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Basic Trope: Science fiction or fantasy setting revolving around Africans and black people

  • Straight: A story features The Greater African Empire circa 3025, where scientists have mastered the use of nuclear fusion energy and cybernetic enhancements. The GAE still has a distinctly African aura and culture however, not lost in the face of modernity.
  • Exaggerated: The GAE is the most advanced nation on the planet and is on its way to colonizing the multiverse.
  • Downplayed:
    • The GAE is an ideal Post-Cyberpunk society that isn't any more advanced than the other great powers, but is still a great power and leading the world in one field.
    • Africa is still divided into multiple states, though many of them have joined a political and economic bloc that collectively act as a major geopolitical, cultural, economic and technological power.
  • Justified: The GAE was able to analyze what lead to the downfall of other African nations before it, tap into Africa's vast array of resources, and pursue an agenda focused on human and technological prosperity instead of enriching a few oligarchs and colonialists.
  • Inverted: The GAE is a prosperous Renaissance or older era nation and the story is about the Black experience in an older era.
  • Subverted: The GAE in the future is a dirt poor and technologically primitive polity.
  • Double Subverted:
    • Turns out these kids were part of a primitive cave tribe the GAE has yet to contact and the rest of the nation is a technological powerhouse.
    • Relative to the Pan-Eurasian Union, but relative to us, it's still wealthy and technologically advanced.
  • Deconstructed: The GAE, just like many real-life African countries, is ruled by a corrupt regime, and unity is threatened by conflict and rivalry between various different African ethnic groups.
  • Reconstructed: The GAE regime undergoes sweeping reforms that remove the oligarchs and military strongmen and replace them with a fairer, more just leadership that are better able to mediate ethnic disputes.
  • Parodied:
    • The Roman army tries to stake a claim in Northern Africa, and are shocked to find it guarded by quantum aqua-distributors manned by cryokinetic blackhole powered machines.
    • Triangular slave traders purchase a fresh batch of black slaves from a blind man claiming to be a chief. After a 3 month trip the surviving slaves are lead into a barn house to be auctioned, and are killed by lasers. 2 years later the same slaves, on airplanes, lead an assault on the American colonies along with the blind man who turned out to have been seeing through a surveillance drone one of the slaves hid in the barn.
  • Zig-Zagged: The GAE in the year 3025 is an advanced nation, but as is the rest of the world, but the nation does lead the world in certain technological innovations, but other nations are catching up to its advantage as well, while domestically poverty and crime are still major issues, but the GAE has been moving towards eradicating these issues as well via benevolent government policies.
  • Averted:
    • Africa is equally or less advanced than the rest of the world
    • Africa is advanced, but so is the rest of the world
  • Implied: The GAE's are never shown in full detail but the protagonists who live there seem to be used to having advanced tech on them 24/7.
    • A black world hopper with African stylings has highly advanced technology and remarks in Western cities that they "Still seem exotic to me after all of these years traveling."
  • Enforced:
  • Lampshaded: "Huh, Africa as the center of world power and advancement. I wonder why we haven't seen ones like it more often when world hopping."
  • Invoked: A time traveler gives African countries advanced technology with which to conquer the world.
  • Exploited: The GAE uses its advanced technology to barter with the world at large and make favorable deals with it after years of having Africa exploited.
  • Defied: When the GAE comes into existence, world powers all crush it to dust as a threat to their place in the world order.
  • Discussed: In a work set in modern times, a black character, frustrated that he can't afford a better phone, quips "I wish I lived in Wakanda." The audience understands this as shorthand for wishing he lived in a technological utopia that was more accessible to black people.
  • Conversed: In a work set in modern times, a black character says he doesn't much enjoy most sci-fi, finding not enough representation and a worldview too much based around European values and social ideals. Another black character suggests he check out Octavia Butler's books, and describes their more African-based vision of the future.
  • Implied: A character living in a future dystopian America attempts to immigrate to Africa.
  • Played for Laughs: The citizens of the GAE play up the worst stereotypes of Uncle Tomfoolery and the Blaxploitation genre despite being an technologically-advanced utopia.
  • Played for Horror: The GAE's great advancement compared to everyone else, combined with the wide networks of resource requirements to produce their advanced technologies, and they wind up themselves being Eviler Colonialists who consider everyone else barbarians. This leads to an isolated and insular culture which has little resemblance to real world ones, let alone real world cultures surviving in modern times. For one they skipped several steps in technology.

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