"And how shameless is that?! To do something, to promote something else?! [hides mouth with hand] Monster Madness."
The Shameless Self Promoter is the kind of narcissistic personality that is always out to promote its own credentials and knowledge. They will stick their accomplishments on anything and everything and don't hesitate at claiming responsibility for all good things.
Often a strongly downplayed version of this will lampshade — more accurately brag about — their "shameless self-promotion".
Compare: Small Name, Big Ego, Attention Whore, Stealing the Credit, Please Subscribe to Our Channel and Single-Issue Wonk (where the issue is themselves).
In-Universe Examples Only:
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Anime & Manga
- In My Hero Academia, there's Mei Hatsume, from the Support Hero Course, who is constantly trying to promote her inventions (which she calls her "babies"). In fact, during the Sports Festival, her whole fight with Iida amounts to pretty much use him as a guinea pig to show off her gadgets, and once she's done she steps out of the ring and throws the match.
Comic Books
- This is a natural feature of The Boys due to the fact they're corporate marketed and produced superheroes.
- Booster Gold was always attempting to market his image and impress people with his heroics, more so than doing his actual heroics.
- Funky Flashman. We probably shouldn't name the well-known Silver Age collaborator Jack Kirby based him on.
Fan Works
- Dante's Night at Freddy's:
- The Gainax Ending of Dante's Night at Freddy's 2: Animatronic Boogaloo features the story's writer, who is somewhat subtle in mentioning his other work at first, but crosses into this territory pretty quick. Dante disgustedly calls him out on this.
- In the third installment, the writer's ego and self-promotion has reached such ridiculous levels that Evie asks his girlfriend if he makes her wear a mask of his face when they have sex.
- Ultra Fast Pony does this as a parody. Episode 16 is titled "Shameless Self Reference", and it's filled with Call Backs, Continuity Nods, and references to the creator's other work — all complete with in-video hyperlinks. Then the episode ends with a Title Drop, and the end credits claim that the entire series was leading up to that one joke.
Game Shows
- One episode of Taskmaster has Greg get in on this for a laugh. The contestants are tasked with making an announcement to the most possible people and Asim Chaudhry made his during the previous episode arguing that not only did their entire audience see it, but also people would see it on repeat on Dave. When he mentions the network, Greg looks dead into the camera, removes his glasses, puts on the most phony used car salesman smile imaginable, and adds that the channel does original content and is excellent at it.
Literature
- Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series book 2 (Winner Takes All), Joshua Kincaid is one of a pair of mercenaries (along with his partner, Laurence Bearclaw) who help to protect James Adamant. He also has a sideline, writing chapbook adventure-stories and songs with himself as the hero under a nom de plume.
- Dave Barry Slept Here claims that Donald Trump in 1989 purchased Ohio, the Coast Guard, the Italian Renaissance, and Mars, and renamed all of them "Trump."
- Dave Barry's "1987: Look Back In Horror" has Bob Woodward reporting the dying words of various late celebrities, who all seem to have been interested in promoting his forthcoming book Veil.
- In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Gilderoy Lockhart takes every opportunity to refer to his past exploits and point out how useful his skills are to a given situation. He claims several prestigious titles, repeating them throughout the book, and has written several biographical works based on his adventures. Justified, because he never actually did any of those things. All of the adventures were stories he heard from other wizards before performing a memory charm and claiming to have done these things himself. So, if he didn't shamelessly self promote, he wouldn't be famous!
- Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM from The Supervillainy Saga is this as he seems not to get that being a supervillain isn't something to be proud of. Amusingly, his sidekicks take advantage of this and actually get him marketing deals and action figures during a Zombie Apocalypse by the second book.
Live-Action TV
- Just like in the comics, the superheroes of The Boys (2019) are mass marketed and expected to do everything in their power to play to the crowds.
- In Castle, Dr. Kelly Nieman 3XK's girlfriend calls herself this when offering Beckett a pen when they first meet, but that's as far as it goes.
- One of the marks the team goes after on Leverage steals other people's inventions and names them all after himself.
Elliot: What kind of guy names a toilet after himself?
- Our Miss Brooks: Mr. Conklin, to some extent. He even has a huge photograph of himself hanging above his living room mantelpiece.
- Garth Marenghis Darkplace: Parodied when Dagless picks up a Marenghi novel and spouts off several lines of dialogue concerning how he had "misjudged the genre".
Podcasts
- Erik D'Corah, MASTER OF THE MYSTIC!, from Less is Morgue guests on the podcast specifically to shamelessly plug his Vegas show, his merch store, and his 43 step course on contacting the dead.
