Freya Allan and Anya Chalotra will star as Ciri and Yennefer in The Witcher
40 replies, posted
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/witcher-netflix-show-casts-ciri-yennefer-roles-1150868?utm_source=twitter&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral
Freya Allan (The War of the Worlds, Into the Badlands) and Anya Chalotra (The ABC Murders, Wanderlust) join Henry Cavill as Ciri and Yennefer, respectively, in the upcoming fantasy series based on the series of novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. The books previously inspired a bests-elling video game franchise by Warsaw-based game studio CD Projekt Red.
Rounding out the cast are Jodhi May (Game of Thrones, Genius) as Queen Calanthe; Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson (Fortitude) as her husband, the knight Eist; Adam Levy (Knightfall, Snatch) as the druid Mousesack; MyAnna Buring as the head of the magical academy at Aretuza, Tissaia; Mimi Ndiweni and Therica Wilson-Read as novice sorcerers; and Millie Brady as the outcast Princess Renfri.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8463347/
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9923141/
Seems the first season is going to be doing a lot with the Short Stories then!
Witcher subreddit has a picture of each of the people announced as cast so far.
https://i.redd.it/e0dqcriyodr11.jpg
I hope they give Fringilla her green eyes and black hair, since those were her most prominant figures.
Also an interesting note from the interview in the article, they're trying to not rely on the video games for the look of the show. Glad they're going to try and do their own thing that fits the source material!
Oooh, MyAnna Burning’s in this too? Cool
Wait so they're kids?
No idea how old the actress playing Yen is, but when Geralt find Ciri, she’s still a child.
Not feeling their pick for Yen.
The books take place before witcher 1, before Geralt lost his memories while being in the wild hunt.
Ciri is young in the books. When she's first introduced she's about 10 years old, and by the end of the saga has grown to about 16-17.
Those would not be kids, no. Those would be women. They're the other half of this species.
I feel like Yen's actress should be older. She's the one woman around who Geralt loses his spine, after all. She's got him wrapped around her little finger. Given the age of the actor we have playing Geralt, you want Yennefer to be a woman whose age and apparent experience are enough to intimidate him. That said, 90% of the effect comes from the actress' style of acting. I look forward to seeing how she handles herself.
fringilla the woman from Toussaint is black lmao leave it to netflix as always.
They should have just hired Eddie Murphy and Terry Crews to play every character.
One: Nilfgaard is a huge area and conqured a lot of people.
Two: Nothing in the books talks about Fringilla's skin color, only her eyes and hair.
Three: While she is second cousin to Duchess Anna Henrietta, that only means they share a great-grandparent. That's enough generational wiggle-room for some people in her family tree to no be white (or on Henrietta's half to white).
Four: Nothing in the books says that everyone in Toussaint is white. In fact, skin color isn't really much of a factor in the books - where it matters is people who are closely related (or at least supposed to seem closely related) looking the same.
Five: While the cultures of the Witcher series are based on amalgamations of various European monarchies/cultures, that doesn't mean they all have to be white since skin color isn't a cultural norm (unless of course you're talking about something like Jim Crow racism, but in the Witcherverse that doesn't happen with people. Rather it happens against non-human species). In your head, and in the CDPR version, nearly everyone is white. But that doesn't mean that in a fictional universe where skin-color doesn't matter (but your literal race does) it's not odd to have people of color in such a large empire like Nilfgaard (or hell any of the other ones).
That kinda has a big problem with it, you know.
Who's gonna be Geralt and who's gonna be Ciri?
Ever notice how all you do is complain about black people and women being in things?
I'm starting to wonder why.
His avatar says "Nigger Alarm". Shouldn't come as a shock.
have i? you don't seem so bothered by me defending the choice to keep people of colour or women in established roles as they are though.
hehe yeah the blaxploitation movie about dumbass white racist cops i sure am racist despite advocating greatly against racism and also as a person who has had to endure much racism aimed towards me.
you two sure love attacking me instead of actually attempting to refute my points with any validity.
No where in the books is her skin-color brought up and she's only related to Anna Henrietta through a great-grandparent, in a fiction series where skincolor is not a factor. you haven't bothered to tackle any of the points I brought up.
the sheer amount of pissy whining in your first post about one (1) black person getting a role is what people in the real world call a 'warning sign'.
wait how do u know shes black
Just imagining Terry Crews yelling "POOOOOWEEEEEEEEER!!!!!" tearing and bashing monsters at the speed of sound
as Ciri
Mimi Ndweni was officially cast as Fringilla.
Fringilla is related to Duchess Anna Henrietta as a second cousin. However, as I've stated earlier, that only means that they share a great-grandparent. It doesn't mean they have to be the same exact skin-color as there's enough generational wiggleroom with her grandparents and parents to look different from Anna.
and give me a break about "respect for the books lore" when the books lore doesn't go into detail about people's skin color because in the witcherverse skin color doesn't matter.
