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Black Vikings
- 140 statements
- 25 feature instances
- 72 referencing feature instances
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This trope comes into play when an actor is cast for a role in a historical setting who would appear to be of an unlikely ethnicity to portray such a role, usually because the population of the historical setting tended to be predominately inhabited by people of a different ethnicity. This may occur because the creators were unaware of the actual ethnic composition of the historical setting, value diversity over historical accuracy, had budget problems, or a myriad of other reasons. If the work is a comedy, this may also be simply Rule of Funny. Depending on the time and place, this can actually be surprisingly realistic, due to environments like trade cities and ports being conducive to ethnic mash-ups. For instance, Egypt, while having an ethnically distinct population of its own, has been a trade hub, tourist destination, and cultural melting pot for millennia. It's also important to note that "race" as it is seen today is largely a modern construct only appearing in the past few centuries. It is possible that when a Black Viking appears in film or TV, the character is not intended to be seen as the same race as the actor. The actor used might have simply been the best available for the role, and the writers are merely asking us to use our imagination to make the actor's physical appearance fit the character's. This is actually standard doctrine for modern stage theatrical productions as is called "non-traditional" or colour-blind casting, referring to "the casting of ethnic minority and female actors in roles where race, ethnicity, or sex is not germane", in other words, where it is not relevant to the plot; Othello can never be played by a white actor again, for instance, because his blackness (or Moorishness, in any case) is central to the plot, and blackface has understandably fallen out of vogue. (Aside from special productions like one with Patrick Stewart in the title role, with Othello being a white guy while every other character is black.) This trope can have a touchy relationship with tropes like Plays Great Ethnics; for instance, it's not uncommon (especially in US productions) to cast black actors to portray North African peoples such as the Berbers,note Which is quite wrong. Thanks in part to the long history of Mediterranean trade and the travel barrier of the Sahara desert, North African populations are ethnically and culturally distinct from Sub-Saharan Africans, to the point that in some European languages "White Africa" is a synonym of "North Africa" (though the term is rarely used today). to the objections of those who feel misrepresented as much as they would by having a European actor play the same role (with the additional irony that southern Europeans like Italians and Spaniards sometimes resemble Northern Africans enough to belivably pass as them).note This goes back to the ancient times, as while Mediterranean civilizations were often enormously different in cultural terms, ethnically wise they could be often very hard to tell apart, which is, for instance, the whole joke of Roman playwright Plautus's play Poenulus. Add in the Carthaginian and Muslim conquests of Hispania and the mix goes even higher. A Sub-Trope of Politically Correct History and Colorblind Casting. Compare with Not Even Bothering with the Accent and Race Lift (and Divine Race Lift). Related to Western Samurai, when a non-Japanese character is a samurai right down to the armor and strict adherence to the code of bushido. Compare and Contrast Non-Specifically Foreign, when a character is from a different culture and/or ethnicity in an ambiguous but acknowledged manner. No Real Life Examples, Please! This is strictly a casting trope and not intended for use to describe historical figures. |
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| Black Vikings / int_261c8d3f | type |
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The Simpsons: Carl portrays explorer William Clark (of course, Lenny is Meriwether Lewis). Homer, who, in an inversion, plays the father of Sacajawea (Lisa), lampshades this at one point, welcoming "the white man... and Carl." Carl is canonically from Iceland, and the episode "The Saga of Carl" centers around his Icelandic family. His parents are both white and a possible adoption is never brought up. The later episode "Carl Carlson Rides Again" confirms that he was, indeed, adopted, and his birth parents were African-American (with his dad being a famous bull-riding cowboy). The Simpsons does "color blind" casting quite often, in fact. Whenever the episode takes place in a historical or fantastical setting (e.g. Treehouse of Horror stories), it seems that the main criterion is which established characters fit the role best personality- and relationship-wise. Dr. Hibbert and Apu, for instance, have played all sorts of characters in all sorts of contexts where an African-American or Indian might not ordinarily be found. |
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In the Looney Tunes animated short Jungle Jitters, the queen of an African tribe is revealed to be an elderly white woman. | |
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Inverted with Francis X. Bushlad and his tribe in Tazmania, who are, inexplicably, white Indigenous Australians. | |
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Toni Braxton played Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway from September 1998 to February 1999. | |
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| Black Vikings / int_5c5648a9 | type |
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Parodied in Diamanda Hagan's review of "Vikingdom" when they talk about how historically inaccurate the film is and Malcolm shows up in Viking costume. Happy Viking, Malcolm, and Diamanda get so caught up in the argument that it takes them a while to realize they're all completely aware that black Vikings did in fact exist. | |
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| Black Vikings / int_6af83614 | type |
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In A Thing of Vikings, a How to Train Your Dragon fanfic that puts the events of the first HTTYD film in real-life history and letting the consequences explode from there, one member of the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Empire (Gudmund Hallvarsson) is a literal Black Viking—an Afro-Norse warrior who is the child of a retired Varangian who returned to Sweden a generation earlier with an African concubine. | |
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In Fushigi Yuugi, Nakago is blonde-haired and blue-eyed, yet lives in ancient China. He's explicitly stated to be a foreigner and later revealed to be a member of a tribe that lived in the Kutou region that tended to have those traits. There might be some factual basis to this. | |
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In the 1999 Broadway revival of The Lion in Winter, African-American actors Laurence Fishburne and Chuma Hunter-Gault were cast as (British) King Henry II and his son Richard Lionheart, respectively. The actors who played Henry's two other sons and his wife were white. | |
