#red-frame

Here’s the incredibly offensive white savior background, as described by yellowis4happy:

 Aly, the white girl chosen by the brown-skinned god of a brown-skinned nation enslaved by other white people, has been charged with keeping the half-white, half-brown daughters of an exiled white family alive over the summer. One of these girls, the god hopes, will become queen when the brown-skinned slaves overthrow the white colonizers ruling them.

 The family goes on a trip to visit local villages, and Aly decides to join them. She’s looking for a mage to help back up the brown-skinned conspiracy group she’s been looped into with some firepower, in case the white rulers of the nation find them out and decide to crush them. She knows the mage hates white people and so is likely to be found in the village known for its marked resentment of white people. So while the family is there, she slips off, slaps some brown paint on, and looks around.

 I HATE THIS.

 I ESPECIALLY HATE THE WHITE SAVIOR ELEMENTS IN THIS STORY, AND I HATE THE BROWNFACE SCENE.

I wouldn't have had Aly use brownface to begin with. But if Pierce felt that this element had to be present…well, there is no reason in having Aly use brownface if she isn't going to learn that it's horribly, offensively bigoted…not to mention extremely inept espionage for someone who's supposed to be a superb spy.

 So there are two ways to go with an AU. One erases, from the beginning, elements such as white saviors. This means that Aly must go.

Instead, the Trickster God of the Copper Isles chooses a raka girl; his brother and sister, the gods of the white conquerors of the Isles, don't pay much attention because she's a slave (as most of the raka are since the conquest) and disabled. She has hearing problems (she can hear, but not perfectly, and she uses lip-reading to help herself clarify some of what she's hearing) and cannot speak. She talks by means of sign language. She's also observant and very, very bright. And she's absolutely petrified at being chosen by a god to help foment a revolution. She doesn't know any of the revolutionaries, and even if she did, why would they believe her? She wants her people freed, but she isn't sure that she can help—and she dreads making things even worse. But, despite her fears, Intan (a Malay adjective meaning "diamond") agrees; she's been a slave for as long as she can remember, and she knows her people's need all too well.

 The remainder of the story focuses on Intan escaping from her current owner and having to make her way cross-country without being noticed, struggling to communicate with people who don't know sign language while trying to contact revolutionaries. Along the way, she does pick up some valuable information, but the question is who to get the information to.  She may be the Chosen One, but she is out of the revolutionary loop at the start and somehow she has to find her way in.

 (Assume that Aly gets her own separate series about her struggles to overcome her father's protectiveness and her mother's insistence on Aly having a plan for her life that conforms to Alanna's wishes. She doesn't get an country handed to her; she has to find ways around her father's strictures so that she can spy—and can learn from other spies and from experience. Aly struggling to become who she wants to be—especially on her father's literal and metaphorical turf—is a perfectly acceptable story. She just doesn't need to go to the Copper Isles as Kyprioth's chosen to accomplish it.)

The problem is that Intan's story isn't so much an AU as original fic. Everything changes, because Intan isn't remotely the same person as Aly Cooper. And while I would have liked a book about someone like Intan much better, Pierce has said that she wrote the Trickster duology because fans kept asking what happened to the daughter of Alanna the Lioness.

So, in the second of the two AUs, the fanfic is about the canonical lead. And Aly, unlike Intan, is cocky and a trifle arrogant, a child of privilege, wealth and position who has never really had to struggle. She often displays a patronizing attitude toward others even before the brownface incident.

The second AU permits Aly's flaws to exist up to a point…and then has them to bite Aly in the ass hard, causing lasting consequences that she neither likes nor wants. In this scenario:

1) Aly gets caught during the brownface incident and does NOT defeat her captors or talk her way out of trouble.  She tries to fight, as she does in Trickster’s Choice, but is outnumbered by people who have weapons, who don't waste time fighting her one on one, and who don't have any reason to spare her.

 2) She is eventually wounded by her captors—not seriously, but painfully and in a location that will prevent her from fleeing and will take a considerable time to heal.

3) The raka mage, Ochobu Dodeka, tells Aly in no uncertain terms why slapping brown paint on white skin is not a disguise and is, in fact, insulting; didn’t she think that the raka hereabouts know each other? Did it never occur to her that her features and eyes were characteristically luarin, or that she did not move like a young raka woman who had to strive, every day, to evade people who saw her as a thing? Did she really believe that the raka didn’t know what their own people looked like? Did she think that the raka were so interchangeable that none of them would recognize a complete stranger?

