"When they put together this costume I said, 'Imagine an African, white Christ from space.' And this is what they came back with: An African white space Christ. Well, that's just the concept, you know, obviously and I'm not saying I'm African white space Christ, that's not for me to say. That's for other people to say. It's for other people to say if they think I'm like Jesus."
— Aldous Snow, Get Him to the Greek
A common trope in 18th and 19th century adventure fiction, when Europeans were visiting and documenting vast swathes of the world for the first time, Mighty Whitey is usually a displaced white European, who ends up living with native tribespeople and not only learns their ways but also becomes their greatest warrior/leader/representative. In cases of the first and second, this trope can heavily overlap with Led by the Outsider. Extra points if he woos The Chief's Daughter along the way; an unfortunately common variation that perpetuates into present-day media is that she will continue to love our hero even if he is directly responsible for the death of her husband, brother, or father. When he becomes closest to the leader of the tribe and his family, or another important member, it's a case of The Outsider Befriends the Best.
Sometimes the foreign societies are shown to be realistic, three-dimensional and actually rather pleasant places to live. Indeed, sometimes the native peoples are shown to be better in some way than European society and the white man begins to despise his old home. All this is a setup for the white man to adapt to the Native's ways, thereby making him superior both to the natives and the Europeans back home. In modern-day fiction, sometimes the Mighty Whitey is there to lead or inspire the Hollywood Natives or bring some aspect of modern technology or knowledge to their aid, something they presumably could not do before he showed up. One particular version has it so that the sympathetic Author Avatar whitey is not only now the Great White Hope for the non-white Noble Savages, but is very often defending them from other evil whites.
In modern-day fiction — particularly in Hollywood movies — Mighty Whitey pops up as the result of creative types trying to appeal to as broad a cross-section of society as possible to get their cash back. And since the majority of major Hollywood stars are white Americans (despite the fact that only a small minority of their audiences are Americans at all, let alone white Americans), it's almost inevitable that the all-singing, all-dancing hero is also going to be registering low on the melanin count... which can become a self-perpetuating mess.
Of course, these writers might also just be doing the respectable thing, and be writing what they know. Perhaps not in the "I'm a badass Adventurer Archaeologist" sense, but in the 'I'm used to the cultural norms of my race/gender and would be terrified of offending people with incorrect cultures cues' sense. Or in the 'What I know has been mostly informed by what has already been established in fictional story-telling and I'm subconsciously perpetuating those same pas' sense. Often involves a strong element of wish fulfillment for the First World writer and First World audience, in the sense of, "I'll bet I could be a great hero if I could just escape this straight-laced and boring 'civilized' world I'm stuck in." Or it might be a combination of their or the audience's preference for a protagonist that looks like themselves combined with the natural desire to see the protagonist become The Chosen One.
Remakes of shows/movies with the original trope often subvert this; for instance, making the Mighty Whitey into a dunce, and their Ethnic Scrappy sidekick into a smart, street-savvy badass. This trope can also occur as an unintended side effect of writers trying to show the equality of all races and cultures — in a tone-deaf and more than potentially offensive kind of way.
Non-American media can exhibit versions of this trope tailored to their home audiences (e.g. the awesome guy in an Anime/Manga series being Japanese). But Not Too Foreign is often used as a way to set up this version of Mighty Whitey.
Can be a Justified Trope as it did happen in real life. Explorers from a technologically more advanced civilization had access to nutrition, education, technology, and general skills and experience that a native who never traveled further than the neighboring village didn't. Especially as only those who were already among the strongest and bravest in their home countries did have the courage and motivation to become explorers in those dangerous times. The Unfortunate Implications came in when people began to assume that they were better because of their culture, beliefs, or genetic stock, rather than access to tools and benefits derived from hundreds of years of accumulated advantages.
As the following examples will show, the trope tends to be used pretty liberally, especially because of the historical difficulty of defining the term "white" (i.e., whether it should primarily refer to Europeans, Caucasoids, or simply light-skinned people). It's most convenient to define this trope as a "modern" character achieving mastery over "primitive" characters, not necessary with respect to race per se.
See also White Male Lead and (especially) Going Native. Compare The Man Is Sticking It to the Man and Born in the Wrong Century (similar tropes but removed from race), Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow, Led by the Outsider and Instant Expert. Contrast Flawless Token, Token White, Evil Colonialist, and White Man's Burden. The inversions are Majored in Western Hypocrisy (for when a character from a less "civilised" race receives training from his overlords and frequently ends up using it against them) and Pretty Fly for a White Guy (for when a white or analogous character's aping of a different culture is treated as ridiculous and/or offensive).
In fantasy works, Planetary Romance and Lost World stories are likely to have a similar theme, where the hero from Earth ends up being a better Mongonian or Skartaran or Pandoran than the natives themselves (often the alien world will have lighter gravity, hence making the Earth guy a Heavy Worlder with Super-Strength). Many alien super heroes provide a variation in that they usually come from some more advanced society, go native on primitive Earth, and become heroes here. Isekai stories will often feature something similar, especially if it's set in an RPG Mechanics 'Verse, with the hero from Earth receiving skills and abilities that far exceed those of the natives because they're The Chosen One and not due to any actual skills or talent on their part.
open/close all folders
Conventional Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Code Geass plays it straight with Lelouch vi Britannia, a white man leading a war to drive out evil white men from Japan, but also inverts it with Suzaku Kururugi, a Japanese man who is the best Knightmare Frame pilot in the white man's army. Both examples are somewhat justified, however, since Lelouch had been scheming to take down the Empire since his mother was killed, while Suzaku's physical skills are effectively a Charles Atlas Superpower.
- Fatal Fury, especially the anime, is founded on blonde-haired white guys mastering Eastern martial arts teachings beyond everyone else. The two Japanese members of the main cast are respectively the token female and the goofball.
- Played with in Freezing. All the top Pandoras in the world seem to be of white descent, even the ones situated in Asian countries. However, the one Pandora touted as the most powerful Pandora who evet lived, Kazuya's sister Kazuha, was Japanese, while the currently-living most powerful Pandora is Korean.
- Subverted in Fullmetal Alchemist (2003). Edward thinks he saved Lior, whose citizens are brown-skinned in the 2003 anime (but white in the original manga) after he exposes their religious leader as manipulating them. The homunculus kill Cornello and Envy impersonates him which helps cause a violent civil war. When the soldiers come around, they only make things worse and it becomes something of a parallel to the Ishval War. So basically Edward caused an entire town to go from prosperous to a war zone within months of him 'saving' it, which also caused Rose, a girl he met there, to have a Child by Rape which also causes her to go from a Mama Bear to a mute Broken Bird.
- In Ouke no Monshou, the girl who carries on the story of Ancient Egypt and changes it for the better is — a blue-eyed blonde lass, Carol Reed, mistaken as a goddess or goddess avatar due to her hair and eyes.
- Serendipity the Pink Dragon: Shades of this with Bobby, since the island and its denizens need him to save the day. However Serendipity plays as much of a role, and Bobby's race is never exactly clear despite his pale skin. (Which just makes it a case of Humanity Is Superior.)
- Played straight in Sword of the Stranger. The strongest of the Chinese warriors is Luo Long, who is a six-foot-tall blonde-haired blue-eyed man. Possibly the main character, Nanashi/Nameless as well. He has red hair but is otherwise indistinguishable from a normal Japanese person. It's theorized that he is of mixed race.
Audio Play
- Lampshaded in The Firesign Theatre's High School Madness movie-within-an-album from Don't Touch That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers. After the school disappears, a bunch of Latino students arrive out of nowhere and ask Porgie for advice because he's a white man and will know exactly what to do. Porgie is beside himself, asking where all these Mexicans suddenly came from.
Comic Books
- Inverted in the early-'80s comic Arak: Son of Thunder, in which a Native American crosses the Atlantic to become the greatest swordsman in Scandinavia.
- Asterix and Obelix come to mind in Asterix and the Great Crossing and its animated adaptation Asterix Conquers America, since they quickly excel at everything the natives challenge them at, though it certainly helped that they were aided by the magic potion that gives superhuman strength and speed.
- Deconstructed with White Wolf, archenemy and adopted brother of Black Panther. He was raised by T'Chaka the former king of Wakanda and has always loved the country. However Wakanda is a fairly xenophobic country, so he was never accepted or treated with respect by people outside his family due to being white. Add T'Challa generally being treated far better than him by both their father and the people of Wakanda, and the result is a deep resentment of his brother combined with a desperate desire to be loved by others. All he wants is to help Wakanda and gain the acceptance of his adoptive culture, but his desperation to do so and the natives' constant refusal of his help drove him into supervillainy.
- Both parodied and played straight in the comic book Charisma Man, produced for English-speaking expatriates in Japan. The title character was a dorky Canadian unsuccessful with women in his own country - until he arrives in Japan where he instantly becomes suave and supercool, admired by all the locals and able to pick up any girl he wants. His mortal enemy is "Western Woman", the only one aware of what a loser he really is.
- DC Comics Western hero Firehair subverts the mold — he's a white man raised by Blackfoot Native Americans, taught to be a great hunter, fighter, tracker, and survivalist like all the other men in the tribe, but neither the white settlers nor the Blackfoot ever truly accepted him as one of theirs. This caused him to start Walking the Earth in search of a place to call home.
- Doctor Strange. A wealthy, spoiled, arrogant Dr. Jerk travels from Manhattan to the Far East seeking a cure for his injured hands, meets The Ancient One, and within a matter of years, he has surpassed all other students in The Ancient One's temple to become the next Sorcerer Supreme. In both the comic and animated adaptation, the second-best student is consumed with jealousy and becomes Baron Mordo. In later years, the mighty whitey implications have been softened. His replacement as Sorcerer Supreme was Doctor Voodoo, a Haitian psychologist.
- Subverted in ElfQuest. Although Leetah is definitely The Chief's Daughter, Cutter and the Wolfriders mix pretty thoroughly with the Sun Folk and their cultures support each other relatively equally (and the white Wolfriders are considered the Noble Savage types). It's further subverted with Dart, who teaches the Sun Folk warfare as a child, but it's because he's lived in the village all his life; he stays living there for most of the rest of the series.
- The story of Little Patch, Tyleet´s adopted human son, plays it more straight, although Patch was raised by the wolfrider elves. Because of his woodland skills and other skills, he swiftly "out-hunts and outgraces" everyone in the human village, and eventually becomes their chief. In this story, the elves have the role of cultural superior beings.
- The Ghost Rider: Carter Slade, the original Ghost Rider, was given his equipment by the medicine man of an Indian tribe, chosen by a prophecy to become their champion. However, Slade mostly protects everyone who is victimized by criminals, not just Indians, and isn't regarded as any sort of cultural hero or anything.
- Snake Eyes, in the Marvel comics G.I. Joe series, is an interesting example, as he was essentially invited to adopt another culture by Tommy Arashikage AKA Storm Shadow, a friend who was doing much the same thing himself at the time (being a traditionally-trained ninja then serving in the US Army), nor did he excel his friend in skill and ability, but rather became his equal (though the one is said to be slightly better with a blade, the other with a bow).
- Iron Fist was adopted and raised in the mystical city of K'un-L'un to take the title and powers of Marvel's ultimate martial artist.
- And not just the current one either; his predecessor was white too. Both of them did start training when they were very young though.
- This is lampshaded in Avengers Academy, where Hazmat (who is of Japanese descent) refers to him as "Mr. I Wish I Was Asian".
- Immortal Iron Fist, on the other hand, reveals that Iron Fist is just one of several Immortal Weapons. Most of the others are Asian, and most of them are better than Danny.
- The trope gets inverted and/or played with in the case of the Iron Fist of Thor's original team of Avengers shown in The Avengers (2018), who is Atlantean and thus of an entirely different minority altogether.
- Legion of Super-Heroes, set in 30th Century earth, for decades managed to have blue-skinned members, orange-skinned members, and green-skinned members, but no blacks or Asians. They were still almost entirely Northern European body-types right into the 1980s. When they decided to have a martial arts expert join the Legion—in 1966 before it was fashionable—they got Val Armorr, Karate Kid raised on an earth colony, allegedly of mixed human genetics, but with features and curly red-brown hair that suggested Irish ancestry, if anything.
- There was a (probably unintentionally) funny bit in the issue which examined Val's origin, where he's absolutely SHOCKED to discover that he's not actually entirely Japanese. Despite his appearance being as white as possible without making him blond, and his name being decidedly non-Japanese.
- Jim Shooter originally wanted Ferro Lad — who joined the Legion at the same time as Karate Kid — to be of African descent but got vetoed by Mort Weisinger (likely out of fear of offending readers in the South.) So Shooter had him make a Heroic Sacrifice seven issues after his introduction. Later iterations of the character would be white.
- Brian Michael Bendis's Legion of Super-Heroes (2020) unintentionally played this disturbingly straight. The majority of the Legionnaires received major redesigns, some no longer white-skinned while others were more distinctly humanoid aliens. But at the same time, their desire to have Superboy (Jon Kent, a white male human/Kryptonian hybrid) join them bordered on actual reverence. They argued that they needed Jon to show them how to be better heroes and treated him more as a cult-like figure than a potential friend compared to Superman's Legion. It got even worse with the knowledge Saturn Girl, who reminded as a white humanoid girl, admitted she possibly brainwashed the team by accident into obsessing over Jon due to her strong belief in his ability to show them the way.
- In the Marvel Universe, Daniel Lyons was chosen by a Blackfeet Indian chief to be a champion of justice, after besting 100 challengers by outrunning a deer, outswimming a salmon upstream, hitting the bullseye while blindfolded and then catching arrows that were fired at him, and then wrestling a bear, finally winning by breaking its neck with his bare hands. He was given a longbow into which he carved a notch whenever he performed a good deed. When he had attained 100 notches, would be judged worthy of having taken the mantle of the Black Marvel.
- The title character of Richard Dragon was a white punk who ended up being trained into one of the greatest martial artists of the DC Universe.
- Sheena, Queen of the Jungle is a fairly conventional 'white woman Raised by Natives' example.
- B'wana Beast, originally appearing in the DCU's Showcase #66 (1967), is called "the White God of Kilimanjaro". During Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man (1989), he passes the title to a (black) successor, who rechristens the character "Freedom Beast". Averted in his Batman: The Brave and the Bold incarnation, where he lucks into his powers by drinking from a radioactive waste-tainted stream. The locals are surprised by his weird new ability, but that's all (before they were watching him wrestle— and lose to— a gorilla).
