In Witcher 3, Size Matters

[Cerebrawl]

Since I'm not interested in rehashing this same argument for the 9 millionth time, maybe someone more familiar with the books can answer my question here, it is at least tangentially related to race in the Witcher.

What race are the Zerrikanians exactly? I just read that post up above saying that they were Black, but all their in-game descriptions come off as really Middle-Eastern: deserts, Genies, and all that other stuff. Do they have a defined race or cultural influence or are they just a hodge-podge of "mysterious" middle-eastern/north African traits mashed together.

Also, why are all the best horse accessories in the game the Zerrikanian stuff? Is there a lore reason for that, do they have awesome horse riders in the books? or is it just kind of random selection when the items were created? Is all their stuff super awesome, or is it just the horse accessories?

I do find it funny that all this Zerrikanian stuff is apparently in the North, including mentions of Skellige raiding Zerrikanian merchants, apparently being isolationist doesn't stop me from finding random hobo merchants in Novigrad selling Zerrikanian saddlebags, or Skellige giving me a Zerrikanian saddle for winning their horse races.

Zerrikania lore:

Books (canon) - IIRC no info about skin color. Female warriors with curved blades wearing exotic furs. They worship dragons. Not much else to say, there's only two unimportant Zerrikanian characters (Tea & Vea) in ONE short story.

Polish comicbooks (not canon, but Sapkowski incorporated some things from comics into the official lore) - Judge yourself: http://oi59.tinypic.com/14xgwae.jpg
Tea & Vea seem... rather... white. Though on some panels they have somewhat sub-saharan facial features.

Pen'n'paper (not canon) - Generic amazons. Matriarchal society from faraway land of deserts and jungles. *isolationists!*.
http://wiedzmin.irpg.pl/dane/img/1045_rys2.gif
http://wiedzmin.irpg.pl/dane/img/1045_rys1.gif

Games - eh, your guess is as good as mine. Near East I suppose. But with more dragon worship and jungles.

I've actually run into one Zerrikanian, sort of lategame though, a lvl 30 sidequest in Skellige(he'd ended up there by being in a mage tower that teleported as a security measure against intruders).

He was pretty white, maybe lightly tanned, with some middle eastern culture influence.

I must say though that I am so tired of the SocJus crusade for enforced tokenism. This game is actually heavily anti-racist, it just plays it out with humans, elves, halflings and dwarves, instead of skin colours.

 

[dangoball]

Yet, it doesn't seem to have any black people.

You know what I find racist? That no one is complaining about the absence of Asians in the game.
Mind you, I personally don't care whether they include real world minorities or not, they've got enough racism towards (and from) elves and dwarves. It's funny, though, how moral outrage is only over inclusion of black people as if Asians are somehow less deserving of representation.
Some people use the "people of color" (note the absence of a "u" in "colour") label, but me thinks you illustrated nicely what the outrage is about.

OT: I wanted to put in my two cents on their reasonable budget resulting in grand game but others said it better than I could, EternallyBored for one. I also think viral marketing did a lot of work for them, or they depended on it to do so and as such didn't spend silly amounts on marketing.

 

[RyQ_TMC]

I also want to throw in a few cents about the whole "Witcher is raciss'" thing.

We had ethnic conflicts in Poland in the past. We still have ethnic prejudice. We were probably the most ethnically diverse state in pre-modern Europe. But, and this is an important point to make, it was not based on skin colour.

Poland didn't have colonies. Poland didn't participate in chattel slavery. But it was a country with significant minorities, mostly Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Lithuanian, Tatar... All those groups would fall under the umbrella of "white". But the conflicts we had were based on religion, language, culture - all things much deeper than skin-deep.

