Basic Trope: A character of a certain ethnicity is present in a setting where their presence is not historically justified.
- Straight:
- A work set in Scandinavia includes Asger, an artist from modern-day Nigeria.
- Exaggerated: None of the characters in the work is Nordic, or even white. But many African and Asian Viking warlords command Arabic and Incan soldiers into warfare.
- Downplayed:
- Asger is Ambiguously Brown and implied to have unnaturally darkened skin.
- Asger is Italian instead of Norse.
- Justified:
- The story takes place during the 13th to 16th century, where the transcontinental slave trade and the existence of Nigerian pirates can justify the presence of a black man in the Nordic region. Not impossible, just improbable.
- Asger's superiors explain physically going to Nigeria and taking a boy named Zabi back with them, renaming him Asger, then making him an artist.
- The work doesn't actually set in the Real Life history, but it's either an Alternate History or a Fantasy Counterpart Culture.
- The story follows the life of Asger from his youth in Nigeria to his eventual career in Scandinavia so the reasons for his presence there are fully explained and justified in universe.
- Asger is from the Sami People, and migrated from his Northern Finland homeland to nearby Scandinavia.
- Inverted:
- A warrior in historical Africa/Asia/America/etc is, for some reason, blond, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned.
- Western Samurai
- There is a suspicious lack of German Soldiers in a post-Norman-invasion England.
- Subverted: In Japan, Shogun Aterui looks like a white, long-bearded samurai but hails from the Ainu — who resembled Eastern Europeans genetically far more in the time period.
- Double Subverted: Except it is revealed that he merely learned the Ainu language and he came from Hungary.
- Parodied: Far in the future, The Greys are cast in a historical World War II movie among the other soldiers.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Asger has a Multiple-Choice Past, telling different people different stories about his heritage.
- Aterui was born in Hungary to at least one Ainu parent, or at least one of them had an Ainu parent.
- Averted: Asger is white, Norse to be exact.
- Enforced:
- The work is a children's show and needed an assortment of ethnicities for children to identify with.
- The character wasn't originally written as Nigerian, but a Nigerian actor auditioned and his performance was too good to pass up.
- The producers employed colorblind casting, or they needed to satisfy a diversity quota.
- It was (part of) a fundraiser by the blacks for their school.
- Lampshaded: Asger periodically snarks about how out of place he is.
- Invoked: Bob the cosmic trickster finds it hilarious to set up situations where an Inuit ends up as a successful merchant in 12th-century Indonesia.
- Exploited: Asger uses his status as a foreigner in the most productive way possible: getting laid by Viking babes.
- Defied: Asger is exiled and deported from Scandinavia for objectively racist reasons.
- Discussed: Asger's new ally Alva remarks on his exotic appearance, and he explains to her the unlikely series of events that led to him being an artist in Scandinavia.
- Conversed: Bob complains about having his immersion broken by the presence of black officers in a film about the Napoleonic Wars.
- Deconstructed:
- In-Universe: Asger faces racial discrimination because the Norse have literally never seen a black person in their life. His actions and personality paint an image of all African-descended folk in the eyes of the Norse, leading to folktales telling of strong positive or negative stereotypes for when black people start arriving and living in Scandinavia en masse.
- Out-of-Universe: People begin to accuse the work of "Social Justice Warrior" pandering, believing Asger's race to have
Unfortunate Implications. Others believe, both ironically and unironically, that Asger ought to be Black since there's a lack of representation of the Black community in European media, despite his race not being addressed or justified.
- Reconstructed:
- Asger travels back to the African country he hails from and tells his government about the frozen north. The two countries establish commerce and become allies, erasing all stereotypes both groups once held of each other.
- The work's creators decide to extend the narrative of the work in such a way to where Asger's race is justified either in real-life context or in-universe. This quells all legitimate controversy.
- Played for Laughs: When traveling through time the heroes always encounter a strangely familiar Irish guy in every group no matter how remote or xenophobic.
- Played for Drama: Asger is Driven to Suicide because he thinks, rightly or wrongly, that he's not getting the opportunity to prove himself in Scandinavia.
- Played for Horror: Asger is shunned and becomes a Person of Mass Destruction in response — or he turns out to have been one all along.
- Implied:
- Asger is Ambiguously Brown and a bit darker than seems realistic for Scandinavia, but he may just have a tan, or he may be a Saami.
- Asger is always seen clad in face-obscuring armour and never seen without it, but the few glimpses show he has fairly dark skin, and his obscured silhoette has facial features that Blacks have.
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