- Played with regarding Roy Harper and the few times his Native American upbringing is discussed. In all of Roy's origin stories, they involve him being orphaned at an early age and then looked after by a Native caretaker. Devin Grayson's take on Roy's backstory was a humanized version of his Post-Crisis origin, wherein Roy was raised on a Navajo reservation after the death of his father. In this case, Roy spent his formative years not realizing he was white until he turned 13 while English was a second language to him. As an adult, Roy receives a second naming ceremony and a tattoo symbolizing he's an official member of the Navajo but that's as far as it went. While incredibly knowledgable and respectful of his Navajo upbringing, to the point Roy passed on a lot of teachings to his daughter Lian, and considered one of them despite his skin, Roy was never considered to be a potential savior or lauded for being a better Navajo than those around him. Sioux woman Dakota Jamison was left speechless after she assumed Roy's tattoo was tacky disrespect against actual Native people.
Dakota: Your tattoo should've tipped me off you that don't know the first thing about respect. You even known what those markings mean to actual Native Americans?Roy: Yeah, they mean I'm an officiated member of the Navajo Tachini clan.(Dakota looks as if she's done a Double Take)
- Tintin had a notorious example in the album Tintin in the Congo, in which the boy reporter goes to the Belgian Congo, bests the childlike natives in both physical and mental prowess and explains to them about their homeland, which is here identified as Belgium. Later versions of the album would remove some of the more extreme stuff. Current English editions feature a prominent disclaimer, having spent many years out of print. In fairness to Hergé, he acknowledged this as Old Shame, and the trope is (mostly) absent from later albums.
- An inversion in V for Vendetta, where the fascist regime has eliminated all non-whites from the British Isles and the Show Within a Show Storm Saxon is a cringingly racist and narmy serial where the eponymous white hero fights evil black savages. After V takes out the government's Propaganda Machine, forcing them to use different announcers, he claims the show had better writing.
- In Violine, the doctor is treated like this by the pygmies, who proclaim him their world champion after they see him perform "magic" (blowing bubbles which shrink their heads in the reflection, significant because they are headhunters). Van Beursen, a Western Corrupt Corporate Executive, tries to invoke this on the natives of Zongo, but they reject this.
- Tarzan is parodied in Youngblood: Judgment Day with Zantar, the White God of the Congo. The narration in his story is casually racist towards the natives, but heaps accolades upon Zantar. A descendant of his remarks upon discussing Zantar's adventures that it's all pretty offensive.
Comic Strips
- The Phantom, a generational line of more than twenty white males who protect the first South Asian, then African jungle, including tribes of native Africans. Partially justified in that the twenty-first Phantom was originally written as a Batman/Bruce Wayne type of superhero, and when Falk decided he should instead be the descendant of a long line of Phantoms they didn't change the design. This was back in 1936, and today it seems the Phantom mostly gets by on Grandfather Clause.
- The Phantom Chronicles contain a complete genealogy of the Phantoms. None of the 21st Phantom's female ancestors were African, but the majority (note, majority, not plurality) were South Asian, and he has Native American, East Asian and Latin American ancestry as well, so it's not quite as clear-cut as it (admittedly and unfortunately) looks.
Fanfiction
- In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, Assassin Johanna Smith-Rhodes comes from the Discworld's Fantasy Counterpart Culture of South Africa. Brought up in a country stuck in The Apartheid Era, she is changed by her years of living in Ankh-Morpork. When her apartheid-supporting aunt sees to it that her status of a Married Woman Of Means is graced by a complement of domestic servants, they are Black Howondalandian. Johanna has a problem with getting them to address her as Madam, and not as "Baas-lady", as their conditioning has taught them. Johanna no longer believes in apartheid; her servants believe, with good reason, that if they don't abide by apartheid and treat their employers as Mighty Whitey, they're in a lot of trouble. Readjustment takes place on both sides.
- In The Victors Project, white 'Settler' Bovina spent sixty years being worshiped as a goddess in human form by the Anasazi natives, because her victor's winnings provided food and medicine. Compounding this is that the Settlers of District 10 believe anyone Reaped must have been disloyal, and thusly even her own family rejected her. She marries an Anasazi man and by the time of the first Quarter Quell, Bovina believes that both tributes voted in by the district should be Settlers, so they can "save one of their own".
Films — Animation
- Downplayed in Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Milo Thatch, a white linguist, can read the ancient language of the Atlanteans, even though none of them can. An odd example of Truth in Television, though, as this was inspired by the Egyptians of the 1800s, who had no knowledge of the meaning of the pyramids.
- In Isle of Dogs, a white American exchange student and pro-dog activist leads the investigation of a conspiracy, amid a canine influenza outbreak in a dystopian Japanese city.
- Averted in The Road to El Dorado. In spite of being mistaken for gods by the natives of El Dorado, Miguel and Tulio are woefully out of their depth when it comes to learning the natives' customs. Simply climbing the steps to their pyramid leaves them out of breath, while the king (who probably weighs significantly more than both of them combined) does it with little difficulty. They only manage to keep the ruse going with help from a sympathetic native. However, they still manage to do a lot of good. Due to being mistaken as gods, they're able to ban the practice of human sacrifice and "pulling rank" on the blood-thirsty high priest. They do end having to leave, but that is to protect the place when Cortez shows up (though they do end up locking the entrance as to keep anyone from finding it again, thus keeping the people safe from Cortez and the High Priest.
Films — Live-Action
- In Aelita, a 1924 film from the Soviet Union, a group of stranded Soviet astronauts on Mars lead a communist revolution by technologically advanced, but ideologically backwards masses against the ruling class of that planet!
- In The Air Up There, white basketball coach Jimmy visits the Winabi in Kenya to recruit the player Saleh. When the Winabi bet their land in a basketball game against a Tyrannical Town Tycoon's team, Jimmy is initiated into the tribe so he can play basketball with them, complete with painful Initiation Ceremony, and coaches the team to victory.
- A little-known film called American Guerrilla In The Philippines, wherein the titular American soldiers are stranded in the Philippine Islands during World War II and end up leading the rebellion against the Japanese. The main character even meets and falls in love with a white woman who went native, and she falls in love with him after her Filipino husband dies.
- Deconstructed in Apocalypse Now, in which Colonel Kurtz becomes the leader of a native tribe, but in doing so goes absolutely bonkers. This subversion originates in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where a white trader had made himself god to an African tribe before losing his marbles.
- In Back to the Future, a white kid from The '80s named Marty McFly travels back to 1955 and is implied in a Historical In-Joke to have introduced Rock & Roll to the world by playing "Johnny B. Goode" at a school dance where Chuck Berry's cousin is in attendance, three years before Chuck wrote the song.
- Averted hard in Balibo. The film focuses on several white journalists who enter East Timor to provide coverage of the ongoing Indonesian invasion, intending to attract worldwide attention. Not only are they respectful of East Timorese culture, but they are all executed by the Indonesian military and fail to accomplish their objective. The only one to actually come close to making any progress is native East Timorese politician José, and even that comes at a great personal cost.
- Played with in Bananas, in which Woody Allen gets mixed up with a revolution in a fictional Latin American country. Of course, since he's Woody Allen, he isn't exactly competent, but when the revolution succeeds and the Great Leader immediately goes crazy, his underlings get rid of him and force Woody Allen to become the new dictator because Woody Allen is an "educated American."
- Parodied in Beverly Hills Ninja where Chris Farley's character is adopted by a tribe of ninjas who think he'll be the prophesied Great White Ninja. As it turns out, Farley is a blundering klutz, who is far outmatched by his Japanese brother. Though they do end up playing it straight in the end.
- Big Trouble in Little China subverts this by presenting Jack Burton, a big, brawling, two-fisted white guy who thinks he's the hero, but who often gets his ass handed to him in the battle against the Big Bad. The real hero of the movie is Jack Burton's competent, martial-arts savvy, Chinese-American "sidekick," Wang Chi. That said, Jack is the one who kills the Big Bad, to even his own surprise. According to the DVD commentary both the director and the star wanted to make the subversion more obvious but Executive Meddling prevented it.
- Black Rain. The Japanese Police Are Useless, it's up to the white American protagonists to catch the criminal. Neither side is portrayed as flawless, but in the end, the white guy wins after persuading an uptight sympathetic local officer to loosen up a little.
- Blind Fury has a dash of this, with Rutger Hauer playing a Vietnam veteran who gets blinded and adopted by a local tribe. Under their tutelage, he becomes a Master Swordsman despite being blind.
- Bullet Train: A very villainous and very unsympathetic version. A Husky Russkie who managed to become the most powerful crime boss in Japan, the White Death only did so by means of ruthless violence and usurpation of the clan that took him in. This only earns him the ire of The Elder, a true member and the Sole Survivor of said clan (besides his son) who seeks to exact his revenge on him.
- A horrifically Deconstructed version in Cannibal Holocaust. Being arrogant enough to believe the natives fear their "powers" does not stop Yates' team from being killed by the Yanomamo Tribe; this is not helped by their tendency to go Bullying a Dragon...repeatedly.
- "Crocodile" Dundee: Averted by the eponymous Mick Dundee, a white Australian bush expert who was raised by Aborigines. As such, he knows a lot of mystic secrets and survival tricks that serve him well in the bush. However, he's never shown to be any better at it than his Aborigine friends. He simply has one foot in the urban world, allowing him to make a living showing off to tourists and newspaper reporters.
- Dances with Wolves: Played completely straight and criticized for having Dunbar be the reason why the Lakota defeat the army despite the Lakota historically doing so alone.
- This is a common criticism of 8 Mile, in that the white rapper Rabbit is a uniquely gifted rapper whose friends are virtually all black, and that the climax of the movie shows him beating a succession of black rappers. However, the movie does addresses this by making Rabbit reluctant to battle out of anxiety that he is seen as a tourist or appropriator. The final battle also ends with Rabbit winning against a violent black bully by pointing out that his opponent comes from a middle class family, goes to a private school, and likes to slum it in the hood to feel like a gangster - indicating that despite Rabbit's race, he is still part of an oppressed working class through which he can authentically connect with hip-hop culture. Also, Rabbit is played by Eminem, who is a uniquely gifted battle rapper, and the film is inspired by his own background.
- Farewell To The King: The blond, blue-eyed American Learoyd deserts his command, flees into the Borneo jungle, winds up with a tribe there, slays their best warrior in a duel, marries a beautiful princess, and becomes their chief.
- In the Americanized live-action version of Fist of the North Star, Kenshiro and Shin, who are both inheritors of secret assassination styles, are played by white actors Gary Daniels and Costas Mandylor, whereas Julia, Bat, and Lynn, the Love Interest and the two kid sidekicks respectively, are played by Asians. Moreover, Kenshiro's Old Master, Ryuken, is played by another white man, Malcolm McDowell.
- 2013's 47 Ronin is a very, very loose adaptation of the original story, but with fantasy elements and a character played by Keanu Reeves, a half breed who nonetheless charms his samurai lord's daughter, wins a spot of honor among his fellow samurai, and all but orders all the Japanese men around him about in the second act.
- The Ghost and the Darkness, a pair of lions are killing scores of local tribesmen, so two white men, Patterson and Remington, go off to kill them. Patterson is the one who survives, and he's just a military engineer by trade. The film is based on a true story and actually makes Patterson less badass than he really was. Patterson was an experienced hunter and took both lions down himself (though the only record is Patterson's own journal, and he was a known self-promoter so there's a question of just how much help he had from other people).
- In G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Snake Eyes is a white street urchin in Hong Kong who fights Storm Shadow to a draw on their first meeting, even though presumably Storm Shadow has been combat-trained since he could walk, by virtue of throwing every object he can get his hands on at Storm Shadow. After being accepted into the dojo, it takes Snake Eyes only a short time to surpass Storm Shadow's skills, though it seems Storm Shadow retains the edge with a Katana—in their climactic fight, Storm Shadow disarms Snake Eyes and breaks his Katana, and the Joe is only able to win after switching to bladed tonfas.
- Hidalgo has the underdog whitey beating Arabs and Bedouins in their race, on their own lands, which he had never before visited. He gets the bonus points for having a good chance with the Sheik's daughter, whom he rescued. Then again, it's almost a subversion because the hero is supposed to be part American Indian - but in Real Life, this turned out to be a lie). The whole movie is based on the Real Life Hopkins' bullshit stories he told as a performer.
- The title character of His Majesty O Keefe starts out as an Evil Colonialist, but becomes a Mighty Whitey after being shown the error of his ways and undergoing a Heel–Face Turn. Hey, it was made in the '50s.
- The Indiana Jones franchise plays with this trope, playing it straight (Belloq and the Hovitos), inverting it (bumbling Marcus Brody, given extra comedy by Indy's describing him as the ultimate Mighty Whitey, immediately cutting to his being hideously out of his depth in only-barely-non-Western Turkey), and subverted, inverted and played straight at various times with Indy himself. As the movies are inspired by the tone of old adventure serials, this was probably intentional.
- Although each mummy they've encountered has had its own particular native guardians/jailkeepers who have been watching over it for centuries, only the white O'Connell family of The Mummy Trilogy can actually destroy the mummies, even if the guardians are the ones who have made the means for doing so. This is true to just about all Mummy films, though the second one has the hero trained by the Middle Eastern guardians as a youth.
- All of the '30s through '50s "Jungle" movies and a standard trope is a white woman having been adopted as a goddess to the native Africans. This trope was used because 1) white, and 2) a female would be subservient to the men coming to rescue her, and she wouldn't try to subjugate the tribe that's worshiping her. See White Goddess as Example A.
- Used uniquely in Kill Bill. Pai Mei is an elderly Chinese kung fu master and also a colossal Jerkass. He hates white people, women, blondes, the Japanese, and Americans. So when the Bride - a skinny, white, blonde American woman who tries to impress him by speaking Japanese and claiming to be a great fighter with the katana - comes to his secluded temple to learn under him, his notorious Training from Hell becomes all the harsher. It becomes Heartwarming in Hindsight when the viewers find out that she was his favourite student, and he taught her alone the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.
- Kingdom of Heaven has a scene where Balian, fresh from Europe, has to teach a bunch of lifelong desert-dwellers how to dig a well. The scene is vague enough that he may just be upgrading their existing system; he is an engineer after all.
- Subverted in Kong: Skull Island. Lieutenant Hank Marlow has been living among the native tribe for twenty-odd years, but he isn't their leader or a figure of importance, merely an outsider that they welcomed into their home and who learned their ways.