- On the video game music podcast Nitro Game Injection, Larry Oji never wastes an opportunity to mention Overclocked Remix. This isn't so surprising, considering he's the Head Submissions Evaluator of the site. This is Lampshaded in the website description for episode 118, in which it's suggested that the listener takes a shot every time Larry mentions OCR.
Radio
- The Stan Freberg Show was limited to a short run due to never obtaining a corporate sponsor. Stan Freberg therefore decided to mock the concept of sponsorship in the second-to-last episode by naming himself as the sponsor of a show that already had his name in the title and filling it with Parody Commercials for himself.
Video Games
- In the Crash Course DLC for Left 4 Dead, Valve slips one of these in as a little Easter Egg. If the player was to gather all the survivors around a leaking steam pipe, a conversation like this might occur:
Francis: Hey, watch out for that goddamn steam pipe.
Zoey: Man, I love steam.
Francis: Yeah, steam's alright I guess. - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has this conversation in the intro:
Marche: OK, if you could make any game real, which would it be?
Ritz: Hmm, that's a good question!
Mewt: I'd pick "Final Fantasy." That's my favorite.note - In Punch-Out!!, Doc Louis will promote the Nintendo Fun Club between rounds. In the Wii version, he reuses this quote but corrects himself to mention Club Nintendo instead.
"JOIN THE NINTENDO FUN CLUB TODAY, MAC!"
- Papyrus from Undertale constantly talks about his own greatness thanks to his inflated ego, but since he's just self-assured and extremely enthusiastic rather than arrogant and haughty, players tend to find him more lovable than not.
- Rovio Entertainment will bombard the player with ads for their other games in Angry Birds. Doubles as Enforced Plug.
- Rock Band 3 has an achievement called "Shameless Self-Promotion", unlocked by playing 3 songs by bands that have Harmonix developers in them.
- Varric, in the Dragon Age universe, is a writer who enjoys promoting his most famous book, Hard in Hightown. However, his Nice Guy personality has him as the more downplayed version of the trope; his books sell well even without his involvement, and he seems to find the whole situation more amusing than anything. Most notably, he urges the players to "buy my book" in the video the developers made to say thanks for Dragon Age: Inquisition being nominated for Game of the Year 2014 (which it won). Come 2018, this has become even funnier now that Hard in Hightown is available as an actual book.
- Not for Broadcast: Lampshaded. Alan does what he can to flog his book.
Alan: It's all in my book, "Alan James is...."Jeremy: Shamelessly self-promoting?!
Web Animation
- In-universe, all of the various women in The Nekci Menij Show are constantly promoting whatever product they're hawking in everyday speech, to each other.
- Action Bunnies took this trope literally.
Bunny: This is nothing but a shameless plug!
Plug: [sultry voice] Take off your pants, let's do it right here. - A lot of fanfiction writers tend to use this very wiki as an excuse to promote their work, taking advantage of There Is No Such Thing as Notability. JusSonic does it the other way around, using his work to promote the trope page for that work!
- Whenever Yahtzee has released a new game or book, he'll often make references to them in his Zero Punctuation reviews of the time to advertise them in a comedic manner.
But I have a special place in my heart for the solo-development racket, play Hatfall. Sorry, I'm not sure that was subliminal enough. PLAY HATFALL, YOU PRICKS!
Web Original
- Clickhole has a pair of satirical articles "written" by a man allegedly writing about the political ideas of the day, but blatantly just pushing his B-Movie screenplay for Chronotaur: Labyrinth Of Time, and later also its sequel, Chronotaur 2: Thread Of Destiny:
- The first is If People Think There's a Quick Fix to Illegal Immigration They're as Misguided as the Scientists in My Screenplay "Chronotaur: Labyrinth of Time"
- This was later followed up with Abstinence-Only Education Is as Doomed to Fail as the Robo-Chronotaur Built to Fight the Chronotaur in My Screenplay "Chronotaur: Labyrinth of Time"
- The first is If People Think There's a Quick Fix to Illegal Immigration They're as Misguided as the Scientists in My Screenplay "Chronotaur: Labyrinth of Time"
Web Videos
- The Nostalgia Critic once got kidnapped by the Game Heroes (to promote their T-shirts) and ended up trying to promote his own. A gun digging into his face quickly dissuaded him though.
- The Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter's Twitter Takeovers have a slight Running Gag where the characters say what their favorite anime series is, and while most of them give answers unrelated to their franchisenote , Sonic's answer is...less than humble.
Sonic: Ha! Mine's easy: Sonic X! Not that I'm biased or anything...