Ochobu would also explain privilege. Something like this (and yes, I am just making this up now, and yes, it probably does not match canon exactly):

***

"I know," Ochobu said in a chilly tone, her gaze flickering over Aly's paint-smeared face and hands. "You thought of none of this. You never had to. You are luarin, and you were never poor; you move and speak with the confidence of one who has never gone hungry, never had to work when you were sick or in pain. You are eager to battle trained and armed warriors, sure that only you could know a means of fighting without weapons and that one luarin girl is more than equal to six or seven of us. Even today, you came here, not as an ally of ours, not as someone who sees that we have no reason to trust those with white skin, but as a way of proving to yourself how clever you were, as in the story of the thief and the lemons."

"The what?"

"Listen. There was once a thief called Suhendra, and he longed to be the greatest of all thieves, stealing the sun from the sky and breath from the dead. So proud was Suhendra that he could strut sitting down. But he was not nearly so clever as he thought himself, for his tricks were common ones that any competent pickpocket might learn, and he never heard the mockery in people's voices when they praised his unusual shrewdness and skill."

Aly clenched her fists at this, feeling her stubby nails dig into her palms as her face grew hot.

"One day," Ochobu continued with deliberate calm, "Suhendra decided that he would steal all the chests of gold and jewels from a ship laden with them. He had no friends who could help him, and even he knew that his usual tricks would not work. So he thought and thought, and at last he decided that his best and cleverest choice was to be invisible; the sailors could not chase him if they could not see him.

"So he went to the market and bought bushels of lemons. Then he went home, cut them open, and squeezed them all. He covered himself in lemon juice—his hair, his skin and nails, even his clothes. He had heard, you see, about lemon juice being an ink that faded into invisibility. And then, once the lemon juice had dried on him and his clothes—which he could see because he was invisible—he went to the ship, and picked up a treasure chest just as soon as it was loaded on board.

"Can you guess what happened next to foolish Suhendra?"

Aly glared down at her feet. "All right. I understand. I was stupid."

"Yes," replied Ochobu, "and that is the problem. I can believe that Kyprioth would choose someone who would help us free ourselves, though I cannot think that he believes a white girl must free us from whites. And I especially cannot believe that he would use one such as you. Kyprioth is clever, full of twists and turns. And he cares about us, his people. How can I believe that he would choose someone whose foolish, foolish plan so clearly shows contempt for us? Foolishness that might endanger the entire revolution later?"

Ochobu's voice grew harsher but remained firm. "We do not need stupidity or arrogance or pride. We do not need an ally who thinks us indistinguishable from each other or who cannot tell paint from skin.

"We can save ourselves.

"We do not need you."  

***

Sorry. I needed to vent. Back to the outline.

4) Aly has to apologize. Profusely. She will also have to learn to mean it, though that will happen later.

5) She is eventually identified by Ulasim Dodeka, a middle-aged free raka who works as the head footman of the aforementioned exiled white family. Ulasim's action does not help. Some people start wondering if Aly is a spy for the luarin royal family and if Ulasim has been suborned, which damages Ulasim’s credibility and portion of the rebellion. Which is not fair, but a person's actions affect more than just themselves. This is something else Aly is going to have to learn.

6) A lot of the friendships and alliances that Aly was building? Gone.  People are angry, and they don’t trust her now.  Some start saying that she’s just an ignorant luarin who lied about being the choice of the Trickster.

7) Kyprioth, the Trickster God who chose her, is disgusted by her privileged attitude toward his children (the raka) and who feels shamed by her using such an insultingly dumb way of disguising herself.  He goes looking for a raka Chosen One (which, he tells her, he actually would have done earlier if his divine siblings hadn't been paying so much attention to the Copper Isles).

8) Aly is no longer the Chosen One. (Note: she never gets Chosen One status back in my AU. NEVER.) She’s just a sixteen-year-old white girl whose skills aren’t nearly as exceptional as she thought they were. She has no friends and no way to get home. And she has alienated and angered a god.

9) She has to start over again, choosing rather than being chosen. She must rebuild the trust and the respect that she threw away. She also must learn spying from the people who live in the Copper Isles and who know each other, the luarin, the languages and the territory better than George Cooper’s spies do, whatever their training. Aly begins to appreciate the strengths and abilities of  the raka and see them as her equals—even, in many respects, her superiors.

10)  Instead of Aly’s strategy directing everything as if she were the proverbial spider in the web, the revolution eventually becomes a cooperative venture and the story an ensemble piece. It expands from Aly's point of view to Ulasim's and Ochobu's and Dovasary's  and assorted other people.

Aly does play a minor part in the revolution, though she definitely makes a contribution. And the part that she plays makes a huge difference to her personally.  But she is not the savior, just a small cog in a very large machine. 

The raka save themselves.