- Deconstructed in The Last King of Scotland, in which the white protagonist Nicholas Garrigan is at first presented as a likable young man who wins the favor of Ugandan leader Idi Amin, but descends into Fallen Hero territory as he allows himself to be seduced by the power and luxury Amin offers (even as the evidence of Amin's brutality mounts). When Garrigan finally has his Heel Realization and decides to resist Amin, he's laughably out of his depth, and nearly every Ugandan who aids or gets involved with him is punished horribly for it. For all this, the movie ends with Garrigan getting on a plane out of the country, as happened in real life. However, his whiteness is part of the reason he gets saved by the local doctor, because the international community will believe the atrocity of Amin's regime if told by a white, British citizen.
- The Last of the Mohicans is an excellent example of Mighty Whitey in traditional American literature and, hence, in classic movies. Imitations and similar characters appear in Westerns. Although Chingachgook is just as much of a badass as Hawkeye — and he's the one who kills the main antagonist in many adaptations and he's the guy who the entire book/movie is named after. The 1992 film at least subverts it in that Nathaniel identifies as Native American and eschews white civilization, even giving a "The Reason You Suck" Speech about it to Cora.
- The Last Samurai has many elements of this. After being captured by the samurai leader, Nathan Algren adopts their ways, falls in love with the widow of one of the men he killed and becomes a key advisor for those he was originally ordered to defeat. However, he's never really shown to be any better than the Japanese. As a career soldier, after lengthy training he's finally shown to only bring his trainer to a draw (and even then after several losses in a row), and he was an advisor mainly because he trained the people they were going to fight (in that case simply due to his familiarity with the weapons). Algren even states in his journal that the Japanese treat him mostly with "mild neglect." Even when they begin to begrudgingly respect his combat skills, one samurai jokes that even if he has gotten better, he's "still so ugly".
- Might qualify as an inversion, as the white man is instead saved by the alien culture he joins, without reforming it and his attempts to save the samurai way of life from modernity ultimately does not work. Algren was an alcoholic with a genuine death wish at first, but the beauty and meaning of the Japanese culture causes him to back away from that destructive mindset.
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is one of the most well-known examples of this in cinema, with an Englishman leading the Arabs in a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It's based on the real Lawrence. By the end of the film, however, it becomes a subversion, as Lawrence is (and, in real life, was) unable to secure Arab independence, instead seeing the Middle East carved up into European colonies, nor able to unite Arabs in a sense of national unity over traditional loyalties.
- In the 1970 Western A Man Called Horse, Richard Harris plays English aristocrat John Morgan who is captured by the Sioux. After various trials and tests, he becomes not only a tribe member but eventually its leader.
- Exploited in The Man Who Would be King. Our antiheroes are two conniving ex-soldiers who decide that it will be a snap to go to Kafiristan and become kings because, after all, they're Britons! With the aid of 20 rifles and their military experience, the pair do in fact conquer all of the local tribes and become kings. One of them is worshiped as the son of Alexander the Great, the last Mighty Whitey to steamroll through the region.
- On Deadly Ground is more an environmentalist fable than anything else (if a particularly demented one), but Steven Seagal's character puts it upon himself to speak for the Inuit who are being screwed over by the oil companies. Because, well, the Inuit have no voice. There's even a scene where undergoes a Vision Quest to essentially purge himself of white guilt.
- This is the very premise of Outcast, otherwise known as "The Mighty Whitey Movie", where Hayden Christiansen and Nicolas Cage plays a pair of paladins who fled the Crusades and ends up in Han Dynasty China. They then help a Chinese prince regain his throne from his evil brother and save the entire dynasty from tyranny, with Christiansen's character dueling the villainous elder prince mano-on-mano and putting an end to his reign by killing him.
- Pathfinder (2007) has an 11-year-old Viking boy raised by Native Americans and becoming their greatest warrior. The boy is the best because he learns to combine the savage Viking combat skills he learned as a child, with the patience and cunning ambush skills he picked up as a teenager. He does accidentally wipe out his own side in the process, though...
- Referenced in a throwaway remark by Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl while recounting his adventures, "And then they made me their chief!" We see the tribe he became chief of in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. However, this trope is subverted because even as the chief, Jack can't stop the natives from doing what they've already made up their minds to do, like keeping his crew imprisoned or honoring Jack by having him ritually sacrificed and eaten. It's also worth noting that the throwaway line itself was a reference to The Fast Show, which Johnny Depp was a big fan of.
- In The Proposition, Arthur Burns is essentially the evil version of this. He lives up in the hills, and the Aborigines are terrified of him and think he's a werewolf.
- Tony in The Pumaman is supposed to be this, with him (and his father before him) apparently being the greatest protector of the Aztec people despite being white. In practice, he's a whiny idiot, and Vadhinio, his Aztec sidekick, is a far better hero than him.
- In The Quest, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a street criminal who is shanghaied and sold into slavery to a Thai boxing camp. Without any past training as a fighter, within two years he is one of their top-ranked members, despite the native boxers having trained from early childhood. And this just from watching the classes on the beach...
- The 1991 Dolph Lundgren/Brandon Lee buddy cop movie Showdown in Little Tokyo. A blond, tall, muscular American cop raised in Japanese culture slaughters an army of Yakuza and is physically and martially superior to anyone, including his comic relief half-Asian partner. His sexual prowess is commented on while the Yakuza boss is implied to be impotent unless he beats women and he romances an Asian woman whom the boss had kidnapped and previously raped.
- Straight Outta Compton ends up subverting this trope twice, and in a unique way.
- Jerry Heller, N.W.A's manager, seems like he's honest in helping the group become Household Names. He even defends the group when they're harassed by the police during recording sessions. However, once they become a national sensation, Heller resorts to dirty tactics to rip the band apart, by giving Eazy-E more money and favoritism than his fellow bandmates. Heller's deception backfires on him when Eazy E discovers Heller's been stealing money, causing him to find out about the deceit. Eazy E doesn't take his supposed plea for forgiveness seriously and terminates him.
- A more clear subversion with Bryan Turner, the head of N.W.A.'s label, Priority Records. He tries to withhold royalties from Ice Cube for his album, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted. It doesn't go so well for Turner.
- The Time Machine (2002): The film (probably inadvertently) has this effect by the Eloi all being Ambiguously Brown with Alex being the White Male Lead, him rescuing them from the evil Morlocks who prey upon them, which they can't do (having been culled to stop any resistance). Sure enough, he's soon getting close with one of their women, Mara, and sacrifices his time machine to protect them, happily staying with the Eloi.
- The 1937 John Ford film Wee Willie Winkie absolutely reeks of this. The story is about a British unit on the Afghan frontier, trying to subdue the Afghans and force them to acknowledge Queen Victoria as their sovereign. Col. Williams explains to his cute little granddaughter Priscilla (Shirley Temple) that all the British want to do is facilitate trade and bring order and make the natives "become civilized". When Priscilla winds up in the Afghan camp, she tells them all that the Queen wants to make all her subjects happy and rich. She eventually gets them to make peace with the British.
- The French film White Material looks like it's heading in this direction. Taking place in an unnamed African country torn by a rebellion, Maria, a fierce and fearless white woman, refuses to abandon her coffee crops and to acknowledge the danger to which she is exposing her family. Maria puts the farm in even more danger when she looks after a wounded rebel officer known as 'The Boxer'. Cruelly and brutally subverted in the end.
- Save Our Students movies with a white teacher in minority classrooms:
- Dangerous Minds has ex-Marine and sassy white girl Michelle Pfeiffer inspiring a classroom full of angry ethnic minority teens to learn (and, in one scene, kicking their asses). It's Justified since the movie is based on a true story, though the Hollywood treatment given to the story isn't reflective of reality in many ways.
- Freedom Writers
- The Principal
- Music of the Heart
- Conrack
Literature
- Both used and subverted in Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries. Amelia and her husband, son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren are all white and regarded with awe, admiration, and dread by the Egyptians they work with, but one of the causes they champion is equal rights for Egyptians, and they cultivate some impressive Egyptian sidekicks (though none in their own league). In The Last Camel Died at Noon, Amelia and family visit a Lost World, where Amelia is irritated to discover that the heroic native prince believes in the Mighty Whitey trope.
- Bazil Broketail: Relkin takes this role when meeting the primitive, oppressed Ardu people. He ends up not only liberating them from slavery, but teaching them how to fight their tormentors effectively and helping them establish a more organized society.
- Dick Lestrange, son of the original couple in Henry Stacpoole's 1908 novel The Blue Lagoon. He appears in the sequel, The Garden of God and the followup novel The Gates of Morning. He can best be described as an intelligent, likable and very easygoing Surfer Dude. Katafa, something between a Jungle Princess and a Broken Bird, washes up on the shore and causes trouble. She isn't really a Kanaka, but a Spanish girl who was Raised by Natives. To ensure the plotline, she's been cursed as an untouchable. After sundry how-likely-is-that events, Dick and Katafa fall in love. Katafa becomes touchably soft and takes him home with her, where he is immediately hailed as King, the old King having died in Katafa's absence. More to the point, laid-back ol' Dick immediately accepts, as a matter of course! (Having earlier picked up a Royal MacGuffin probably helped with this decision.) Stacpoole (usually fairly nonracist) clearly implies that in their present predicament, the natives need a white couple to save them.
Dick was, in all but blood, a kanaka, a savage—and yet the white man was there. He could think forward, he could think round a subject and he could imagine possibilities.
- Played with in Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian. A few of the stories are about black people getting defeated by a quasi-Celtic white guy, who is pretty savage. He also recurrently fights against the Picts, described as having white skin but not considered white by their neighbors for being painted, cannibalistic savages. Many of his longer-term enemies were also Stygian (Egyptian equivalent), not least Thoth-Ammon, with more than a handful of clashes against white Hyboreans to even the scales. And the lily-white Vanir are the Cimmerians' worst blood enemy, whom they'd gladly cross a glacier to kill, though Conan eventually becomes more tolerant of a few of them. Played tiresomely straight when the (Shemitish but very pale) pirate queen Belit takes him as a lieutenant and lover after seeing him outclass all her black crewmen, and that time when he was chief of the not!Afghani bandits and it turned out that while the not!South Asian people were inherently vulnerable to mesmeric Eastern magic, Conan is immune because Westerners, by virtue of their sensible rationalistic culture, are inherently resistant to hypnotism (despite evil wizards being ten a penny everywhere in the Hyborian Age).
- A Confederacy of Dunces: This is deconstructed with Ignatius. On some level, he sympathizes with the poverty-stricken black community of New Orleans, but he has no genuine respect for their humanity or needs, looking at them through his incredibly skewed pro-Renaissance worldview. His "rally" of the black factory workers is not done out of any desire to help them, but to serve his crazed and selfish desires. The black workers at Levy Pants think of him as a hilarious fool, while Burma only associates with Ignatius for his own schemes.
- Subverted in the H. G. Wells story The Country of the Blind, where the outsider assumes his ability to see will automatically make him the ruler of a primitive blind tribe. But the blind villagers have adapted perfectly to their environment, and fail to see why they should do anything the newcomer says when their own ways make more sense. They have been blind for such a long time that they've forgotten what sight is, and think that the man is insane.
- Subverted in The Cumerian Unraveling trilogy by Jason Letts. When one of the characters is stranded in an impoverished foreign city, she is told she must be the savior of that city, and for a time she believes it. However, after her family discovers large deposits of mineral wealth, they decide it would be best to let the citizens bring themselves out of poverty than to "help" them and use it for their own advantage.
- Kylie Chan's Dark Heavens trilogy in which a young, white Australian nanny with no previous training develops superhuman martial-arts skills and magic qi powers in just a few years, beats up demons and generally proves herself an equal to Chinese gods, never mind mere mortals. Then she gets upstaged by a half-American, half-Chinese six-year-old. Justified to an extent as the most recent book has revealed that this is largely a result of her half-Shen heritage.
- Genially deconstructed at Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Dead Man", the seemingly impossible life and death of Benjamín Otalora, a courageous Argentinean White Guy hoodlum who emigrated to the Brazilian frontier and became the leader of a band of racially mixed smugglers in only three years. All the Native smugglers are pulling a scam to mock Otalora, who is naive enough to fall for it and is murdered by them.
- The long-running pulp serial The Destroyer is predicated on a prophecy that a white man will become the greatest master of the phlebotinum-laden Korean martial art of Sinanju. Main character Remo Williams is not just the prophesied white Sinanju master, he's also the incarnation of the Hindu god Shiva.
- Dune has Paul Atreides who is born from the waterworld Caladan, son of a duke, trained by the best swordsmen and tacticians in the galaxy and trained as a Mentat human computer. He and his pregnant mother went into hiding from their enemies, the Harkonnens, who killed his father, and met the natives of Arrakis, the Fremen, who also hate the Harkonnen. They managed to win the favor of the Fremen, learned their culture and Paul fell in love with a Fremen girl (but she's not a full-blooded Fremen because her grandfather is a former Planetologist of the Emperor who went native). He's also destined to be the Messiah which the Fremen had been waiting for due to his prophetic powers and at the end of the novel, he led the Fremen against the Harkonnens and the Emperor and took over the throne by marrying the Emperor's eldest daughter while keeping his Freman lover as his concubine. However, this example is both a deconstruction and exploitation, as Paul's abilities and the prophecy itself are just part of the Bene Gesserit's machinations, and Paul knows he will become a tyrant who will unleash his diehard followers into the entire galaxy, causing chaos and destruction in his name. He hates it but can't do anything about it because it's part of his destiny.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs:
- Lord Greystoke, AKA Tarzan, was shown in the original books to be far better suited to life in the African wilds than any of the black natives. The original books explicitly said that his European noble ancestry is what allowed him to shine, not the fact that he was raised by apes. Eugenics was a popular topic at the time. However, Burroughs seemed to be more interested in aristocratic blood than racial blood, considering his characterizations of lower-class whites and upper-class blacks.
- John Carter of Mars is an (white) Earth man who bests people of nearly every color on Mars. He even weds the Red Men's Princess, though John Carter is a Heavyworlder on Mars, not to mention an immortal man and trained soldier who fought in the Civil War.
- Similarly, the Amtor series features a white Earth man thriving on Venus, among Human Aliens described as resembling humans from the Middle East.
- In the Pellucidar series, David Innes and Abner Perry use SCIENCE! to overthrow the reptilian overlords and free the humanoid natives, culminating in David being crowned emperor. When David is lost through Pellucidar again, captured and made a slave, the chief's daughter wants him...
