Define popular. 'cause right now it seems to be popular to brownwash (for the lack of a better word) established fantasy settings in their adaptions (glares at
The Witcher and
The Wheel of Time). And even though at the core of it this probably has more to do with marketing strategies and focus group think than politics it still greatly rubs me the wrong way.
Maybe to expand on this and clarify my position: I've got nothing against ethnically or otherwise diverse casts. In fact, I'd love to watch something like
Tyrant set in 12th century Bagdad, or a series centered on Old Egypt and the cataclysm we've come to know as
The Sea Peoples, or something centered on the Nubian pharaohs, or maybe an wholly Indian fantasy series. Or something like
Rome.
It does, however, bother me a great deal (probably more than it
should) when diversity of skin color is forced into a product where it makes zero sense to do so, and where it destroys the well-crafted atmosphere and setting it originates from.
It's as if skin color has become the sole arbiter of diversity, an idea that most the European members of this board surely can only offer a bored smile for. I mean, Poles are by and large probably a shade whiter than Germans, and yet we slaughtered them as non-Aryan
Untermenschen by the bucketload.
In a central-European/eastern European climate setting, there are no native dark-skinned folk. Simple as that. So the natives making up that setting can't, logically, be black or otherwise dark-skinned.
Especially not if that goes completely against their canonical description. Meaning, you don't get Yennefer
of Bollywood (rather than Vengerberg). Or Fringilla of Zimbabwe. Or Triss of... being a 40 years old gypsy traveller ripping off people in front of a train station.
Especially not if you ran around first, claiming that you wouldn't change the characters and stay true to the source (looking at you, Lauren S. Hissrich^^).
The same is true for
The Wheel of Time adaption. The Two Rivers is supposed to be this reclusive backwater, where Tam al'Thor leaving and marrying an outsider was something super out of the norm because people married within the Two Rivers for dozens of generations (which was why the Old Blood was still so strong there), and where Rand's
hair color set him apart fom the majority. And now you turn Nyneave and Perrin into black folk.
And Lan is Asian. Yeah. Fine, that one I can even get, with all the obvious Asian overtones of the Borderlands, even though neither the author nor any official product until now ever depicted him like that...
I mean, one of the great parts of
The Wheel of Time was the protagonists getting in touch with new cultures that they had never experienced before. It's kinda hard to keep that sense of wonder when you've known
vastly different ethnicities all your life.
/sorry about that rant
