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Ethnic Magician

 Ethnic Magician
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 Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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In most fantasy series, if the resident spellcaster isn't a long-white bearded Merlin type, or a Vain Sorceress, then they're probably reminiscent of a non-European culture (or at least a European culture outside the Western European Germanic- and Romance-speaking countries). Part of this is Flawless Token. After all, if magic is that world's equivalent of science, somebody particularly adept at it is The Smart Guy. Also, many African and Asian cultures (not just Egypt) were already advanced in terms of agriculture, literature and so on, while Europe was just getting itself together. On the other hand, it becomes something of a cultural Flanderization, reinforces stereotypes of non-whites having some mystical nature, and may evoke a sense of the hero being full of valor and vigor, while the darker skinned spellcaster is a weaker Squishy Wizard.
Common in sword and sorcery settings, though in Historical Fantasy or Urban Fantasy settings, the "reminiscent" part can be filed off, with the character hailing from an actual culture non-white culture rather than a Fantasy Counterpart Culture
.
For instance, Native Americans will fill the mystic slot in Westerns. Those of African origin, including their descendants in the Americas (especially in Haiti and New Orleans), would practice Hollywood Voodoo; meanwhile, Aboriginal Australians are steeped in Hollywood Dreamtime. Scandinavian works have historically tended to use the Sami people, and Japanese works often use white or Chinese people for this role, but the principle is the same.
Not to be confused with Magical Negro (or its supertrope Magical Minority Person) or Token Wizard, though both overlap from time to time. Often results in Religion is Magic. Related to Magical Romani, Magical Native American, and Magical Asian. Compare Witch Doctor, which may be the progenitor.
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DBTropes
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Ethnic Magician
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The sisters offering teleportation service in the Pirate chapter of the second The Lost Vikings game are stereotypical old Gypsie women.
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When Ranma from Ranma ½ needs esoteric lore, he goes to Cologne, an unspeakably ancient Chinese wisewoman.
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In Mampato we sometimes find characters that fall into this trope, in stories located in places like the island of Rapa Nui of the fifteenth century or the city of Baghdad of the seventh century (with djinns and magic carpets), although there are also sorcerers more western, like Morgana le Fay.
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Zezylry in Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire... though he isn't very good at it.
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Queen Hvit in The Saga of Hrolf Kraki who was the illegitimate daughter of a Sami chieftain.
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The venerable Shaman in Bravestarr.
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Young Justice Has Anita Fite, A Haitian-American voudou practitioner.
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Ethnic Magician
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Stand Still, Stay Silent: Lalli and Onni Hotakainen are post-apocalyptic versions of the Magical Finn. It's also mentioned in the comic that Finland has taken to worshipping the Old Gods and spirits to an even larger extent than the other nations of the Known World, and have the highest relative number of magicians. (The author is also a Finn herself.)
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 Stand Still, Stay Silent (Webcomic)
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May Chang from Fullmetal Alchemist is from Xing, the setting's equivalent of China. She's the only practitioner of alkahestry seen in the story.
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Ethnic Magician
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The Earthsea setting was created simply to avert many heroic fantasy tropes, with the aforementioned pale barbarians and darker-skinned advanced races, but in doing so helped cement this trope.
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The Snow Queen features the Old Finn Woman and the Old Lapp Woman, who have some vaguely defined but shared magical powers.
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Ethnic Magician
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In the original, Arabian Nights version of Aladdin, the main characters were Chinese while the Evil Sorcerer was from North Africa. The Disney version settled for making the Evil Sorcerer more of a stereotypical Arab than the heroes, and a villainously-upgraded historical character as well.
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 Arabian Nights
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A purely literal example in an episode of King of the Hill featuring a Hispanic stage magician.
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This is taken even further with the alternate-universe DC Comics Bombshells series, which reimagines Zatanna herself as "the daughter of a Jew and a gypsy", whom Joker's Daughter smuggled out of the Nazi death camps.
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In Holes, Madame Zeroni is an old Egyptian woman with dark skin and a very wide mouth. She puts a curse on Elya and his descendants for not carrying her up the mountain so she can drink from the stream.
