Sometimes a people, group, or race's best hope comes not from within, but from without. In this trope, a group who is in a struggle against an antagonistic (and often larger and more powerful) opponent receives a leader who is not originally one of them. However, in many cases they are much more competent, intelligent, or passionate than the people themselves are. This does not always have to be the case, since in some stories the outsider who became leader was simply the right person at the right place at the right time. The origin of the leader can vary from story to story. In many stories, the leader is originally born from the opposing side and something drives them away from it. This developed dislike of their values or beliefs may have caused them to leave. In other cases, the leader may have formerly fought for or even led the opposing side, but after having seen the error of their side's ways, they decided to switch over to atone for what they'd done.
In other cases, the outsider is a true outsider and has no prior knowledge, connection or interest in the conflict. In stories like these, it's possible that the character slowly developed an interest in the community, stumbled upon it, was forced to go there, or visited them for a completely unrelated purpose. In cases of the former, the Fish out of Water and From New York to Nowhere tropes can heavily overlap. After having been introduced to these people, the character will inevitably fall in love with the place and/or its people and seek to lead and defend them. In cases like these, the Training the Peaceful Villagers trope can sometimes be seen.
Depending on the setting, the Going Native trope can heavily overlap. Especially in more backwater or rural settings, there's a good chance that the character will begin to dress and behave like one of the natives that he will lead. In stories, like these, the native group is likely much smaller and less advanced, but the leader will lead them nonetheless. Mighty Whitey can also overlap in stories where the character who becomes leader is white, and the group he is leading is made of natives in a conflict against an Evil Empire. Though this trope heavily overlaps with the "non-white" examples of Mighty Whitey, it's important to remember that the latter has a heavy focus on the outsider being of a different race, and not necessarily always being a leader. In that sense, it's like a more specific version of this trope. What's more, in that trope the outsider is necessarily better than the group they join. Though that can happen frequently in this trope, it's just as possible for the outsider leader to be equal or even less competent than those they lead, and they became leader due to circumstance.
An important thing to note is that the leader does not always have to have a noble motivation or endgame. Such is the case in the sister trope Foreign Ruling Class.
This trope is similar to A Protagonist Shall Lead Them in many ways. Still, the key difference is that the latter usually involves a Chosen One or individual from the people themselves becoming leader, making that trope an inverse of this one.
Examples:
- In Code Geass, Lelouch Lamperouge is not actually Japanese, and is in fact an exiled Britannian prince, but he becomes the Japanese rebels' most efficient and intelligent leader against Britannia.
- Golden Kamuy: The seven Ainu in Hokkaido who gathered the gold to revolt against the Japanese government were led by Wilk, a Polish-Karafuto Ainu fugitive. They had a deadly falling out when Tsurumi exposed Wilk's past as a revolutionary in Russia.
- In Yasuke, the titular protagonist is African but helps the Japanese fight against the witch who controls the land.
- In Superman: Red Son, the alien-born Superman becomes the leader of most of Earth. While he occasionally shows qualms about this situation, as he's uncomfortable with how much the humans grow to rely on him, his Sinister Minister Brainiac convinces him that most humans would either fail to meet the standards he'd set or abuse their powers outright if he allowed them any chance at real autonomy.
- Aquaman:
- Arthur Curry, in spite of being half-Atlantean, was born on the surface to Tom Curry and Atlanna, and lived his childhood there. (Except for Post-Crisis, where he was a full-blooded Atlantean.)
- In the Rebirth era, the Xebel-born Mera becomes the leader of Atlantis following the overthrow of Corum Rath. This doesn't last, nor does the monarchy for that matter, as Mera decides to abolish it in favor of a democratic nation.
- The Mountain and the Wolf:
- The Wolf repeatedly mentions Daenerys ending up at the head of three different armies (Dothraki, Unsullied, and the North) as a sign that she's meant to conquer the world through force, which her followers deny.
- The Wolf himself ends up leading a coalition of Wildlings, Ironborn and even some Dothraki in his efforts to conquer the world in the name of the Chaos gods (having converted them to the worship of said Chaos gods).
- By the start of Avatar: The Way of Water, Jake Sully has gone from distrusted foreign invader to respected leader of the Na'Vi forest tribe and the leader of their resistance against the RDA's return.
