History Main / NoPlaceForAWarrior

* In ''Film/Ronin'' the soldiers of fortune are all ex-Cold War operatives from both sides of the "recent unpleasantness" trying to make few bucks now that peace has arrived.

* The backstory of ''LightNovel/ICouldntBecomeAHeroSoIReluctantlyDecidedToGetAJob'' involves this. Raul was training to be a heroic knight to fight the demon lord. Once that path is cut short as the same demon lord is defeated, he isn't able to find a job where his considerable fighting skills are seen as a plus, and he doesn't have any practical business skills, forcing him to settle for an entry-level position at an electronics store.

** PlayedStraight with DarthVaderClone Darth Malgus in ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'', a ruthless BloodKnight who despised the fact that the Empire made peace with the Republic after [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdgmH9Vv2-I all the work he put in destroying its capital]]. In his eyes, war and conflict are what being a Sith is all about, and he conspired to try and take the Empire over and [[DystopiaJustifiesTheMeans escalate the conflict]] into a (worse) ForeverWar because that's just the sort of galaxy he preferred to be in. Despite this he ''still'' manages to be one of the few ReasonableAuthorityFigures the Sith have.

* In the backstory of ''TabletopGame/{{Battletech}}'', the SLDF exiles found themselves in this position. After abandoning known space in order to keep their skills and machines out of the hands of the inevitable SuccessionWar, the exiles settled an unknown world far outside the reach of the Inner Sphere and tried to build a new society from the ground up. Unfortunately, all of the exiles were veterans of the 14 year-long Amaris CivilWar and many had never known anything but war, which made transition to peace difficult. Within a decade, the SLDF had split itself up in factions and started the Exodus CivilWar, which itself was only ended by [[ProudWarriorRace The Clans]], a society that was constantly on war-footing and saw fighting and battle as a natural form of stress relief.

** One of Revan's top Jedi Generals was left Force-deaf by the sheer destruction at Malachor, went back to the Council to plead their case (and the case of the others who followed Revan), only to get a sentence of Exile. The Exile spent the events between Malachor and the second game wandering aimlessly, taking odd jobs outside the boundaries of "civilized" space because without being a Jedi or a soldier, they had no purpose. During the game, they ''get'' a purpose of sorts, both in taking on the Triumvirate and in [[spoiler:collecting and training several similarly lost Force Sensitives to rebuild the Jedi]], but end up leaving again. [[spoiler:Eventually, the "canonical" Exile and Revan, still unable to adjust to peace, go and charge in on [[InvincibleVillain Vitiate]] like a pair of idiots, get curb-stomped, and the Sith end up stockpiling and catching the peacetime Republic with their proverbial pants down so we can have an EndlessWar in an MMO.]]

* ''Film/Ronin'' the soldiers of fortune are all ex-Cold War operatives from both sides of the "recent unpleasantness" trying to make few bucks now that peace has arrived.

* ''Film/AvengersAgeOfUltron'', Ultron claims Steve Rogers defines himself completely as a soldier and as such secretly doesn't even want a world at peace, because such a world would have no place for him. [[VillainHasAPoint This is supported by]] [[spoiler: Steve's hallucination under Wanda's influence, where his ''worst fear'' appears to be a world at peace where he has nothing to fight and so can be with Peggy.]] [[CharacterDevelopment He gets better.]]

* Videogame/{{Littlewood}}: The game is about what happens in the standard fantasy RPG plot after the FinalBoss has been defeated. One of the residents of the town the Hero is rebuilding moves in because he's a knight by trade and the disappearance of the Dark Wizard's monsters has left him out of a job.

* During the time frame of ''Series/TheMandalorian'', TheEmpire has fallen, and the Rebel Alliance has disbanded. Cara Dunn is a former Rebel soldier who doesn't want to just be part of some senator's security detail, so she chooses to live in the Outer Rim as a gun for hire. The season 1 finale reveals that her home planet was [[EarthShatteringKaboom Alderaan]], so she doesn't even have a home to go back to.

