Fan service and its appropriateness
- Thread starter Geriatric hedgehog
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This is all just my personal opinion but given that the games are just one studio's interpretation of the characters, I think it's fair for the Netflix adaptation to bring its own interpretations of the text-only source material into play. I have been well aware of the games since the first one (my partner has them all) but I have never had even the slightest interest in playing them and the aesthetic of the characters (male and female) is part of that disinterest. They don't stand out, as someone who hasn't sat in a game with them for hours clicking through their sultry dialogue. I just Googled the women from the games and honestly, they all look really similar to one another except for different hair and eyeliner styles. That's not how actual Polish women look and it's not how my mind's eye would have visualised them from the written source material. That was an aesthetic choice on the part of the game adaptation.
I haven't read the books so forgive me from basing this on Google image search, but is there any meaningful aesthetic difference between game Yennefer and Netflix Yennefer? Both are fierce-looking, dark-haired beauties. Most of game Yennefer's visual identity as a character comes from her clothing and makeup. They could have spent a long time looking for an exact face-clone of the idealised, pin-up style CG design but if they were dead set on an exact 1:1 aesthetic copy, finding one who could also carry the role with the right blend of confidence and vulnerability would have been very hard indeed. If there's any explicit plot-based racial segregation in the game world which would make it confusing to have an Asian-looking woman not coming from the faux-Asia region of their world, perhaps that didn't come across in the Netflix version, but I kind of got the impression that real-world race was irrelevant and the different fantasy races replaced that aspect of society.
Maybe people have differing ideas of what constitutes the 'essence' of a character. Maybe it's more visual for some people and more about how the actor carries themselves for others, which is how such wildly divergent ideas of good casting come about. For me, race is irrelevant unless race is a specific plot point in that series.
I know that me mentioning this is going to backfire but sometimes casting the 'wrong' aesthetic for an established character can lead to a more powerful interpretation. The real George Washington was undeniably a privileged white guy. However, every George Washington I saw in the media growing up focused on the visual side - actors who physically resembled contemporary depictions of the man - and I found every single one of them unrelatable, more like idealised symbols than believable human beings. The slavish dedication to creating a 1:1 replica made it harder for me to understand why people in the US thought he was such a big deal. Enter Hamilton and a version of George Washington who looked nothing like any of the portraits. Setting aside all other opinions about the musical and its fans, for the first time in my life I 'got' George Washington thanks to the stage actor's portrayal. He was charismatic, intelligent, decisive and pragmatic. He had a gravity to his interactions which had been thoroughly absent in every cartoon, game or live action rendition of the historical figure I'd seen in the past, which tended to expect the audience to accept that he was charismatic without actually showing it properly. Yeah, the guy wasn't a bald black man in real life by any stretch of the imagination, but everyone knows that. The show wasn't trying to rewrite the established history, it was trying to reframe it in a way that carried the 'essence' of the story more the details. It's ridiculous, and I honestly have no idea how much next level genius was required to realise that this was how the character would 'click' so well, but somehow it did and it blew my mind.
We get this sometimes in anime too. One of my all-time favourite shows is the bonkers action romp Sengoku BASARA, which reimagines Japanese historical figures as hyper-exaggerated flying robots, tokusatsu heroes and modern day shrine maidens. It's nuts and while there are plenty of nods to actual historical detail for anyone paying close attention, the staff of the game series made an active design decision to focus on the 'essence' of each character more than recreating what already existed. My usual preference is for realistic historical anime but at the same time, I freaking love Sengoku BASARA. Its overt dismissal of convention and common sense gave me a much deeper understanding of the main players of the Warring States period than anything I'd seen before, without diminishing the more 'authentic' period shows in any way. Most Japanese history buffs understand that these reimaginings of the stuffy topics people are forced to learn at school are a great way to get them more involved in researching the facts in a way that 1:1 reenactments never will.
Anyway, when the Netflix version of The Witcher was first being advertised as an upcoming show I still had no interest in watching, having been left cold by the games, but I joined my partner to watch the first episode just so that I could see what it was all about (Geralt being such a persistently popular character made me curious). The rest is history; we devoured the show really quickly and I ended up buying the soundtrack and getting really into the series. Since then even my aged mother-in-law (who has never played a video game in her life) has stumbled upon the Netflix adaptation and ended up enjoying it. From that perspective the Netflix version feels as though it was a rousing success. It expanded the audience of the original games beyond their (fairly saturated) demographic and gave the successful series another shot in the arm by making it more accessible. The games still exist for game purists, so everyone wins, right?
(Since it keeps coming up unprompted I have no particular opinion on the whole 'woke' bashing trend that recently started; as with the 'SJW' bashing and 'feminist' bashing and all of the other keyword-bashing movements it's sort of irrelevant, because I don't define myself by others' assessments of my opinions or the perfection of other people whose ideals occasionally overlap. If anyone wants to write me off because I share some opinions with the current trendy villains of the Internet, that's their choice. My skin is pretty thick.)
R
Lordhippos
Pokémon Master
For me I guess it circles back to what I mentioned before, and there being a perception that media companies are forcing diversification above and beyond what is necessary or sensible. It shouldn't be a competition to try and get X% of your cast being from Y culture.
