[ 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)]

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