- In The Last Samurai one of the last groups of traditional samurai are led by a soldier who formerly worked for the modernized Japanese government that was trying to eradicate them.
- In The Mission a former hunter of the Guarani tribe leads them in their fight against the European governments.
- In Animorphs, the Moses Archetype for the Hork-Bajir is not one of their own, but Tobias, a human in the body of a hawk. He leads the first two escapees to sanctuary in a hidden valley. After that, they free more of their own people.
- In the prequel The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, this is subverted with Aldrea. An Andalite, she helps Dak Hamee lead The Resistance against the Yeerk Empire, but he is the true Rebel Leader (plus, they fail to prevent the Yeerks from winning and enslaving the Hork-Bajir).
- Dune:
- Imperial Noble Fugitive Paul Atreides takes refuge among the Fremen natives of Arrakis and comes to be seen as their prophesied messiah, leading them to revolution against the Emperor and elevating himself to the throne. And unleashing a devastating jihad on the universe.
- A couple generations before the arrival of House Atreides, Planetologist Pardot Kynes taught the Fremen terraforming techniques to make their desert planet more hospitable, giving them a vision of a green Arrakis. This mission was taken up by his half-Fremen son Liet-Kynes, and was incorporated into the prophecy Paul exploited.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs:
- John Carter of Mars: In his first book John Carter married the princess of the Martian city-state of Helium. In later books he rises to the position of Warlord of Mars via alliances and conquests.
- Pellucidar: David Innes, an American mining magnate who managed to find himself in Hollow Earth by accident, led the near-humans of Pellucidar to revolt against their reptilian Mahar overlords and declared himself emperor.
- Tarzan is a human raised by apes who managed to take over the troop by Challenging the Chief.
- Prince Caspian: The titular Narnian prince and rightful heir to the throne is persuaded to use Queen Susan's horn to summon the four Pevensies to help take Narnia back from the Telmarines, who had overtaken the kingdom during the 1300 years (in Narnia Time) since the children returned to their homeland of England. Peter, former High King of Narnia, not only takes over the war effort from Caspian but also challenges Miraz the usurper ("now styling himself King of Narnia" as Peter puts it) to a duel before Aslan the Lion arrives to help them.
- In The Hunger Games protagonist Katniss Everdeen is relatively an outsider to the rest of her country. Her home of District 12 is largely irrelevant to the country as a whole and is mostly ignored by the government prior to her Hunger Games conscription. After she survives and sparks a rebellion, the rest of the country begins to take her and her district seriously.
- The Traitor Baru Cormorant: The country of Aurdwynn has been conquered a few times, but is famously ungovernable because of how independently-minded its ruling dukes are. But that also means it's incapable of uniting as a nation, because the dukes are constantly feuding. Now occupied by the Hegemonic Empire of Falcrest, Aurdwynn's rebellious dukes end up turning to the foreigner Baru Cormorant to first lead their revolution, as only someone with no connection to their politics can rise above them, and second to rule them as queen, because they need to unite to keep Falcrest out. Since she was formerly employed by Falcrest, she knows best how to fight them, and as a plus she's of the same ethnic group as several of the dukes, so she's not too foreign for them to accept. Hearing their reasoning, Baru briefly imagines her own, similarly conquered homeland being liberated by some random Oriati prince emulating her traditions like he was born to them.
- Warrior Cats:
- The protagonist of the first arc, a kittypet (housecat), ends up rising through the ranks and becoming the first kittypet-born Clan leader in the Clans' memory despite all the prejudice he faced along the way.
- During the first arc, after ShadowClan loses their leader and deputy to a sickness, they welcome the exiled ThunderClan deputy Tigerclaw as their leader. Normally an exile would be looked upon with suspicion, but nobody in ShadowClan was in any state to lead the Clan at the time. Although he does help rebuild the Clan's strength, Tigerclaw's real intent is to use his new Clan to take over the entire forest and get revenge on ThunderClan.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: During the last season, the Cardassian leader Damar has defected from the Dominion and launched a resistance movement to drive the Dominion out of Cardassia. Capt. Sisko urges Major Kira Nerys, who helped lead the Bajoran resistance movement against the Cardassians, to help Damar's movement, giving her a Starfleet commission of commander as a way of helping ease tensions with Cardassians who wouldn't be comfortable working with a Bajoran officer.