Chief: You can't marry a white man! It is beneath you!
David: How interesting! In my world, it is the white people who are superior.- Oddly, many of the human tribes in David's empire are also white, despite Pellucidar being a Hollow World wrapped around a miniature sun that never sets and irradiates all of the surface equally.
- Flashman discusses this trope in Flashman and the Redskins, and points out the ridiculousness of it (with a clear Take That! at King Solomon's Mines as an example of the trope). While he does best an Apache warrior, it is made very clear that Flashman chose to fight using a weapon he knew he could handle better than the warrior, and the warrior in question is indicated to be generally mediocre. Having been accepted, he is not held in any high regard and, indeed, is on the whole less skilled than the rest of the tribe.
- Good Omens has a member of the Witchfinder Army who served in Britain's African forces in the colonial era, who didn't so much learn to live with the natives as he did terrify them into submission by countering whatever magic they had.
"Sergeant Narker, whose striding, bellowing, six-foot-six, eighteen-stone figure, clutching an armor-plated Book, eight-pound Bell, and specially-reinforced Candle, could clear the veldt of adversaries faster than a Gatling gun."
- Madi in The Grimnoir Chronicles is a rare villainous example. Japanese Iron Guard are considered badass if they can survive taking up to five kanji brands. Madi, a white man, has thirteen and is second only to the Big Bad in power. That said, there are other white people in the Iron Guard and none of them are as badass as Madi or the Japanese members.
- Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King plays this trope brazenly straight. Eugene Henderson is a disaffected middle-class American who goes to Africa and quickly impresses the local tribe enough for him to have the title honor bestowed upon him.
- Orson Scott Card's Hidden Empire spends pretty much 70% of its length dealing with well-meaning white Americans saving Africa from itself. There's even a scene where the male lead has to instruct Nigerian natives on how to treat an aggressive strain of cholera, which you'd think they'd know all about.
- In Greek Waters, a group of white Brits sail to the Ottoman Empire to aid the revolting Greek minorities against the Turks. The British protagonists are described as superior in strength, morality, skills, and intelligence than the Greeks and Turks, who are seen as savage, ignorant, violent and incompetent without the Brits. At best, a few Greeks and Turks get the Noble Savage treatment a couple of times.
- Played with in Terry Pratchett's Jingo, an extended Lawrence of Arabia reference. Some of the (overtly racist) Ankh-Morporkian generals refer to Klatchians as the finest soldiers in the world - provided they're led by white officers - but it's quite clear that the seasoned Klatchian leaders are very competent, while the nobles leading Ankh-Morpork's hastily-assembled forces think an ideal landing spot is a desert peninsula three days' march from anything but a Klatchian fortress. On the other hand, once he visits Klatch, the white Carrot almost immediately starts fitting in and is able to order around a fearsome tribe of desert nomads, but that's more because he's Carrot than because he's white. In Carrot's specific case nobody really thinks of him as 'white' in-universe because he's culturally a dwarf (he's adopted; it's complicated).
- H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines has a white character who instantly masters forms of combat that the natives have been trained in since childhood, while the natives can't touch a rifle without it exploding.
- Natty Bumpo, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales, is a white man who was raised by Delaware Indians and becomes a remarkable warrior and hunter.
- Discussed in Legend of the Animal Healer. Martine wonders why of all the people in Africa, it's a foreign biracial girl who has the power to heal animals. Grace says that it's her heart that led to her being chosen, and the animals themselves don't see a difference. (Note that The Chosen One is prophecied to save all sorts of animals, not just African ones.)
- Shows up in Lost Horizon, which is notably progressive for featuring a modern Mighty Whitey in the 1930s, when the old-fashioned version was still in vogue. When a plane full of white passengers finds themselves in Shangri-La, the mostly Chinese and Tibetan monks there prove themselves to be wise, intelligent, competent, and well-rounded characters. However, the white Conway turns out to be better at being a monk than the best of the Tibetans, and it turns out that the founder and leader of the monastery is a European who arrived in the 15th century.
- In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), Lord Roxton becomes the best hunter in the native village he visits.
- In The Mystery of Urulgan by Kir Bulychev, Douglas Robertson is a deconstruction of the Mighty Whitey. He can hunt well, but he is violent, rude, arrogant, racist, cowardly, vain, and responsible for a lot of trouble in the story.
- Another Terry Pratchett novel, Nation plays it a bit straighter, except that the white man who becomes the leader of a tribe of natives is the Big Bad, and the tribe he takes over is a group of marauding cannibals that were impressed that he was just as evil as they were.
- Olaf Stapledon's Odd John both subverts and plays this straight. Roughly half of the super-intelligent mutants are of East Asian descent and there seems to be no racial discrimination between them. However, the protagonist and de facto leader is still a white man of mixed European ancestry. Though it's made clear that there are several members of the mutant species/ race with powers and intelligence far in advance of Odd John, including a Tibetan and an Arab, and most of them think of John's venture as another [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Crusade
Children's Crusade.
- Parodied in Our Dumb Century with a headline from 1955 reading "Whites Invent 'Rock and Roll': New Caucasian-Based Teen Craze Sweeps America - Authorities Assure Public that Negroes Had Nothing to Do with Popular Music Form". The article lists "white Rock-and-Roll pioneers" such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly.
Where does this new type of music come from? According to Collier's music critic Nathaniel Gettinger, it comes from whites.
- Ransom had some ideas of becoming something like this in C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet, but the closest he came was contributing to a hunt for a monster, and even then, he didn't do more to succeed in that hunt than his martian companions did. He also didn't have superior scientific or technical knowledge to the martians, as he was a Cunning Linguist rather than a scientist, plus the martians actually had surprisingly advanced scientific knowledge for how little technology they showed. In fact, when the martian scientists sat down to get as much scientific data about Earth as they could from Ransom, they figured out some scientific knowledge that Ransom himself didn't know, and they managed this by inferring it from information Ransom gave them about other scientific topics that he hadn't realized were related, making this something of an inversion.
- Deconstructed in "Pale Blue Memories" by Tobias Buckell. Human explorers are Made a Slave after landing on a primitive alien planet. All their attempts to convince the authorities of who they are, impress them with their knowledge, work their way to a higher position, escape, or lead a slave revolt fail. The protagonist (who's been hiding his Afro-American ancestry from his white crewmates) warns them against this trope, but they don't listen. The story ends with the protagonist doing the only thing he can do, passing on his knowledge to his son in the hope that one day the system of slavery will collapse as it has on Earth.
- Peekay in The Power of One, who acquires a cult of personality with the black prisoners at Barberton Prison when he is still just a small kid - because of his multilingualism, boxing prowess and the sophistication of the smuggling system he helps to set up for the prisoners, they start to see him as some kind of saviour. Slightly subverted in that said cult of personality is mainly due to how prisoner Geel Piet keeps talking up & promoting him with the other prisoners, but the fact that the prisoners buy into it is a case of Mighty Whitey.
- Sandokan presents several examples, including the historical character of James Brooke. Yanez is the most prominent, both for being the co-protagonist and the only white man who was captured by the Tigers of Mompracem and lived without paying a ransom.
- Yanez's improbable survival of his initial encounter with the pirates is lampshaded when he himself explains Kammamuri that the Tigers of Mompracem never spare white men and Kammamuri notes that Yanez, while white, has just led the pirates that attacked the ship he was on. Yanez replied he was a special case.
- H. Rider Haggard's She features an immortal white queen, "She Who Must Be Obeyed", who rules over a primitive tribe of Africans and has magical powers due to her ancient wisdom. She is of Arab origin, and the book implies that white people made up the oldest civilizations.
- Subverted in James Clavell's Shogun. While John Blackthorne does eventually integrate into Japanese society, he has a lot of difficulty learning the new ways, becomes only moderately competent, does not impress people, and is usually irrelevant, except as a Spanner in the Works who unwittingly derails everybody's schemes, save for Toranaga, who plays him like a fiddle.
- The 1632 novel series averts this trope. While the 2000-era Americans do have far superior technology and want to spread American ideals, history teacher Melissa Mailey quickly points out, after finding a 1632-era doctor is fluent in at least a dozen languages, "You didn't actually think you were smarter than these people, did you?" In addition, the most respected American doctor is the African-American James Nichols, who is instantly trusted because, in 17th century Germany, the best doctors were usually Moorish.
- Madoc in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, though he has completely abandoned his Welsh homeland. He is still admired for his spiritual wisdom and prowess as a warrior and is on the verge of marrying The Chief's Daughter.
- Averted to an almost shocking degree in a short story by Tais Teng published in an anthology. The main character is a loser hunter who grew up in a Viking settlement in Greenland, and both he and the rest of his Norse neighbors are perfectly cognizant that the native tribes are far more ferocious and knowledgeable of the land than they can ever appreciate. He's driven to go on a suicidal hunt for a frickin' polar bear to win the favor of the prettiest girl in town, only to be tricked by an indigenous shaman into killing one of his rivals (who had transformed himself into a polar bear) after being given an enchanted spear. The ghost of the dead shaman returns and orders the Inuit to exterminate the entire Norse settlement in retribution.
- Temeraire repeatedly subverts this trope in Lawrence and Temeraire's travels across the world.
- In Empire of Ivory, Lawrence is captured by the Tswana people of the modern Zimbabwe and discovers that they have already successfully replicated European military technology with no friendly white people to help; all they want Lawrence to do is to improve their map of Europe. Later, Lawrence, Temeraire, and their squadron are completely unable to save Cape Town from the Tswana army.
- While Temeraire, as a Celestial, gets a lot of respect in China, Lawrence doesn't really have much to offer and is looked down upon by the Chinese.
- Tortall Universe:
- In the third Song of the Lioness, when Prince Jonathan becomes the Voice of the People to the Bazhir Tribesmen and Alanna becomes a respected shaman to the Bloody Hawk Tribe. Pierce later realized that she was playing into this trope and in subsequent series made efforts to avoid it.
- Trickster's Duet: The white protagonist goes to the Copper Isles and becomes the spymaster of a developing rebellion by the native, dark-skinned raka against the white-skinned luarin conquerers. Granted, Aly was raised by Tortall's spymaster. It's also stated that they need a Token White on the rebel side to stop a general slaughter of luarin, but given that their own Chosen One is half-luarin and loves that side of her family, it's possible she could do that on her own. The other rebel leaders are mostly raka, but spying and clever plans are shown as being basically the most important thing. In the second book (and likely as a result of complaints about the first), it attempts to show that Aly is still only a small cog in a rebellion that represents generations of work by the raka.
- Played with in the final volume of The Wheel of Time. Shara is an isolationist empire, at least partially populated by dark-skinned people (Sharans of varying shades are described), who accept the pale-skinned foreigner Demandred as their Messiah and happily march to war under his overlordship. Of course, Demandred is a manipulative, vengeful villain and Shara is a brutally repressive slaver society both pre-and-post Demandred, so this is a very dark take on the trope and the association doesn't make either side look that good. Not to mention that Demandred's mightiness comes from his being an immortal who dates back to a golden age millennia ago and was the considered the second-most badass person on the planet even then, so he's mighty next to just about everyone- Shara just happened to be where they had prophecies about him.
- Not to mention the more general one of Rand going to the Aiel Waste, becoming their Car'a'Carn, bringing water back to their ancient city, and the Aiel for all intents and purposes becoming his personal army for the rest of the saga. On top of that, he also 'gets the girl' Aviendha, who, even more in line with this trope, is the first Aiel we readers meet. Of course, this is slightly averted in that Rand is Aiel by birth, so he's not really the white man coming and taking over the savages. However, he does identify as a Two Rivers man throughout. Also averted by the fact that the Aiel themselves are described as having European features like red or blond hair and blue eyes.
Live-Action TV
- Parodied in The Armstrong and Miller Show with the arrogant Dr. Tia ("I live in Botswana, saving lives- do you?"). He sees himself as a much-loved figure among the Botswana natives and is oblivious to the fact that they all hate him.
- Arrow plays with this trope in the third season. Oliver takes on the League of Assassins, a Middle Eastern guild of warriors who all take Arabic titles, where his superior skills lead to him essentially playing out this trope: He becomes the next in line for leadership and is set to marry the leader's daughter. However, the leader himself is white, having been a Mighty Whitey himself who took leadership centuries ago, who seems to be invoking this trope by electing to position Oliver, an outsider, as his heir, and forces his daughter, who is a lesbian, to marry Oliver against her will to ensure that the eventual heir is still a blood descendant. In the end, it's Malcolm, another white outsider, who takes leadership... but not through his own skill, but rather through Loophole Abuse and making a deal with Oliver.
- In the early seasons of Doctor Who, some of the Doctor's Companions can brush against this trope. For instance when Ian Chesterton, a science teacher, is forced to compete for command of the armies of the Aztecs with the best soldier in the empire. Rather than realistically being portrayed as out of his league, he manages to beat the Aztec warrior with one thumb and later the Aztec has to resort to poisoning him to stand a chance of beating him.
- The final scene of the third season of Game of Thrones. Lily-white Daenerys Targaryen has just liberated a city's slaves, and they come out to hail her as "Mother." In the book, the slaves were all kinds of races, but in the show, the scene was filmed in Morocco with the crowd made of entirely of locals.
- Subverted in Heroes; when Hiro goes back in time and meets the great Japanese hero Takezo Kensei, he discovers that Kensei's actually a white man. He then goes on to discover that Kensei is not nearly the patron of bravery and honor that myth has made him into, and finds himself trying to hammer Kensei into the role that history has made for him. Kensei eventually undergoes a Face–Heel Turn and it is Hiro who ends up inspiring the Takezo Kensei legend.
- The Marvel Netflix show Iron Fist (2017), based on the comic of the same name, actually serves as a deconstruction of the concept. The only reason Danny was able to become the best fighter at K'un-Lun was that he dedicated himself to nothing but training to cope with the trauma of being orphaned and marooned there after his family's plane crash. Additionally, the other students of K'un-Lun, all of whom are indigenous to the region, are furious that not only did an outsider of a different race best them and obtain the power of the Iron Fist, but that he abandoned the region to return to America at the first opportunity, effectively forsaking the duty and tradition of the post. In the second season it's further revealed that Danny didn't win the powers of the Iron Fist because he was the strongest or most worthy candidate, but rather because the actual strongest, Davos, had the all-important duel rigged against him, thus meaning that Danny simply happened to be in the right place at the right time. Though it does become a Zig-Zagging Trope since Danny did have to become strong enough to face-off and defeat Shou-Lao, a creature described as infinite, in order to gain the Iron Fist.
