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Square Race, Round Class
aka: Rogue Elephant
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A character in an otherwise typical fantasy game/story whose profession seems at odds with their nature or appearance as assumed by tradition or the audience, like a dwarven ranger or an ogre engineer. Sometimes this is for sheer game balance and variety, while other times it's actually Lamp Shaded as being appropriate if seen in the right light.
Ocasionally this is invoked as a reason the Comic Relief seems so inept; it's just misplaced interest into something inappropriate for them.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering has a lot of these, including Rhino Monks and a slightly more probable Ogre Samurai.
- They also features an Ogre Savant
 , with the flavor text, "He's an oxymoron".
- Goblin soldiers, in a setting where goblins are generally characterized by total lack of cooperation.
- A surprisingly large number of Zombie Clerics. Similarly a couple zombie Druids.
- Death Charmer and Pit Raptor, the improbable worm and bird mercenaries. Not humanoid worm and bird people, just inexplicably for hire animals.
- The Time Spiral block is full of these, by design.
- The Pokémon Trading Card Game has a year's worth of these in the Delta Species, Holon Phantoms, and Dragon Frontier expansions. These sets featured "Delta" Pokémon, creatures with mutated types (e.g., a Charizard would become Metal and Lightning instead of Fire and Flying).
Comic Books
- The original concept of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles owes a lot to this trope. Turtles aren't exactly renowned either for their speed or agility. So what should we do, obviously? Turn four of them into Ninja Martial Artists! Trained by an intensely honorable and noble rat of all things.
Films — Animation
Literature
- Ironically found in The Lord of the Rings, where your average hobbit is generally not fond of adventuring, burglary, or heroic renown even though their latent abilities imply they'd be especially good at it. Most derivations are based upon the Bagginses (who prefer sneaking and cleverness) or Pippin Took (a more moderate warrior type). Most LOTR-influenced RPGs make the class more attractive to players by having a race of halflings that all are fond of adventuring and/or burglary. Interestingly enough, this might actually be close to the wandering hobbit ancestors alluded to in the prologue.
In the early drafts of LotR, all the Rangers were wandering hobbits, Strider included (his name at the time was Trotter), and ironically fit very well in the D&D version of a hobbit adventurer. Later Tolkien came to conclusion that he had too many hobbit characters going around, and rewrote a fair deal of the story, which at the time had barely reached Rivendell.
Wandering "wild" hobbits are still mentioned in the narration, along with a comment that they may be more common than their civilized Shire cousins might think, but none are actually met throughout the story. They seem to be more like survivalist vagabonds than adventure-seekers, however.
- The very plotline of The Hobbit is a bunch of dwarves, apparently not much good at anything except fighting or running away, who got in a group to do nothing other than sneakily steal treasure from an effectively unfightable dragon. Fortunately, they did realize this and hired Bilbo.
- A good example of this trope is Horton from Horton Hears a Who!. The title elephant character must exercise a great deal of delicacy and gracefulness in order to protect a micro universe which he discovers.
- Discworld
- It may be easier to list the cases where race matches profession on the Discworld. Through the series we see vampire photographers, troll musicians, orc footballers, goblin savants, policemen of every race under the sun and hiding from it, and even girl wizards.
- While Discworld plays with Our Dwarves Are All the Same a lot, they still tend to fall into a lot of the common stereotypes — hard-working, greedy, serious-minded, dangerous when drunk, etc. Casanunda (a Casanova expy) is a dwarven con artist and dashing swordsman who channels his race's single gender into a seducer with hints of Anything That Moves.
- In Dragaera, Dragons are known as arrogant warriors who are ultra-ambitious and if angered, are direct (and brutal) about it. Kragar, who was booted out of group, has no ambition, preferring to be a Servile Snarker, and is the epitome of stealthy, being an assassin with a Stealth Hi/Bye ability so powerful that it's outside of his control.
- In the very first Conan the Barbarian book, a young Conan's search for a thief daring enough to risk burglarizing an evil sorcerer's tower results in the disdain of the local criminal underclass, his own contempt returned... and an alliance with a master thief whom all the other rogues hail as their superior. He's massively obese and looks like a candidate for quadruple bypass surgery, yet he can shimmy up a rope faster than Conan can (a rope woven from the tresses of dead women's hair, which he stole from their coffins at night, and steeped in wine to give it strength).
- In The War Gods, the Hradani are akin to Orcs. Even have a Tolkenish history of being a race of High-Men before wizardly twisted them into a race of berserkers. Bazhell, the main character is akin to an Orc Paladin chosen by the god of Justice. His best friend, Brandark, is a Bard and scholar.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons And Dragons, and most other fantasy roleplaying games, allow players to create all kinds of characters embodying this trope.
- An old joke regarding character creation involves an "orc bard," where the player admits he just wanted to be able to hit people with a guitar. The counter to this is that a member of a primitive or outright illiterate race is actually more likely to maintain a strong song and oral storytelling tradition. It's not called an axe for nothing...
- WOTC had fun with this one April: Humorous PC Portraits, including a Dwarf Ninja.
- Also, one of the prepackaged miniature sets they released has a Halfling Barbarian... which works brilliantly with a couple of the settings that feature Halfling Barbarians as the central example of the race, just to flip common expectations. Dark Sun has them as cannibals and Eberron has tribes of dinosaur-riding halfling barbarians.
- Ogre Mages in nearly any setting embody this trope. There's no point in being big and brutish when you can turn most adventurers into human popsicles.
- Bugbears, despite being the biggest and toughest of the goblinoid races, are also quite stealthy.
- Hackmaster, mostly a parody of AD&D, is a bit of a send-up of fantasy roleplaying in general. One subrace for player characters is the gnome titan, a member of a group of gnomes who follow the Gnomish God of War, and are trained from birth to be incredibly bad-ass warriors and battle mages. They still cling to their Cute/Comic Relief origins but in a decidedly twisted sort of way... one racially-specific magic item is the rightly feared +3 Gnomish Boots of Groin Stomping.
- Warhammer 40000 has Ork Kommandos. Orks are, as a rule, the loudest and least subtle species in the galaxy (their word for firepower comes from the sound it makes), so of course their having stealth units is regarded as a joke (in true 40K fashion, the Guarsman trying to tell his encounter with them is executed for making stuff up). Meaning, of course, that Kommandos are all the more effective at their jobs when no-one thinks they exist...
Ork have a system of color-coding where painting a vehicle/weapon gives it special properties: red is faster, blue is luckier, etc. Fans believe that purple and/or orange are the stealthiest colors to an ork. Why? Well, have you ever seen an purple/orange-painted ork?
Video Games
Web Comics
Web Original
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