#white savior

Anon asked: 

One of my Black MCs for the first “season” becomes stranded in a mostly white portion of the world, and is taken in by a shady white family.  The entire community is somewhat shady and uncomfortable but she’s injured and doesn’t really have a choice.  She does end up legitimately bonding with two of the white family, who later flee the community with her when monster/fantasy stuff starts happening that puts them all in danger.  By the end of the season she’s reunited with her wife, another MC, who is Black and is with her for the rest of the story (I think, still storyboarding).   However her and the other two white people have formed a very close, family like bond by the end of the season, and refuse to be separated from each other.  Although they all help each other in different ways, I’m worried it’ll be like she “owes” the white people in her life, and that they are her saviors.  I hope to remedy this by making it clear the white characters are flawed and have sometimes put her in danger due to blind spots, and also that while they love each other, they don’t necessarily “like” each other.  However it seems like no matter what I do, it’s a thin line between friends and white saviors given they do have to give her medical care.  Is there a way to make this distinction clearer?

From what you’ve described, the established relationship between the Black main character and her found (white) family seems to be pretty equitable. Although white people have literally saved her, it doesn’t come across as them being her White Saviors on its own. 

It can actually be refreshing to have a Black woman character being in need of help sometimes instead of always doing the saving. As with all things, there is a need for balance, and you seem to be quite aware of that.

If you’re worried, add BIPOC characters of color

You say she is stranded in a mostly white portion of the world, so that means there may be some People of Color around, right?. Might there be other community members that she has that help her, even at least initially, so it isn’t only white people that have taken her in, give her medical attention and care.

For example, you say she is injured. Perhaps they bring her to a doctor or skilled medic who is not white. As for creating bonds, maybe there is another non-white person that she befriends or that mentors her. I think even adding one of these elements is helpful.

What if some of the chosen family members were BIPOC? Perhaps through a marriage, a cousin, re-marriage? And not just family members that they also saved and took in.

Although they all help each other in different ways, I’m worried it’ll be like she “owes” the white people in her life, and that they are her saviors.  I hope to remedy this by making it clear the white characters are flawed and have sometimes put her in danger due to blind spots, and also that while they love each other, they don’t necessarily “like” each other.

What you’ve described here is why I feel as if you have got a handle of things! She does not sound like she is worshipping the ground of her found white family members just because they saved her. It’s okay for her to be grateful and even thank them for their help in whatever way makes sense to her, but they should still stand on equal ground.

Example of a balanced scenario in which a character is rescued but gives back

The below situation involves all Black characters, but it may still help.

I recently read a story where the Black FMC, named Rielle, who lost her memory and was in a new world, was saved by a Black couple. From there, many town folks rallied around her and made her feel welcome and at home in their town.

For instance, they gave her:

Immediate medical attention and saved her from the danger they found her in

Emotional and mental support and friendship as she processed her reality

Food, shelter, clothing, etc.

In return, Rielle ends up working for one of the helpful townspeople, who takes on a protective grandmother-y role. Rielle also protects them by giving herself up to authorities that would otherwise do the people harm, showing loyalty and alliance to her found family. There is even a "return" in that loyalty as they absolutely did wish to let her go and even did her best to hide her and prevent it from happening in the first place, at risk to themselves.

Another great act of returned care is when she uses her healing powers to save a townsperson who was injured. In all this, she isn't just there existing to be saved the whole time. She is vulnerable at times, but also has agency.

(Book i'm referencing: "The General's Healer" by L.S. Bethel. This is a spin-off book, but I highly recommended her series "The King's Seer" in general!)

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The fact that your characters are all flawed but love each other, and there is give and take, makes all the difference. 

It's a trope you see a lot in fantasy and adventure stories going back ages. Heck, the entire portal-fantasy and isekai genres are built on that simple framing device. I suspect the reason for that is, if you want to show how cool your setting is, it's useful to have a protagonist the audience can relate to who arrives to that setting as a visitor and so can marvel at its coolness. Combine that with the protagonist and the hero who saves the day usually being one and the same character, and you end up with all these stories about a stranger to the setting ending up its hero.

You can probably see how this has the potential to lead to "White Savior" implications since it's fundamentally about a hero from outside the setting coming to the local inhabitants' rescue. On the other hand, you can't deny there's something appealing to most people about the concept of having a cool adventure in some strange new place.

By: Brendan O'Neill

Published: Jun 16, 2025

Don’t you just hate it when brown people reject your white saviourism? So rude! Such mannerless ingratitude greeted the Global March to Gaza last week. These valiant few from the US, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere had planned to trek to Rafah in Gaza to save poor, hungry Palestinians from Evil Israel. But they came unstuck in Egypt, where instead of welcoming these fearless foreign liberators of the benighted Arabs, local folk ridiculed them, pelted them with plastic bottles and roundly told them to fuck off. Wait, you people don’t want to be saved by a plummy white lady from London in a keffyeh?