- General John Doe from the Kraft Suspense Theatre episode "Jungle of Fear" is a villainous example. He's a white 19th century American who claims to have been raised in China, although it's more likely that he's a US Navy deserter who jumped ship there to escape hanging for murder. By 1850, he's a general in the Chinese army and the chief adviser to the Emperor's brother, and he plans to make the brother Emperor so he can rule behind the scenes as an Evil Chancellor.
- Kung Fu (1972) is a borderline example - the half-white child is stronger than all the Chinese mercenaries sent to recapture him. The character was originally going to be played by Bruce Lee (who has white ancestry himself), but television studio executives recast the role with David Carradine, a completely white actor (but a thoroughly incompetent martial artist; he didn't actually learn martial arts until after the show ended).
- 1984 TV series The Master: Lee Van Cleef plays a man who stayed in Japan after WW2 to learn the ways of the ninja, and became the head of a ninja clan. He abandoned it to search the US for his daughter. Naturally, the ninja clan thought his abandoning them was dishonorable, and sent his best student after him to exact revenge.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: During the Joel era, when films like Jungle Goddess or Rocketship X-M were experiments, Joel would inevitably roll his eyes and say something along the lines of, "Thank you, Mr. White Male Reality!"
- This comes back in the Jonah era with The Beast of Hollow Mountain as the main character is a white, male American in a cast of numerous Mexicans. At one point, the character whistles at his two Mexican companions like they were dogs, prompting Tom Servo to groan, pretending to be one of the two, that "Now, granted, I've got problems, but I'm a human being! And in front of my SON?!"
- On The Office (US), Michael and Vikram talk about the latter's Worthless Foreign Degree from Pakistan, where he was a surgeon. Michael, not really understanding that trope, thinks he'd be Chief of Medicine there.
- Off the Map is a Medical Drama about American doctors working on a remote village in South America, so naturally this tropes is lampshaded in the title of the Pilot episode, "Saved by the Great White Hope". Mostly averted, however; most of the patients are treated with native medicine and plants as opposed to medicine brought from the states, and there are many people who refuse treatment because they don't trust the doctors.
- In the live-action series for Planet of the Apes, there are definite hints of this; where the human's tech and knowledge thereof gives them a great advantage.
- "The Good Seed" is one of the earliest and best examples of this. Virdon and Pete's advanced old-time knowledge lets them educate their hosts, a family of ape tenant farmers, on using a block and tackle (making it easier to store hay), the importance of using the best kernels of corn to grow next year's crop and of using horizontal ploughing on hills rather than vertical (to control erosion), build a rail fence (better than the simple planted sticks fence they were using) and a windmill for them, and midwife a cow having trouble calving. It's further justified by Virdon having been a farm boy before he became an astronaut.
- There's an episode where Virdon gets shot and Pete has to retrieve a book on human medicine to teach the ape doctors to perform the life-saving surgery Virdon needs. He also has to educate them on how to properly match blood types for blood transfusions.
- "Tomorrow's Tide" hinges on them teaching a fishing colony how to make fishing nets rather than rely on just individual fishing spears.
- "The Cure" revolves around them helping a village that is being plagued by malaria, teaching them how to identify the tree that makes the antidote and instructing them on the importance of avoiding mosquito bites and draining the stagnant water where the plague-carrying mosquitoes breed.
- Shaka Zulu: Deconstructed. The Europeans arrive in Zululand to establish diplomatic ties and trading rights, and Dr. Henry Flynn points out that an unscrupulous person with their superior technology could become a god in this country, but it turns out that King Shaka is a dangerous, cunning ruler who has them totally at his mercy throughout their stay, and they're effectively political hostages. This small collection of mostly western civilians does manage to oppose an army of 20,000 enemy soldiers with a few rifles and a cannon, and Shaka becomes convinced that they possess the secret to immortality (actually hair dye that makes him appear younger and more medical knowledge to nurse him back to health after an attempted assassination). When Lieutenant Farewell returns from Capetown, his meeting with Shaka after the King has experienced a mental breakdown because of the death of his mother, in particular, is a very bitter take on this trope, as Shaka likens himself to a simple monkey who allowed himself to be tricked into getting his hand trapped in a bottle containing something shiny.
- Stargate SG-1.
- Colonel Mitchell is captured by the Sodan tribe, "the best Jaffa warriors ever", who are offshoots of humans and dark-skinned. He's taught their fighting style prior to a ritualistic one-on-one deathmatch. Mitchell rapidly learns their fighting style, and even uses it in later episodes to easily dispatch Jaffa Mooks. However, both his teacher and Teal'c (who in addition to being non-human, also happens to have dark skin) still effortlessly beat him on multiple occasions.
- The first season episode, "The First Commandment," had a rogue SG team set themselves up as gods to a primitive tribe on a world they had been sent to explore, exploiting the natives for their own benefit.
- In the eighth season episode, "It's Good To Be King," former NID agent — and thorn in SG-1's side — Harry Maybourne had been exiled to a remote planet. He used his knowledge of future events (from his ability to read the notes left behind by a time-travelling Ancient) to elevate himself to command of the local population. He turned out to be a benevolent ruler who truly improved the lot of the people under his rule so much that when they found out about the con that had placed him in command, they chose to keep him.
- Shōgun (2024) - As per the book, the series looks like it might be going in this direction but over time it subverts it completely. John Blackthorne has his moments - he really is a great sailor and is generally a useful and resourceful guy - but he's unremittingly manipulated by the Japanese nobles around him, even (especially!) by the ones who like him. Even the Portuguese, who have a lot more agency and influence than Blackthorne, are very much not in charge.
Music
- Rammstein: Parodied in the music video for Auslander. The band is a bunch of missionaries who visit an African village and try to act like this trope, but they're actually just a bunch of ignorant rubes who act more like college students on spring break and party with the villagers.
- Eminem's need to avoid this trope is part of the reason why he rarely does unironic braggadocio. Rappers are expected to claim they're the greatest rapper alive — even in his strongest boasts, Eminem will only ever claim he feels like he's the best rapper alive, or that he's one of the best rappers alive, frequently placing rappers who influence him ahead of himself on his rankings. He does occasionally claim to be the best white rapper alive, though, an opinion which is not quite as controversial.
- In the 2020s, Eminem has begun to claim himself as the actual best rapper alive period, fully addressing the racial politics and even claiming to be underrated due to his skin colour (in his view, he will never top a Greatest Rappers Of All Time list due to writers' fear of appearing politically incorrect). This has caused tension with other rappers, particularly Melle Mel.
- Chris Rock described Marilyn Manson himself this way in his opening monologue at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards:
"And Marilyn Manson, worshipping the Devil, who thought that was a good idea? Whites always have to be the illest, blacks can't ever be the illest, whites always have to be the illest. A black guy will be like, 'I'm from Compton, I'm from Watts, I'm from the hood, you better recognize.' A white boy will be like, 'Yeah? Well, I'm from HELL!"
Professional Wrestling
- TNA had evil takes on this trope with Mexican America. Among the group's goals were to prove the superiority of the "Mexican race" but the best wrestler in the group, Sarita, was not of Latin American or Hispanic descent, but a Canadian. Even ignoring kayfabe, when the group was about to be defeated by Beer Money they were saved by AAA Mega Champion Jeff Jarrett, a non Mexican trying to prove he was in fact "The King Of Mexico".
Stand Up Comedy
- Discussed and justified by Dave Chappelle with regards to predominantly black street gangs in his "Killin' Them Softly" show:
David Chappelle: You'll be walking down the street and you'll see a bunch of black dudes walking, not just any old black dudes, we're talking 'thugs'. And in the group, they got one, or two, sometimes as many as three white guys with them, you ever seen that shit? Well, let me tell you something about those white guys. Those white guys are the most dangerous motherfuckers in them groups. It's true, man. There's no telling what kind of crazy shit they've done to get them black dudes respect, but I'll tell you they've done some wild shit.
- Also discussed and mocked to hell by Bill Burr not only in being tired of feeling guilty about segregation against ping-pong, but also directly mocks Save Our Students films like Dangerous Minds in wishing that the teacher gets harassed out of town.
Tabletop Games
- In Magic: The Gathering's Amonkhet set, the all-white cast travels to the fantasy version of Egypt and fights against the local death-seeker culture.
- Zig-Zagging Trope in Warhammer 40,000's backstory. The Primarchs were the Emperor's twenty clone-sons, who were scattered across the galaxy and became (with the exception of Angron) legendary leaders on their adopted homeworlds. But when someone is a gene-enhanced demigod with physical, intellectual and in some cases psychic powers well beyond those of mortal men, this is only to be expected. The degree to which the Primarchs integrated into their homeworlds also varied - Fulgrim reversed a dying world's decline and allowed a cultural renaissance, Leman Russ and Jaghatai Khan became barbarian conquerors, Guilliman simply led an already spacefaring civilization into a golden age of expansion, while Konrad Curze was little more than a vigilante killer who ruled the populace by fear. As an aside, while most of the Primarchs were white, several had darker skin tones, two were freakishly pale, Vulkan's skin was pitch black, and Magnus the Red, well...
- The trope is played mostly straight in some of the Primarchs' backstories when the Emperor arrived to collect them. In many cases, they immediately recognized and swore fealty to their father, but in others, they impressed the locals and only won their sons over after competing with and besting them at various challenges. This is particularly true in Vulkan's story since he and Nocturne's people were puzzled by the "pale outlander" who appeared before them. That said, the Emperor was actually from ancient Anatolia, so "pale" is relative here. Their planet is extremely geographically active and is irradiated and their skin is literal pitch black as a natural adaptation.
Theatre
- The outdoor drama Blue Jacket, White Shawnee War Chief, performed every year in Xenia, Ohio, from 1981 to 2007, was based around the idea that the eponymous warchief was actually a white settler captured and adopted into the Shawnee tribe before rising to lead it against the early United States. The increasing amounts of historical evidence against this Mighty Whitey myth may have contributed to the eventual closure of the drama.
- The Book of Mormon: Parodied with the song "I Am Africa", in which the white Mormon missionaries sing about how they represent Africa. It's ultimately subverted, since none of the missionaries are actually able to inspire the Ugandans, who have to deal with a dangerous warlord, AIDS, and maggots in their scrotum. Even Arnold's stories aren't actually believed by the Ugandans, but provide good life lessons. By the end, the missionaries succeed in repelling (and eventually converting) a violent warlord and inspiring hope in the Ugandans, but don't seem to actually fix any real problems.
Video Games
- Assassin's Creed III subverts it by means of the protagonist's skewed perception. Once with Haytham Kenway who gets involved with the Mohawk during his mission and falls in love with a Native American woman, only to be ultimately kicked out by his lover due to his Templar allegiance despite him and his faction trying their best to keep the Natives safe from the ever-expanding colonies; the second time with William Johnson, an Irish templar who spends most of his time among native Americans, to the point where he wears several articles of tribal clothing above a typical British colonial outfit. He has spent most of his life trading with the natives, which Connor assumes is ultimately part of an evil plan due to his belonging to the Templar Order. Except Connor is entirely wrong, Johnson was helping the natives all along including Connor's own tribe, and represents their sole salvation in a world where every other colonial wants them eradicated. The fate of the Native Americans is sealed when Connor stabs Johnson to death and sides with a faction that proceeds to drive all the natives off of their lands and kill most of them.
- From BlazBlue, we have a deconstruction, a subversion and an inversion.
- First up, we have Jin Kisaragi, who despite his very Japanese-sounding name is actually an Evil Brit. He was adopted into the Kisaragi family and soon proved to be better than any of the real children at pretty much anything, including iaido, although constantly having to put up with their jealousy is one of the contributing factors that led to him becoming a big-time Straw Nihilist. By the time of the sequel, he admits that he's "given up on life (and) the world" and that he believes the only "truth" is death.
- It's revealed that the Kirsaragis are considered pretty strong due to adopting from all walks of life, making Jin an exemplary case.
- Next up to bat is Noel Vermillion, who gets preferential treatment over her Japanese friend, Tsubaki Yayoi despite the fact that she... well... is worse at everything you can possibly imagine than Tsubaki is. The Big Bad eventually reveals that in a previous time loop, Noel didn't exist and Tsubaki had everything she did... in the most horrible way possible, that is. This causes her to snap and pull a Face–Heel Turn out of envy and hatred. However, the real kicker is that said villain is entirely responsible for the time loops and most likely orchestrated events so that Noel would take Tsubaki's place so that he could use them ''both'' for his own personal gain further down the line.
- It's revealed that the Yayois are growing weaker due to inbreeding and that Tsubaki's the first child to survive. Her general lack of talent compared to most caused her to take a sealed weapon that causes her Face–Heel Turn.
- Arakune aka Lotte Carmine provides our inversion. He couldn't stand the fact that Kokonoe was constantly bettering him (the fact that she is a Jerkass of the highest order probably didn't help matters) and so he sought forbidden knowledge from beyond the Boundary. His body couldn't handle what he discovered there and so he turned into an Eldritch Abomination.
- First up, we have Jin Kisaragi, who despite his very Japanese-sounding name is actually an Evil Brit. He was adopted into the Kisaragi family and soon proved to be better than any of the real children at pretty much anything, including iaido, although constantly having to put up with their jealousy is one of the contributing factors that led to him becoming a big-time Straw Nihilist. By the time of the sequel, he admits that he's "given up on life (and) the world" and that he believes the only "truth" is death.
- Spencer Rice in Caravaneer unwittingly spawns Spencerism in the Kivi Tribe when he teaches agriculture to them. You later find out that he is actually a biological scientist, and he can help you convince the Kivi to wipe out the Drekar tribe.
- Far Cry:
- The protagonist of Far Cry 3 is a rich, entitled white guy without any combat training or experience who stumbles into the midst of the Rakyat tribe after escaping his captors. He's promptly given his own set of sacred Rakyat tattoos for no particular reason and proceeds to more or less single-handedly liberate the tribe from the pirates oppressing it - a feat the entire tribe apparently wasn't able to muster.
- The Rakyat seem unusual in that they're willing to adopt any foreigners who "hear the call" (and prove their strength) into the tribe. That includes not only white American Jason Brody, but the Liberian Dennis, and even their ruler, Citra, is probably of Latina heritage given her brother's accent. The implication may be that Jason is far from unique. Also deconstructed, since despite Jason's growing combat skills, he also becomes increasingly violent and less sane, and eventually, depending on the player's decision, can end up killing his friends and loved ones and getting knifed to death by Citra.
