Maybe it's just me but I'm really side-eyeing casting a black person as Mistle because of the whole SA stuff. TWN has already a pretty poor track record of casting poc as side characters or whitewashing them (or the black family being brutally murdered in NoTW). I don't mind poc being cast, however I do mind when they mistreat them or give them very questionable roles that aren't given to white actors. I dunno, the way *most* poc have been treated in this show so far doesn't sit right with me.
So far, the Witcher has one of the largest amounts of diversity I’ve ever seen in a fantasy show. And while there are definitely mistakes they actually have characters of color which is genuinely not true for any other part of the franchise. So we must continue to call out the mistakes that the show makes but also be willing to support that diversity and encourage it because they are trying to do better and they are trying to include more and more characters of color into the universe. This is the first Genderfluid actor that is cast explicitly as a love interest I have ever seen in fantasy. That’s a big fucking deal. It breaks my heart that under the casting announcement for this actor, who has this is one of their breakout roles by the way, you see nothing but racism and hate comments. I think that some sense of positivity here should be fucking warranted to combat the absolutely massive amount of hate.
Considering the fact that they have left out any graphic sexual assault in the show I doubt this would be the point where they decide to include it. The show has made a lot of changes to the books and one area where I think they’ve created a definite improvement is around the treatment of female characters. Specifically they have graphic assault we saw present in the books which I really appreciate because I am very tired of seeing women raped in fantasy.
I will say this. With the casting of Mistle as a black woman if they choose to have her sexually assault Ciri on screen that is my fucking line with the show. I actually will drop it because it that is a choice that I simply cannot except. But based on the trajectory of the show has seen I doubt very much that they are going to do this and I really hope that the assault scene will not happen. Mostly because it is entirely unnecessary to Ciri’s character development and really fucking homophobic.
But the other thing is that unless they speed up the timeline a lot I doubt we will see Mistle until the very end of the season and even then we might not even see her interact with Cir much. So we could be a very long time before we find out what the relationship looks like and I don’t want to see people shitting on this actor that entire time for something we don’t even know will happen.