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Mild examples in Night Watch (Series), since this is an Urban Fantasy setting, many powerful Others are very old, and don't usually talk about their origins. Geser is a powerful Light Other, originally from Tibet, although he has adopted a Russian name after moving to Moscow and his vaguely Asian appearance doesn't seem strange to people (considering how many ethnic groups live in Russia, it's not surprising). He is, occasionally, seen walking around in an Eastern robe and pointy shoes. Zabulon's origins are unclear, although an old friend of his calls him Arthur in a spin-off novel, and another novel indicates that he lived in Ireland for a time, so he may have been born in the isles thousands of years ago. The latest novel also introduces a powerful Jewish mage whose spells tend to be related to his culture in some manner (for example, he creates a golem to fight the Tiger and commands it in Hebrew). Overall, it's not that magic is different from culture to culture (Magic A Is Magic A, after all), but the way the Others use magic tends to be affected by their culture. For example, Western Others tend to go for more direct magic. When Anton meets a Taiwanese Other, he notes how intricate and beautiful the Asian mage's spells are, composed of multiple interconnected layers like a tapestry.
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300: During the battle, the Persians send out troops who chuck explosives of some kind. The narrator refers to them as cowardly magicians.
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Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: "The Moor" Azeem was added to the Robin Hood mythology as a Token Minority (a massive historical liberty), and spends most of the movie commenting how barbaric and primitive Britain is. At one point, he introduces them to black powder explosives which they adapt to using rather quickly. He's not actually a magician though; he just has better technology. The whole Middle East did at the time (although the explosives are a little dubious).
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In the Earthsea miniseries, most of the characters (canonically brown, including Ged, with a few black) were given a Race Lift to become white — save for Ged's mentor, played by Danny Glover. So the only black actor was the (quite literally) Magical Negro who helped the white hero with his magical talents.
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Pathfinder:
The continent of Garund (a much-more-developped-than-usual fantasy Africa counterpart) has a few examples, such as Old-Mage Jatembe and his Ten Magic Warriors, who are largely responsible for humans in general rediscovering wizardry after Earthfall and the Age of Anguish, and the alchemist Artokus Kirran, discoverer and crafter of the nation of Thuvia's main claim to fame, export, and unifier, the Sun Orchid Elixir.
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Zigzagged in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Everyone in the world comes from a Fantasy Counterpart Culture for either China, Japan, Tibet, the Inuit, or the Aztecs, meaning there are no "Europeans" to compare them to. At the same time, however, each nation and corresponding ethnicity is still firmly linked to one particular element and its associated bending style, which is part of why Aang had to travel all over the world so he could learn all the styles where they were actually practiced, so in that sense they're still all Ethnic Magicians to each other.
The Guru Pathik is the best example, he is the one who helps Aang to open his Chakras and enter the Avatar State, and he seems to be a man of Indian descent, the only one in the entire Avatar universe.
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Dungeons & Dragons:
In the Birthright setting, the Khinasi culture (the setting's generic Middle Eastern Turkish/Persian/Arabic mishmash) is particularly renowned for its wizards, who are held in even greater esteem than magic-users of the other human cultures, and this is reinforced by the Khinasi getting a cultural bonus to Intelligence.
In the Ravenloft setting, the Vistani are a race of magical gypsies, based off of the stereotyped gypsy fortune teller.
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In Berserk, the Western-analogue cultures like Midland and Tudor have very few (human) magic-users, really only a couple of witches who subscribe to an oppressed, near-dead nature-focused pagan religion. The Kushan, on the other hand, an Indian / Persian Fantasy Counterpart Culture, have sorcerers out the yin-yang. This is justified; Midland, Tudor, and the other "Western" countries are tightly controlled by the Holy See, which is an exaggerated take on the worst of Inquisition-era Christianity, while the Kushan Empire is run by an Apostle.
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Early in The Vampire Diaries, most witches are shown to be descended from one apparent family line of black people... Descendants of a handmaiden... The writers may have notice this, as going farther back in the family tree shows her ancestor to be Qetsiyah, one of the most powerful characters in the show's mythology. Averted in later seasons with the introduction of other clans of witches of varying races. The aversion continues in the other series in the TVD-verse, The Originals and Legacies.
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In Hundred Companions second in command One-Eye is described on the author's blog as looking like Morgan Freeman cosplaying Gandalf.
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The Black Company has two black wizards, One-Eye and Tam-tam, this is justified because the black company is called precisely because originally all its members were black, from the equivalent of Africa in this fantasy world , although over the centuries their demography changed and these two magicians - who are also very old - are the only black men left in the company.
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One of the characters in BioShock 2's multiplayer mode is an Indian mentalist and stage performer named Suresh Sheti, who is implied to have possessed prodigious psychic powers even before coming to Rapture and discovering plasmids.
