Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Everyone talks about diverse casting in shows like Witcher, Wheel of Time, LotR, etc. like it's all because of wokeness.

But I think the biggest factor is that producers want to show audiences a world where the people look like the people those audiences are used to seeing.

2/I live in a country where the people are about 60% white, 20% Hispanic, and 20% Black, Asian, and other. And I have spent most of my adult life living in cities that more or less reflected that ethnic mix.

That is what is "normal" for me to look around and see.

2/If I am in a place where everyone is white, I don't think "Ahh, the people around me look normal". I think "I am in a foreign country." Because I can't even remember being in such an environment in the U.S.

3/In fact, I do think TV shows generally under-cast Hispanic/Latino people, which does feel a little weird. But other than that, the diversity on modern TV feels *normal* to me; putting all white actors on the screen feels foreign.

4/And feeling foreign isn't necessarily bad. The characters in the LotR movies pretty much all white, and that's fine with me; it just made Middle Earth seem more foreign and weird. It's a fantasy world, so it's OK to be foreign and weird.

5/But in the Wheel of Time show, the diverse casting that others said was jarring just seemed perfectly normal to me.

In fact, Robert Jordan himself said that his series was supposed to reflect the American melting pot.

6/In fact, I did feel a shift in the late 2010s when casting became more diverse. The people on screen felt more American...more normal. I hadn't realized in the 2000s that seeing mostly white actors on screen always felt a little foreign. But it did.

7/Anyway, I don't feel the need to watch shows where everyone is white unless it's set in historical Europe, or in some other historical place where everyone or almost everyone was white, in which case it's necessary to seem realistic.

8/And as for fantasy worlds, I don't imagine these to be ancient Europe; instead I imagine them as a fantasy past for my own country. And my country is a diverse one, so I imagine that it looked the same in this fictional magical past.

9/Anyway, I wish people wouldn't think of diverse casting as producers trying to push some vision of a diverse world onto fans. If you're American, that diverse world already exists. You live in it. That is your country. That is the population of which you are a part.

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