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Hot Skitty On Wailord Action
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alt title(s): HSOWA 
In Video Games where you Gotta Catch Them All, and where "them" are Mons, often the only way to acquire every last critter in the game is to... well... breed them.
This may involve somewhat conventional animal husbandry, or stranger things, but the important thing is that there are rarely any reasonable limits on what can be bred to what. Near the extreme end of the scale, in Pokemon, we have the two-foot-tall catlike Skitty and the forty-seven-foot-long blue whale Wailord, which, as they are both part of the Egg Group "Ground", can mate and produce viable offspring in either gender combination. When this topic came up on the GameFAQs forums, the user Endgame, a professional troll, reportedly said "HOT SKITTY ON WAILORD ACTION!" The name stuck, and has become famous in the field. Technically it could get even more dissimilar with Seedot, who is eight inches shorter, sixteen pounds lighter, and a plant. Depending on the game, the offspring of such a blasphemous union may be either parents' species, or a third creature altogether.
In a broader sense, this may apply to any work of fiction in which two grossly dissimilar species are somehow capable of interbreeding. This pretty much misses the point of the term "species", which is supposed to indicate which animals can breed successfully. Is Skitty to Wailord what a poodle is to a German Shepherd? Or worse, Chihuahua / Irish Wolfhound? Apparently. Then again, one early Pokemon manga adaptation claims that all Pokemon are expressions of the genetic code of a single species that defies traditional biological taxonomies.
If the results aren't Half Human Hybrids or Mix And Match Critters, then it's probably a case of Gender Equals Breed. The first Pokémon breeding centre is found on Route 34. The unintentional (or intentional) ability to produce this phenomenon is attributed to Gameplay And Story Segregation.
See Also: Interspecies Romance and Hybrid Monster.
Examples:
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Comics
- Cerebus the Aardvark got it on with a human woman and had a mostly-human child. Apparently all the dominant aardvark traits manifest in the toes.
- Done with very grim realism in Jeff and Rexa's conception in the Top Ten spin-off Smax — they're half-ogre, half human (human mother), and the size differences involved meant their mother didn't survive pregnancy.
Fan Fiction
- There has been at least one DS 9 fan fic where Odo and Nerys not only have intimate contact but their union produces an offspring.
Film
- One script of Galaxy Quest has this ending for Fred and Laliari. Thankfully this was not shown. (For those who don't know, Laliari is a Thermian, a species of Starfish Aliens who look like an octopus eating a squid. She uses a holgram to "dress up" as human, but apparently takes it off to have sex. "Oh, that's not right" indeed!)
- In the sequel to Hellboy, it is discovered that Liz is pregnant with Hellboy's children. It's never quite explained how this works, but nobody seems to question their biological compatibility.
- In Meet The Feebles by Peter Jackson, an elephant named Sid is said to have had sexual relations with a chicken. Said chicken then brings up a paternity suit against Sid, who claims the baby isn't his ("She slept with half the chorus!"). It becomes apparent, however, that the baby was, in fact, fathered by Sid, as it's seen that the baby is a cross between a chicken and an elephant.
- Shrek 2, at the very end, shows Dragon and Donkey's offspring. According to the action figures, they're called "Dronkeys". They're pretty strange-looking, too.
- That gag started life when the first movie came out, as a short comic in a Mad Magazine. The animators probably thought "why the hell not?"
- "Look at all my mutant babies!"
- The Golden Child has Kala, a female human/dragon hybrid, whose ancestors were supposedly raped by dragons.
Literature
- Gene Wolf's Wizard Knight books (bilogy? Duology?) actually have a character explain exactly how a human women is expected to have sex with one of the Angrborn giants. This becomes the justification for killing the King before he can take his new wife to bed.
- In Glen Cook's "Garrett, P.I." books, the main character's homeland of Karenta is full of this. Because the human empire is at war, many jobs have been filled by various creatures (trolls, dwarves, elves, etc), all of which seem to be able to breed with each other and humans, sometimes in such variety that it's impossible to tell exactly what a creature is unless you know their great-grandparents.
- In the somewhat perverted Xanth novels, any two species of creature are capable of breeding and having viable offspring. The result is either a Biological Mashup like a centaur or a winged centaur or who knows what else, or a were-creature of some sort. All of the chimeric creatures in Xanth, such as mermaids, are literally the result of interspecies breeding.
