The Chief's Daughter/Playing With

Basic Trope: The daughter of a tribal chief, who likes to hang out in the woods and other stereotypically Native American things. Often falls in love with Mighty Whitey.

• Straight: Ana is the daughter of the tribal chief. She's skilled with a bow, loves to run around the forest, and is a Friend to All Living Things. Oh, and she falls for the explorer Bob.
• Exaggerated: Every native woman, from the nubile females to the infants and grandmothers, is a huntress in scanty clothing and is attracted to Bob.
• Justified: The tribe is conducting an alliance-marriage.
• Inverted: A white princess falls in love with one of the tribe members.
  • Alternatively, tribal princess Ana is distant and distrusting, and the first to suggest that the visitor(s) will be more trouble than they're worth. She is also quite possibly the first one to get violent with them, depending on how she's portrayed.
  • If you want to be very literal in inverting, cast the father of a young chieftain in a similar role.
• Subverted: Ana looks like this trope on the exterior, but once you get to know her, she acts, thinks, and speaks like those from the outside civilizations.
• Double Subverted: ..but it turns out that she's a deeply devoted fan of media from the other culture, and her familiarity with it is as superficial as the first persona.
• Parodied: A hapless white explorer is trailed by beautiful native women, as the local tribes give him one as a souvenir every time he visits.
• Deconstructed: Because she hunts and prowls the woods and conforms to a European ideal of beauty, the native princess is actually ostracized from her community for her unconventional ways, and she is sent off with the white hero as a punishment or exile.
• Reconstructed: ...which is exactly the outcome she wanted, as she and the white hero had already fallen for one another.
• Zig Zagged: ???
• Averted: The chief's daughter is not particularly adventurous and is rather domestic and plain, and/or the native women are not particularly attracted to the white hero.
• Enforced: The story is explicitly based on Pocahontas.
• Lampshaded: "Why do all native women run away with the first European coming to their camp?"
• Invoked: "When my daughter is born, I shall raise her to wander far and marry a European!"
• Defied: The chief's daughter wants to honor her father's wishes to stay out of trouble and marry within the tribe, and does so.
• Discussed: The white protagonist tells his friends he's sure to win over the native girl he desires because she's the daughter of the chief.
• Conversed: ???

---

Back to The Chief's Daughter.