For us, the memory of ethnic conflict is not "people of one skin colour oppressing people of another skin colour". It's the Holocaust, the "Polish operation", Kulturkampf, the Volhynia massacre, Operation Vistula, massacres at Katyn, Palmiry, Ponary - yeah, most of those don't tell you anything, but here's the point: it was all whites against whites, with lines of oppression based on national, cultural, religious identity. Not on how someone looked. So when we create fiction dealing with themes of prejudice, we don't immediately jump to outward physical differences.

Also, kudos to Yossarian for the awesome post.

You know what I find racist? That no one is complaining about the absence of Asians in the game.

I had the same thought, considering Warsaw, where CDPR is based, is home to a large Vietnamese community. So they are raciss' after all!

ANYWAY, OT: One of the things I love most about TW3 is how even the tiniest quest is like an iceberg, with the actual mechanical stuff only the visible top, and a HUGE backstory below the surface. I'm discovering new things every day, and I'm still mainly traipsing around Velen with occasional trips to Novigrad. The world seems to have a life of its own, with new stuff to discover when you come back to previously visited areas.

It's an amazing game and I don't for a moment regret pre-ordering it.

 

[Ugicywapih]

Except:
1. There is no logical reason for Zerikanians to be there.
2. Too few would mean "tokenism".
3. That is a very "american" way to look at these issues. Ethnicity or nation mean a lot more than colour in Eastern Europe.
Poland never took part of the slave trade (neither has Bulgaria BTW, the law stated than any slave on the land of the Bulgarian Empire was a free man)

4. It was literature made for people that have over 1000 years of both getting butchered and doing the butchering themselves. In a mono-ethnic region.
That is how you teach the young ones. With cool fantasy.

I'm... I'm sorry. I'm a Pole myself, one with rather vested interest in history too, so I'm quite well aware of the background in this case and actually, and I have honestly not been expecting anyone to take it seriously. I mean, come on, one of the main themes of the books, that is being retained by the games, is systemic oppression of ethnic minorities, with its mutually destructive results, all of this, to a lesser degree affecting the protagonist as well. And people accuse THIS particular world of being racist. Frankly, I'm actually expecting the derailing of this thread to be the work of some troll, though it's often hard to tell for sure between well-concealed malice and well-meaning ignorance.

At any rate, my previous post was not intended to be taken seriously. I can hardly believe it wasn't obvious, gonna use green text next time.

 

[dangoball]

snip

I'm... I'm sorry. I'm a Pole myself, one with rather vested interest in history too, so I'm quite well aware of the background in this case and actually, and I have honestly not been expecting anyone to take it seriously. I mean, come on, one of the main themes of the books, that is being retained by the games, is systemic oppression of ethnic minorities, with its mutually destructive results, all of this, to a lesser degree affecting the protagonist as well. And people accuse THIS particular world of being racist. Frankly, I'm actually expecting the derailing of this thread to be the work of some troll, though it's often hard to tell for sure between well-concealed malice and well-meaning ignorance.
I
At any rate, my previous post was not intended to be taken seriously. I can hardly believe it wasn't obvious, gonna use green text next time.

Frankly, you presented your satire too calmly. Just reading your first post I couldn't tell whether you were being sarcastic or not. Maybe use more exclamation marks to emulate the raving lunatics, something akin to the infamous "!!1!" or if everything else fails, simple "/sarcasm" does the job without giving away the subtlety of sarcasm at the first glance, which colour coding would betray.

 

[TT Kairen]

I for one agree with the folks complaining about racism in Witcher 3 - perhaps the inspirations for the original book lore did not contain much room for racial diversity, but that is no excuse to simply ignore a real issue and instead focus on ridiculous fantasy themes like indigenous non-human races being persecuted based on their ethnicity and their destructive reaction (Scoia'tael) to such oppression when civilized discourse within accepted social norms, as well as appeals to the government fail them. Or witchers themselves being social outcasts, at least as much because of their recruitment process, as because of their physiological diffrences and hermetic culture. Those forms of discrimination are not valid arguments against it, since they only affect fictional beings and discrimination is real and thus, it needs to be portrayed affecting fictional people belonging to real groups suffering under its yoke.