- In The Bible, Moses is a Hebrew by birth, but is still an outsider to his people as he was raised by the Egyptian pharaoh.
- Theseus, one of the most important Athenian heroes in Greek Mythology who is credited with uniting Attica's twelve districts into a single kingdom under Athens, and freeing it from the control of Crete, among many other things, was not Athenian by birth but was born in a neighboring kingdom.
- Oedipus was made king of Thebes for slaying the Sphinx by marrying the city's widowed queen. Unfortunately, he only thought he was an outsider, his birth parents had abandoned him due to a prophecy that he'd kill his father and marry his mother, and after being adopted by a neighboring king and queen then learning of said prophecy, promptly left them to defy his fate. We all know how that went.
- Doom Eternal: The Doom Slayer, who first shows up in Argent D'Nur as the tortured and embattled Doomguy, soon becomes the greatest champion of the Night Sentinels when the demons invade their realm, especially when the Seraphim, one of the Maykrs that the Sentinels worship, uses the Maykrs' Divinity Machine to transform Doomguy into a demonslaying demigod. Unfortunately, this doesn't come without a price — the Khan Maykr and her Priests first learned of Hell through him, since he had been spending a great deal of time fighting the demons before ending up there, which led them to make the deal with Hell that ultimately dooms Argent D'Nur, and blame the Slayer for what they themselves chose to bring about.
- Fallout 4: The Sole Survivor, an outsider, from a completely different time period, no less, can rise through the ranks of the Minutemen to become their general.
- Pokémon Legends: Arceus: The player character is an outsider to Jubilife Village who appeared through a space-time rift, yet they soon become the strongest trainer who takes on any threats the village faces.
- Triangle Strategy: Frederica is the daughter of the previous Duke of the nation of Aesfrost, and has spent her entire life there, with an aristocratic upbringing that has made her focus on The Needs of the Many. However, her mother was a Roselle, a pink-haired racial minority, and a fugitive from the nation of Hyzante, who use the Roselle as slave labor. The more Frederica is exposed to this side of her heritage, the more driven she is to correct the injustice, to the point that she's willing to spearhead a Slave Liberation despite never being enslaved herself.
- Warcraft III: In the Rexxar campaign, Rexxar battles the chief of the Stonemaul ogre tribe to convince them to join the horde. Rexxar is a Mok'Nathal (an orc-ogre hybrid, both species being native to Draenor), so it's not as far-fetched as an actual orc leading them.
- Wings of Liberty:
- Zeratul shows up to convince Raynor that Kerrigan is the key to saving not just the Protoss and Terrans but all life in the galaxy.
- In the "Maw of the Void" mission, Raynor can free some Dark Templar held prisoner by the fanatic Tal'darim Protoss.
Truly you bring freedom to all, friend Raynor!
- Girl Genius:
- Paris University student Jiminez Hoffmann, while adventuring in the catacombs, somehow managed to get adopted by the Moligarch of the subterranean Talpini after saving him from a monster, negotiated a peace between the Talpini and the Argurons of the Silver Lands, and get himself engaged to the Arguron Princess as part of said peace negotiations.
- Lampshaded
when the King of the Silver Lands turns out to be a rogue professor of color theory from Transylvania Polygnostic University. Apparently it's a regular enough occurrence that the university has a procedure for bringing them in.
- She-Ra: Princess of Power: While Etheria does have an active rebellion looking to oust the invasive Horde that has conquered their planet, at the start of the series it's "a fairly small rebellion." It's only the intervention of He-Man, an Eternian, and the defection of his sister Adora, as She-Ra, that allows the Rebellion to gain traction.
- Adolf Hitler, Austrian by birth, remodelled Germany according to his ideology and turned it into a powerful military force that conquered much of Europe. Obviously not for noble reasons.
- Lawrence of Arabia was a white British man, but he led the Arabs in their revolt against the Ottoman Empire. He had developed a love for Arab culture and wanted to be a part of it.
- In many revolutions of the poor against the rich, the leaders of the movements are actually children from wealthy families, including Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Pol Pot, and Che Guevara. It is believed that the education they are able to receive gives them the skills to question the values of their society and the wealthy. However, many of them end up abandoning the cause in favor of power once they are able to.