I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but can we please not overlook how unbelievably hilarious it is that the Global March to Gaza has been thwarted by angry Arabs. That this swarm of pompous gits who fantasised that they would shield the Arabs of Gaza from the ‘genocidal lunacy’ of the Jewish State were instead roughed up by the Arabs of Egypt who don’t want their nation used as a stage for moral masturbation by every puffed-up Palestine fetishist of the West. That instead of getting bottles of water to Gaza, these people had bottles of water lobbed at their own heads by pissed-off Egyptians. The mirth of it all might just get me through the rest of this year.

The Global March to Gaza consisted of 4,000 people from 54 countries. They had planned to walk to the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza where they would have ‘demand[ed] that Israel re-open the border [and] create a humanitarian corridor’. How the Jewish State would have trembled before this mighty delegation that included a gaggle of anoraks from Welsh CND, a British art curator called Tasmin and a bald politician from Ireland! Honestly, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the unworldly vanity of this dishevelled army of weak-chinned Westerners who really thought they could finger-wag a war out of existence.

Some of the marchers were from North Africa. Others were from the West. Like the self-styled ‘empathetic human’ from the UK who said ‘I endeavour to do what our governments have failed [to do]’ and ‘mobilise [my] passion and humanity’. Or the Brit who lamented her ‘privilege’ of being a ‘white, north European living in relative peace’ and promised to do something worthy for once, like ‘lend my presence to this cause’. Or the Canadian who said ‘I can’t ignore my conscience’. All I’m hearing is I, me, mine. Was it really Gaza they wanted to liberate or their own morbidly obese egos?

Sadly, by which I mean hilariously, their cloying pity for Arabs crashed against the reality of Arab self-respect. I am still not recovered from the sight of these self-loving midwits in their culturally appropriated keffiyehs being shouted down by Egyptians in real keffiyehs. On the road to Ismailia in northern Egypt, the marchers were stopped by security forces. So they gathered in a square by the mosque and chanted ‘Free, free Palestine!’. Locals weren’t best pleased. Well, would you be if a gang of pious pricks from afar rocked up in your town and started yelling political shit near your place of worship? The locals shouted at the ‘empathetic humans’. They threw plastic bottles at them. White Saviour card, declined!

The outsiders hollered ‘Shame on you’ at their Arab critics. Yes, in English. These are the kind of people who look down their noses at Brits who holiday in Spain and never utter a word of Spanish and yet here they were barking English-language insults at Egyptians in Egypt. There will never be a better representation of the phoney virtue and haughty self-regard of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set than this dystopic image of Westerners in Arab headgear screaming ‘shame’ at real Arabs who just want to go about their day without encountering some tit from Britain ‘manifesting passion and humanity’.

Some of the marchers were arrested. They were bundled on to buses and taken to the airport to be returned to the ‘privileged’ lives they hate. They were ‘shocked’ by their treatment. Why? Anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of Arab politics will know that Egyptian officialdom is iffy about the Palestine issue. They don’t want the Gaza tragedy leaking into their already troubled land – hence, Egypt’s border with Gaza is if anything more militarised than Israel’s. The childish moral fables that the West’s white-saviour classes tell themselves – where Israel is the source of every ill in the Middle East, if not the world – took one hell of a beating in Egypt.

The farcical state of ‘pro-Palestine’ activism is best summed up in that viral clip of a Welsh male nurse begging Egyptian cops to have a heart. He weeps as he pleads to be let through so that he might help the poor people of ‘Falasteen’. The children are starving, the women’s breasts are empty – prove to the world that Arabs have ‘white hearts’ and let me pass, he says. This is the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement’s Four Lions moment. Indeed, if I ever write a satire on these keffiyeh pricks, this is exactly what will happen: an emotionally incontinent white man in a keffiyeh will holler ‘Let me save Palestine!’ as bewildered Arabs raise a what-the-fuck eyebrow.

The hilarious collapse of the Global March to Gaza follows Israel’s thwarting of Greta Thunberg’s ship of fools. That watery clown show, where 12 moral preeners imagined they could land in Gaza and ‘save’ its people, was likewise motored by a toxic mix of political infantilism and moral self-importance. From grumpy Greta being flown home to that Welsh dude being memed and mocked across the internet, the cult of the keffiyeh is in trouble. Many can now see that the aim of this activism is not to feed people in Gaza but to feed the vanity of Westerners bored with their privileged lives. It’s an orgy of Orientalism in which the activist class cosplays as Arabs because they think it’s lame and shameful to be white.

That’s what ‘pro-Palestine’ activism is now, everywhere from the keffiyeh-fest on the lawns of Harvard to the ludicrous white-saviour theatrics in Egypt: a fairytale for self-hating, time-rich Westerners in which Arabs are always the victims and the Jewish State is evil incarnate. It has no basis in truth, of course, but then truth is not the aim: moral absolution is. Cry more, Israelophobes – your sanctimony is crashing against the shores of reality.

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The rare occasions when intersectionality intersects with reality.

Everything they knew about the Middle East they learned from liars, lunatics and psychopaths in fake classes like "Gender Studies" and "Palestine Studies."

That being said, new chapter soon?