OT, glad to hear the game turned out well, my PC needs a major upgrade before I can run it, but I very much intend to get it once my hardware's up to par.

This is the best satire I've read on this site. Bravo, good sir.

 

[Areloch]

Well, even then, it apparently only had a 10.5 million dollar budget. Which is very small by AAA standards. So even if they were secured in their budget from GoG and the like, it's still very apparent they spent their money and time much more wisely than the norm.

I doubt CDPR had to spend 90% of their budget on hookers and blow for the marketing team, like most AAA studios.

Wow, I am so looking forward to this game. When I can, one day, afford to buy a full price game again, or find it on a Steam sale. I was impressed at TW1, I was amazed at TW2, and when I finally play TW3 it may very well kill me.

Haha!

And yeah, I've been greatly enjoying it. I've had a few rough spots, but all in all my experience with it so far has been excellent, so I'd heartily recommend it when you get a chance.

 

[Lightknight]

You see, I just don't buy this. There were black people in medieval Europe, you know that right? Not all that many, but they were there. I don't see it as being an especially big deal but it did strike me some ways in that I hadn't encountered a single non-white character save for one succubus in a game that has so many NPCs. It's just kinda weird.

They were incredibly rare. We find a reference to a handful over multiple centuries with the only exception being Spain which was invaded by the Moors from 711 to 1492. So Spain circa the middle ages? Sure, an incredibly diverse culture though mostly Arabic individuals rather than black. But the rest of Europe? Not so much. I'll do the math lower but the general black population in all of Europe today is only around 1.4% so how much fewer were they back then before the slave trade and the mass immigrations of the more recent centuries?

Combine that with the fact that Poland itself, where the game is made and the developers are from, has a black population that is somewhere less than 00.1% and what are we expecting to see? Do we expect Polish developers to create a game matching American demographics where we have 12.2% of a black population? I don't get it, why are we so arrogant as to try to force even our demographic distribution onto another country's games? Would we be mad that a North Korean developer created a game that had all Asians in it? No, people are only upset because the characters are white. But Poland and North Korea are both ethnically homogenous nations. Do we get what less than .1% Means? It's hard to really grasp but it means that for every thousand people you see in Poland, there are likely no black people. That is the most generous possible number too, because we have no idea how much less than .1% the black community comprises of. Wait, I'll do the math since Wikipedia doesn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_Poland#Other

There are 80 African-Americans living there (specifically Africans of American Nationality).
There are 92 Zulus who may or may not be counted in the African population below.
There are 229 "Romanians, Georgians, Africans, and Palestinians" but it doesn't list what proportion of each comprise that demographic (I would expect Romanians and Georgians make up the bulk of it)

So even if we assume that none of the numbers overlap and even if we decide that the 229 number is entirely African (Black African too, since there are absolutely White Africans) then the total number of black people in Poland would be 401. Let's be overly generous and round up to 1,000. Poland is up to around 38,484,000 people. So for nearly every 40,000 people in Poland you might see one black person in a beyond generous estimation that more than doubled the estimated number that itself was generous. With just the numbers and not being generous then it would likely be less than 1 per every 100,000.

Do you realize how rare that is? In the US it's 12-13 per every 100 people. I can't even imagine such homogeneity as less than 1 per 100,000. Yet that is exactly what their population is.

We are just being ugly Americans here. Being mad at another nation for not exclusively catering to us and our own population. Shame on us and our pseudo-equal rights crusade. It is just one of ignorance in this case.

What's more is that Europe itself is also vastly White. Only 3% to 4% (depending on definition) of Europe's residents are from non-European countries at all. That's 3% for all other nationalities to squabble over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Europe#Ethnic_minorities_of_non-European_origin

That 3-4% is around 22-29 Million people. The total population is around 728 million.

