I love The Witcher, and I love so many people in this fandom who make amazing content but it is just so sad to be a Witcher fan. I’ve been in many fandoms but I have yet to see anyone that has this much blatant racism everywhere I turn.
I just wanted to be excited about this cute tweet where Anya Chalotra is holding a water bottle
But of course you go the replies and you see racist and just plain deeply insulting things
And before you say “oh that person is just talking about book accuracy” they are actually using that as a dog whistle because they just want an excuse to be racist as fuck.
Which btw, as a massive fan of the books, it’s such a shame to see “book accurate” turned into a racist dog whistle, particularly on Reddit and Twitter. Just look at some of the replies under the new casting announcement RI released today.
You have ur blatant racists
Then you have ur “Slavic Erasure” crew who use that as an excuse to be racist
Which is closely related to the “book accuracy” crew of racists
And of course we can’t forget the people who try to say the reason Sapko supports the show and says color of the characters doesn’t matter is because he was bought out
And I love the few people in the replies trying to combat this, and I love how almost all the quote tweets are super positive but holy fuck is it exhausting to not be able to even celebrate the casting of a character.
I often feel like I can’t enjoy the show at all without getting dog piled in some way. And it’s not that I think the show doesn’t deserve criticism, but it’s more like sometimes I just want to enjoy friends without having to dissect every tiny intricacy. I just want to make a nice meme about Yennefer being dorky or Fringilla being flustered around Francesca without having to make some sort of disclaimer about how I hate X part of season 2 or I thing Y is inaccurate to the books.
I feel like many people are so pedantic that they’re finding more enjoyment in complaining about the media than the media itself. and I’ve done a fairly good job of trying to block it out but it’s just difficult when you have to really put the work in to try to avoid constant negativity.
I will say this, Tumblr is definitely the best place that I have found. Reddit and Twitter are practically unusable at times.
I don’t know what makes the Witcher different than other fandoms that the racism is so consistent, blatant, and common. More so than most places. But it’s just sad.
Sometimes, I just want to enjoy a show I love, talk about my favorite characters (if u know me u know who that is), and feel like there’s an actual fan community.
But it’s just. Hard. And I’m tired. And I know others are tired too and I just don’t know what to do to combat widespread racism of this magnitude.