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alt title(s): Proud Warrior Race Girl; Proud Warrior Race
"To defeat you in such a manner would be lacking in honor. I prefer to beat my opponents the old-fashioned way... brutally!!"
Dinobot, Beast Wars

"You ask a krogan if he'd rather find a cure for the genophage, or fight for credits, and he'll choose fighting -- every time. It's just who we are, Shepard. I can't change that. No one can."
Urdnot Wrex, Mass Effect

A specific subtrope of Blood Knight, the Proud Warrior Race Guy seeks battle and bloodshed because his culture teaches that doing so is the greatest source of personal honor and glory. This Proud Warrior Race will often be based on one of several real world cultures who are perceived to have acted this way, such as the Samurai, Spartans, Vikings, and Mongols. They are often a Martyrdom Culture. The Proud Warrior Race Guy is almost always a hero. If evil, he will probably be the Worthy Opponent.

"Proud", in this case, meaning "Psychotically Violent". Critiques of this position will be met with: "You do not understand". May occasionally overlap with the Always Chaotic Evil race, though the two are usually differentiated by the Proud Warrior having a strict Code-of-Honor, while the Chaotic Evil race has no real rules and does cowardly or underhanded things. If the Code-of-Honor is too alien for humans to understand, or too xenophobic to allow cooperation, then the heroes will treat the two groups as the same. The better sort of Code of Honor will enforce Would Not Shoot A Civilian, although often civilians are dismissed as too weak and cowardly to be good fighters, and so they get passed over in the search for worthy enemies.

While most commonly seen in science fiction programs in the guise of Rubber Forehead Aliens, the Proud Warrior Race Guy is not limited to that genre. Consider Hawk in Spenser For Hire, B.A. in The A Team, and (arguably) Tonto in The Lone Ranger or Kato in The Green Hornet. This trope currently tends to be limited to SF because applying it to human races really skirts the bounds of current racial sensitivities. You don't see a lot of the Noble Savage anymore either, except as alien races, for the same reason.

Species that are essentially talking animals based on predatory creatures, like the obligatory catgirls in some Sci Fi anime, are also apt to be of this type.

Interestingly enough, the best-known characters of this type in recent TV history not completely covered in makeup and prosthetics (Worf, Tyr, and Teal'c) are all black; Ronon Dex is played by a half-Hawaiian actor wearing his hair in dreadlocks. Whether (and if so, why) this is a key component of the Proud Warrior Race Guy is an open question. (See also Scary Black Man.)

See also Blood Knight and Barbarian Tribe. See Warrior Poet for what happens when the Proud Warrior Race Guy becomes more developed. Often is fond of being In Harms Way, and is a Glory Seeker wanting to be Famed In Story. They often are of the mistaken belief that this means they have a Badass Army, but often are proven wrong. May be from a Martyrdom Culture.

Writers using this trope tend to think of the "warrior," the lone fighter whose final authorities are his own goals and his own conscious, as superior to the "soldier," who obeys orders and does what his superiors say. WWII saw two warrior-ethos cultures lose to three soldier-ethos ones, but that doesn't always happen — see this book.

Compare and contrast with Humans Are Warriors.

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