"Well, Mr. Ryan, profit or not, no man bails water out of privies built by Bill McDonagh."
— Bill McDonagh, BioShock
A character who is not only a skilled artisan, but also known for their complete zero-tolerance policy for Cutting Corners — they will not, under any circumstance, be responsible for a bad boot, a faulty floor, a shoddy sword or anything that is not made to the best of their ability. Their work is their pride and joy, and they take great delight in making things that are meant to last from father to son, and maybe beyond.
They find something fulfilling about Doing It for the Art and creating things of the highest quality, even at the expense of potential profit from compromising their standards and producing lower-quality work.
It is possible that they will belong to the Proud Industrious Race, in which case they may not even stand out among the rest of their kin.
Subtrope of Consummate Professional. Compare Quality over Quantity.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Dr. STONE: Kaseki is sought out by Senku precisely because he is a craftsman of great skill. While Senku and Chrome can devise numerous scientific advances for the Stone World, and Kohaku and the local villagers can provide physical strength and manual labor, none of them are able to do the create the finer pieces of equipment that are required for more advanced machines and devices. Kaseki, though initially distrustful, is wowed by the ideas Senku and Chrome show him, form an Intergenerational Friendship with the two teenagers, and is regularly fired up by even the most difficult acts of crafting Senku demands, both dreading and enjoying their difficulty.
- Gunsmith Cats: Rally goes out of her way to ensure that one of her customized guns is used in a murder. This is, however, on the reputation damage of it being used. However, Rally mentions that she makes sure everything is top notch when it comes to her work, so if she can't do a thing (in the manga she mentions the inner work on a barrel) she sends it to a specialist.
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: Welf is from a family that was so good at making swords they were cursed by the Gods to never make another sword again and he's the first one since this not to have the curse. Problem is that he wants to be able to make the best swords possible through sheer skill instead of using his innate gifts, which pisses off most other blacksmiths he runs into because they have to use every single tiny scrap of talent, skill, and inherent gift to the craft every time they work a forge.
- Parodied in One Piece. The way of Zoro, Usopp, Sanji and Franky is cut off by a destroyed bridge. They take a moment trying to figure out how they are going to get to the other side. Then the three notice Franky (the shipwright of the crew) has managed to built a new bridge, and not some shoddy emergency bridge, but a sturdy one with railings and all.
Franky: Wait just another 30 seconds, I'm not quite satisfied with this finish...
Zoro, Sanji and Usopp: He made a bridge!!!
Franky: With this much rubble around, there was plenty of wood to use as material.
Usopp: But isn't it a bit much in an emergency to put in such detail.
Franky: Are you saying that I should skip crucial parts of the construction!!?
Comic Books
- Red Sonja: The Art of Blood and Fire has the chef Gribaldi, who cannot stop himself from rendering foraged camp food into gourmet meals.
Films — Live-Action
- Kate in A Knight's Tale, who makes lighter and stronger armour than any other smith.
- High and Low: Gondo has worked at the National Shoe Company from age 16, and takes great pride in the quality of their products. So when the Corrupt Corporate Executive trio at the beginning of the film entices him to make lousy shoes that are cheaper to make and would bring the company a lot of money, Gondo refuses, stating that he would not make a bad shoe.
- In Jabberwocky, Dennis' father is outright pissed at the travelling salesman for even suggesting about making barrels that are only good for one trip.
- Busotti, the creator of The Red Violin, is an Italian master who creates instruments that last for centuries. He wants them to be played and loved—he destroys an apprentice's violin in the opening scene because he says it is only good to be a collection piece.
- Lazar from The Man with the Golden Gun takes immense pride in producing finely balanced weapons that meet the specific needs of each customer.
Lazar: Here, you will find only craftsmanship and quality. Mass-production — your Walther PPK, for instance — I leave to others.
Bond: What about ammunition?
Lazar: Designed to individual requirements, whatever they may be.