- This is due to the abundance of unmarked, naturally occurring Love Springs, which (generally) cause unsuspecting people and animals who drink the water to immediately and involuntarily mate. It also magically ensures offspring. This is a rather abrupt and off-putting experience, so those cross-species couples actually interested in enjoying the experience generally use 'Accommodation Spells'.
- Harry Potter fans often speculate on how Hagrid the half giant was conceived. Fortunately, his mother was the giant in the relationship.
- Don't forget, that means his father was a wizard.
- Hagrid did ask Madame Olympe which one of her parents was the giant - so apparently, some females managed... And perhaps the giants have gorilla proportions in this area.
- And Hagrid himself seems to have a thing for odd crosses - blast-ended skrewts aren't a naturally occurring species.
- The conception isn't the problem, it's the gestation and (oww!) childbirth.
- The mother's body won't let the fetus to grow too big. Human multiple births are handled that way, right? And a caesarian is not that difficult.
- Think again
 ◊ (brain bleach may be required).
- A Song Of Ice And Fire author George R.R. Martin apparently had the same mechanics-related thoughts. In the far north of Westeros, humans are occasionally abducted by giants. Abducted men have produced half-giants who have since further interbred with humans. The abducted women... don't survive.
- This is actually Older Than Print — there is a rather horrid image in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur about a giant who has abducted the Duchess of Brittany: he hath murdered her in forcing her, and hath slit her unto the navel.
- Dunwich Horror, anyone? A human woman and an Eldritch Abomination locked out of time and space have some rather... unique offspring.
- Thanks a ton for that mental image. I need Brainbleach!
- In the Discworld novels the reason for all the Mix And Match Critters in heraldry is because the heralds insist on drawing all the designs from life, and there's not really enough space to keep all the animals, so they get a bit... close, If You Know What I Mean.
- Don't forget Errol and the "king" in Guards! Guards!. He can sit on a person's shoulders while she weighs several tons and was once mistaken for a castle turret.
- The hero of Tad Williams' The War Of The Flowers is shepherded through Faerie by, well, a fairy. Several times people assume they're boyfriend and girlfriend, squicking him out. He later asks how such a relationship would even be possible. The answer? "Surgery."
- Note that this was a Magitek universe; this was not a flippant answer. The surgical/sorcerous procedure which could accomplish the deed was a significant plot point.
- Eventually, the tiny fairy does hook up with a much larger character. They have tentative plans for him to have the compatibility surgery, since it's easier going "from large to small". The hero still had trouble processing this information.
- One of the books in Mercer Mayer's Little Critter series entitled "Just a Little Different" has a character that has a turtle father and rabbit mother.
- Explicitly and bluntly averted in James White's Sector General novels. Though circumstances may lead to an Earth-human falling in lust with a Melfan crab-person and thinking longingly of her lovely mottled carapace, there is no chance they're interfertile. In fact, you generally can't even catch an alien COLD in these books, much less a baby.
- In Dr Seuss's Horton Hatches the Egg, a half-elephant, half-bird was created by the titular elephant sitting on a bird's egg.
- In a short story of The Dresden Files, Harry and an...ally run into a monster whose only means of reproduction is this. It kidnaps human women and then rapes them. The creature in question is at least eight feet tall, and made worse by the fact that its genitalia are huge in proportion to its body, even compared to a hypothetical human its own size. The resulting offspring ''rip their way out of her womb'', a la Alien. However this is made remotely funny by the fact that the monster has to get blind stinking drunk before bedding a human.
- Saruman apparently crossbred Orcs and Men. We really don't want to know how that works...
- The same way elves and men does, presumably, given that the Orc/Elf split may be more cultural than biological.
Live Action TV
- On Hercules The Legendary Journeys, Herc and Iolaus befriended a mixed couple consisting of a centaur man and a human woman. And they had a son. Who was also a centaur.
- In the final episode of Lexx, the titular Living Ship, dies of old age, but not before giving birth to a smaller newborn ship. The other parent that helped produce the offspring was a dragonfly. A normal dragonfly from Earth. Forget Skitty and Wailord, inches long insect and Manhattan sized insectoid spaceship is way more bizarre.
- May be less bizarre if you consider real life mating habits of some animals. Not going into details, but look up anglerfish. Really.
- An episode of The Golden Girls featured the character Rose dreaming of a peaceful, utopian future, one where bears would live in harmony with field mice, "But they wouldn't be able to mate or else the field mice would explode."
