The opening scene of 300 shows a young boy training to be a Spartan warrior. When he goes to battle against a giant wolf, the narrator introduces the threat against “sacred” Sparta: the Persian “beast. . . awaiting the meal to come.” The Persian Empire is literally a monster, and Sparta, playing the role of the hero, is “the world’s one hope” for “justice,” an oppositional relationship portrayed through the presentation of the normative, human Spartans and the monstrous Persians, whose alterity is represented through deformed physiognomy, racial difference, and deviant sexual practices.

XREF: This connects to Orientalism scholarship and postcolonial media analysis of how Western narratives represent Eastern adversaries.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 672