Quote Originally Posted by Ashen Lilies View Post
So imagine my surprise and delight when I saw the casting announcement for The Witcher Netflix series, and saw that for Yennefer of Vengerberg they had cast a brown lady, of south asian descent. It was... immensely validating. Maybe too validating. I'm an adult person with a degree and a job and a rent and medical bills. There's people who are going to call me sad and pathetic over wrapping so much of a small part of myself around looking so much like a specific character from a fantasy book. There's people who are going to tell me that the trailer was awful, and that the show is going to be garbage (and it seems probable that they'll be correct). But I got an adaptation of a thing where the character that want to be like looks like me, and I'm keeping that with me.

So if we're asking the question of 'should fantasy strive to look more like the people reading/playing/watching it, especially people who might not have been able to see themselves in a character that they like before?'

The answer is a solid 'yes!' from me, dawg.
Not a cosplay thing, but for me it was when Ben Grimm became officially Jewish (not that it wasn't an open secret before 2002, just not explicit). "Oh wow, I didn't realize I was missing this feeling."