Mythology
- In Greek myth, the Minotaur was born of this sort of a union, making this Older Than Dirt. King Minos angered the sea god Poseidon by refusing to sacrifice a bull (given to him by Poseidon for that very purpose), so Poseidon caused his wife Queen Pasiphae to fall in love with that same bull. She asked Daedalus to help her, so he built her a device that looked like a cow and enabled her to go tryst with her beloved. Don't think too hard about the mechanics of this.
- Zeus, that philanderer of mythological proportions (pun very much intended) often seduced human women in the guise of animals, such as a bull or a swan. Or a shower of gold.
- And lest we forget that Zeus was the child of Titans!
- All the Greek Gods were descended from Titans, which leads one to believe they were the same species, just different cultures.
- Not all: the gods have children, too.
- Also, Aphrodite who was born out of foam on the waves when Chronos - Zeus' Father - threw Uranos', HIS father's, penis into the sea. So Aphrodite's birth is not only mind-boggling, it also shows her to be a generation older than Zeus and his siblings.
Newspaper Comics
- In one Bloom County arc, Hodge Podge and Rosebud, respectively a jackrabbit and "basselope" (basset hound/antelope) had jackabasselope children.
Pornography
- A particularly hilarious (but very, very NSFW) Furry comic called "The problems with cross breeding" illustrates the sort of bedroom problems you'd have in a universe where every single animal has been anthropomorphized and is capable of interbreeding with each other. For example, a "marital aid" for a Giraffe/Rabbit couple is a stepladder.
- A similar one involves a Butt Monkey main character who is at first enthused with bedding females from different species, only to find out they all have 'quirks' related to their actual animals' normal mating habits (The Ups And Downs Of Anthropomorphic Relationships by Jim Hardiman, most renowned for his slutty skunk sisters). He usually ends up mauled, distended, or incapacitated in some fashion. A couple of them had him knocked out from sheer exhaustion, having taken on animals renowned for looooong mating habits.
- "You're not going to hurt me, are you?" "Not unless you want me to."
- I demand linkage to these comics!
- You know what? Let's not.
Tabletop Games
- The dragons of Dungeons And Dragons can change shape into nearly any living creature, and can mate with anything into which they change shape to produce viable half-dragon offspring.
- The increased amounts of splat books have brought increasingly outlandish (and Squicky) variants of the above half-dragon, such as the half-infernal and half-celestial, the half-troll, the half-illithid, and even the half-golem (though this has nothing to do with parentage. Most of these, being templates that are applied to other creatures, have far too few limits on what they can be placed on.
- Beyond this, several editions of the game have talked about the fecundity of goblinoid races, which include goblins, hobgoblins, ogres, and orcs. They could easily interbreed with each other, with humanity, and with several other species. It seems that developing new monsters for the game mostly consists of finding two creatures already in the game and figuring out what happens when they have sex.
- See also the Book of Erotic Fantasy. Yes, it's a real book. Or "The Complete Guide to Unlawful Carnal knowledge" (includes rules for hybrid childs, critical hit rules for Groin Attack and "Porno periodical for humanoids" treasure tables). Or "Nymphology. Blue Magic." (Mongoose Publishing, Encyclopaedia Arcane series). Invariably contains mix of Fetish supplements, Mix And Match Critters close-up supplements, things You Do NOT Want To Know (whoever you are) and lots of jokes.
- d100 monster FATAL is pretty much what would happen if your introduction to D&D WERE the above mentioned books.
- The Book of Erotic Fantasy actually has a friggin' TABLE for this kind of thing. Complete with cloud giants and 1" tall sprites interbreeding. Brain Bleach now, please?
- Half-Dragon Shambling Mound. Half-Dragon Shambling Mound.
- Of course, the true madness lies in the fact that successive halves technically do nothing to dilute the effect of each one... and the half-dragon template can be applied multiple times. Counting the half-dragon possibilities listed in the 'Draconomicon', it is possible (if impractical) to create a Half Amethyst, Half Battle, Half Beast, Half Black, Half Blue, Half Brass, Half Bronze, Half Chaos, Half Chiang Lung, Half Copper, Half Crystal, Half Deep, Half Emerald, Half Ethereal, Half Fang, Half Force, Half Gold, Half Green, Half Howling, Half Li Lung, Half Lung Wang, Half Oceanus, Half Pan Lung, Half Prismatic, Half Pyroclastic, Half Radiant, Half Red, Half Rust, Half Sapphire, Half Shadow, Half Shen Lung, Half Silver, Half Song, Half Styx, Half T’ien Lung, Half Tarterian, Half Topaz, Half Tun mi Long, Half White, Half Yu Lung Dragon... Gelatinous Cube. So bad, it's awesome.