- Averted in Far Cry 4 in response to criticism. The protagonist is a native-born Kyrati but grew up in the United States, which explains his unfamiliarity with the country. Big Bad Pagan Min can be considered a variation of this trope, being a half-British criminal from Hong Kong who overthrew the original regime to become the local dictator (even had he been 100% Hong Kongese, he'd still be an example as an alien foreigner from a more advanced nation, as Kyrat is heavily implied to be around Nepal's area).
- In the Fatal Fury universe, Terry and Andy Bogard are white boys adopted by Jeff Bogard and taught his martial arts style. After Geese Howard, Deceptive Disciple of Tung Fu Rue, murders him, the brothers set out to stop him, with Terry being the ultimate hero in the end. In the anime movies, Terry is always portrayed as the strong, silent hero while the highest-profile Asian character from the games, Joe Higashi, is relegated to comic relief.
- Parodied in Jade Empire, with Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom. "Mighty Whitey" is his mantra, and he's a card-carrying supremacist through and through dedicated to "educating" the locals (the Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Ancient China) primarily by shooting challengers with his musket. The one person he has "enlightened" is a guy he renamed "Percival" and made his squire, who sees it more as a job than anything. Your character is given the mission of humbling Roderick so he'll finally stop bothering everyone by first defeating him in a debate (where he does at least raise some worthwhile points) and then in a duel. Once defeated, however, he's gracious enough that he'll offer up a reward and be on his way.
- One of the reward for fighting him is his Tactical Manual, a treatise on the art of warfare which gives you a bonus to your fighting ability by teaching you what not to do. Another "reward" is a manual on trepanation, which has your character noting that this goes against every known medical practice in the land and so must be metaphorical. Or his gun Mirabelle, one of the best weapons in the game once upgraded.
- Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg features a villainous example of this trope with Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (a German Russian) managing to secure Mongolia's independence and then goes on to declare himself Genghis Khan's successor and restore the Mongolian Empire, wishing to conquer the entire world.
- Max Payne 3 is a double subversion. Max, who has moved to Sao Paulo to work security for the Branco family, repeatedly fails to stop local Gangbangers from making off with his principal's wife. As we reach the end, though, he stops the large-scale Organ Theft of Sao Paulo's poor, destroys the paramilitaries and Dirty Cops responsible and brings down the Corrupt Politician exploiting the whole operation to fund his mayoral campaign. Lampshaded when Neves, one of the masterminds behind the Organ Theft scheme, sarcastically calls Max "The Great American Savior of the Poor" (which is also used as the title of that particular chapter).
- Metal Gear:
- The series has a recurring character template of a white child soldier in an army of black children who is noted for being markedly superior to the other soldiers, and in most cases get a nickname indicating their whiteness as well. This is at least partially justified in two of the cases ("White Mamba" is a clone of Big Boss and carries the perfect 'soldier genes', "The White Devil" was raised by another clone of Big Boss as a test case to see if combat ability, among other things, could be passed on outside of genes) but the recurring nature of this image, combined with the fact that it uses real-life wars as a backdrop (in one case, the wars in Liberia, a state founded by African-American slaves), gives this some definite Unfortunate Implications.
- Metal Gear: Ghost Babel:
- Slasher Hawk is a white Australian who claims to follow Aboriginal teachings better than the actual Aboriginies who adopted him and uses Aboriginal magic in battle, as well as boomerangs. However, his tribe rejected him no matter how hard he tried to fit in, leading to him joining Black Arts Viper's terrorist cell.
- The Gindran Liberation Front aren't a full use of this trope but have some strange racial politics going on. The group's highly talented Jeanne d'Archétype, Sophie N'dram, is mixed Boia-French and apparently passes for white enough that Snake mistakes her for his white American female ally, Chris Jenner. The actual leader of the group, Augustine Eguabon, preaches sovereignty for the Boia despite not being Boian or even from Gindra, and it's stated he owes most of his ability to the mentorship he got from Big Boss.
- Sub-Zero in the Mortal Kombat series is a white man (officially half Asian but you wouldn't know it by looking at him) that was born and raised in Minnesota. He moved to China with his father after his parents divorced when he was a teenager, and became leader of the Lin Kuei; he even moved the ancient tribe to America after they were discovered, instead of just relocating somewhere in China.
- The Lin Kuei are also shown to be a very diverse organization; Cyrax is Motswanan and Smoke is revealed to be Czech.
- He was portrayed by an Asian actor in his ending in Mortal Kombat II though, but he was masked for the rest of the game.
- Nioh:
- The main character William is a white Englishman (heavily based on the real life William Adams) fighting his way through Japan during the Sengoku Period. After his Guardian Entity Saoirse is kidnapped by Edward Kelley, he pursues the alchemist to Japan during the era's final years where he meets Hattori Hanzo, who offers to help him track down Kelley in exchange for helping Tokugawa Ieyasu combat the Toyotomi loyalists working with Kelley. While he initially becomes their ally solely to rescue Saoirse, William ends up coming to greatly respect Hanzo and Ieyasu, and by the end of the game, William plays a major role in bringing the Sengoku Period to a close and is recognized as one of the greatest warriors in Japan, though his and Kelley's involvement in the events are kept a secret by the newly established Tokugawa shogunate.
- The aforementioned Edward Kelley provides a much more twisted subversion. While he presents himself as a foreign savior to Ishida Mitsunari and the losing Toyotomi forces, in truth he's only using them as pawns in order to prolong the conflict so he can harvest more amrita from the country for England and his master John Dee. Mitsunari and his men aren't fooled for even a second though, but they're willing to put up with Kelley, because blatant monster or not, his magic is their best chance to turn the war around.
- Red Steel:
- Scott Monroe plays this trope almost painfully straight, being a white American who becomes the successor to the head of a Japanese Yakuza family. His Japanese allies throughout the game are constantly showering him with praise, whether it's complimenting his sword/gun skills or his character.
- By contrast, the villain Tokai is a Japanese man who leads an American gang based in Los Angeles.
- Soul Series:
- Rock was a white English boy who marooned in the New World and raised among Native Americans, though they were afraid of the "white giant." His immense size and strength make him one of the toughest fighters in the world. In this case, his being White is just a coincidence.
- Setsuka is a European woman who was raised in Japan. Despite discrimination for her European features, she's one of the deadliest fighters in the world.
- Although it's also subverted in that the only person she has found who would accept her white heritage was her master, which would go a long way in explaining why she's a great fighter. Otherwise, she had a very hard time fitting in.
- Street Fighter:
- Ken has a rich white father and a Japanese mother. Compared to his best friend and rival Ryu, he is the most out-going and coolest. However, it's how he's portrayed in the American animated TV series that qualifies him for savior status. By the final season, Ken is given the title greatest martial artist of all time and the only one who can beat Akuma. Interestingly enough, the Anime motion picture would avert this, by making Ken a victim of Bison, and Ryu being the only one who can save him. And let's not forget the live motion picture, which portrays Guile - played by Jean Claude Van Damme - as the hero and savior, when in the fighting game universe, he's not a main character (though it is he, and not Ryu or Ken, who has the biggest personal beef against the Big Bad). Ken and Ryu, who are the main characters, are portrayed as traveling con-artist who get in over their heads.
- Ryu spends every moment of his life wandering the world to challenge the greatest fighters he can find and hone his martial arts. He breathes, eats, sleeps, and craps his style 24 hours a day. Ken, on the other hand, spends a wild time in American nightlife, gets married, has a kid, and lives life like a rich guy. He practices martial arts to avoid getting rusty, but nowhere near the level Ryu does. When Ken and Ryu fight, it's often described that Ryu is better... but not by much, and Ken can give Ryu a serious workout.
- In the 2008 Turok, General Roland Kane is such a master of the ancient warrior ways of the American Indians that he ends up teaching them to Turok, a Native American marine. Somewhat justified in not everyone studies their own history extensively; simply being of Native American descent wouldn't automatically grant him in-depth knowledge and Kane had actually researched the subject. Turok also ultimately proves to be a superior warrior to Kane when he defeats him in a knife fight after Kane turns out to be an evil Broken Pedestal.
- World of Warcraft: Legion: The long-awaited return of Second War hero Turalyon and his wife Alleria reveals that he has since joined the Army of the Light, a faction of enlightened races spoken of by the Draenei as survivors of homeworlds overtaken by the Legion. Although almost entirely made up of Draenei, Turalyon becomes more or less the leader of the Army of the Light. While Turalyon doesn't strike up a romance with any of the Army's Draenic women, his still carries out the trope of an exotic wife in his High Elven lover Alleria, who also ascends to a high rank within the Army.
- X: Beyond the Frontier (and pretty much the entire X series, for that matter) takes this trope and Humans Are Special and runs with it. In the first game, displaced human Kyle Brennan (a white man) is stranded in the X universe and, over the course of the series, contributes to the near-defeat of a race of genocidal robot ships, builds up a massive and influential R&D company in the hopes of finding a way back to Earth, uncovers the true nature of the Kha'ak, and through his actions eventually sets in motion the reunion between Earth and the rest of the universe. Terran Conflict plays this trope in a mechanical sense in that Terran ships — which are often faster, better shielded, and more destructive than anything else in the X universe — range from a bright polished platinum color to near-pure white.
Web Original
- This Listverse entry that purports to highlight the ten most "intellectual" rappers. Fewer than 25% of the artists mentioned are people of color, while people of color make up somewhat more than 25% of all rap artists.
- Roxton A. Colchester III, though an orange Lutari in Neopets, is a character created based on this trope - a bold mighty white adventurer accompanied by a white chick and a short Asian sidekick. The Atlas of the Ancients plot even went so far as to say that their adventure is essential to saving the world of Neopia.
- The blog Smart Bitches Read Trashy Books warns against this trope.
If the heroine is a noble white maiden and the hero is a member of an indigenous Native American tribal people, AND the title contains the words "half-breed," "savage" or both, then you’ve got the makings of a really, really bad romance. Apocalyptically bad, even. In fact, if these romances could ride horses, they could probably substitute for War and Plague all by their little selves. If the plot of that romance involves the heroine taming the hero's wild ways while he teaches her to listen to the music of the rhythm of the night wind, and he’s not referring in any way to flatulence or El DeBarge, then you’ve definitely embarked on a bad romance.
- Screen Rant Pitch Meetings: The pitch meeting for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has the Screenwriter say that the residents of the starving village were "praying for the white person to come around and save them." When told about how the British army saves the day at the climax, the Producer says, "Thank God for British colonialism."
Western Animation
- Parodied in the American Dad!! episode "Home Adrone." Stan Smith rides a Predator drone disguised as a dragon in a Chinese New Year's parade. An old Chinese man cries "The prophecy has been fulfilled! The Great Dragon awakens!" A young Chinese American woman sarcastically replies, "Oh, and with a white guy riding him. Awesome."
- In Bruce Timm's Batman: The Animated Series Bruce Wayne is considered by his martial arts master, Yoru, to be his best student. This creates the friction between Wayne and Kyodai Ken who constantly refers to Wayne as "Rich Man's Son" (since this is a kids' show, race never comes up).
- Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos plays the trope straight. The series is full of Asian martial artists, but the greatest of them all is Chuck Norris, of course.
- In Journey to Saturn, sergeant Arne Skrydsbøl says "We are the white gods" to the aliens when landing on Saturn. The aliens do (presumably) not understand Danish, but it does not end well.
- Molly of Denali: In "Truth, Trust, and Harvest," Gertie criticizes the cover of the Thanksgiving book, saying it looks like the Wampanoag needed the pilgrims' help when in reality the opposite was true.
- In The Mummy: The Animated Series, Rick's son Alex gains a golden band which gives him the superpowers of a Medjai (such as telekinesis), allowing him to become the most powerful of the students training to be a Medjai.
- Parodied in the South Park episode "Last of the Meheecans" where Butters, dressed up as a Mexican for a game with Cartman, unintentionally inspires and leads hundreds of immigrated Mexicans-Americans back into their home country to the point where America loses its prosperity to Mexico.
- Ultimate Avengers plays with this in the second movie. The Wakandan elders believe they don't need the aid of outsiders and especially the Avengers to stop the Chitauri as long as they have their Vibranium meteorite deposit and the salvaged Chitauri technology, since they did in fact repel them before. However, not only is the Chitauri assault implicitly much bigger than the one Wakanda faced in the past, the aliens realize the Wakandans are using their technology to help power their weapons and blow it up, crippling Wakanda's defenses. Also, the Avengers would have had to go to Wakanda anyways since that's where the mothership coordinating the whole planetary assault is stationed to have any hope of saving the world (and as far as most of the isolationist Wakandans aside from Black Panther were concerned, the rest of the world could burn as long as they themselves were victorious).
Real Life
- Emperor Akihito declared in 2001, that according to the Shoku Nihongi, he was descended from King Muryeong (5th century Korean ruler of Baekje) and many learned men from Korea during Japan's infancy with advanced skills and technologies and made a big portion of its founders. Supporting that claim is according to the records in the Shinsen Shoujiroku, Korean families made up about 383 of 1183, or 1/3, of the ruling noble houses in Japan around the 9th century.
- Happened again in China in the late 19th century, during the Taiping Rebellion. The Ever Victorious Army consisted of Chinese soldiers trained, armed and led by European and American officers and fought on behalf of the Qing dynasty against the rebels. Their efforts are generally considered instrumental in the Qing dynasty's eventual victory. Most notably, the most famous commander of the group, the British officer Charles George Gordon ("Chinese Gordon") was lavished with honors by the Qing for his service.
- According to the Chronicle of Fredegar, Samo was a Frankish merchant who united a number of West Slavic tribes against the raiding Avars (called Huns in the chronicle), was acclaimed as their king, and led the resulting empire successfully against an invasion from his fellow Franks.
- In Homage to Catalonia George Orwell describes the Spanish militiamen he fought alongside viewing him as Mighty Whitey. Despite Orwell's total lack of training or familiarity with soldiering, his compatriots were thrilled that an educated Englishman had joined up with their cause.
- Lawrence of Arabia tells of T. E. Lawrence. It would be an exaggeration to say he alone put together a loose band of irregular tribesman that threw back the better-armed, better-equipped, much-more-powerful Ottoman Turks by mastering desert warfare on a level that amazed even his Arab irregulars, and thus was directly responsible for weakening the Ottoman Empire critically and thus changing the entire strategic balance in the First World War... but it would not be a gross exaggeration.