5 million North Africans. (mostly in France, Spain, Netherlands, and Sweden)
5 million Sub-Saharan Africans (Mostly in the UK and France)
200k Somolis (UK, Netherlands and Scandinavia).

So let's play the math game again. 10.2 million.

That's a whopping 1.4% over all of Europe and mostly concentrated in just three or four countries on the west coast (surprise, it's near Spain where they would have come into Europe from). This is a region almost touching Africa at the tip of Spain and across one sea anywhere else. The number may be a bit higher since they don't really mention African Americans specifically or even tally the number of Americans, but most of the numbers are already accounted for so I don't think the end result would even crest 1.5% if we figured that out. They would mention anything over 1 million.

 

[Areloch]

I don't know where Areloch got the 10.5 figure from, every source I've seen says 15 million, and that's before marketing budgets are calculated. The marketing budget for the game was supposedly 25 million, putting the total cost somewhere in the realm of 40 million, which isn't exactly that much higher than a lot of other games commonly lumped into the AAA category. The extraordinary part is that they didn't blow triple the games development cost in marketing.

I'd seen that number floated a fair bit on various sites, but it's entirely probable that it was an old estimate. Once you bring marketing into it, it does begin to get into the more 'normal' range of budget, this is true. But again, if you look at their "normal" sized budget and look at how much content they managed to squeeze out of it, it's still super impressive.


As for the Witcher presenting racism towoards/from non-humans topic. Wouldn't that *technically* be species-ist?

 

[Vykrel]

Could... could we not do this? For once? Please?

When actual racists call the lack of black people a victory, that's a problem

i dont think anyone is claiming victory because there are no non-whites in the game, but rather that there are no races that were shoehorned into the game to appease people such as yourself.

also, dont you think its a tad racist of you to specifically call them out for a lack of black characters? that makes it sound as though you dont care that there are no asian, middle eastern, inuit, or hispanic characters in the game.

anyway, this whole criticism is illogical. the world of The Witcher is not a particularly large one. the primary modes of transportation are horses and ships. having different ethnicities requires a large world. the farther apart people are, the more different they will look from one another. if the world is fairly small, everyone looks similar. the game world is also inspired by medieval Europe, so obviously the characters are going to be white. thats not to say that there are no non-white ethnicities in the game, though. it simply means that they are, at the very least, separated by vast oceans... just like humanity was in real life for many thousands of years.

 

[Mr_Spanky]

I'm sorry what? Everybody wants to ***** and complain about racism in THIS game?? Good god throughout the whole series you have seen the atrocious segregation and persecution of the different races. Elves, dwaves, humans and several other races are seen being persecuted without reason or justification. Fuck sake. Or maybe it's that the people complaining haven't played it? Or maybe just so concentrated on their own political agenda that nothing else matters? I dont fucking know anymore. I just know that the next person who wants to complain about the lack of representation of rascim in THIS of all games is a fucking moron.

There's plenty of games that such an accusation can be levelled at - put THIS? Fuck you and the bus you rode in on.

And btw are we just going to complain about the fact that there are no black people? How about, Chinese, Indians, Hispanics etc? How about having some native aussie/americans? Inuit? Noooooo ofc none of that matters. Fuck me sideaways with a dragon dildo.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I must say though that I am so tired of the SocJus crusade for enforced tokenism. This game is actually heavily anti-racist, it just plays it out with humans, elves, halflings and dwarves, instead of skin colours.

Sure, but you'd think that in a realistic universe like this there'd be some varying colour tones based on climate. Especially among the Elves and Dwarves, seeing as they've been here way longer. I mean, there's enough Zerrikanian (as apparently they are the coloured people of this world) stuff lying around so there's obviously no real isolation, and there's plenty of boats and ships -- you're telling me not one ethnic diverse individual found their way to the north?

There doesn't seem to be any strict segregation either seeing as Elves and Dwarves are just running around amongst humans with seemingly little care. If there was I could sort of understand all the races keeping to themselves and far away from one another.

