Proud Warrior Race

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The Proud Warrior Race is a fairly common archetype in speculative fiction for various civilizations and cultures, both sci-fi and fantasy. The basic idea is based (and this must be stressed, very loosely) on a variety of IRL cultures like the Vikings, Sengoku era Japan, medieval Knights, Spartans, Mongols and certain Native American tribes such as the Apaches. In any case what they have in common is this...

• Placing extreme value on marshal prowess and master of combat techniques. One should dedicate one's life towards mastering combat.
  • A veneration of heroic military figures, often by oral record. To join their ranks of the exalted heroes is often the end goal in a warrior's life.
  • Position in this society is generally dictated by being the best fighter one way or another.
• A strong and strict code of honour outlines the life of a Warrior, especially in combat.
  • An attitude towards death that's at the very least accepting and usually glorifies dying in Honorable combat. Often to the point that it's disgraceful to simply fade away in a hospital bed of old age, as opposed to falling in battle.
• A decentralized society with power divided over small tightly knit sub-groups (often familial) which often fight with each other for position.
• A societal reverence towards war at the expense of other aspects of their society (economic, commercial, scientific, cultural, etc).
• A tendency to try to shoehorn warrior stuff in every aspect of their culture.

It should be noted that the "Race" part, while often a thing here, is not essential. You can have variations on this in which heritage is easily trumped by commitment to the code.

Problems

There are a lot of issues with the Proud Warrior Race and how they function, but the stem of it is that any society is complex and reducing them to one part of that greater whole makes as much sense as designing a car and only designing an engine.

The first and most obvious point is that even in a Warrior Culture, someone needs to keep them fed, clothed, armed and armoured. To get their sword, a warrior gets a blacksmith to forge it. To do so, the blacksmith needs food, fuel, metal, and a forge to work them in. This requires peasants to feed them and supply them with coal and bog iron, as well as a mason to build their forge (who also needs to be fed, requiring even more peasants) and the peasants and mason will need metal tools, so you'd probably want another smith who'd make them who'd also need food, a tanner to make forge bellows for the smiths, a carpenter to build their houses, etc. In the end for every full time warrior, you need a bunch of other people behind them providing support.

Similarly, even in warlike cultures not everything was about war and fighting all the time. The Vikings and the Mongols were not only warriors, but skilled traders. The Samurai produced a lot of capable poets and artists who's work would as often be about flowers than battle and eventually they largely evolved into a class of Bureaucrats.

That said, a Warrior Culture can still exist and thrive in a pre-industrial context as they lord over civilian subjects and is not above doing some farming, herding, trade, accounting and landscape painting on the side. A few elite warriors clad in the best armour with the best weapons, trained from childhood to use them and willing to press on even when death seems certain can best several times their number of peasants with cheap spears and helmets and minimal training that are liable to panic if things don't go their way.The most obvious and extreme example of this in history are the Spartans. Spartans themselves did all the Proud Warrior Race guy stuff training, spartan way extreme training, fighting and so on and so on. But they were supported by an entire social class of slaves, the Helots who they conquered at some point in there history (we think this was over 2,000 years ago). But due to them being slaves the Spartans had to spend a lot of time and energy keeping them in line. Nevertheless it was effective for a few hundred years even if Spartas power would wane by the time of Alexander the great.

The problem is that as things advance, this model gets less and less viable. A nation which both firearms and cannons as well as the apparatuses of state to recruit the sons of peasants, artisans, clerks, etc in the tens of thousands and train, drill and organize them into a professional army which can overcome mighty warriors even if they can have a substantial advantage in a one-on-one fight. Now that is a lot easier said then done. Until relatively only Roman and maybe China could really claim to have been able to do that until arguable the 16th century so in a fantasy setting the Proud Warrior Race Guy can make sense. It's when you get into the vast industrial complexes of science fiction that this can strain suspension of disbelief without some additional thought put into it the way the Tau do for example.

Another problem is the "Proud" part of "Proud Warrior Race Guy". Codes of Honour are not a bad thing in of themselves, after all they can provide stability and encourage people to do their best and push their boundaries. The problem is that the Honour systems the Proud Warrior Races usually are more concerned with glorifying an individual. They'd often avoid weapons and tactics they deem "cowardly", which a pragmatic and opportunistic enemy will identify and exploit. There are of course varyious degrees this could be portrayed. For example US Marines could be said to have a code of honor to not shoot medics and don't harm non combatants or chemical weapons are dirty for example as reasonable codes of honor , but more often in fiction it's something stupid like don't ambush or range weapons are a cowards tool for example. In that case there codes are so inherently self limiting that you wonder how there able to manage to be successfully warriors.

Overall in both fiction and IRL: the proud warrior race guys tend to lose eventually to those society's that are better able to mobilize larger parts of there population then the small, more elite Proud Warriors. More so when firearms are involved.

Examples

• Green Martians in John Carter of Mars
• Klingons in Star Trek - probably the most well known incarnation.
• Sontarans in Doctor Who are a rare exception to the rule, as their militaristic traditions are shown in a negative (or humorous) light rather than positive or at least neutral.
• Sangheili in Halo
• The Clans in BattleTech
• Orcs often fall into this trope.
  • Same can often be said for the Dark Elves.
• Saiyans in Dragonball
• Mandalorians in Star Wars sort of straddle the line between race and creed, but either way they only focus on warfare and making weapons for warfare.
• The Tau Fire Caste. Wile often not thought of that way, the Tau Fire Caste are the proud warrior "race" or maybe sub-species of the Tau Empire with even subtle eugenic pressures to ensure that the best Fire Warriors have children who themselves will become fire warriors. They are of course supported by other castes of Tau which solves the various logistical issues a Proud Warrior race may have.
• Turians from Mass Effect. The Turians an interesting case in that there 'proud warrior race guy' trope is manifested as a strong and legally mandated tradition of public service, which is often done through the army which does more then just fight and covers police forces, fire fighters, engineers and even civilian shipping via a merchant marine force. It does also mean that like a more stereotyped proud warrior race, every single Turian can if pressed join the armed forces and fight to the last and they openly practice Total War rather then doing anything in a limited fashion. Overall if your on the receiving end of a Turian war it probably look a lot like a Klingon or most other Proud Warrior Race Guys with the entire society mobilizing to kick your ass, but unlike other proud warrior race guy's there not actually looking for somebody to fight at all times.

Problems

There are a lot of issues with the Proud Warrior Race and how they function, but the stem of it is that any society is complex and reducing them to one part of that greater whole makes as much sense as designing a car and only designing an engine. However before we begin it's worth remembering that while what we said is true: the engine is the sexy part of the car. In books, games, movies and so on the proud warrior race guy is the thing the story is set around not the logistical engine chugging behind him keeping him supplied with horse shoes nails. It's only when they go all in on this culture thing that it strains and begs the question of just how this society works when it seems war is all they value, espically in science fiction.