Literature
- Beast Tamer: Gantz Storf is a dwarven blacksmith and weapon shop owner in the town Rain lives in. By the time Rein meets him, he's reached a point where seeing his beloved creations be viewed as nothing more than "good weapons" has disheartened him, prompting him to put out worse products with short life cycles that look good for regular sale, and keep the quality and detailed masterpieces for customers who can spot the difference. This comes back to bite him, as the antagonists in his introductory arc are adventurers he sold his shoddy wares to trying to ruin him by sabotaging his source of the mythril used in his finer creations. Gantz realizes afterward that he was making a big mistake in evaluating his customers the way he had, and resolves to resume making all of his weapons with the heart and soul he had before.
- The Belgariad: The Blacksmith Durnik is like this. In his Establishing Character Moment, he's doing precise finishing work on a minor piece that no one will see; he explains that if he didn't do his best on the piece, he'd remember it every time he saw the customer.
- Peter Straub's Koko: The carpenter Conor is working for is such a craftsman, and Conor is learning a lot about house-building. But then the carpenter is obligated to hire on a worthless in-law and Conor has to be let go just in time for him to join the main plotline. Toward the end of the book, the in-law is divorced from the family and Conor is rehired.
- Momo: Subverted with Momo's friend the bricklayer. When the Grey Men have taken over, he and his co-workers have to work faster, building a new floor in a week, but he admits it's crappy work which may last a few years at best. He often gets drunk, because that's the only way he can stand the thought of what he's now having to build.
- The Spiritsmith in The Balanced Sword by Ryk E. Spoor. He has forged the weapons and armour of most of the gods, studied his trade for thousands of years, and very much cares about how his creations are used.
- This is almost always a trait of the Order Masters of the Saga of Recluce, beginning with Lerris in the first book, The Magic of Recluce. He's so determinedly perfect in his carpentry that everyone around him is in awe watching him work. It gets him in trouble when he imbues some of his creations with order... and they're intended for use by masters of chaos.
- Invoked in Belisarius Series. It is several times said that the title character is a Consummate Professional who wants to be a blacksmith and makes war with a smith's professional pride.
- Discworld:
- In Going Postal, many of the original clacks engineers were this, and left when the Grand Trunk began taking their maintenance time away so that they could profit more from constant running. Bill Pony is one of the few left, and he has a lot of thoughts about how the people he used to employ wouldn't do shoddy work no matter what you paid them and actually knew what was going on in the clacks system. The new management's insistence on Cutting Corners is ultimately costing them more money than they're saving, because repairing an equipment failure creates far more downtime than a scheduled maintenance period.
- In Soul Music, the guitar maker is slowly reduced to a subversion of this after inherently musically-inept people keep buying his guitars after seeing Buddy rock out, ordering his apprentice to haul his old practice guitars out of storage to sell them, and eventually just selling metal wire stretched over wood, giggling madly.
- In Snuff, the goblins take the crafting of unggue pots very seriously. One of them, having created one that looks beautiful to both Vimes and Feeney, throws it against the wall in disgust and shame because it doesn't meet his own standards.
- In Raising Steam, the young engineer Dick Simnel treats everything related to his locomotive design with utmost seriousness, not least to avoid ending up a cloud of superheated red mist like his father. His single-minded focus is infectious, however, and he inspires Ankh-Morpork's first generation of Rail Enthusiasts.
- In The Princess Bride, Domingo Montoya has the highest standards for himself and the swords he makes. He could be wealthy and renowned, but he doesn't want to make swords that will only be trophies for stupid elites. He is ecstatic at the challenge of making a balanced sword for a six-fingered man - but changes his mind when the six-fingered man sees only a product to buy, not a masterpiece. Domingo leaves his final sword to his son, Inigo.
- Once: A lifelong fascination with wood drives Thom Kindred's fastidious devotion to carpentry.
Live-Action TV
- At the very end of The Good Place, Tahani shows her positive growth by learning to build high quality furniture. This shows her positive Character Development, as she has learned to do good work for its own sake, rather than to get praise and adoration from others.
- In an episode of Mad About You, Paul buys some hand-dipped chocolate-covered strawberries for Jamie. Well, he tries to do this, anyway – the shopkeeper is such a perfectionist that if he dips a strawberry and it doesn't come out perfectly, he hurls it at the wall during a Foreign-Language Tirade.