* ''Fanfic/TheMountainAndTheWolf'': The Wolf is [[TheFriendNobodyLikes already hard to tolerate even at his most useful]] (that is, when planning a siege or CombatByChampion is involved), but he becomes unbearable after Daenerys is crowned Queen and his every suggestion is along the lines of "keep making war" or making Daenerys TheDreaded (the reader knows that he's been acting on both sides to see as big a battle as possible, [[spoiler:bringing the Golden Company's elephants to Westeros, unleashing a SeaMonster to halt the Iron Fleet's massacre at Dragonstone, making it look as though Cersei attacked Daenerys after surrendering]]). The situation is "solved" when [[spoiler:Daenerys catches him trying to steal the Iron Throne and attacks him, but is killed in the process]], but a few weeks later he's back and demands the whole of Westeros fight him.

* ''Manga/MahouSenseiNegima'': This is a problem Setsuna Sakurazaki constantly worries about. She doesn't have any good qualifications besides her skill with the sword and thinks that she is kind of useless after peace is established, especially compared to her classmates who have already figured out their future career choices. Evangeline listens to her concerns, calls her a moron and a bore, and proceeds to lock her in several wrestling moves.

* In ''Comicbook/TheTransformersIDW'', the Autobot-Decepticon War finally came to an end. This results in an entire race that spends billions of years fighting not being sure what to do now. This spilled into two series: ''Robots in Disguise'', with focused on Cybertrionians rebuilding their society, and ''[[ComicBook/TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye More Than Meets the Eye]]'', where the protagonists left in order to embark on a quest to find the legendary Knights of Cybertron. In both series, the characters don't have a clear idea of what to do now, especially the Decepticons.

* ZigZagged in VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublic and VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords.

* The opening cutscene of ''Videogame/{{Z}}: Steel Soldiers'' has [[BloodKnight Captain Zod]] becoming angry at the prospect of a lasting peace treaty between Megacom and Transglobal, fearing it will see him and his men being demoted to security guards in a two-bit shopping mall.

** King Robert Baratheon is a major sufferer of this. He was an excellent military leader but a crappy peacetime king, and over time he sank into alcoholism, depression, and apathy because of his inability to do what he did best, (fighting) or to truly deal with various factors working together to make his life miserable. (Said factors included him being unable to get over the death of [[TheLostLenore the woman he loved]], a DeadlyDecadentCourt which he despised, and his [[AwfulWeddedLife horribly]] unhappy ArrangedMarriage.)

* This becomes a major concern for Sousuke as ''LightNovel/FullMetalPanic'' progresses. Sousuke begins entertaining thoughts of living in Japan with Kaname indefinitely as his [[DefrostingIceQueen "mental permafrost" starts melting]]; but at the same time, he's developing just enough social awareness to realize how difficult it would be for a ShellShockedVeteran who SacrificedBasicSkillForAwesomeTraining such as himself to actually live a civilian life for real.

* In "Loyalty" from ''Series/{{Hornblower}}'', officers of the Royal Navy are shown to be struggling to survive on half-pay during the truce with France. Horatio has to pawn many of his possessions, including his coat in the middle of a freezing winter, but can't get a good price because every other officer is doing the same. Luckily, he can occasionally supplement his meager income by playing cards.

* During the time frame of The Madolorian, TheEmpire has fallen, and the Rebel Alliance has disbanded. Cara Dunn is a former Rebel soldier who doesn't want to just be part of some senator's security detail, so she chooses to live in the Outer Rim as a gun for hire. The season 1 finale reveals that her home planet was [[EarthShatteringKaboom Alderaan]], so she doesn't even have a home to go back to.

* ''Literature/TheLostFleet: Beyond the Frontier'' applies this trope to an entire society. TheAlliance and [[OneNationUnderCopyright the Syndicate Worlds]] have been at war for so long that everyone who can even remember peacetime is long dead; when the end finally comes, the nominal winners are left with literally millions of unemployed veterans, an economy that's headed for a painful recession because there's no more demand for war material and a political system that was already under strain and now has no common enemy to unite against. "SoWhatDoWeDoNow" is the {{driving question}} of the whole story arc. The losers are even worse off, but [[BalkaniseMe a lack of wars to fight is the least of their problems]].