- Subverted by the "Mad Khan", Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. He was a Russian-German Count, a very colourful person, eccentric to the point of lunacy, and known for his wanton cruelty. In the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, he carved himself a state in Outer Mongolia, claiming to be "the Last Khan" and reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He managed to keep the Mongols down and the Chinese out, but things went south quickly when the Soviets came and he was defeated, captured and executed.
- Came about in China during the late medieval era, when the Mongol hordes (famously led by Genghis Khan) overran most of the Middle Kingdom and subjugated the Chinese people. They soon found themselves having to establish a bureaucratized government for the sake of continuity with the "Mandate of Heaven" (the ruling authority of all of China's imperial dynasties)... but being basically barbarians up to this point, the Mongols had none of the experience - and very little of the knowledge - necessary to serve as government leaders. Nor could they conscript ethnic Chinese to fill the role of civil servants, for the Chinese people were sullen under their conquerors and would surely try to sabotage their rule. So the Mongols Took A Third Option: while a Mongol Khan continued to reign as Emperor of China, he filled his government offices with people who were neither Mongolian nor Chinese - and sometimes were not even Asian. Quite a few European traders, explorers, and missionaries wound up working as Chinese bureaucrats.
- In 1511 a Spanish ship sunk off the coast of the Yucatan. Those who didn't die in the shipwreck or from thirst before reaching the coast were enslaved by the natives, sacrificed or worked to death, except for a friar, Gerónimo de Aguilar, and a soldier, Gonzalo Guerrero. Guerrero won his freedom after saving his owner from a crocodile, embraced Mayan culture and religion, and rose rapidly in rank until he married The Chief's Daughter. When Hernán Cortés passed through the place on his way to Mexico and offered the two men to join his army, Aguilar readily took the offer but Guerrero chose to stay with his wife and three children. By the beginning of Francisco de Montejo's Spanish Conquest of the Maya in 1528, Guerrero was the Nacom (general) of the army of Chetumal. Montejo tried to win Guerrero to his side but once again he refused, and instead led the Mayas to several victories using both Mayan surprise guerrilla tactics and Spanish anti-cavalry phalanx tactics that he had learned while serving in Italy decades before. He was killed in battle in Honduras in 1536, of an arquebus shot to the chest. Given his ridiculously troperiffic life, it is incredible that Guerrero's story has never been adapted to film.
- In 1510, three Spanish expeditioners ended up taking refuge in the local tribe in modern day Panamá after the local governor, Diego de Nicuesa, made everybody's life hell. One of them, Juan Alonso, killed another in a swordfight for unknown reasons, and seeing him so strong, the indigenous chieftain Careta made him the leader of his royal guard. Turned into tribal warriors, Alonso and his remaining partner adopted the local language, customs and clothings and lived with them for a year until the arrival of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, providentially another enemy to Nicuesa. Diplomacy between the Spaniards and the indigenous turned difficult, and when Alonso secretly warned Balboa that Careta was not willing to listen, the explorer captured the chief in a shocking raid to ease the negotiations. Núñez and Careta made up with a common alliance against a rival tribe, to the point Balboa eventually married Careta's daughter, but Alonso was not so lucky and, upon being declared a traitor by the locals, had to return full time to the Spanish contingent. He became Balboa's second-in-command and advisor in indigenous affairs until being killed in action.
- Aleixo García, a Spanish sailor of Portuguese origin, was a member of a Spanish exploration fleet that was mauled by tribesmen in South America in 1516, after which he and three survivors traveled inland and joined the local Guaraní tribes, learning their languages and culture. For diversity's sake, there was also a Mighty Blacky on board, as one of the survivors, Francisco Pacheco, was a mulatto. In any case, at the time it was popular for Guaraníes to attack the lands of the Inca Empire in the search of plunder, and when García heard tales about the fabulous riches of the empire, he either joined or commanded one of those tribal enterprises in 1525. Although the Inca eventually drove them away, the Spanish-Guaraní army managed to defeat several Inca garrisons and escape with lots of silver and slaves, and García even sent word to the Spaniards living in the Atlantic coast, asking them to call home and request reinforcements. At this point, contact was lost with García, Pacheco and their people; some believe he died fighting Inca forces that were still pursuing them, others believe they suffered an ambush by unrelated Payaguá tribes, and there is also the perennial speculation that maybe the expeditioners killed each other for the booty.
- The history of the Tanegashima matchlock musket is this trope. In 1543 a few Portuguese reached a Japanese island when the Chinese ship they were on had to take shelter during a storm. The local ruler, Tanegashima Tokitaka, bought two matchlock muskets from them and set a swordsmith on reproducing them. At the time, the Japanese had both crossbows and primitive hand cannons, so reproducing one of the most advanced firearms then available wasn't too hard... except for one little thing. The matchlocks they bought used a screwed-in bolt to seal the breach which could also be unscrewed for both cleaning and to remove things stuck in the barrel (before that, something getting stuck in the barrel rendered it permanently unusable). The Japanese didn't know how to make the grooves on the outside of a metal bolt match the grooves on the inside of a metal barrel until the Portuguese returned the next year and a blacksmith showed them the trick.
- Played remarkably straight in the case of the White Rajahs of Sarawak. English adventurer Sir James Brooke was granted the title of Rajah of Sarawak by the Sultan of Brunei, as a reward for his efforts in combating piracy in Malaya. To the surprise and fascination of many, Brooke forged Sarawak into an independent sovereign state, introducing a modern system of government and efficient civil service. Although there were some western influences (Brooke invited a number of Anglican missionaries to set up schools), he made a determined effort to preserve the local culture and led the natives into battle against local pirates on several occasions. When Sarawak was absorbed into the British Empire after WWII, many locals objected and sought the restoration of the Brooke Dynasty because they felt the White Rajahs had been one of the most effective barriers to western colonisation. When the British withdrew from Sarawak in 1963 it was promptly absorbed into Malaysia, but to this day, the Brookes are still remembered with considerable fondness.
- A popular legend holds that the Native American war leader Chief Blue Jacket was actually a white man originally named Marmaduke Van Swearingen.
Non-White, Fantastic, or Raceless Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Likewise in Attack on Titan, Action Girl, 3D combat prodigy, and all-around badass Mikasa also just so happens to be the only surviving person of Asian descent on Earth (the other survivors being apparently European).
- Dragon Ball's Goku fulfills this trope in the same way that Superman, listed below, does. He's an alien from another planet but upon beginning his wanderings as a child he quickly becomes one of the strongest fighters in the world and only improves as time goes on.
- Gundam has a whole actually tends to play with this by having their heroes not technically be Japanesenote but rather Spacenoids. If a character is considered The Ace and can fly rings around more experienced mobile suit pilots, pick up the ability quickly or get that series version of a Super Mode then they are likely from space. In fact in the thirty plus history of Gundam only three franchises have main characters are not Spacers After War Gundam X, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny and Mobile Suit Gundam 00 and of those two of them are not Japanese (Garrod Rannote and Setsuna F. Seieinote ).
- Jewelpet Twinkle☆: the heroine Akari Sakura is the only Japanese kid in the magic school she attends; her classmates and the students from other schools are all white (though Sara is half-Japanese, but doesn't live in Japan). Additionally, she is the last one to enroll, but that doesn't stop her from surpassing everyone, solving all the problems in Jewel Land and becoming the most powerful wizard by the end of the show.
- In Monster, the brilliant, long-suffering, morally infallible main character is a lone Japanese man among Europeans.
- Often subverted and ridiculed in Nangoku Shounen Papuwakun, a series in which Shintarou, the Number One most competent warrior in the Ganma army, is marooned on an island in the southern seas. Although Shintarou often tries to introduce elements of his own culture, it usually either goes terribly wrong or is revealed to have already existed in some way on the island. Shintarou, throughout the story, is also relegated to the role of housekeeper for Papuwa, the only other human on the island at his arrival, who is a young boy...and much stronger than Shintarou.
- In a rather odd example, Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix: Sun is about a Korean soldier who flees to Japan after his Baekje kingdom (1 of 3 kingdoms in Korea at the time) was defeated in 660 AD in a war between his kingdom and a coalition of Tang Dynasty and Silla (another of the 3 kingdoms). He eventually becomes a feudal lord & a major player in the 672 AD Jinshin War. (According to the Shinsen Shoujiroku, Korean families made up about 383 of 1183, or 1/3, of the ruling houses in Japan at this time, and even Emperor Akihito declared that many technologies and arts were brought over to rural Japan in its infancy by Koreans. According to the Shoku Nihongi, Akihito was descended from King Muryeong of Baekje). Later on, this was also subverted a bit: he is also invited to join a tribe of Noble Savage Shinto wolf-spirits (because his face was cut off by the Tang Chinese & replaced with a wolf's) but declines because he feels he'd be a burden to them, having no supernatural powers of his own.
- In Red River (1995), the girl who carries on the story of the Hittite Empire... is Yuri Suzuki, who is a full-blooded Japanese.
- A manga version of the old Romance of the Three Kingdoms story, Destiny Of An Emperor (which was also made into a Dragon Quest knockoff RPG for the NES, which bizarrely enough managed to cross the Pacific), posits that historical warlord Lü Bu was, in fact, a blond European who had taken a Chinese name, thus explaining his historically-documented freakish height and strength. Hilariously, when applied to Lü Bu of all people it becomes a subversion of the trope, as Lü Bu was a lecher, a murderer, and betrayed everyone he ever met. He died alone and utterly ruined.
- Pick just about any Real Robot Genre Humongous Mecha series you can think of. The Super Robot Wars series really tends to point it out: For so many supposedly international organizations, there sure are a hell of a lot of Japanese people compared to any other ethnicity.
- And they sometimes double up on it, with a large percentage of the non-Japanese characters being American. Some games in the series, such as Alpha and Compact 2/Impact, will pair the two together.
- Super Robot Wars is making a habit of making the "better" Original Generation pilots be German as well. Sanger Zonvolt and Elzam V. Branstein come to mind. Fridge Brilliance can also elevate Elzam's brother Raidese to this level as well (And their cousin Leona, though she's mostly out of focus). See also Arado and Seolla.
- Not to mention Latooni (... well, Latun, as a proper romanization of the way her name is written), who is one of the best pilots in the game (can easily compete with Raidiese for 'ace of the younger generation') - she's Russian. Or at least her name is since her backstory makes it rather hard to figure out her ethnicity and nationality...
- And they sometimes double up on it, with a large percentage of the non-Japanese characters being American. Some games in the series, such as Alpha and Compact 2/Impact, will pair the two together.
- In The Twelve Kingdoms two very successful rulers (and two noble kirin) are from Japan. In fact, a rival ruler is trying to prevent one of them from rising to power because he fears the success that he believes is inevitable if the rival nation is ruled by someone from Japan.
Comic Books
- The Adam Strange comics used a concept nearly identical to the John Carter of Mars books. On Earth, Adam is just an archaeologist, but he uses his jetpack to make himself the hero of the space planet Rann. Popular comic author Alan Moore later subverted this by having the Rannians still treat Adam with contempt because they have superior intellects. Note that Moore's interpretation was a Retcon, and has been ignored since.
- De Cape et de Crocs has a race flip where a black former slave ends up on the shores of an island populated by white savages who dress like Robinson Crusoe. Because they'd never seen black skin before, they took him for a god, but he was quick to insist that he was just a man (he is their chieftain, however).
- Oddly enough, Superman may be the earliest example of a superhero playing to a variation of this trope, except that the "mighty whitey" is actually an alien, and the entire human race are the natives who he joins (in contrast to the more common Sci-fi variant of the trope where the opposite would be the case). Kal-El learns the ways of the primitive Earth folk and ultimately becomes their greatest champion while inspiring them to bring out the best in their culture, and even turns against the race he was born to when they try to molest his new home with their advanced strength and weapons.
- Travis Morgan got stranded in a Lost World (originally depicted as being the Hollow Earth, later declared to be an Alternate Dimension) called Skartaris, learned its ways, and became the Warlord, its greatest hero. Travis is white, and while there are white-looking folks in Skartaris (including the villain Deimos), the Warlord's best friend in Skartaris is Machiste, who is black.
Comic Strips
- Flash Gordon goes to the planet Mongo, learns its ways, liberates it from tyrant Ming the Merciless, and becomes its greatest hero. Played particularly straight in the early strips where Mongo's Human Aliens are depicted with yellow skin.
Films — Live-Action
- Indian movies are also capable of playing this trope straight, with an upper-caste Hindu playing the Mighty Whitey role to other Indian people: according to this, the hit action film ''RRR (Rise, Roar, Revolt)", a heavily mythologized version of the story of two Real Life Indian heroes of the struggle against British colonialism with no pretenses of historical accuracy, Rama Raju plays the upper-castw Mighty Whitey while Komaram Bheem and the other Adivasi characters are reduced to darker-skinned Noble Savage stereotypes.
- Avatar has a paralyzed human. A bit unconventional since he doesn't fulfill the trope until his consciousness is put in a half-human, half-alien body, but after that happens, he eventually learns the Na'vi ways and embodies this trope by doing several things: marrying the Princess, becoming a legendary chief, getting the planetary consciousness to fight to push back the humans, and eventually transforming permanently into a Na'Vi.
- The Karate Kid (2010): Dre Parker (black) moves to China, and with a month or so of training, beats all the experienced bullies at the local kung fu tournament.
- Rambo IV starts out with the half-Indian John Rambo having become a Burmese snake-wrangler.
- Shanghai Noon: Chong Wang (played by Jackie Chan), a Chinese palace guard from the Forbidden City, travels to Wild West Nevada to rescue Imperial Princess Pei Pei. Although a Fish out of Water in the western setting, his superior fighting skills impress a Native American chief who tricks him into marrying his daughter, Falling Leaves. Chong subsequently teams up with outlaw Roy O'Bannon (played by Owen Wilson) and gains notoriety as the "Shanghai Kid" on a "Wanted!" Poster without even trying, causing Roy to gripe that the bounty on Chong's head is already bigger than his even though he's been committing crimes for years.
- Sister Act racially inverts the trope. Protagonist Deloris, played by Whoopi Goldberg, goes into hiding as a nun, and is the only black woman in the convent. She also ends up saving the choir by educating them on how to sing. On a larger scale, it's her who brings the neighborhood together in doing so.
