[ 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)]

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.