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 (to varying degrees) is this...

  • Placing extreme value on marshal prowess and master of combat techniques. One should dedicate one's life towards mastering combat techniques and honing one's skills.
    • An extreme 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 tendency to resolve interpersonal conflicts with duels or other contests of marshall skill.
  • 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 as the trope also applies to a social caste. You can have variations on this in which heritage is easily trumped by commitment to the code. (Like, for instance, Star Wars' Mandalorians who accept(ed) anyone willing to live by the Resol'nare 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 from subservient castes 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, aprons and gloves for the smiths and leather bits for the armor, a carpenter to build their houses, etc. In the end for every full time warrior, you need dozens of other people behind them providing support. While some societies and fictional settings have some take up hybrid occupations with part time craftsmen and traders, such setups tend to either degree martial prowess or lead to different tiers of membership (with all the politicking and segregation that that entails).

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 are not above doing some farming, herding, trade, accounting, land management and landscape painting on the side themselves. 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. The Spartans (i.e. officially recognized full citizens of the city of Sparta) 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. Said Helots were conquered at some point in history (we think this was over 2,000 years ago), and were kept in slavery to do all the support work the Spartans required for their Proud Warrior stuff. 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 roughly between 900BC and 200BC: Sparta's power and influence would only wane away by the time Alexander the Great came conquering along and ultimately be definitively put under by the Romans.

The problem is that as societies and technology advance, this model gets less and less viable. When a nation has access to 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; said army can overcome mighty warriors trough tactics and/or sheer numbers, even if the opposition has a substantial advantage in one-on-one fights. Do note that it is a lot easier said then done: historically, only the Roman Empire and maybe China could really claim to have been able to do that until arguably the 16th century. In no small part because warrior classes will often resist the implementation of systems which renders them and their political station obsolete. In a fantasy setting, the Proud Warrior Race Guy can perfectly make sense make sense: one could say the romanticized version of a knight is a form of Proud Warrior Race Guy. It's when you start getting 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 T'au 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 various degrees this could be portrayed: a modern real-world military like the US Marines could be said to have a code of honour. Not shooting medics, Not harming non-combatants, Not torturing people and Not using chemical weapons/sub-munitions/etc... make for a reasonable code, as they limit collateral damage and casualties without hampering the combatants (too much). In fiction, however, it get taken to stupid levels like No ambushing, head straight for the enemy! or Ranged weapons are a coward's tool!: such codes are so inherently self-limiting that you wonder how they're able to manage to be successful warriors in the first place. The Mameluks were a class of elite heavy cavalry in Egypt that had such attitude to missile weapons, which did not serve them well when the Ottomen marched in with matchlock muskets. Other impractical practices can include refusal to accept or offer surrender and expected suicide in the face of failure; all good for heroic tales and extreme motivation but can lead to excessive waste of life and experience.

This is before the matter of internal conflicts. If you have a bunch of fairly small factions which feel that see armed conflict as the first and best option to resolve problems and advance their interests and feel that it's important that grudges need to be avenged it does not take a lot to get these guys to kill themselves. A good weapon that has often been used against feudal powers is to capitalize and inflame these internal conflicts. A case and point example of this is the rapid disintegration of multiple nomadic steppe Empires like the Mongols and the Turks; when you inevitably subjugate everyone in view then it’s more likely you and your extended family will start quarreling in the absence of a strong and charismatic leader to keep it all together.

Overall in both fiction and IRL: the Proud Warrior Race guys tend to eventually lose to those societies that are better able to mobilize larger parts of their population than 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 and Jiralhanae in Halo
  • The Clans in BattleTech
  • Orcs often fall into this trope.
  • The Dothraki from A Song of Ice and Fire
  • The Ironborn from A Song and Ice and fire. Notably they are a bit of a subversion of the archetype in that a lot of it is the opinion of Romantics yearning for a lost golden age which never really was and they are moving slowly towards trade.
  • 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. While 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.
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