Examples are in the Witcher, although I understand a lot more criticism came from the casting call that was sent out for Ciri, which specifically asked for a BAME actress (I just learnt what BAME meant today after doing a bit of reading about it). From what I understand this flew a lot more in the face of the perception of how Ciri was described in the source material books. Yennefer less so. So much so that Ciri got recast I think following the backlash.
That casting approach goes too far in the opposite direction for me, I think it's making a point of ignoring a balanced/fair approach, which for me would be best person for the job based on talent/fit for the role.
I still maintain that I prefer a reasonable cultural/historically accurate fit when a specific setting is involved though. To me, having read the books and played the games, it's going for a very medieval Europe approach, with magic thrown in. On the opposite side of things, when I watched Black Panther, I would expect the roles to largely be filled by people that look like they are from Africa.
Examples are in the Witcher, although I understand a lot more criticism came from the casting call that was sent out for Ciri, which specifically asked for a BAME actress (I just learnt what BAME meant today after doing a bit of reading about it). From what I understand this flew a lot more in the face of the perception of how Ciri was described in the source material books. Yennefer less so. So much so that Ciri got recast I think following the backlash.
That casting approach goes too far in the opposite direction for me, I think it's making a point of ignoring a balanced/fair approach, which for me would be best person for the job based on talent/fit for the role.
I still maintain that I prefer a reasonable cultural/historically accurate fit when a specific setting is involved though. To me, having read the books and played the games, it's going for a very medieval Europe approach, with magic thrown in. On the opposite side of things, when I watched Black Panther, I would expect the roles to largely be filled by people that look like they are from Africa.
ayase
State Alchemist
I don’t know why (and I haven’t seen any plays in about 15 years) but for whatever reason I feel far more relaxed about theatre making more radical casting choices. Probably because in some ways, regardless of the reasons, it's established tradition (men playing older women, women playing younger men) and it's also sort of an alive thing that different actors jump in and out of and give their own spin on, due to plays running for years (in some cases centuries) and performances taking place with local casts all over the world. There will be, I'm sure, performances of Shakespeare in Africa or India and it's not like anyone expects them to bring in a bunch of white Europeans to ensure "historical accuracy" (Shakespeare's plays were far from historically accurate in the first place) and it would be a bit unfair not to give local actors a chance to shine, so it seems silly to me to criticise casting choices based on things like race or gender in what is already a fictionalised version of history. But it seems equally silly that people are now levelling criticism at the casting of straight actors as gay characters, or non-trans actors in trans roles. We're back to role-playing again, who the hell is anyone to say an actor can't pull off a convincing portrayal of a character who doesn't share the same life experiences as them? If we go down that road then the first thing that should happen is that as some of the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet, no successful Hollywood actors should be able to play poor or disenfranchised characters any more (although wealth and class seem to be entirely left out of these discussions on inclusion, I mean I think I have a pretty good idea why that's the case, but that's probably a discussion more suited to the politics thread if anyone ever argued with me in there any more).
I do feel this is a bit different though when things are actually being committed to celluloid, because given the fickle nature of the industry, that might be the only time those characters are portrayed on screen. Since big-budget TV and movies are (sadly) far more popular than books and shoved down everyone's throats with the entertainment industry's multi-million pound PR machine, that often becomes the version of the character that enters the public conciousness. I can understand why fans of the original source material might be a bit frustrated by that - I imagine it's easier and more common for theatre fans to discuss and debate who made the best King Lear or whatever, and why they believe that, but nine times out of ten if a fan of printed source material wants to discuss the merits or otherwise of live action adaptations the response will be "Well I've never read the books, so..." (and that sentence does more often than not trail off at "so" as if to say "so it doesn't matter to me", which is fine I guess, but doesn't exactly make for any interesting discussion). This perhaps creates a degree of resentment towards live action adaptations and their fans from fans of the source material, which I don't know is really present in theatre (I could be wrong) because mostly those plays were imagined as plays, and both the writers and the audience know that the parts will be performed by many different actors. They don't have to deal with the hopes and expectations of people who had already imagined how characters would be from often quite comprehensive descriptions (or drawings) in the original writer's work. There's the argument to be made, as you have noted, that people simply shouldn't care or let it bother them because they still have the original versions and their own imagination (which are generally my feelings on the subject, though I'm still not entirely immune to at least feeling a little disappointed by some adaptations. The answer there is probably to have no expectations anything will ever be good, which I'm a fair way along with now) but people do care about things they hold dear and I think it's probably a bit unrealistic to expect most people to ever stop.
Like I hope I made clear earlier, I have absolutely zero problem with people creating new things with diverse casts of characters, and I think that's actually a lot better than gender or race-swapping characters in existing works that didn't originally include them, because the intention to be representative was never there in those works to begin with so it has to be shoehorned in (and this is often not done particularly well). Again I think the blame here lies in the general lack of originality of much of the entertainment industry. Making new stories and coming up with new characters is haaard, can't we just purchase an IP that already has good brand awareness and slap a new coat of paint on it?
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