- That's 41 different species, BTW.
- But the real kick is that you can have a half-dragon dragon. Pink dragons (half-white reds or half-red whites) are especially powerful, as the template changes natural cold/fire vulnerability into immunity.
- An electrum dragon (half-gold, half-silver) would do the same deal... Except not be evil. And pink.
- I wouldn't recommend bashing pink dragons around Vaarsuvius.
- Half-Dragon Warforged.
- The 3.5 monster manual does specifically say not to add more than one template to a creature. However, jerks like me will do it anyway to screw with the players.
- To be fair, a half-Illithid is an incomplete parasitic infection (or, if you insist on being Squicky, standard Illithid mating gone hilariously wrong), and half-golems are essentially mystically created cyborgs.
- However, there is the presence of the Tauric template, which results in a cross between a quadruped and a biped. Hobgriffin, anyone?
- A Wizard Did It. And that's the sample creature. Be more imaginative - Orc/Monstrous centipede?
- Humans also seem to be able to breed with many things as well. When a Half-X is a race and not a template, the "Half" is assumed to be human.
- Parodied in Order Of The Stick, where some of the characters are discussing the legendary reproductive... talents of Humans. Various examples are given- half-elves, half-orcs, half-dragons and so on, before somebody says, "... Centaurs."
- Mr. Welch, of "Things Mr. Welch is not allowed to do in an RPG" fame, apparently uses this to imply that elves are easy.
- Not to mention making fun of Biological Mash Ups like the owlbear.
- Speaking of dwarves and elves, Myth Drannor was named so "In deference to a visionary elf of old who found the love in him to marry a dwarf". And yes, in Forgotten Realms dwarves of both sexes has beards, elves of both sexes haven't. This one isn't too hard to unimagine; though you may or may not need Brain Bleach afterwards.
- A certain third-party book contains guidelines for turning anything into a half-template. Yes, anything.
- Of course, the experimentation justification can't be used for the Draegloth, a product of hot Drow priestess on Glabrezu action. What makes this one especially squicky is that Glabrezu are incapable of altering their appearance, meaning that someone had consensual sex with a hideous, giant, four-armed, pincered, dog-faced, unholy abomination of the universe.
- One of the Drizzt Do'Urden novels actually not-quite-shows this happening. In Menzoberranzan (at least) the 'valedictorian' of each class of priestesses is accorded this 'honour' as part of the graduation festivities; indeed, Drizzt's sister partook of this herself when she graduated (though thankfully without 'offspring'), and considers "It brought me power" to be justification enough - before, during, and after. Thoroughly Squicky, even though the 'action' takes place off-screen.
- And the War of the Spider Queen series finally proved that the presence of one Draegloth is all that needed to not only turn bunch of bickering, scheming, backstabbing drow on a mission for the sake of Religion Of Evil into party of rather likeable characters, but also do the same for another half-demon and half-shadow dragon half-drow. There's bastards, and there's... bastards.
- There's entire House of Gold Elves who not merely played with this, but had crossbreeding program, so now it consists of Daemonfey (half-fiends) and Fey-ri (tieflings). Apparently, old elven villains could be "outbastarded" only in literally... but at least not with Glabrezu.
- Traditionally (i.e., before 3rd Edition), humans, orcs, and ogres were all interfertile. Humans mating with either always produced half-orcs or half-ogres (who were themselves fertile with each other and all three species), but orc/ogre pairings had it differently: A female orc mating with a male ogre would produce an "orog", basically a large orc that's smarter than either of its parents, while a female ogre mating with a male orc would produce an "ogrillon", a small ogre that's less intelligent than both parents and is inexplicably covered in bony nodules that give it an armor bonus; orogs are fertile but ogrillons are not. They dropped these complicated ideas in 3E and made no mention at all of orc/ogre hybrids, but orogs did return in Forgotten Realms as simply a large subspecies of the main orc race.
- You have to wonder exactly what bizare combination of creatures brought about the Landshark.
- All that was probably the reason for doing away with half-breed templates in 4e. Wizards of the Coast parodied the template system with a fake leaked 4e Character Sheet on April 1st in 2008 with the race entry containing "Half-.../Half-.../Half-...".
