[ SECRET POST #6044 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6044 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #864.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT other anon's link is probably a good one but honestly if "the consistent popularity of stoic warrior race archetypes in Western fandoms is directly related to our cultural history of racism in a variety of ways" isn't something you can at least begin to unpack on your own I don't really know where to start.

But I guess one longer version is: the "warrior races" we get in modern SF/Fantasy are directly traceably descended from "Native warriors" that appeared in its explicitly colonialist racist Adventure/Western/Orientalist precursor genres in the 19th/early 20th centuries; you can draw a straight line from Chingachgook to Din Djarin; and untangling what SF has done with that start is super complicated! and not unambiguously Bad even! Some of it is even about working through that history in antiracist directions.

But the short version is: it's the racism

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that's a good explanation for why people (men in particular) like it, though, as most people don't like that history.

I think it's safer to say that men are attracted to the trope because they're attracted to war and battle more generally. They aren't thinking about the racial implications; they're thinking, "wouldn't it be cool if I were in a society that was organized around a warrior tradition? I'd have been raised to be a badass."

[(Anonymous)]

SA

*"like that history" should be "know that history"

DA

[(Anonymous)]

But it could be argued that they're only thinking that because they were raised in a colonialist racist society that had those archetypes in their western media. It's not like men are genetically predisposed to like warriors or want to be a badass, that's all cultural.

Re: DA

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I'm not so sure about that. I think you could say that the expression of the impulse is cultural, but cultures across time and place have warrior traditions, and seek ways to control and direct male aggression; it's not something that's limited to colonial powers.

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, but that's also a lot of why the Native Warriors in the old stories were super popular (they were!) And you can tell stories about people who grew up in warrior traditions with placing them in an othering/outsider/"different race" position, and attaching a lot of the other things that are generally also attached to it (the 'last of a dying race' part, the laconic/stoic part, the coincidental dark skin, the vague mysticism, etc.)

There's something about that specific framing of the warrior culture as ancient, isolated, stoic, outsider, noble yet savage, spiritually connected, and-- often-- dying out, that appeals, and it appeals in very specific ways to the colonial imagination. Our culture is in large part built on that image as part of our founding myth; people find it familiar, appealing, reassuring even if they don't know the history of why they do. Making our noble savages Mandalorian or Satedan or Fremen or Elvish or whatever instead of using Earth races makes it feel more ok to modern culture than writing about the Last of the Mohicans or African savages or whatever, but it's the same stories we're telling ourselves.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I'm not convinced that's totally a colonial phenomenon, though. The mythologizing of older, more disciplined, more noble, more "earthy," more spiritual, more pure bands of warriors happens across cultures. There can undoubtedly be a racist or xenophobic component in the way these bands are imagined, but the fact that base trope itself appears under different guises I think points to some other underlying impulse.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think we really disagree? Obviously my original comment was phrased flippantly and erased a lot of complexity! And it's also conflating "popular" as "fans love it" and "popular" as "is overused by media producers" which are two connected but different questions.

I do think it's problematic when the kind of Romantic exoticizing that's common to all cultures and seems to just be part of how humanity processes the world is written off/condemned as Western racism, but at the same time Western Modernity isn't the only culture to have ever had a colonial outlook, even if the specific ways race is constructed are different. And there are definitely aspects of the Ancient Warrior Race trope that connect back to Noble Savage in a way that's specifically colonial (especially around the frequent positioning them as having lost their ancestral lands/nation or being from a disappearing/lost race) there's often a fairly transparent aspect of their appeal in Western media that is about grappling with living in a colonizer society. Not unique to American or Western European narratives either - I've been thinking a lot about how the Witcher canon is often specifically working with Eastern European history in its handling of fantasy racism and colonialism.

[(Anonymous)]

DA but it seems to me that the central part of the discourse is the part to do with modernity and tradition

[(Anonymous)]

I would sort of gently push back on this a little?

So, one, I think it's pretty clear that the idea of Proud Warriors clearly predates the discourses you're talking about here. All of that stuff, the idea of martial virtue and honor and the idea of a specific people being brave and honorable, that's just a commonplace in European cultural history; that's the entire point of chivalry and chivalric romances, that's the point of the long-running glorification of the Spartans, and on and on.

Second, I don't think the transformation of the idea of Proud Warriors into the more specific trope of the Proud Warrior Race is specifically racist. I think it is bound up with ideas of modernity and otherness. The Proud Warrior Race is, in general, bound up with an idea of an ancient honorable past that exists in opposition to the putative modernity and reasonableness of the observer. And colonialism is one of the primary locales of modernity and otherness, and Proud Warrior Race as a category was frequently invoked for dealing with actual colonized peoples. But I would also argue that like... one, the *charge* of the trope isn't the racism; a huge part of the charge of the trope is the same as the appeal of the chivalric romances and the Spartans had been. Two, I think one of the classical ur-sources of the Proud Warrior Race is the Scottish Highlanders, who I would say are distinctly *not* part of this sort of 19th-century colonial racist discourse.

[(Anonymous)]

The Fianna, as well, if we're treading into that territory.

[(Anonymous)]

That's fair, and certainly the 17th-19th century narratives I'm mostly referencing didn't spring out of nowhere fully formed! But there are specific aspects of the way they were used in that period that are very often pulled forward into the SFF versions of Proud Ancient Warrior Race and their appeal to modern audiences is often traceable primarily through the explicitly racist versions of the trope. We can talk about the deep sources of the trope's appeal, but a lot of it is pretty transparently "let's do a Western or a Lawrence of Arabia, but not have to deal with RL history"

I think we may be working from fairly different subsets of what makes an sf/fantasy culture an "Ancient Proud Warrior Race", though. Not all made up warrior cultures pull on the same specific tropes! When I think of classic fantasy stories that heavily draw on Highlanders or chivalric knights I'm mostly thinking of things I *wouldn't* file in the same category that I'm thinking of here, and there's certainly a shared appeal but the ones that draw on colonialist tropes are far more consistently popular. But it's not like I carefully defined my sets when we started this discussion!

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, totally agree - the trope is deeply implicated in colonialism! In fact it was literally directly a tool of colonial exploitation - see the use of "martial races" as a construct in British India which is probably pretty directly transmitted into SFF by way of Kipling. You also have the ERB Barsoom stories, which are a major locus of early Proud Warrior Race stuff showing up in SFF - and, well, it's not exactly hard to make the point that ERB's fiction was tied up in colonialism.

So, I definitely agree that colonialism is bound up with the trope, yeah. I just don't think it's necessarily the *core* of the trope or its continuing appeal. And it's certainly *a* reason that the trope became common in SFF, because a lot of SFF is very directly transposed from literature of the frontier, or colonialism, or imperialism. But it's not the entire reason for it and it also exists outside of that context.