- The 13th Warrior features something of a reversal: the cultured Arab diplomat Ahmad ibn Fadlan leaves his country with some Vikings to go north. The Vikings don't expect him to be very useful, but he learns their language, fights alongside them, and amazes them with his literacy, though he does not surpass the Vikings in any of the skills they teach him. In fact, the Vikings treat him a bit like a child, calling him "Little Brother". He is ultimately a secondary figure in the big picture behind their leader Buliwyf. The story, taken from Michael Crichton's book Eaters of the Dead, is very loosely based on the accounts of the real Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, spiced up with a non-magical retelling of Beowulf.
Literature
- At Play in the Fields of the Lord is about a half-Cheyenne who organizes Amazonian peoples. Not really sure if it counts as nonwhite (since that's what the other half was), but since the Cheyenne really did modernize before the Amazonian Indians did, it fits the trope.
- Hermione Granger from Harry Potter only learns that magic exists at the age of eleven, but becomes the best in her year from the start although most of the students come from a culture where magic is common and have parents who do magic.
- In the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, many kings of fairy kingdoms have actually been humans who were stolen into fairy. The footnotes indicate that while fairies like the idea of being kings, they also tend to be highly capricious, irrational, and easily distracted. Humans are much better at the actual business of ruling, and thus constitute a disproportionate percentage of long-reigning monarchs within fairyland.
- In Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, Mowgli, a native of India Raised by Wolves, is implied to be superior to the vast majority of Indians because his upbringing under "The Law of the Jungle" gives him a set of moral values that are closer to Europeans (which makes absolutely no sense if you think about it). This is particularly noticeable in "In The Rukh", the first Mowgli story to be written although chronologically the last.
- In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, four British, human children travel to Narnia - a world inhabited by talking animals and mythical creatures - and learn that a prophecy declares that four humans will become the rightful rulers of Narnia. When the White Witch is defeated, the natives joyfully accept the children as their kings and queens.
- Played with in The Lord of the Rings. The Sindar and Númenoreans 'are' superior to the Sylvan elves and Rohirrim respectively: but the Sylvan and Sindar elves are distant relatives, and the same is true for the Númenoreans and the Rohirrim. Although culturally distinct, these groups are all tenously related by blood: which somewhat changes the dynamic of the interaction. It's more like if your cousin goes off to college and then comes home and fixes your computer without asking. Kinda rude but like... they were trying to be nice? Also like... in both cases the "invaders" are themselves refugees, so it's a little bit more of an Israel/Palestine situation than a Britain/South Africa situation (especially in the case of the Númenoreans, whose culture is more than a little bit Judaic in flavor). Also there is kind of a good reason to appoint the most powerful guy as ruler, since there is a clear and present threat to everyone's lives (in the form of the Dark Lord Sauron).
- In Michael Bishop's No Enemy But Time, a time-traveling black man fills this role for a group of homo habilis.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe has two Fantasy Counterpart Culture examples in the "Sith" and the "Mandalorians."
- Until a few thousand years before the Battle of Yavin, the Sith were actually a Near-Human species who hailed from the remote world of Korriban. They had red skin, yellow eyes, tentacled goatee beards, and various horns or spikes on assorted parts of their bodies. Eventually some (Human) Dark Jedi came to live with them, intermarried and interbred with them (lightening their skin a good deal and removing their tentacles and horns from the gene pool in the process), learned their language and absorbed their culture, and fused the Sith religion with their own "Dark Side" Force doctrines to create the order of the Dark Lords of the Sith, who became the greatest foreign enemy of the Old Republic and later served (and headed!) the Galactic Empire. Today, racially pure Sith are pretty much extinct (basically the only remnant is that some humans now have red skin), and the name has been appropriated by evil Humans and other non-Korribanese species with Dark Jedi talents.
- The original Mandalorians were genetically drawn from the Taung, a race of monkey-like humanoids who once lived on Coruscant; they were defeated in ancient times by the Human warriors of the Battalions of Zhell, whereupon they fled Coruscant and escaped to the far-off world of Roon, only to relocate to a slightly less distant planet near the Gordian Reach. There the Taung war chief, Mandalore, lent his name to both the newly-colonized world and to his people and their warrior culture. As time passed, the Taung-descended Mandalorians began allowing Humans and other species to emigrate to Mandalore - and ironically, the "pure" Mandalorians eventually relocated to yet another planet. The process started out with Humans other non-Taung species being adopted by Taung Mandalorians; while family ties are essential to Mandalorians, they make no distinction between blood relatives and adopted ones, something which continued to be central to Mandalorian culture even after the original Taung descendants were gone. This departure left non-Taung in control of Mandalore, and these other species remade the order in their own image, resulting thousands of years later in Human Mandalorians such as Journeyman Protector Jaster Mereel, Jango Fett and his son Boba, and Sabine Wren. For comparison, imagine if modern-day (non-Native) Americans completely absorbed and internalized the American Indian way of life, began dressing in Indian garb, and called themselves "Indians" without any irony whatsoever.
- At least six different bearers of the mantle of Faerie Queen in The Dresden Files (Maeve, Lily, Sarissa, Molly, Mab, and (by implication) Titania) were originally mortals, albeit mostly changelings (half-human/half-fey).
- In Warrior Cats, the domestic cat Rusty joins a group of feral cats because their leader Bluestar thinks he has talent. He is renamed Firepaw and goes on to become the leader of that group (his name then becomes Firestar), despite the strong prejudice feral cats have against domestic ones.
- Not strictly a non-white example, but not conventional: In Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear, Kvothe is a white man who learns the martial art of the white natives in a ridiculously short time. He does not become better than his teachers, but it is implied that, with a few more months of training, he would surpass his native friend (who has spent a lot more time practicing).
Live-Action TV
- The Book of Boba Fett is careful to downplay this trope. Boba Fett is played by Maori actor Temuera Morrison, and he instructs the Tusken tribe who adopts him on how to use outside technology that they are unfamiliar with. When he's taught the use of a gaderffii stick, he eventually becomes good enough to disarm his instructor, only for the instructor to put Boba on the ground moments later. The series did still face some criticism along these lines though, for relying on stereotypes of a native culture that is completely helpless against a technologically superior opponent until someone from the opponent's culture helps them, and for later slaughtering the entire native tribe off unceremoniously to advance the main hero's story.
- The Doctor from Doctor Who is this trope in much the same way as Superman. He (She, starting from Series 11) is a Time Traveling alien who originally looked down on other species, until becoming enamoured with the universe, in particular their favourite planet, Earth. They're now one of our greatest defenders, inspiring us to be better.
- Farscape has "Jeramiah Crichton". Stranded on a primitive planet populated by dark-skinned natives, John builds a number of labour-saving devices and is romanced by the chief's daughter. He actually lives a ways out from their village in an attempt to avoid this, but it sucks him in anyway.
- Within Days of being on the station, human Starfleet Commander Benjamin Sisko of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is named as the Emissary of the Prophets by Kai Opaka of the Bajoran people. The less advanced and more spiritual Bajorans quickly begin to worship Sisko and see him as a father figure. Sisko spends the first part of the series trying to ignore them, but unfortunately for him they have his home address. Eventually, Sisko learned to accept his role and became one of the spiritual leaders of Bajor as well as its chief proponent for Federation Membership, and saved the planet multiple times from external threats they are too weak or incompetent to defend themselves against. By the way, Sisko was black, while the majority of the Bajoran people were played by white people.
Tabletop Games
- Rules accompanying the Classic Dungeons & Dragons game's "Hollow World" setting, which was largely inspired by works that use this trope, incorporate a Mighty Surface-Dweller element to adventures involving outer-world PCs. Most of the heavy-damage spell effects such as Fireball are unknown to the Hollow World's natives, ostensibly to evoke the feel of literature in which heroic explorers' use of firearms gives them a tactical advantage over indigenous peoples.
Video Games
- Dragon Age: Inquisition: Given the Fantasy Counterpart Culture nature of Andrastian humans being Medieval European Catholics and the tribal nature of Dalish culture (Word of God has admitted that Thedas elves were inspired by Medieval Jews and that their historical struggle under humans has some real-world parallels to Native Americans and other oppressed minorities), Morrigan, a white human woman, being presented as a greater Eluvian/Elvhen expert than any elven characters (particularly the Dalish Merrill or a Dalish Inquisitor), has left many players getting this vibe. Subverted in that the team's other Elvhen expert, the elf Solas, thinks she's an idiot taking legends at face value as history. He turns out to be right.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- The extinct "Bird Men" were a Beast Race native to what would become the Imperial City Isle in central Cyrodiil. Topal the Pilot, the legendary Aldmeri Bold Explorer and poet, became this to them. He and his men taught them to speak their own words and how to write, so they declared him their lord and offered him their islands. Despite this, the Bird Men would be rendered extinct at the hands of "cat demons," believed by modern scholars to have been the ancient Khajiit.
- Morrowind has it present in the main quest. While the races and cultures involved are fictionalized, getting recognized as the Nerevarine of the Ashlander tribes (and, to a lesser extent, the Hortator of the three Great Houses) amounts to this trope, since your character is a hated outlander and an agent of the Imperial government that has conquered Morrowind — especially if your character is not a Dunmer. Even if you are a Dunmer, as an outlander you're seen as a 'cultural' outsider and are treated as such by the people you're trying to get to recognize you.
- Played with and deconstructed in Far Cry 3. Delving into Rook Island's background and paying attention to the players involved in the current story indicates that it's less of a case of Mighty Whitey and more of a case of Mighty Outsider-In-General. Rook Island has a history of outside individuals coming to the island and taking control of it, only to go mad and be killed by another outsider. The Chinese general who took over the island and left many of the ruins, only to be killed by his superiors, the Japanese who took over only to go mad and be killed by each other, and now Jason and Vaas/Hoyt (as well as Citra). Depending on the ending, either Citra is killed by Dennis or Citra kills Jason after he kills his friends. in either case, it's another example of an outsider effectively dominating the island being killed by another outsider. Even the mythological background of the island involves an outsider (the "prince from the northern kingdom") slaying another malevolent outside power (the giant).
- Mass Effect: Andromeda sees a massive colonization fleet from the Milky Way arrive at the Heleus Cluster, a region of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy that's home to a native alien species called the angara. Within a few months at most, Ryder then instantly masters the use of ancient precursor technology none of the angara ever managed to control despite centuries of effort, chalks up some major wins in their decades-long Hopeless War against Scary Dogmatic Aliens, recovers priceless artifacts of their lost empire, founds colonies on some of their worlds and revives the entire dying star cluster.
- Deconstructed in Tales of Rebirth. It's done with humans and beastmen rather than people of any skin colour but hey. Milhaust is the only Huma and the only non-Force user of the main villains and, wouldn't you know it, he's also The Ace of it. It's his being so incredible and awesome that causes Agarte to fall in love with him. However, because she believes that he could never love her due to them being from different races, she gets it in her head that she needs to get herself a Huma body. Cue the events of the entire plot that ends in Agarte dying and Milhaust revealing that, actually, he felt the same way about her; thereby making everything she did to win his heart completely pointless.
Web Original
- Parodied in A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever, where the protagonist must fight alongside the "Native American Analogue" against the "U.S. Military Analogue".
Western Animation
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Northern Water Tribe gets turned on its head in two episodes as Katara comes in, tells them that Stay in the Kitchen is wrong thinking, gets into an insult match and subsequently assaults the Old Master that teaches waterbending, then proceeds to master their signature martial arts style in a matter of weeks (days?). Sokka fills in the bonus points by wooing The Chief's Daughter. While Katara and Sokka's Southern Water Tribe is related to the Northern Water Tribe and both tribes are relatively dark-skinned, they're culturally distinct and the Northerners tend to have somewhat lighter skin.
- Aang is ethnically Asian and lighter-skinned than Sokka and Katara, and he masters in a few minutes the waterbending techniques that Katara took years to learn. On the one hand Katara had to learn those techniques by herself, without anyone to teach her, on the other hand Aang is The Avatar.
- John Blackstar is an Earthman who gets stranded on the planet Sagar, learns its ways, acquires a powerful weapon, joins a rebellion against its tyrant and becomes its greatest hero. It's no coincidence that Filmation produced this series not long after finishing their version of Flash Gordon. Blackstar's ethnicity is up for debate, though: urban legend has it that he was originally supposed to be black (hence the name), but the network nixed the idea and he was made Ambiguously Brown instead. Filmation's Lou Scheimer later said he had no recollection of this, though. At any event, many of the show's fans have declared John Blackstar to be Native American.
- Futurama: In the episode "Fun On A Bun", Fry is an outsider to the Neanderthal tribe (and unknown to them and him, not even a Neanderthal), but with one Rousing Speech he is able to rally them into a fearsome army to conquer the humans. The chief seems to have no objections.
- Samurai Jack has a subversion in "Jack in Africa". The boy that would grow into Jack (who's Japanese), still a pre-teen, goes to train with a native African village, which is attacked by a different village, and all the inhabitants bar Jack are captured. Jack adapts to the superior weapons that the opposing village has, and fights against them, but, while Jack can fight off one or two, the reason he wins is that he frees the other villagers, who prove that the enemies' better weapons are no match for their own better skills. The Big Bad is not defeated by Jack, but by Jack's mentor, and the day is won by both Jack and the villagers.
- Parodied, and ultimately deconstructed, with the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "A Mathematically Perfect Redemption." An embittered military medic, hiding in a low-tech village to avoid punishment for desertion, introduces the locals to modern medicine and saves several lives, in the process growing more open and less cynical, finding love with the chieftain's child, and ultimately saving the whole village from an invading force. The deconstruction? The medic deliberately called in the invading force so she could fend them off, fake being a hero, and return to the culture she actually wants to live in under the guise of being redeemed by her efforts. That is, she's doing what lost European explorers most typically did with locals: selfishly exploit them and then ditch them without a shred of actual empathy. The parody? The medic is Ensign Peanut Hamper, a non-humanoid utility robot who looks like an expressionless metal egg on skis and is voiced by a very snarky Kether Donohue.
- In Voltron: Legendary Defender, a semi-sentient planet-sized organism called the Balmera has been taken over by The Empire and its inhabitants, the Balmerans, enslaved. The Balmerans can telepathically commune with the Balmera, allowing their entire species to communicate with one another across the entire planet; exceptional individuals are also shown to be able to directly ask the Balmera for help. When the Voltron Force shows up and resolves to free the enslaved natives, it turns out that off-worlder Princess Allura can not only commune with the Balmera as easily as Balmerans who've been doing it their entire lives, she can also perform a ritual restoring the injured planet's Life Energy. For bonus points, the ritual involves Allura being surrounded by a ring of Balmerans who prostrate themselves, presumably before the Balmera itself, but the imagery certainly makes it look as though they're bowing in worship of Allura.