As long as her acting is good (and she gets some green contacts and they darken her hair), I think she'll be a great fit for Fringilla.
nilfgaard is big, yes. toussaint is still a region far from lands such as Zerrikania or Ofier however. just because Rome conquered a vast landmass doesn't mean it was comprised of people of colour every two steps (outside of slaves but even then the majority of slaves hailed from mostly from conquered regions in Europe but there were indeed slaves from far away lands)
No, granted that does not occur. But in a fantasy setting known for being greatly based on mainly european countries, cultures and peoples I think nobody upon reading the books envisioned Fringilla as a coloured person. Had the setting been different then perhaps she would've struck some readers as non-caucasian.
I'm not sure, that all depends on genetics in the end. If such a thing happened then sure, she would be coloured. But she could just as easily have had caucasian great-grandparents which again is far more probable in the setting where The Witcher takes place.
Why must the author specify the colour? Use your imagination. You yourself even bring up the amalgamations of various European cultures so obviously you would have some idea as to what Europe back then looked like. Or are you akin to that person who accused Daniel Vavra of racism for portraying Bohemia as it were? Even if it is fantasy, that doesn't mean you can just go willy nilly with everything. You still need to ground it somewhere otherwise it takes a reader, viewer or player out of the immersion.
In my head? In the majority of the readers heads I can assure you here and now. Skin colour itself is not a big deal in the setting, no. Did I say it was? Let's take the games as an example. We have a very few amount of foreign merchants with exotic skin colours, and at one point we even face off against a zerrikanian villain in 1, as well as fend off Ofieri mercenaries and a mage in The Witcher 3. That works fine, I can buy that because they're just people doing trade or there to hunt someone or something down. In my head, I don't view The Witcher as a purely caucasian setting, that's silly. But to try to convince me Fringilla Vigo, the Toussaint sorceress to be coloured? No. If they had made up a brand new sorceress for the show? Absolutely fine. The lands we're accustomed to in the stories are to me mainly white, much like medieval Europe was. Do Zerrikanian and Ofieri people exist? Of course they do, and they have a chance of passing by and perhaps a very minor amount do live in these areas. Maybe. But don't try to tell me that upon reading the stories you envisioned various people to be so foreign. I certainly did not because I look at it from the perspective of where the author grew up and wrote it, as well as the cultures he chose to focus on greatly in the stories themselves.
Firstly, Sapkowski is very wishy-washy when it comes to proper geography and we've never gotten an official map from him. What we have are a collection of fan maps that try their best to approximate based on locations from the books. A couple examples being like such:
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-45a02c14601c7061bc77474fc9e8f4f0
https://i.imgur.com/t0M1vQ2.jpg
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-357e4ed2534e52c82351bd193a3c450b
As to your point about Rome, historians and archeaologists are discovering that Roman society was much more mixed in terms of skin-color than it has been given credit for in the past. So there being a sizable chunk of people of color all around is not out of the realm of possibility for rome either
Secondly, and this goes back to my main point, we don't actually know what the skin-color of people in any of those places are. Because it doesn't matter if a kingdom is made up of white people or black people, it's just as easy to imagine that when humans came to the world in the witcherverse they were already mixed. Since you know, humanity invaded at the conjunction of the spheres.
Again, it doesn't really matter if you or anyone else envisoned her as white or black since it does not effect her character.
Since we don't actually know the racial mixup of humanity in the witcher universe you can't say that for certain.
Culture =/= skin-color. Something can be based on the cultural aesthetics and norms and not have the people all be white.
and humanity was not native to the world, the elves were. So the different witcher cultures being populated by people of varying skin-color is not out of the realm of possibility, especially since human skincolor racism isn't present or a feature of the witcher's universe.
and this is exactly what I pointed out. In your head you imagined they were all white, but there is nothing in the books that suggests that.
We don't actually know much of her background, where she was born, who she was born to - beyond the fact that she did at one point live in Toussaint and was distantly related to Anna Henrietta. There is nothing that says everyone in Toussaint has to be white or that Fringilla must either.
Discussing Ciri and Yen's race was pretty important to ethno-cultural implications of universe-wide cataclysmic potential retcons. That was important, but fringilla vigo is a peripheral actor in this grand play. Can you chill out and take you meds?
Don't sorceresses literally change their appearance anyways? Yennefer was a humpback. Maybe Fringilla prefers to look darker. Whatever the case, it doesn't really matter to the plot of the books like Ciri's case.
I'd watch Tyler Perry's Witcher.
Also, I'd like to add that humanity entered the Witcher's world with the conjunction of the spheres roughly 1,500 years before the books take place. The Northern realms had only been a thing for about 500 years prior to that. Skin color takes far longer than that to change due to climactic reasons. Again, there is nothing suggesting that these places are entirely white/homogenous cultures.
werrcherr
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