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— Let them call us "savage". Cause that's what we like to be. — Helloween, Savage
As a great band once said, modern life is rubbish - and there are plenty of people who would like to escape it and go live off the fat of the land. The Going Native trope plays to this fantasy by having a character lifted out of his typical environment and thrust into a new one - often by being captured in war, or being found unconscious in the wilderness - only to become a part of that new world. For example, an explorer who discovers a lost tribe of Incas and ends up joining their ranks. If he is the protagonist then his old life will come back to haunt him in some way, often in the form of his old people attacking his new allies.
Going Native stories don't just have to be about people from modern civilisations living humbler, more traditional lifestyles however; the trope also includes stories about humans living with aliens, or cops going undercover and turning into villains. (See Becoming The Mask.) The important factor is that the character gives up connections to his old life and pursues a new one.
If there is a racist element to the story — i.e. a white man who not only becomes part of a tribe but also outdoes the black/asian/whatever people and becomes a great warrior (or even survives their destruction) by virtue of his race — then the story is in the Mighty Whitey subgenre of Going Native fiction.
Compare: Mighty Whitey, Raised By Wolves, Becoming The Mask, Between Two Worlds
Examples
Anime
- Jyu Oh Sei draws heavily from this, with the very much civilized lead eventually outdoing the natives of Chimera.
Comic Books
- In the Tintin comics The Broken Ear and Tintin and the Picaros, the titular reporter comes across Ridgewell, an English explorer who ended up living with natives in the South American rain forest.
- Down features two police officers who both go undercover in the drug trade and find themselves becoming part of the criminal underworld.
- Sleeper is about an undercover secret intelligence agent working to bring down a massive supervillain cartel - unfortunately, the bad life seems to agree with him...
- The early Aliens Vs Predator comics featured a woman who ended up becoming a Predator warrior.
- And sucked horribly at it, to the comics' credit.
- Ultimate X-Men had the "cop infiltrates gang" variant played in reverse — Wolverine joined the X-Men to assassinate Professor X, but found himself seduced by Xavier's visions (and Jean Grey's barely legal charms) and ended up joining the team.
- Swedish comic "Johan Vilde" (Johan Savage), is about a swedish boy in 17th century west Africa, who is raised as the son of a prominent merchant from one of the larger tribes/nations in the region.
Film
Literature
- Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels are full of Terran citizens going native on Darkover; Andrew Carr and Magdalen Lorne are notable examples.
- In Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Kurtz goes into Africa and after a spectacular backstory breakdown, goes native in horrifying ways, inverting the European life he came from.
- Stanislaus Grummann from The Subtle Knife spent the rest of his days as a Siberian shaman.
- In the Liaden Universe books by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, this is an occupational hazard for the Scouts, whose task of exploring new worlds often results in them spending long periods immersed in alien cultures. Many an experienced scout, even among those who resisted the temptation, has retained traits from a culture where he or she felt particularly at home.
- In The Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor flees to Earth, goes native, marries Loren, and fathers a son before the Ellimist returns him to his Andalite form and the StarSword.
- In Stephenie Meyer's adult novel The Host, the alien invaders, the so-called Souls are physically inserted into a host body, and eradicate the host's mind. Except in the titular character's case, in which the host's mind is still present and they both think inside Melanie's body. Later, the ragtag group of human survivors finally finds another group of survivors with their own dual-minded alien/person, who literally refers to the situation as "going native".
- Uncomfortably in JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings backstory, the so-called Black Numenoreans who escaped the destruction of the island-realm often ended up living in cultures loyal to Mordor, and becoming their leaders. At least some of the Nazgul belonged to this group of people, as well as the Mouth of Sauron.
- Not too uncomfortably, since Tolkien claims they were racists.
- And they're also not black-skinned. Just as white as regular Numenoreans.
- Jimbo in Cloud Of Sparrows came to Japan from America as a Christian missionary; after being badly injured and subsequently rescued by a group of children, he ended up becoming a Buddhist monk who speaks fluent Japanese.
- Ho Sa in the Conqueror books. When he first joins the Mongols in Lords of the Bow, he is initially reluctant, but later catches himself enjoying his new life. By Wolf of the Plains, he doesn't want to go back.
- John Blackthorne from James Clavell's Shogun is an English sailor shipwrecked in old Japan. Unlike his shipmates, he decides to learn the language and cultural skills needed to fit into the unfamiliar society, and eventually decides that it's preferable to the society he came from in a number of ways. He's no Mighty Whitey: he has a lot of difficulty learning the new ways, becomes only moderately competent, does not impress people, and is usually irrelevant.
- Liet Kynes and later Paul Atreides and Jessica adopting the Fremen ways in Dune.
Live Action TV
- In the later series of Northern Exposure, Joel ends up living with native villagers on the banks of the river.
- Happens at least twice in Stargate SG-1:
- In A Hundred Days, Jack O'Neill gets trapped on a planet after a meteor hits the Stargate and buries it. He gets a quick Time Skip montage wherein he gets married and settles down, only to get rescued by the end of the episode.