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In Erik the Viking, the mysterious wise woman Freya was played by Eartha Kitt with an exaggeration of her customary vaguely-foreign accent.note Born and raised in South Carolina, Miss Kitt had a Dutch-speaking stepfather and spent many years in France. She spoke eleven languages.
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In Fable II, two of the three legendary heroes are white, as is the hero (if he/she isn't blue), but the Hero of Will is dark skinned with cornrows, scholarly, and voiced by Book.
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The Lord of the Rings mentions that the less Europeanish corners of Middle-Earth have sorcerers and magical cults. Although you have to bear in mind that this doesn't say anything about if they are actual 'magic sorcerers' or just believed to be, as the typical generic fantasy spellcasting kind of wizards doesn't exist in Middle-Earth. And "wizards" like Gandalf & co. are another thing entirely.
And there are also sorcerers who come from Númenórean descent as well, though according to Faramir this generally does not happen in Gondor. The Witch-King himself was one prior to his, ah... alteration. "Sorcery" (as opposed to the wizard or elven magic) is generally presented as the province of Sauron and his minions, regardless of what culture they hail from.
The Drúedain are described as a race of men with some degree of magic, who also build statues of fat men sitting cross-legged and engage in meditative techniques while in the same position themselves, definitely evoking oriental Buddhist imagery.
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In The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Midi isn't actually a witch, but everyone—including the other protagonist Ava—treats her like she is because she is "The Negresse."
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In Cardcaptor Sakura, Clow Reed is famous for merging Eastern and Western magic styles, because his father was British and his mother was Chinese.
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A brief and fascinating example in M*A*S*H, of all places, in the fifth-season episode "Exorcism". When Col. Potter orders a jangseung post removed from the camp, a rash of incidents ensue — mostly annoying, a few more serious. Just coincidence, right? Until an old farmer jumps in front of a jeep to scare his own evil spirits away and is badly hurt. His English-speaking granddaughter insists on getting a "priestess" to exorcise him and the entire camp. What she means is a mudang. Her sacred dance, probably a dodanggut ritual, is shown at some length, and it works. Klinger might be interested in the fact that these shamans cross-dress, because they embody male and female spirits.note  The actress (if she was an actress and not an actual mudang, keeping in mind this was all filmed in Southern California where there are many Koreans) has never been identified.
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Averted in Doctor Strange (2016), as the Ancient One was Race Lifted from Tibetan Chinese to white, specifically Celtic. (The role was also Gender Flipped from male to female, but that's beside the point.) The film also features non-white sorcerers such as Mordo (black) and Wong (Asian), with the overall effect that magic is unrelated to race.
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The Scorpion King inverts this in that the primary Squishy Wizard is not only white, but very British, and played by Bernard Hill. Though the Sorceress is played by Kelly Hu, and appears very much Asian.
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The red priests from A Song of Ice and Fire are seen this way, at least in Westeros where their monotheistic religion never took hold. Of the three prominent red priests in the series, Scary Black Man Moqorro fits this trope the most.
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Everquest: The Erudites. Their skin was changed to gray for the sequel.
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In Age of Conan, most of the magic classes are Stygian (an Egyptian/Middle Eastern Fantasy Counterpart Culture) or Khitan (Chinese/Korean based Fantasy Counterpart Culture).
And in the Conan the Barbarian universe, Stygians are indeed the most common sorcerers of the world (and Conan's most frequent villains as a result) along with certain sorcerers of Khitai.
There are also sorcerers from Hyperborea, which is somewhere around the real-world Greenland - these ones are white.
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The Occultist class in Darkest Dungeon is Middle Eastern looking and wears a turban. He's almost certainly a reference to Abdul Alhazred "the Mad Arab", the H. P. Lovecraft character who wrote the Necronomicon.
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Mage: The Ascension Justified due to the way the setting's metaphysics work.
In universe, magic works around and is flavored by the belief of the practitioner. As mages are fundamentally human, and the game takes place in an Urban Fantasy setting, many of he playable factions are based off of real life mystical practices and take on many ancient culture's aesthetics and beliefs.
In-universe these practices are passed down from mentor to student for hundreds if not thousands of years. This results in many rituals and spells taking on a thoroughly "ethnic feel".
It's important to note that ethnicity of any kind is by no means necessary to practice magic. Just that the form any given rituals may take are likely to be colored by the specific mage performing it, and how much stock they place in the tools they are using.
