Have I Mentioned I Am a Dwarf Today?

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

You're just strolling along, life is amazing. But no matter how well things are going, there's always that one guy mistakes you for a bearded gnome. And for a dwarf like you, nothing spoils your day like this.

But wait, you can prevent this! All you need to do is inform the people around you of your dwarvenhood before they call you a gnome. Everyone. All the time. Even if you're with people whom you've known for a long time.

If you belong to a Proud Warrior Race, then it goes without saying that unless there's something wrong with you, you're proud of it. Make sure you remind everyone, constantly, that you are a member of this race.

Dwarves seem to suffer the most of this habit, but it's an equal opportunity trope. Any character that loudly and near-constantly preempts any confusion there would be as to their race or culture as a matter of principle, or even just brags about belonging to a Proud Warrior Race, is an example of this trope.

Kind of a passive variant of Fantastic Racism. A character who does this because he's pretending to be what he constantly proclaims he is (such as a gnome trying to blend in as a dwarf) is acting under the Most Definitely Not a Villain clausule.

Examples of Have I Mentioned I Am a Dwarf Today? include:

Multiple Media

  • Scottish characters in many sources seem to have a strange need to use phrases such as "what the haggis" which are hard to picture anyone ever uttering unironically.

Anime and Manga

Film

Literature

  • Played with on the Discworld:
    • Corporal Carrot does this, as a 6-foot-tall human who was raised by dwarves and therefore still identifies as one.
    • And then there's Nobby Nobbs. He has to carry a card around certifying that Lord Vetinari, having examined all available evidence including testimony from the midwife herself believes that the balance of probability leans slightly towards him being human.
    • Lance-Constable Cuddy[1] of Men at Arms inverts the trope. Throughout the book, people give him the rather credulous inquiry, "Are you a dwarf?" He maintains a reasonable sense of humor about the whole thing, if by "reasonable sense of humor" you mean "unrestrained sarcasm".
  • Klingons are like this in the Star Trek Novel Verse. In the Star Trek: Klingon Empire series in particular, a great many characters are somewhat obsessed with "being Klingon", and make a point of it routinely. It's relatively justified, in that Klingon society has recently undergone tremendous upheaval and is now trying to reaffirm a sense of what being Klingon means. Characters evaluate their own behaviour, and that of their fellows, against the expected conduct of the ideal Klingon. This is particularly true of Toq (who grew up ignorant of his heritage and now embraces it enthusiastically – perhaps a little too enthusiastically), and Klag (who takes his obligations to the Order of the Bat'leth extremely seriously).
  • In The Secret of Platform 13, one character is a water nymph who repeatedly notes that she's not a mermaid, pointing out her feet. It's Lampshaded at one point that nobody knows why being mistaken for a mermaid would upset her so much (especially since nobody actually does it).
  • While not especially smug about it, the thranx from the Humanx Commonwealth series constantly make mention of their insectoid traits, either commenting on the physiological differences between themselves and humans or voicing perplexity at how humans cope without insect-like bodies (too few limbs, skin not hard enough, etc).

Live-Action TV

  • Star Trek
    • Klingons are obsessed with their Klingon-ness. Worf in The Next Generation is exceptionally bad, even annoying his fellow Klingons with his inability to speak like a normal person and irritation over not following every old tradition to the letter. Hinted to be justified in that he was raised by humans and therefore has an idealized vision of his race and a need to be more Klingon than Kahless.
    • Cardassians also make it a habit to remind everyone of the superiority of their race and explain that everyone just misunderstands their superior culture. But then, Space Nazi is their hat.
    • You could make a drinking game out of how often Spock (the Proud Scholar Race Guy) says, "I am a Vulcan." Once again, this could be over-compensation at work - Spock is only half-Vulcan, and the few full-blooded Vulcans we meet in TOS stray surprisingly far from his ideals, and he acts even more stereotypically Vulcan when his father is around.

Machinima

  • Simon from The Yogscast frequently reminds the audience that he is a dwarf.

Video Games

Web Comics

  • In the "Federation" arc of Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger, Groonch the G'norch makes a point of emphasizing his warrior-race pride (his hat, given by Captain Pidorq, is "token noble savage")--- only to have it brutally subverted when it's pointed out that his "race" has dozens of languages and hundreds of cultures, and "noble warrior" isn't even in the top ten....

Real Life

  • Many comedians, including Jay Mohr, point out that their Jewish friends seem to be unable to get through a conversation without referencing the fact that they're Jewish.
  • Comedians whose schtick revolves around some aspect of their identity, be it female, gay, Latino, redneck and so forth, must inevitably talk about this aspect of their identity quite a lot.
  1. Who is unquestionably a dwarf, just in case you're not keeping up