfgaard - that is, if other things remain the same and Emhyr still being Ciri's biological father.

So technically yes, you can do that, though it doesn't make much sense and changes lore quite a bit - personally, I find it overkill for such thing as affirmative action since it deviates quite a bit from source material...some on the other hand, who don't even seem to care that much for Witcher, seem to not.

Anyway, it was mentioned already few times - best thing would be if they draw from already established lore and build on it - both Zerrikania and Ofir are great choices for non-white characters (and CDPR are mad for not making more expansions set there, unless they are keeping that for Witcher 4) - instead of trying to change already established character like Ciri that is so intertwined into world of Witcher.

Maybe they could've made Vesemir Zerrikanian, that would be way more easier to change IMO.