%% Zero-Context Examples are not allowed, and have been commented out. If you wish to add them, consider editing the existing entries to include the context that was left out.

[[WellThisIsNotThatTrope Not in this case.]] For the professional soldier or sailor, peace means they're suddenly out of a job and have to find their way in a world that may have changed dramatically while they were away fighting. They may lack salable skills (that is, ones other than fighting) and struggle to keep food on the table, and may also be dealing with [[ShellShockedVeteran the afteraffects of their war experiences]]. Perhaps they will go looking for another war and become mercenaries or get involved in extremist politics. Or they will find a hardscrabble job or end up as beggars. They're likely to be found in the LegionOfLostSouls. Naturally they may be a ShellShockedVeteran. On the flipside, the civilians may find that the loved ones who come back from the war are not the same people as the ones who left.

* A recurring theme in ''Manga/{{Boruto}}'', where ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'''s concept of "{{ninja}}" as a social class is becoming increasingly redundant - not only is the world largely at peace, but {{Magitek}} is slowly being developed which allows anyone to use ninja-like abilities without training. Even children born to ninja families after the war's end are impacted by this, with some of them deciding that the "age of heroes" their parents lived through was much better than the present day, and that the only way to make the world fair again is to plunge it into war once more.
* ''Manga/MahouSenseiNegima'': This is a problem Setsuna Sakurazaki constantly worries about. She doesn't have any good qualifications besides her skill with the sword and thinks that she is kind of useless after peace is established, especially compared to her classmates who have already figured out their future carreer choices. Evangeline listens to her concerns, calls her a moron and a bore, and proceeds to lock her in several wrestling moves.

* ''Manga/RurouniKenshin'' takes place eleven years after Japan's UsefulNotes/MeijiRestoration, and many of the characters, good ''and'' bad, are former {{samurai}} who are having a hard time fitting into a Japan that has little need of them, having abandoned feudalism and modernizing into a capitalist Industrial Age state. Himura Kenshin himself is basically cool with peace and hopes to never kill again, but doesn't have a clear goal about how live peacefully and still has the problem of escaping from deeds he committed in his backstory. Other samurai devolve into countryside bandits or {{yakuza}} or rebel against the government in hopes of restoring the old order.

* In ''Comicbook/TheTransformersIDW'', the Autobot-Decepticon War finally came to an end. This results in an entire race that spend billions of years fighting not being sure what to do now. This spilled into two series: ''Robots in Disguise'', with focused on Cybertrionians rebuilding their society, and ''[[ComicBook/TheTransformersMoreThanMeetsTheEye More Than Meets the Eye]]'', where the protagonists left in order to embark on a quest to find the legendary Knights of Cybertron. In both series the characters don't have a clear idea on what to do now, especially the Decepticons.

* ''LetsPlay/AScotsmanInEgypt'' plays this for drama. After finally proving he's a worthy king by having defeated the Mongols, the Russians and the Milanese, Domnall becomes affectionately known as Domnall the Lewd. His brother Aodh, knowing that prolonged inaction will be very bad for Domnall's mental health, engineers a war against the Danes to keep him busy. [[spoiler:He confesses to Domnall much later, and is reassured that his brother doesn't hold it against him]].

* ''Film/FirstBlood'' is about John Rambo, a Vietnam vet struggling with severe PTSD issues, who makes the mistake of drifting through a small town where the sheriff doesn't like drifters. The entire situation is best summed-up in one line.

* ''Literature/HoratioHornblower''. Hornblower is shown eking out his half-pay during a truce with France. In his case he had it less bad then some as he had the talent to be a professional card sharp at a club.

** Other officers end up in similar straits after a new peace treaty is signed between books seven and eight, but Daniel escapes it: he's now [[{{Fiction500}} independently wealthy thanks to prize payouts and his share of his deceased uncle's shipyard]], and in any event he's made himself so indispensable to the Navy as a troubleshooter that they keep his entire crew on active duty for the next two books. By ''The Sea Without a Shore', though, even he's been put in reserve, and when he gets a private job, a bunch of his old crew (and some new characters, including one Midshipman Lucinda Hale who had the misfortune to graduate from the SpaceCadetAcademy just as the war ended) jump at the chance to set sail again.