- Henry Crabbe, the protagonist of Pie in the Sky, is this when it comes to his restaurant. He resists pressure to save time or money at the expense of quality, and is always saddened (and occasionally horrified) when he encounters another restaurant that doesn't have the same standards.
- Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation is a seriously dedicated woodworker (as is Nick Offerman, the guy playing Swanson).
- Kamen Rider Gaim gives us Pierre Oren Alfonso; he may be a Bunny-Ears Lawyer and a Jerkass (refusing to hire Kouta because he's an Aquarius), but the man is one of the best pâtissier in the world. He doesn't cut corners, puts his passion into his work, and values his customers' satisfaction above all else.note
- This attitude even extends to arts which Oren doesn't practice; one of his early Kick the Dog moments has him interrupting a Beat Riders performance and chew them out for being amateur street dancers with no further ambitions.
Mythology
- Hephaestus
of Classical Mythology (also known as Vulcan in the Roman pantheon) the Ultimate Blacksmith of the gods.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer Fantasy: One of the cultural hang-ups of dwarfs is to treat everything as Serious Business, which for any dwarf craftsdwarf means being a true artist in their field. Dwarfs cannot, and will not, do anything but their best possible work: The Warhammer RPGs note that while a human cobbler will make shoes he thinks are good enough to sell and then stop and make a new pair, a dwarf cobbler will not stop until the pair of shoes he's currently working on is the best pair of shoes he is capable of making at this point in time. Implying a dwarf has been Cutting Corners is a vile insult, as while shoddy work ("umgak" in the dwarfen tongue) can be somewhat excused if you simply can't do it any better it will never be excused if done out of laziness or on purpose. The dwarfen runelord Thorek Ironbrow is a particularly infamous example in-universe: As one of the oldest and orneriest of all the dwarf runelords, Thorek worked his way to the top of his field over centuries and is the best one around. His standards are as such impossibly high and he has a Berserk Button about inferior work: He is a nightmare to be apprenticed to, and has fired his main assistant Kraggi multiple times over minute mistakes (only to re-hire him every time because Kraggi is the only apprentice still willing to work for him full-time).
Video Games
- Downplayed by Garret Almstead, one of the blacksmiths in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura. He'll go out of his way to make sure any goods he works on are of the highest quality because he doesn't want his name associated with shoddy work, but he's unwilling to compromise his profits. This leads to him being accused of being a swindler when the innkeeper hires him to repair an antique strongbox; he finds several places where the strongbox is damaged that the innkeeper hadn't noticed and feels obliged to repair them all, then decides that the extra work he put into the repairs justifies him charging more than double his initial estimate.
- In BioShock, Bill McDonagh mentions in an audio log that this trope is what earned him Andrew Ryan's respect (and position as his general contractor). While working as a plumber hired to install Ryan's bathroom plumbing, McDonagh used brass fittings on the pipes instead of the cheaper tin ones that Ryan had ordered and paid off the difference out of pocket, leading up to the page quote.
- In Love & Pies, Sven describes himself as "a simple expert craft maker and woodsman". He lives in a cottage in the woods that he hand-built with Angus and once whittled his own canoe and won a golden axe trophy from a crafting contest. He also uses his craftsmanship to help Amelia rebuild the café.
- In Potion Permit, Reyner is the only carpenter in Moonbury, but he's incredibly skilled in his craft. You can visit his workshop to buy furniture for your house and upgrades to your work area.
Western Animation
- Geri the toy restorer from Toy Story 2 is clearly good at his job and insists that "You can't rush art!" to the impatient Al. Word of God is that he did the job for free, believing the chance to work on a toy as rare as Woody to be its own reward.
- Molly of Denali: Mr. Patak, the local woodcarver, always prioritizes making high quality products.
- Rarity in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic seems to put her all into her fashions, sometimes to the point of exhaustion when keeping up with her friends requests in "Suited for Success".
- Spongebob Squarepants prides himself in making Krabby Patties by hand with the utmost of care. This is highlighted in the few episodes where someone tries to mass-produce Patties ("Neptune's Spatula", "Selling Out") and they end up tasting awful.
