Perfectly stated. And well researched, I might add. Well done, good Sir! I doff my hat at you (and re-adjust my monocle). I came across some interesting trailers for Witcher 3 on Youtube (while watching BattleBorn, Fallout 4 and OverWatch trailers-all of which I’m way more excited about). Then I realised I couldn’t play as a female character (except Ciri, ‘sometimes’ and with extreme choice restrictions) and decided to save my $ for the games that appreciate my patronage (rather than tolerating it/accepting it as an afterthought). ;)

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One small nitpick: “Giving Geralt a plot induced amnesia and having him wander through the world, having weird non-cannon adventures in between the books.”

The Witcher games are post-canon, taking place after the books. Obviously this impacts your argument not a whit, but I’m sure that some pedant will take issue with it if you leave it up there.

@ Robert:
The Coptic Church was well established during the Crusades, even if many Copts were under Muslim rule. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for an Ethiopian Copt to hear about the Crusades and decide to join in, feeling (unsurprisingly) more solidarity with Catholics from Europe than with Muslim Saracens.

If that’s not good enough for you, maybe an Ethiopian caravan traveled through an area when people were recruiting and one of the guards decided to join in because the pay was better. Or maybe he’s part of a mercenary band that decided to hire on with the European side.

And the same for a Berber mercenary. Berbers have dark skin, though they don’t look that much like Morgan Freeman (Freeman’s skin is much redder, his facial structure’s a fair bit different, his nose shape doesn’t really match, and his lips are rather thinner). The fact that North Africa and a fair portion of Iberia were controlled by Muslims would have eased travel between the areas, allowing for the caravan story to make sense.

Plus it’s not like these areas were isolated from each other. People did immigrate. I’m quite certain there were a few natural-born citizens of England with skin that dark during the crusades.

If you even try to think of a reason, it’s trivial to come up with a plausible one. If you instead try to come up with reasons to eliminate non-white people from roles, people might think you’re racist.

@ Ed:

Here’s the really weird thing about everyone complaining that the “Moors” didn’t look like Sub-Saharan Africans like Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman isn’t Sub-Saharan African, he’s African-American, and African-Americans African “blood”(as ridiculous as blood quantum is) comes from either West or North African peoples captured in the slave trade. In fact, AA aren’t black at all if the only “black” Africans are those from Sub-Saharan Africa according to Robert.

In other words, the Moors probably looked exactly like Morgan Freeman. This weird obsession with making the Moors out to be as light skinned and close to white as possible kinda weirds me out.

While that artwork he linked is one representation of the Moors, so is this:

Any of those. Just…really black looking. Yeah.

@ dziko:

If you are looking for representations of dark skinned people in Medieval art, check here:
http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/
Here’s a pdf from a museum showing on African people in Renaissance Art:
http://thewalters.org/assets/pdf/revealing-the-african-presence-in-ren aissance-europe.pdf

Scholarly book about the Black African’s in the Renaissance:
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/619

Or just look at any map of the Ottoman Empire during the Renaissance. Because armies from Constantinople and Baghdad don’t conquer Hungary without their Polish neighbors noticing the ranks of dark skinned folks marching past them.

Robert wrote:

Freeman’s character is supposed to be a Moor, but Moors were Berbers, North African tribesmen. They didn’t, and don’t, look like that.

Go to this page and scroll down a bit: you’ll see four photos of Berbers in a square. Have a look at the chap in the bottom-right picture. Then compare it to this photo of Morgan Freeman in the Robin Hood film.

I think the similarity’s acceptable: same shape nose, similar skin colour. More believable than Kevin Costner’s accent, anyway.

Just reminder: http://theweek.com/articles/454417/watch-daily-show-mock-fox-news-whit e-santa-claim

@ dziko:
Are You ever check it? Medieval world (early) has it center more in North Africa than in North Europe. For example person which link anquity and medieval epoch – st. Augustine was half – Berber and lived n North Africa. How often do You depict him in Your min as a non-causasian (to be honest I dont like this term, but I have to use it now).