Most of the more blatantly "ethnic" magicians are found in the Dreamspeakers. This was a political move by the other (mostly white and European) Traditions, lumping them all together into one group. Needless to say, this really pissed off a lot of them, with a significant portion of the new "Tradition" leaving mage society entirely in disgust.
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Subverted in Demon Knights - the Moorish genius Al Jabr is the only one on the team who doesn't rely on some type of magic.
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The Vinland Sagas: Clearly the Skraelings, the natives the Norsemen encounter in Vinland, are magic-users. They put a sleep spell on Thorvald and his companions (Saga of the Greenlanders), make Thorfinn and his party believe an illusionary host is attacking them from the rear (Saga of Erik the Red), and sink into the earth like ghosts (Saga of Erik the Red).
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Mohammed Avdol from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, an appropriately dressed Egyptian fortune teller who introduces the main cast to the concept of a Stand. His own stand, appropriately enough, is named Magician's Red and gives him power over flame.
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The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal: The soothsaying woman who tells Ingimund that he will settle in Iceland is a 'Finn' (i.e. a Sami), and so are the three wizards whom Ingimund hires to undertake a spirit-journey to Iceland.
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Game of Thrones has the Red Priests, who are considered exotic to Westerosi society. One of the priestesses depicted in the series was played by an East Asian actress, and per Word of God hails from the China-equivalent region of Yi Ti in the far east of Essos. Another we see is black. The rest so far have been white though.
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Chung Ling Soo was a stage magician who invoked this in his acts. In reality, he was a white New Yorker named Will Robinson (no, not that one), an actor who already specialized in performing in blackface, and originally used the disguise to fool a casting agency looking to compete against the "mysterious Chinese conjurer" Jin Lingfu. Lingfu, who was actually Chinese, was not amused.
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In The Magicians, Brakebills has hired professors drawn from a wide variety of cultures over the years; along with the Native American Professor Foxtree and the Haitan Professor Petitpoids, there's also mention of hiring Micronesian shamans, Egyptian Blue Collar Warlocks, and Tuareg necromancers.
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While the Mahou Sentai Magiranger and Power Rangers Mystic Force use Western, Harry Potter-style magic, their resident Sixth Rangers Hikaru and Daggeron have more of an Arabian flair, including a genie in a lamp and a magic carpet. Daggeron is also played by Maori actor John Tui. In addition, Lunagel and her counterpart Claire (in her capacity as Gatekeeper) have distinct Romani motifs.
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Zecora is the closest approximation of this in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. She is a zebra, the only one in Ponyville, and grew up in the Fantasy Counterpart Culture to East Africa. She lives in the Everfree Forest, collecting various herbs for use in potions or elixirs. Oh, and she speaks entirely in rhyme, so that's nice. Despite all that, a surprising amount of effort went into her character design and backstory given that she wasn't meant to be a recurring character (the producers even tried, unsuccessfully, to cast a Swahili-speaking voice actress) and her debut episode was used for an Aesop about not fearing people who are different.
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And in the Conan the Barbarian universe, Stygians are indeed the most common sorcerers of the world (and Conan's most frequent villains as a result) along with certain sorcerers of Khitai.
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Diablo II mixes it up a bit — the two distinctly non-white heroes are the Sorceress (a Squishy Wizard type with a haughty intellectual personality) and the Paladin (a decidedly non-squishy fighting priest type, complete with lots of analogies to real-world monotheistic religions). The Barbarian class is the only one that doesn't use magic of any kind, as his culture forbids it, and he is white.
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Hadji from Jonny Quest. "Sim Sim Salabim!" anyone? The update of the cartoon, Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures, had Hadji be a computer hacker instead of a mystic.
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Aces with magical powers in Wild Cards are almost exclusively this. Justified in that the powers manifest from subconscious, so western people usually get super-strength, flight, telekinesis and other stuff, while people of less advanced cultures get whatever powers are known in their native cultures. Likewise, western jokers are almost exclusively half-animal hybrids, while in other countries they tend to be mythical beasts: among infected Mayans there were literally hundreds of Quetzalcohuatli.
The most straightforward example of this trope is Fortunato, a tantric magician ace who is a twofer minority: black/Japanese, his powers have nothing to do with his nationality but root in the fact that he is a pimp, thus gets sex-based powers. His counterpart, Astronomer, whose powers use rape and violence as a power source, is very Caucasian, though.
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Usually played straight in Tex Willer, as non-white magic users tend to be this. Then we have El Morisco, who is Egyptian but has knowledge in all forms of magic...
