EDITOR’S VIEW
By Benjamin Rose
It’s become a truism in the post-Game Of Thrones age of fantasy television that every new show must begin by adapting homogeneous source material with diverse casting and end in racist backlash. This was true of The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon. It was true of The Witcher over a year before the show actually premiered, when a U.K. casting call was unearthed soliciting BAME (i.e. “Black, Asian, or Minority Ethnic”) actresses to audition for the role of Ciri, an incident that elicited outrage and several highly creative racist memes in the dark corners of late 2010s Reddit. As Gandalf the Grey once memorably quipped, “Be on your guard. There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.”
Over the course of our four-year on-again-off-again run The Path has employed a diverse staff who have often disagreed when evaluating various adaptations of our favorite intellectual property, including in our flagship coverage of the Sapkowski and Pondsmith universes adapted brilliantly by CD Projekt Red and…less consistently elsewhere.
Yet as the Editor, owner, and longest serving staff member of The Path, I will state for my own sake that I share in some of the malaise that has begun to settle over scifi-fantasy fandom in recent years. Marvel has been fading since Endgame, and standout small-screen entries like Wandavision and the Desi-centric Ms. Marvel have not reversed the MCU’s overall commercial and artistic decline. The Witcher has grown tendentious and diffuse since running off the rails in Season 2, and later entries such as Season 3 and Blood Origin have served mainly to emphasize that no amount of inclusive casting or adolescent hottakes on gender politics will compensate for the Cavil-sized hole bleeding at its center. The Rings of Power was bad beyond utterance, and on a half-billion dollar budget managed to conjure one of the blandest exercises in fan-fiction in living memory.
With this slide into widespread mediocrity at the highest levels of sci-fi/fantasy film production, a tedious narrative has taken hold that in the post-Endgame, post-Thrones era, the downfall of the genre belongs to wokeness run amok. This canard is deployed even in cases like The Last of Us where conscious attempts at “representation” have actually produced outstanding television without coasting into polemic. As I noted here (https://thepathwitcher.blog/2023/02/05/the-last-of-us-does-representation-better-than-the-witcher/ ), The Last of Us‘s Very Gay Third Episode was both substantially richer in its depiction of marginalized identities than many recent attempts and easily the best episode of television in years anywhere. “Go woke, go broke” might rhyme, but at the end of the day, it’s doggerel bullshit.
Or is it? A deeper survey of the land raises uncomfortable questions. I have seen many inclusively-casted properties over the last four years but, with the exception of The Last of Us, very few good ones. To dismiss the “Go woke, go broke” crowd on the internet as aggrieved racists is mostly true, and to say that diversity has “ruined” sci-fi/fantasy is repugnant and false; but to equate “Wokeness”, “Critical Race Theory”, “Intersectionality”, “Postcolonialism”, or whatever everyone in The New York Times is currently arguing over with the mere presence of people of color in fantasy or the right of people of color to be present in big budget fantasy is confused and stupid. For while I’ve seen no shortage of strong performances from actors of every identity over the previous four years across a variety of programs, I’ve seen a great deal of self-consciously progressive work that has been drivel. The reason for this is invariably the same: when diversity and social justice become the end of creating great art, rather than a means to it, the result is bunkum, and we wind up with kitsch.
In this regard, the previous year’s major sci-fi/fantasy releases have been instructive in different ways. In the Fall of 2022 as House of The Dragon and The Rings of Power premiered, both shows became the subject of racist vitriol, so much so that in the latter case Amazon temporarily suspended user reviews due to aggressive review–bombing. In both cases, the backlash was addressed explicitly by the casts and production teams of either show and no effort was made to appease such critics.
But beyond their similar casting choices, release windows, and public stance against backlash, the fortunes of House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power could not have been more different. House of the Dragon was critically-lauded and gained a large viewership (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/house_of_the_dragon/s01 ) (https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/media/game-of-thrones-house-of-the-dragon-ratings/index.html), whereas Forbes reporter Eric Kain noted earlier in this year here (summarizing data publicly released by Amazon) that The Rings of Power‘s audience declined significantly each episode, resulting in a terrible 37% completion rate for Season 1 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2023/04/05/why-the-rings-of-power-was-a-huge-flop-that-most-people-never-finished/?sh=24dd7d21d34a)
In the video attached (https://youtu.be/03tJ4Nha6-I?si=kf3RgtljB-H3O5Sh), Kaine goes on to allude to an article from Kotaku lamenting that these numbers for The Rings of Power will further crowd out diverse stories in favor of White male-centric action fare, arguing, in essence, that that is the financial reality in the current streaming market, where the success of less-inclusive but more mass appeal-oriented products subsidizes streamers’ abilities to offer more “niche” content like Reservation Dogs.
