The Heretical Hero

In the works he appears, the Swiss Advisor wears a white hat. He is invariably a Good Guy, and the proof of it is that he walks with crowds and keeps his virtue - although immersed amidst the most raw and primitive of the aboriginal world, he pours out his civilizing whiteness upon them like the oil of anointment, and their aboriginality cannot grasp or overcome him.

His shadow, his dark parallel, is a separate but related trope: the Heretical Hero. Where the Swiss Advisor blurs the line between civilized and savage respectably - by bestowing honorary whiteness upon those around them - the Heretical Hero blurs that line the wrong way: making their darkness his own, even into the depths of his soul.

The Heretical Hero isn't necessarily villainous (although many are.) Nor is he a character who's gone native, although going native is a prerequisite for the role. Almost a shamanic figure, the Heretical Hero has chosen to operate in multiple worlds at once (Western and native), at the cost of compromising his place in the normative (Western) one. And, just as importantly, he could at any time revert to normalcy by force of will - and doesn't.

The Heretical Hero is antiheroic, in that by breaking from Western mores his expression of virtue creates space to challenge those mores and virtues. His partial, calculated savagery makes him powerful; his calculation and choice makes him deviant - and his ability to calculate and choose makes him dangerous.

Characterizing the Heretical Hero

Although the Heretical Hero can dress however he wishes to, and does, his traditional introduction is in native attire, which may mean anything from ornate robes to paint and pubic hair. This in itself doesn't identify him (any civilized character trope could get introduced like that) - but a Heretical Hero is that he never fully abandons it. While he can wear much more Western clothing than a good savage, the Heretical Hero's Western shell is always marred by savage tell - a tribal-print scarf, bone bead jewelry, or the classic concealable tattoo that isn't - that betrays his compromised nature.

Like the Swiss Advisor, the Heretical Hero is a voyager, a globetrotter, and a self-styled Weltburger. He has hundreds of two-fisted tales about his escapades; in a civilized setting he brought back a treasure trove of souvenirs, photographs and news clippings too. When some naïve asks about one, that's the cue card for the storytelling. And there will be quite a few to tell, about the beasts of the Deepest Kongo, the feasts (and that one dark-eyed princess) of the Mysterious Orient, the priests of the Ancient Church, and if it's necessary that's the cue for the author to reveal a mandatory, defining facet of the trope: the Heretical Hero is a heretic. In his time outside of Christendom, he abandoned

The Heretical Hero's aspect is as a liminal and subliminal figure: the necromancer, the oracle and the spy, the purveyor of truths best untold and lessons best unlearned. Expect him to have a few books, still bound up in the original language, which he's translating in his spare time.

When the Heretical Hero comes for violence, he will be a musketeer, combining a European gun with some savage local weapon (and a boast about how it can cut through anything, because it's not Western.)

The Heretical Hero in Andalusada

Depending on the era and ethnicity of the author, the Heretical Hero tends to come in one of several distinct flavors. The very earliest versions of this in Andalusada date back to the Middle Ages [when?], and unlike later versions of the trope were generally Chalcedonian.

• In the medieval romances, all Spaniard warriors could be portrayed this way. This stems from the on-again, off-again struggles to suppress the Hispanic Rite - at various points the church was nominally out of communion with Rome. The occasional renegade foreign knight serving in the Moorish ranks was invariably described this way. Even Greek sources occasionally distinguished "Catalans" as following a different rite from other Latins.
• In the eastern Mediterranean, the Heretical Hero was (for the Italians) usually Greek.

The Heretical Hero's non-Chalcedonian turn starts after 1476, when Westerners in Eastern employ began turning Turk and rejecting Christianity itself.

• The Nestorian Epistles doesn't feature any Heretical Heroes ("Nestorianism" was an artistic license to satire), but it's enormously important in this trope's archaeology. For the first time in history, Western popular consciousness was exposed to a fairly sympathetic, fairly detailed, and fairly accurate portrayal of "Nestorian" (actually Syriac) Christianity. To this day, Francophone Heretical Heroes belong to some sort of Syriac church - usually, as in IRL, from time spent in French India. [details?]
• Fin de siècle Guisard France, where anticlerical sentiments were strong, went a step further, and used Heretical Heroes to attack the Second Estate. Unlike prior Heretical Heroes (who came upon their vague "Nestorianism" in India), the Political Hero's heresy of choice was explicitly Monophysitism, specifically from Damascus. (French Syrophilia eventually brought attention to the Syrian Orthodox Church; by claiming communion in the Petrine-Antiochene descent, radical writers could use the Heretical Hero to challenge Papal legitimacy itself.)

Saxony, meanwhile, codified a second variation of Heretical Hero. The Saxon breed was much less traveled, because they didn't need to be; where French Heretical Heroes were Antiochene, Saxon ones were Alexandrian.

• The Saxon Heretical Hero was based on two actual people: the Orff brothers, first exposed to the Coptic tradition while serving as engineers for the Suez Canal. [details?] Theodor eventually became a monk; his brother Eugen (who served as advisor to the Sharif [who?], introduced the revolver to the Middle East, and pioneered modern Coptology) was a role model for a generation of Saxon adventurers and archetype for all Heretical Saxon Heroes to come.
• One big distinctive of the Heretical Saxon is that he was the first to operate outside of Christendom. Prior to this point, the Heretical Hero was usually back home; the HSH, by contrast, could be coexisting with his real-life coreligionists.
• More recently, particularly since the opening of Abyssinia, this type of Heretical Hero has become an anti-racist mouthpiece for authors. (This is based on the realization that it'd be too hard not to have them, if you converted to a church as black as Ethiopia's.)