They also escape the negative connotations by being extremely competent at what they do and often physically fit (indeed, the only ones who are Squishy Wizards are Mefisto and his son Yama, who are whites, the Tibetan Padma, who is a monk and thus eats very little, and the Egyptian El Morisco, who is rather fat), with Rayado being an all-around badass who deflected bullets with his axe and overpowered and nearly killed Tex in hand-to-hand combat.
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Diablo III has a white Barbarian, a black Witch Doctor, and an Asian Wizard.
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In the Genzo extra, the Big Bad Genzaemon mentions the use of sorcery "from the western lands".
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In Rick Cook's Wiz Biz series, the leader of the Wizard Council is Bal-Simba, a towering black man who has his teeth filed to points and wears a lionskin loincloth. It's practically a lampshade...
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Hellblazer had two African magicians, one who needed Constantine's help with a famine demon in the first issue, and another who ate fellow magicians to gain their power and memories (and uses hyenas and baboons as attack dogs).
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Quest for Glory has several of these, which is only fitting in a series where each game takes place within a different Fantasy Counterpart Culture. Of the full-human spellcasters, Erasmus is Germanic; Aziza, Al Scurva, and Ad Avis are Arabic; the Leopardmen are African; and Magda is Romani.
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The Battle Mage in Sacred is notoriusly dark-skinned, and one of his armor sets is a Mystical India costume complete with a turban, a curved sword and a crescent-shaped shield.
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In the most recent versions of Gauntlet, the wizard is a black Egyptian and the Sorceress is black as well.
By default. All the other colour variations of the classes are white. In fact, every class can be black if the yellow variant (default for spellcasters) is used.
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Negima! Magister Negi Magi features Western, Hermetic Magic-using magi interacting with Eastern, Onmyodo-using ones, thus managing to fulfill this trope from two cultural perspectives.
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Mahajarama from Rockman.EXE practices "yoga magic", is a master of disguise, and operates the Merlin-esque Magicman.
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Calpurnia Crisp from Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, the only Black witch in the entire coven. A subversion too, considering her magic is in no way linked to her ethnic roots.
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In her first fantasy manga, Urusei Yatsura, she featured a comedic inversion of the trope in Tsubame Ozono, boyfriend to Sakura, the magical miko. Tsubame is a Japanese man who went and studied Western magical traditions; he calls himself a "master of Western Black Magic" and dresses up like a Western-style stage magician as a result. This is highlit in one story where he fights a duel against Sakura's uncle, a magical Buddhist priest; whereas Sakurambo conjures Obake during the fight, Tsubame counters by summoning creatures from Western stories, such as a Medusa and a Frankenstein's Monster.
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Dimension X: In "The Castaways", the island natives cast a curse before killing themselves by intentionally drowning in the lagoon where the bomb is being tested. Subverted, the Polynesian "natives" are actually aliens from another planet; the lagoon is holding their spaceship and they needed nuclear power because they had run out of fuel.
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In Parallel Dementia Commander Silverton fufills this role, most visably in This Comic
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Dexter's Laboratory: An episode has Dexter and his friends playing a Dungeons & Dragons-style game. Two of his friends are the knight and ranger, while his Asian friend is a wizard.
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The first Conan the Barbarian (1982) film had James Earl Jones (though he was no Squishy Wizard in the beginning) and Mako as the respective evil and good wizards. The second one also had Akiro, who also fits.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

 Ethnic Magician
processingCategory2
Characters as Device
 Ethnic Magician
processingCategory2
Race Tropes
 Ethnic Magician
processingCategory2
Speculative Fiction Tropes
 Ethnic Magician
processingCategory2
Stock Characters
 Etrigan (Comic Book) / int_8022419d
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
 Nico Minoru (Comic Book) / int_8022419d
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Ethnic Magician
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type
Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
 Heimskringla / int_8022419d
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
 The Kingdom of Little Wounds / int_8022419d
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
 Prophet's House / int_8022419d
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Ethnic Magician
 Skin Hunger
seeAlso
Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
 Wiz Biz / int_8022419d
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Ethnic Magician
 DasAuto
seeAlso
Ethnic Magician
 Grand Vizier Jafar
seeAlso
Ethnic Magician
 A Christmas Carol (2019) / int_8022419d
type
Ethnic Magician
 Friday the 13th: The Series / int_8022419d
type
Ethnic Magician
 Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire / int_8022419d
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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Ethnic Magician
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