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A Scotsman in Egypt has repeated mentions of Middle Easterners with red hair caused to Scotland's World Domination starting in Egypt and spreading from there. Of course, as one Scot proudly proclaims, the Scots are good at two things: fighting and making more Scots. A similar joke is made of the Irish. |
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Gargoyles features one, not in its many historical flashbacks, but in modern-day New York — a recurring antagonist there is Mafia don Tony Dracon. While his organization consists almost entirely of Mooks who don't diverge in the slightest from a stereotypical template of a suit-wearing, slick-haired Italian-American, the role of The Consigliere is held by a slightly less sharp-dressed black man known only as "Glasses", even though the Mafia is usually very selective about the ethnicity of its membership and the consigliere is almost always a full-blooded Sicilian. Word of God vaguely implies there's some sort of personal history between Dracon and Glasses which allowed the pair of them to circumvent the Mafia's usual restrictions. | |
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As in the film, the Broadway production of Chicago has often cast an African-American actress as Mama Morton. A few black actors have played Billy Flynn as well. | |
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In Frozen (2018), black actors commonly play King Agnarr (making him a literal example), Kristoff, and the Hidden Folk. | |
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Wonder Woman: The first example of this trope in the series was the Silver Age character Nubia who was Diana's long lost, black sister who was also made of clay but was kidnapped by Ares. Since the Perez run from the 1980s, the Amazons of Themyscira have been shown as being a multi-racial society with Amazons from Europe, East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. There is also a separate tribe of mostly black and Arab Amazons called the Bana-Mighdall which Artemis comes from. | |
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Broadway's colorblind casting frequently results in this. Case in point, Norm Lewis as Les Misérables' Javert in the 2006 Broadway revival as well as the 2010 25th Anniversary Concert. While it's entirely possible that there were black people in France during that time period (indeed, a black actor played Enjolras in the most recent Broadway revival), it's not likely that one could have risen to Javert's rank in the police departmentnote though in the book it's said that Javert's parents were "gypsies", reading to some fan debate as to what exactly his ethnicity is, as it's uncertain whether that means specifically Romani, or just vagrants more generally. | |
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At least once, the African-American soldier Gabe Jones, of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, impersonated a German soldier. He appeared to have no greater or lesser difficulty pulling this off than any of the white Howlers, which is actually a case of Reality Is Unrealistic. Gabe's presence in the Howling Commandos is itself an example, though, as the US Army was segregated during World War II. The same can be said of Jackie Johnson in Sgt. Rock's Easy Company. Although as noted on other pages, the Commandos and Easy Company were select units so their commanders had discretion over personnel decisions. |
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It also happens with other major figures of The Bible, such as Abraham, Moses, David, etc, who look almost exclusively pale in European artistic depictions (because of local models being used). | |
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Hamilton: Major productions of the musical usually cast the US Founding Fathers and associates with people of color. This is done for strictly stylistic reasons, however, and the play itself treats the characters as white men who own black slaves, etc., with the jarring contrast this creates being part of the point. | |
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In Epic Rap Battles of History, Snoop Dogg is casted to play the role of Moses. Probably due to Rule of Cool. | |
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The Secret of Kells has Italian, British, Chinese, and African monks living in the monastery in Ireland. As recounted in How The Irish Saved Civilization, though, refugees from all over the Roman world went to Ireland fleeing the barbarian horde, so the monks of Ireland at the time would, in theory, be cosmopolitan, although Chinese would be pushing it a bit even then. | |
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Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler is often played by a black actor, as James Earl Jones played the part in otherwise all-white production. | |
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In Lucifer (2000 series), an immortal woman currently going by "Paulina" was once Erishad, a priestess in ancient Chaldea (a kingdom in first-millenium B.C.E. Mesopotamia, now Iraq). A flashback depicts her as a natural blonde even then. This would've been near impossible within a region where everyone was dark-haired, and which as far as we know wouldn't have had any contact with northern Europeans until over two thousand years later. | |
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| Black Vikings / int_d7c4626a | type |
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Subverted in an issue of The Sandman (1989) featuring the immortal Hob Gadling attending a Renaissance fair with his current girlfriend (and making a lot of cutting comments about it.) When Hob asks his girlfriend why she isn't the Queen of the Fair, she points out her ethnicity (she's black) and the fact that the fair is trying to be at least a little authentic (she specifically says, "There were no black Queens of England.") To which Hob immediately replies, "Catherine of Aragon. If she'd been living in Selma, Alabama in the early 60s, they'd have made her ride at the back of the bus." Presumably, he would have to have been referring to the "just one drop" rule since it has been claimed, although not substantiated, that Catherine of Aragon had a black (or Moorish) ancestor just a few generations back, considering that Catherine had red hair, blue eyes, and very fair skin. | |
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Karin from UQ Holder! could easily pass as being Japanese, despite the fact though she's implied to be a Gender Flipped Judas Iscariot. | |
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Frozen II has Captain Mattias, a black soldier in a 19th-century Scandinavian kingdom. The fact that he's black is less jarring than the fact that he and his soldiers still use medieval swords and shields. Mathias implies that his father moved to Arendelle, making him a first-generation immigrant, which could possibly avert this trope. | |
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Lampshaded in Full Metal Panic! when Sousuke explains to Nami that he learned to pilot Arm Slaves in the mujahideen when he was a preteen. Nami buys the age much more readily than the faction. | |
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