This isn't meant to crucify CDPR or The Witcher 3, or to "enforce American race ethics", since I remember seeing atleast a few non-white people running around Europe as well, it's just pretty strange that this issue goes completely untouched in a universe that prides itself on its realism and detail.

 

[Mr_Spanky]

I must say though that I am so tired of the SocJus crusade for enforced tokenism. This game is actually heavily anti-racist, it just plays it out with humans, elves, halflings and dwarves, instead of skin colours.

Sure, but you'd think that in a realistic universe like this there'd be some varying colour tones based on climate. Especially among the Elves and Dwarves, seeing as they've been here way longer. I mean, there's enough Zerrikanian (as apparently they are the coloured people of this world) stuff lying around so there's obviously no real isolation, and there's plenty of boats and ships -- you're telling me not one ethnic diverse individual found their way to the north?

There doesn't seem to be any strict segregation either seeing as Elves and Dwarves are just running around amongst humans with seemingly little care. If there was I could sort of understand all the races keeping to themselves and far away from one another.

This isn't meant to crucify CDPR or The Witcher 3, or to "enforce American race ethics", since I remember seeing atleast a few non-white people running around Europe as well, it's just pretty strange that this issue goes completely untouched in a universe that prides itself on its realism and detail.

Because the same aspects that you're talking about are covered within the Witcher universe already. Why is it that we should suppose that in THIS universe race is about skin colour? Race is about the of this world and the not (read conjunction of the spheres) it's about the elvish race, the dwarfish race, and the human race - and several others besides. The fact that the witchers themselves are despised by so many is a clue to just how much rasicsm exists (and to how seriously the issue is taken within the witcher stories).

To merely focus upon peoples skin colour is simply ridiculous - and denotes to me an ignorance of the entire issue.

FYI I have the same skin colour as a German or a Swede or a Frenchman or most North american and many russians. I am not any of these. Race does not just have to be about the colour of your skin. And in the world of the witcher it's a farce to even suggest it.

 

[UberThetan]

There doesn't seem to be any strict segregation either seeing as Elves and Dwarves are just running around amongst humans with seemingly little care. If there was I could sort of understand all the races keeping to themselves and far away from one another.

This reads like someone who hasn't played the games at all and has zero context for the racial dynamics between elves, dwarves and humans in the world of The Withcer. If you have, then you must have missed all the indicators as to why some elves live in cities with humans (the only alternative is living in the wild with the Scoiatel) or how several times in the history of The Witcher there have been mass slaughters of non-humans in these cities whenever tensions got high.

This isn't meant to crucify CDPR or The Witcher 3, or to "enforce American race ethics", since I remember seeing atleast a few non-white people running around Europe as well, it's just pretty strange that this issue goes completely untouched in a universe that prides itself on its realism and detail.

Internal consistency. It's been explained several times in the last 2 pages WHY there aren't any darker skinned individuals. I'm assuming you bothered to actually read them and the fact that you still believe there should have been people of color means you don't give a shit about artistic vision, the source material, the culture that produced it or the people who sunk 3 years of their lives into this. It's not strange. Strange is asking a foreign culture to pander to your whims.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Because the same aspects that you're talking about are covered within the Witcher universe already. Why is it that we should suppose that in THIS universe race is about skin colour? Race is about the of this world and the not (read conjunction of the spheres) it's about the elvish race, the dwarfish race, and the human race - and several others besides. The fact that the witchers themselves are despised by so many is a clue to just how much rasicsm exists (and to how seriously the issue is taken within the witcher stories).

To merely focus upon peoples skin colour is simply ridiculous - and denotes to me an ignorance of the entire issue.

FYI I have the same skin colour as a German or a Swede or a Frenchman or most North american and many russians. I am not any of these. Race does not just have to be about the colour of your skin. And in the world of the witcher it's a farce to even suggest it.

That's not even what I was getting at.