Whether or not you agree with this “niche” designation, which has the unfortunate though unintentional effect of suggesting anything diverse is somehow off the beaten path, the logic holds. But there is a way past this dichotomy. In House of the Dragon, and later, The Last of Us, HBO found a means of successfully combining both inclusive casting and mass appeal in ways that a narrowly specific, identity driven-show like Reservation Dogs never could (if it was even aiming at such a thing).
Without belaboring the details of their respective source materials or HBO’s track record as a network, this formula boils down to: cast diversely, spend lots of money on high production values, and write well, in emphatically reverse order. Entertainment can be diverse or non-diverse, it can be political or non-political, but it cannot be asinine and bad, it cannot insult the viewer’s intelligence, and it cannot hide shortcomings in craftsmanship behind polemical virtue-signaling.
By “virtue-signaling”, I do not mean serious engagement with questions of social conflict around gender, race, or religion, I mean this off-key blather that opens The Witcher: Blood Origin…
“A flower shall grow where our peasant blood flows
Our lives they have taken are the seeds they have sown
Rise up from the soil we till, rise up from the soil that they own!
We are the Black Rose. Let no one doubt our cause
Rise up and let them hear our roar. The lowborn’s day has come…”
…which must, pointedly, be interrupted to slam one of the virtuous “lowborn” face-first against a stool for sexually harassing an underage girl. So much for the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the Netflix Witcher‘s laughably bad script, its importation of of contemporary Anglo-American political disputes into an ersatz medieval world, and the way in which its characters endlessly declaim against social injustices the writers are mostly too gutless to depict as lived realities in their fictional universe, is known. Poke around Reddit these days and you’ll find the conversation has moved on from the colorful memeing of 2018. If one thing unites major swathes of the fanbase, it’s that for all its attempts to trade on politics, ALL IS NOT AS IT SEEMS. The Witcher by some estimates gave only 25 minutes of screen time to its titular hero in Seasons 3. Every aspect of the production, from pacing, to character development, to costume design, to dialogue is repeatedly panned on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB.
While those who object to its political posturing, as well as those who are simply racist, appear in such forums, the great majority of people from my informal scroll-survey do not seem to care. What unites them is a sacred and dearly-held conviction, for which they would stake their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor: Nextflix’ The Witcher is a terrible fucking show. Forgive us our trespasses, and send us Project POLARIS in our time. Amen.
Modern shows that have been an embarrassment to the genre did not crash and burn due to their efforts to include BIPOC. Though racist outrage has become a constant and ridiculous reaction to inclusive casting, as House of the Dragon and The Last of Us demonstrated, a show may be inclusive and at once brilliant and commercially successful as well. Where diverse shows are failing, they are failing because they have succumbed to posturing or just bad writing. And at the same time, the failure to move beyond political posturing and performative inclusion, beyond hypocritical lecturing and “Stage 2” stereotyping, is not simply producing bad art, but actively undercutting efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in media. No one can out-act or out-direct a bad script. And one wishes that as opportunities for people of color expand in sci-fi/fantasy television, we see more serious engagement with the complexity of social issues, contemporary and historical, than Brett the frat boy of Westernesse yelling “They’ll take your trades” if we let the elves immigrate to Numenor. What’s dumb is dumb.
The Path/パス is an online bilingual journal of arts, culture, and entertainment bringing you in-depth reviews, news, and analysis on the hottest properties in sci-fi fantasy film, television, and gaming.
Through in-depth research on intellectual properties and major franchises, we develop content covering your favorite books, series, films, games, and shows, such as The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077, Lord of the Rings, House of the Dragon, Fallout, and Shogun.
If you enjoy our takes, consider buying us a coffee! Your support will help us continue producing excellent pop culture writing in English and Japanese for a true East-meets-West entertainment experience! Arigatō gozaimasu!
Pingback: February Newsletter and Preview of Content – The Path