* In the ''Literature/McAuslan'' short stories, we see Captain Errol, the former commando and special services soldier for whom [=WW2=] was the happiest time of his life. In a battallion making the transition from wartime service to peacetime garrison, all he can do to break the boredom is to make mischief. AuthorAvatar Dand [=McNeill=] loses touch with him, but twenty years later, as a newspaper journalist, he is reviewing pictures of a post-imperial civil war in Africa and sees a familiar face in a group of mercenaries.

* In ''Literature/{{Sharpe}}'', Richard Sharpe spends some time eking out on half pay during the truce with France. He tries to make a fair go of it after Waterloo and the end of his formal military service, but realises he is not cut out for civilian status. Like so many career soldiers cast out of rapidly shrinking armies after June 1815, he travels to South America to re-enlist in the wars of national independence going on there.

** The expanded universe also deconstructs this in its lengthy and detailed backstory. Westeros is a society where the two main routes for social advancement are [[AsskickingEqualsAuthority proving one's self in war]], or [[ArrangedMarriage an advantageous marriage]]. So when there are lots of warriors without a war, war tends to be created. Probably the most infamous example is the Blackfyre Rebellion. Generations of Westerosi under Targaryen rule had tried to conquer the neighboring kingdom of Dorne, until King Daeron II put an an end to that by putting together a couple of {{Arranged Marriage}}s between his family and the royal family of Dorne and making a few fairly minor concessions to the Dornish in the peace treaty. All the WarHawk lords who had been fighting in the wars with Dorne were suddenly warriors without a war and they ''hated'' it, so many of them promptly supported the King's half-brother, the WarriorPrince Daemon Blackfyre, when he led a rebellion and attempted to claim the throne, knowing Daemon would favor war instead of diplomacy.

'''John:''' God, yes!

*** In [[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E11TheHunted "The Hunted"]], Roga Danar, a genetically engineered SuperSoldier for war is kept in a lunar prison during peacetime, and escapes. And it turns out he's only one of hundreds of other soldiers who were turned away because they couldn't readjust to post-war life.

** In the {{Backstory}} for first game, there ''should'' have been peace after the Mandos were defeated, but Revan took off and came back with a bunch of alien tech and an army of conquest, and it's speculated that it was because the War left Revan and the other veterans unable to adjust to peace. Even when the Republic and Jedi managed to storm Revan's flagship and Malak took [[TheStarscream his opportunity to fire on the flagship]], the army of conquest still kept going and refused any attempt at a peace deal [[spoiler:Turns out to be a {{Subversion}}; Revan was ostensibly trying to unite and harden the galaxy to take on the Sith Empire we later see in VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic, believing a peacetime Republic would be too weak to handle an Empire that only knew one thing - how to fight.]]

%% ZERO CONTEXT EXAMPLE. Needs elaboration: * The Ex-Special Forces archetype from ''TabletopGame/FengShui'' and ''Feng Shui 2'' is based on this kind of character.

%% ZERO CONTEXT EXAMPLE. Needs elaboration: * ''WesternAnimation/{{Alix}}'' has this when the descendants of the Trojans, who'd sworn to destroy the original Trojan Horse, see it go up in flames.

Closely related to StrangerInAFamiliarLand and TheWarJustBefore. Subtrope of NoPlaceForMeThere. Compare AndThenWhat, BornInTheWrongCentury, OutdatedHeroVsImprovedSociety, SoWhatDoWeDoNow, VictoryIsBoring, WonTheWarLostThePeace, PrefersRocksToPillows, FormerRegimePersonell, and of course GloryDays. Can lead to a soldier going FromCamouflageToCriminal. May be experienced by the ReturningWarVet or ColonelKilgore. Compare OppressedMinorityVeteran, when the veteran is mistreated because of their identity status.

* Quite common after a major war. Many of the spinoffs from both World Wars were manned by veterans. Both the Nazis and the Communists in Germany got their enforcers from unemployed soldiers from WorldWarI. Similarly several exiled White Russians in China hired as mercenaries to various warlords.