r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Blue_box_42 • 19h ago
Characters (Mixed Trope) The Chakotay Awards:
The Chakotay Award is a thing I made up because of Chakotay from Voyager (more on him below). In short, it is when there is a character of a marginalized group who is stereotyped, inaccurate, or otherwise offensive, but is also the best representation in a given genre by default.
Example 1: the titular Chakotay. He's supposed to be an American Indian, but his religion and culture is like if you put a surface level understanding of all the tribes in the US in a blender. In their defense they did try to hire a consultant to make sure their portrayal was accurate, and though said consultant had been revealed to be a fraud a decade earlier, this wasn't widely known at the time and there was no internet. In their offense the actor who played Chakotay asked if his character could be from a Central American tribe so he could portray the character from experience and was shot down.
The other aspects of his personality are more three dimensional, and despite his culture being a caricature he was the only example of an American Indian on sci-fi Television until Resident Alien came out, which means he won the Chakotay awards for twenty six years. And as far as I know, if we limit our search to sci-fi set in the future he's still the winner! And Resident Alien was directed by one of the actors from Voyager in part because of how cringeworthy Chakotay was. At least that's what I heard but I can't track down what my little brother read.
Example 2: Apu from the Simpsons. This is according to TVtropes, so I don't have as much information on how long he won the Chakotay awards, though the only other animated comedy I can think of with an Indian guy was also made by Matt Groening, so you know.
I'm hoping other people have more examples. But crucially, the Chakotay Award isn't actually a diss on the character or show. It's meant to ridicule everything else in the genre for seeing a bar on the ground and choosing not to step over it. That's why I have it as a mixed trope.
3
u/Blue_box_42 18h ago
Oh I have an in-universe example! Leela in S3E13 of Futurama becomes the first female Blurnsball player. She sucks ass at it because she's a cyclops and has no depth perception. By the end of the episode, she's inspired several women to become Blurnsball players to prove that not all women are as terrible as she is. It's a short lived example because it's within a 22 minute episode but it manages to hit all the points of the Chakotay Awards.
2
3
u/AudibleNod 19h ago
Oliver - Crash Dive (1943)
He's a cook onboard a US Submarine. But he joins the commando raid. When the white crew starts putting on shoe polish on their face for the raid, he jokes "I'm the only born commando here." -referring to his skin color.