You do know non-white people exist all over right. It's the common argument about ethnocentrism when ever you say another country has racism problems. "Stop forcing your own values on Foreign cultures you dumb Americans racism isn't a thing in Europe ,ignore the Roma" Colonialism happened all across Europe including Poland. Like if their was a Portal in Central Europe 2000 BCE their should be a whole lot of Asian people their .
and the Witcher does have allegories to Jews/Roma it doesn't do it will at all.
There's a lot to unpack here. Like, there are a lot of nuanced dimensions to this topic, and you're not hitting them.
The Witcher 3 came out during a period of time where "dark and gritty realistic historical fantasy" was kind of on the rise, which included the popularization of properties such as
Dragon Age and especially
Game of Thrones, which came out in 2009 and 2011 respectively. As such, when talking about such properties (well, the popular ones, anyways), just as they talked about
The Witcher 3, the issue of the portrayal of ethnic groups came up, and there was a big brouhaha over whether or not there were brown and black people in medieval Europe. Because if medieval Europe was whiter than fresh snow, then of course works based on historical Europe (or settings inspired by them) wouldn't have much in the way of non-white people. Obviously, there
were black and brown people in medieval Europe: Kingdoms in North Africa and the Middle East were rich and powerful, and had merchants and warriors sailing up and down the Mediterranean, plying trade routes and looking for work. Many of them worked for or even swore fealty to European lords, lived and were buried there. And, obviously, there would be sex involved with European women that would result in mixed-race birth.
This is, of course, not really shown in the popular conception of European history in our multimedia environment, hence why there have been so many people who have made fun of the idea that there should be "diversity" in works in medieval Europe or fantasy settings based on medieval Europe, at least not if you wanted to be considered as a "serious" fantasy work with "actual historical research". A lot of people who pushed for diversity of course pushed back with actual historical evidence, which...
...honestly was kind of missing the point. Because
The Witcher - the original book series by Andrzej Sapkowski - is
not meant to be a representation of "historical Europe".
The Witcher is a really blatant allegory for modern Poland.
Sapkowski is a fairly progressive Polish author in a country that has been ruled by a nationalist conservative government described as authoritarian over the last six years, to say nothing of its general Catholic conservatism that has only grown stronger. A lot of the dystopic elements of
The Witcher are direct critiques of modern Polish society. The Church of the Eternal Fire in
The Witcher 3 is a pretty blunt stand-in for the Catholic Church, mired in bigotry and hypocrisy, calling for "family values" while also enjoying the company of sex workers. The elves, the dwarves, and witchers themselves are heavily discriminated against in ways that really have more to do with how modern racism works than how racism worked in medieval times.
The Witcher is an incredibly anachronistic series that would fail the most cursory of historical examinations, except it's obviously not trying to be historical. Putting aside that Sapkowski does have countries outside the Continent that are representative of non-white ethnic groups, is it really that strange that the setting for
The Witcher - an allegory for
modern-day Poland, a country that is
98.6% white European - would...maybe, yeah, look mostly white?
But let's back up a bit and be a bit more charitable to your argument. Sapkowski has written a decent amount of non-white characters into the book, whereas
The Witcher 3 is obviously almost exclusively white (at least until the DLC's). You can reasonably argue that whatever else Sapkowski's intentions, CD Projekt Red - the Polish game studio that developed the video game adaptations - was the entity that made the decision to not include non-white characters.
In that case, I'd like to pose a question: If - hypothetically - an African film studio made a fantasy movie in a setting heavily inspired by African history, and the movie blew up and became this huge international success with massive box office sales and a multimedia property being developed around it, how would you react if someone on the internet asked, "Where are the white people in this film? Why doesn't this film have diversity for white people?" Chances are - and I apologize for assuming - that you'd be pretty annoyed, yes? You'd think it doesn't always have to be about white people, yes? That other cultures - especially those that have been colonized and whose voices have been suppressed for centuries - should have a chance to tell their stories on their own terms, yes?
Okay, then why not Poland? Because Poland has barely been its own sovereign independent polity over the last two and a half centuries. The Partitions of Poland starting in 1772 eliminated the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the subordination and oppression of ethnic Poles by neighboring powers, a common fate for politically-weaker European peoples in the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Poles regained their independence in the aftermath of World War I in 1918, but the Second Polish Republic had barely existed for more than two decades when its people were again crushed by the German and Soviet invasions of World War II, which was followed immediately afterwards by what was functionally a forced takeover by the Soviet Union when the war ended, where the Polish cultural identity was actively suppressed from Moscow. The current Polish state only became independent again with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 (well, closer to 1990, given that the Third Republic was literally established on December 31). Poles still face discrimination in many parts of Europe and the West. Until they started complaining about Muslim terrorists and brown refugees coming in through the European Union, the UK was complaining about Polish immigrants stealing their jobs (and being awful drivers). Many don't even consider Polish people to
actually be white.
Like, this is a country of people who have only just started to re-express their own culture and give voice to their own stories after spending two and a half centuries of being colonized and suppressed...and now that one Polish book/game franchise has become internationally popular, you're trying to ask them why they don't have
your standards of diversity? A diversity that - I'm sorry to assume again - is probably based on the media environment of the English-speaking world? Do you see how
maybe this may be at least
a little bit close to asking why a hypothetical African fantasy film doesn't have white people in it in the name of diversity? Do you see how maybe that
might be a little bit racist or patronizing?
This is not to fly top cover for Polish conservatism, which is incredibly awful. It may be small, but Poland does have a population of non-whites that often gets shafted, and this is before we start talking about non-ethnic minorities, like the LGBT community. CD Projekt Red has certainly said and done some things that makes one wonder how divorced the studio is from Polish conservative society. But I'm using the case of Poland about how we in the English-speaking world talk about
other cultures. There was
a thread earlier this year in News & Politics about how internet discussion of social justice and media in the non-English-speaking world has been utterly
subsumed by the juggernaut that is the English-speaking world,
especially the United States. And when talking about social justice, the English-speaking internet seems entirely comfortable with assuming that other societies and other cultures are
just like America.
So, you know, maybe please don't do that.
i may or may not have made this post because a polish friend got really annoyed about what feels like cultural imperialism and how representation is only when you include african americans specifically
Funnily enough, Soviet scifi was really big on cooperation and interstellar friendship more than anything, though this whole "any interstellar polity has to be communist to have reached space" idea is still present. There are far more criminals, wild animals (in survivalist stories), and generally just random evil/mad groups of people. I can't remember even a singular case of a villainous alien corporation in Soviet sci-fi.
In fact, from what amount of it that I've read, Societ sci-fi often didn't even have an overt antagonist. They did exist, of course, but rather noticeably rarer.
A lot of recent Chinese media is actually surprisingly pretty big on depicting cooperation as well, even with the U.S. The film adaptation of Liu Cixin's
The Wandering Earth basically had zero political or cultural posturing beyond basically all the important characters being Chinese. His
Remembrance of Earth's Past book series similarly just kind of assumes that humanity comes together to counter a great threat.
Helios - a 2015 action-suspense film co-produced by mainland China and Hong Kong - was so unabashedly pro-CPC, the only character to openly question a Party bureaucrat's erosion of Hong Kong's autonomy ends up actually secretly being the ruthless terrorist mastermind all along; but even with that context, the Party's objective in Hong Kong was to prove that China was a capable partner in counterterrorism so they could have a working cooperative relationship with
the U.S. The juxtaposition is actually kind of funny.
