babark: Is that what you're suggesting? Are you saying that the race- a cultural construct in this world, and a lore-related one in the fictional world- of specific characters (not genealogy of those characters) plays any level of importance to the story of the Witcher?

LootHunter: If you wanted a story where skin color is a "cultural construct" determined by people's views, then you should create for it your own world, where genetics is different from ours and not use another fictional world where magic is the only thing that deffirintiate it from ours.

plagren: That's some nice ass-backwards logic there, buddy.

richlind33: O'Really? So when is the Declaration Of Universal Human Rights going to have the force of law and be strictly enforced, or does that fall outside the not-so-all-encompassing rubric of liberal, bourgeois "justice"?

plagren: I don't have a clue what the hell you're talking about anymore, so I'll just stop now.

Telika: Ethnicity doesn't mean "race", absolutely at all. Ethnicity is an agreed-upon collective identity, based on shared attributes, which usually include language, geography, institutions, beliefs, rites, but can also lack a few of these (there are diaspora ethnicities without geographical unty, there are ethnicities with multiple languages, etc). In the end, what defines ethnicity, is an arbitrary, consensual sense of belonging.

Judaism can be described broadly as a shared culture (which is, basically, what ethnicity means), with, indeed, believers and atheists, but even atheists can belong to a religious tradition in the sense that I am an atheist belonging to a christian culture (that is, in a society organised by christian rites, christian calendars, and philosphical currents rooted in christianism). It has been racialized by antisemits (in particular nazis), it can be sometimes vaguely traced by genetic markers (in the sense that all partially in-breeding populations tend to statistically carry some markers around), but it is not a "race", and a person's judaic religion or culture cannot be inferred by the shape of their nose or whatever.

But identities (be it "jew" or "tutsi" or whatever) can also be administratively imposed by the outside, and that's what the nazi bureaucratic powers did a lot, designating people as "jewish" depending on their own pseudo-scientifical definition of the notion. So no, a designated "jew" could not opt-out. But the nazi administration could decide arbitrarily who would be or wouldn't be "a jew".

Enebias: Why there has always to be an "us" and "them"?

Telika: I pretty much disagree with that. I think that most succesfull tv series have a public distinct, broader, wider than their original sources'. The fans of "Game of Thrones" have, in their majority, not read the book, or read it because of the series. Same for "The Expanse", for "The handsmaid's tale", etc. The fans of the novels are a tiny subcategory of the tv series' public. And the series' success is independant from them. That's why the series operate on a different logic, and feels free to re-create its source's world. To adapt it for tv viewers.

Same as in cinema. Faithfulness to a book never played any role on the success of a classic movie. Many blockbusters are very very hollywood-ized novels (even when the book iself is a classic).

richlind33: I would love to live in a society where everyone identifies as human, and leave it at that, because I understand that identity politics only benefits the few at the expense of the many, who are left divided and at odds with those who should be allies.

richlind33: So when Israeli scientists use population genetics to show that Jews are uniquely unique, their credibility is on par with the authors of The Bell Curve?

Lucumo: You don't seem to know how word-of-mouth works. Having an actual (good) product is just a part of getting something successful. If you have an existing base which spreads the word (which is really easy these days), it makes everything a lot easier. This applies to movies just as much as other media (games included).