- In Fallen, Daniel Jackson wakes up on a strange planet with no memory of his previous life (before or after he Ascended To A Higher Plane Of Existence) and becomes a part of the local tribe. The status quo is returned, along with his memory, by the end of the episode ... again.
- In the second season of Heroes, Mohinder works with Mr. Bennet to take down the Company from within, but eventually becomes convinced that the Company is really the heroic organization and Bennet was misleading him.
- In an episode of the revived Doctor Who, a stranded alien has been covertly living as a Welsh politician, and, even as she plots to blow up the entire Earth to facilitate her escape, grumbles that the London-based government wouldn't notice if Wales slid into the sea. She then immediately labels the moment as an example of this trope.
- Lost: Locke "goes native" by leaving the 815 camp to join the Others. Also, in season 5, several of the 815ers join the Dharma Initiative and lead happy lives in the 1970s.
- Zeb Macahan from How The West Was Won
- The Tams in Firefly
- Thanks to phlebotinum-induced amnesia, Captain Kirk winds up accidentally going native in the ST:TOS episode The Paradise Syndrome. Being original Star Trek, this of course is reversed by the end of the episode.
Video Games
- In an "undercover cop switches sides" example of the trope, the John Woo game Stranglehold features Jerry Ying, Tequila's partner, who has gone undercover with Wong's Dragon Claw syndicate. The more time he spends around Wong's crew, however, the more he begins to identify with them instead of the cops he's supposed to be one of. It all comes to a head when Wong orders Jerry to kill Tequila and Wong's own daughter Billie, who Tequila loves and had a daughter by. Tequila survives, but Billie is not so lucky, setting up a furious showdown between partners as Tequila seeks vengeance for Billie.
- The Chozo in the first Metroid Prime, or at least the ones from Tallon IV, resigned to all their years of technological advance and returned to living as peaceful, humble tribes.
- Well, not quite - they still retained a measure of technology in order to keep Metroid Prime locked up, after all - but the Primals from Metroid Prime 3 are more suited to this, what with them slaughtering the Lords of Science on Bryyo and subsequently descending into murderous tribal savagery.
- Many characters with Multiple Endings in the Star Ocean games whose relationship with someone from another planet gets to a certain point will choose to live on that planet with them.
- In the Worlds of Ultima game The Savage Empire, several recruitable party members are Expys from previous games who have gone through this trope, with amnesia to boot.
- In Splinter Cell: Double Agent, the NSA constantly worries about Sam Fisher going native and actively joining the John Brown's Army. In the bad ending, that's exactly what he does. In the neutral ending, that's what everyone thinks he does.
- In Dragon Quest VII, Kiefer abandons your party to join the Deja tribe of the past. It is strongly hinted that Aira of the Deja tribe of the present (who joins your party) is a descendant of Kiefer.
Western Animation
- In the Futurama episode "Obsoletely Fabulous", Bender is stranded on an island with outdated robots and goes native by replacing his metal exterior with wood. He then launches a guerrilla war against civilization. But it turns out to be all a dream.
- Somewhat parodied on Recess when TJ gets captured by the kindergarteners for the afternoon and becomes assimilated into their primitive kindergartener society.
- The Maximals in Beast Wars are Mechanical Lifeforms who recently evolved the ability to copy organic life. But by the end of the show, one teammate prefers Earth's organic nature and wants to stay there as a tiger. Also, in the Sequel-Which-Need-Not-Be-Named, the premise becomes changing Cybertron to model Earth, which Megatron and Rhinox are vehemently against. (If Megatron didn't also want to become the Last Of His Kind, this troper would have cheered for him. Who wants to be a squishy organic when you can live for millions of years as a robot?)
- The Road To El Dorado is about two Spaniards who wind up discovering El Dorado and masquerade as gods. One is only in it for the gold, but the other grows attached to the people, and ultimately protect them from the Cortez's expedition.
Real Life
- The French colonies in what is today Canada were an exercise in this. Many white trappers adopted native customs of dress, residence, and even face-painting. Also, many women who were "abducted" by "savage injuns" refused to leave their new tribes when their families found them.
- What's with the quotation marks? They were abducted. Stockholm doesn't make it less so.
- The fact that many women may have gone off willingly to escape abusive husbands, oppressive fathers or the rut of everyday life.
- A very old example is of Gonzalo Guerrero, one of the shipwrecked Spanish sailors that Cortez encountered on his expedition. Unlike his companion Aguilar Guerrero opted to stay with the Maya and would eventually side with them against his former countrymen.
- Many of the Norman families who settled in Ireland after the invasion of 1169 eventually became "Hiberniores Hibernicis ipsis"-more Irish than the Irish themselves- to the point where the government passed the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1367, which banned the "English" in Ireland from adopting Irish customs, in a failed attempt to halt the process.
- Many of the English colonials in India 'went native', although they didn't so much adopt native dress as use Gratuitous (Local Indian Language) all the time, ride around on elephants and generally be pretty batty.
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