[ 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 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.