What I mean is, if The Witcher's universe has a heavy basis in realism, and if this world has a variety of climates from continent to continent, it's a bit weird then that you don't see that represented in the physical traits of those people. Unless over the thousands of years elves, dwarves, and humans have simply stopped evolving, because of magical reasons.

So again, this is not about how there should be a focus on skin colour, but why in this realistic universe there's no varying skin colour whatsoever. It's just a bit weird.

 

[Areloch]

I must say though that I am so tired of the SocJus crusade for enforced tokenism. This game is actually heavily anti-racist, it just plays it out with humans, elves, halflings and dwarves, instead of skin colours.

Sure, but you'd think that in a realistic universe like this there'd be some varying colour tones based on climate. Especially among the Elves and Dwarves, seeing as they've been here way longer. I mean, there's enough Zerrikanian (as apparently they are the coloured people of this world) stuff lying around so there's obviously no real isolation, and there's plenty of boats and ships -- you're telling me not one ethnic diverse individual found their way to the north?

There doesn't seem to be any strict segregation either seeing as Elves and Dwarves are just running around amongst humans with seemingly little care. If there was I could sort of understand all the races keeping to themselves and far away from one another.

This isn't meant to crucify CDPR or The Witcher 3, or to "enforce American race ethics", since I remember seeing atleast a few non-white people running around Europe as well, it's just pretty strange that this issue goes completely untouched in a universe that prides itself on its realism and detail.

Actually, is there any indication that humans in the Witcher universe even have melanin? Or that there would be other genetic reasonings for darker tones?

Dark skin, like thinner eye shapes with more recessed eyelids a la Asian features and so on are genetic divergences. They don't happen because "they're black" or "they're asian" in real life, they happen due to a complicated slurry of genetic permutations based on their lineage as you're aware.

However, in the context of the Witcher universe, which we've all agreed is fantasy anyways, would we assume that any of these genetic permutations would carry as well?

Maybe that's why so many of the humans in the Witcher series have the same face. ShotsFired.jpg

 

[Casual Shinji]

There doesn't seem to be any strict segregation either seeing as Elves and Dwarves are just running around amongst humans with seemingly little care. If there was I could sort of understand all the races keeping to themselves and far away from one another.

This reads like someone who hasn't played the games at all and has zero context for the racial dynamics between elves, dwarves and humans in the world of The Withcer. If you have, then you must have missed all the indicators as to why some elves live in cities with humans (the only alternative is living in the wild with the Scoiatel) or how several times in the history of The Witcher there have been mass slaughters of non-humans in these cities whenever tensions got high.

Not the first two games, no. But I played the third, and I honestly didn't catch much of the racism against elves and dwarves. I caught a big whiff of witch persecution and people getting strung up from trees, but racism against non-humans..? Uh-uh. Dwarves especially seemed to be doing just fine with one running the bank in Novigrad and others making a proper living as smiths.

As a matter of fact, I can't recall seeing any elves or dwarves getting beaten or murdered for being non-human in The Witcher 3. So however bad this racism is there must've been a lull in the time period that this game takes place in.

This isn't meant to crucify CDPR or The Witcher 3, or to "enforce American race ethics", since I remember seeing atleast a few non-white people running around Europe as well, it's just pretty strange that this issue goes completely untouched in a universe that prides itself on its realism and detail.

Internal consistency. It's been explained several times in the last 2 pages WHY there aren't any darker skinned individuals. I'm assuming you bothered to actually read them and the fact that you still believe there should have been people of color means you don't give a shit about artistic vision, the source material, the culture that produced it or the people who sunk 3 years of their lives into this. It's not strange. Strange is asking a foreign culture to pander to your whims.

The only explanation I've seen thus far that makes sense is that it's a Polish game and Poland just isn't very multicultural, which reflects itself in art, but that hardly makes sense in the game universe.

Also, adressing something means I don't give a shit? I would assume me actively discussing it is a sign that I clearly do.