- Averted in the World Of Darkness game lines, which actually had rather extensive FAQs in some of the supplementary books about what happened if various supernatural monsters got it on. Their solution? While most everything was human enough to mate, the powers you got were a spiritual rather than genetic thing, and the rules of spiritual inheritance were such that you could not have a "mixed soul". The result tended to be that the offspring would be one kind of monster without any real bennies from the other parent. (The writers of those books really hated mummified Vampire/Werewolves with Changeling powers and Mage spells, and went out of their way to keep them out of the game)
- To put blame where blame belongs, the authors of the 1st edition splatbooks of the various gamelines in the old World Of Darkness had caused this problem in the first place. Werewolves had to mate with either wolves or humans to produce offspring, as mating among themselves caused malformed monsters to be born. Even "normal" werewolf mating resulted in kinfolk (wolves and humans with werewolf blood) more often than true werewolf children. Both kinfolk or humans with fairy blood could awaken... or from a gameplay standpoint, a Mage character could also be a kinfolk AND have fairy blood if you bought the prerequisite advantages at character creation. Also, in the 1st edition, Mages and Changelings and even Werewolves could be turned into "ghouls" (servitors of vampires) by drinking vampire blood and thus gaining access to low-level vampiric powers without losing their own powers! Finally, 1st Edition writers introduced the dreaded rare (but apparently not rare enough) case of a werewolf turned into a vampire who didn't die during the transformation to undeath but became a so-called abomination. And of course, these same writers then wrote TWO game modules and a novel which prominently featured an NPC named Samuel Haight (sp?) who had started out as rogue kinfolk, awakened to become a Mage, captured a vampire to ghoul himself and then had used a forbidden black magic ritual to turn himself into a full werewolf, by killing a number of werewolves and stealing their pelts. And he founded his own cult of "Skindancers", other kinfolk eager to steal magical power from their werewolf cousins. And lest I forget, one game module had him trying to steal ancient magical secrets from an ancient archmage in the mythical city of El Dorado... yeah, stop laughing, please. It was the ultimate Munchkin fantasy, and it "inspired" many powergamers to pester gamemasters to allow their own gamebreaking characters.
- It wasn't until 3rd edition Mage/Vampire/Werewolf and 2nd Edition Changeling respectively, that some game designers (namely Justin Achillis) put their foot down hard and tightened the rules: Now, any werewolf who drank vampire blood would immediately become ill and puke it up, and abominations were spiritual blasphemies and so rare as to not exist for all practical gameplay purposes. Kinfolk could awaken to become Mages, but werewolves could not ever because their spiritual connection to Gaia didn't allow them to have a human avatar. Mages who drank vampire blood started losing their connection to their avatar, while becoming a vampire would shatter the avatar forever and rob them of their reality-changing powers. Changelings who drank vampire blood would gain banality points and lose their own fairy powers, going insane in the process, while the transformation into a vampire would kill the fairy soul inside them. A mummy was a mummy, period.
- As for Sam Haight, when the Wraith book was being developed some fans feared that he'd show up as a wraith with all the powers from his other templates on top of that. The developers put these fears to rest by stating that Sam did become a wraith after he died, but was promptly captured and turned into an ashtray.
- The New World of Darkness has a hard-and-fast rule that no character may ever have more than one supernatural template, with various minor plot justifications to avoid questions being raised. (For example, werewolves cannot be possessed by spirits because of their own innate spiritual nature; in rules terms, they're immune because spirit possession is a different template.)
- The Munchkin card game gives us the Half-Breed card, for Half Anything Hybrids. Elf/dwarf? Fine. Elf/gnome? Fine. Orc/dwarf? Fine. This moves into the seriously disturbing when the Dungeon of Ridiculous Races (letting you have as many races as you can find) kicks in; how does being half-elf, half-orc, half-gnome, half-dwarf, and half-halfling (quarterling?) sound? Arguably even worse are the 1/3-Breed and Chimera cards in the seventh expansion; 1/3-Breed lets you have three races, while Chimera means two or more races at all times, with the card being lost if you go below this. Whimper.
- The most powerful half-breed in Munchkin is the DOUBLE ELF. (Two levels whenever you assist someone in defeating a monster and +2 to run away if something goes wrong.) Just try to hoard Elf cards and Half / 1/3-breed and/or Chimera to gain somewhere around 4-5 levels in a single battle by "helping" someone else. Otherwise you can escape no matter what you roll on the die.
- The only problem here is that the other Munchkin players are generally extremely Genre Savvy, and know elves can do this. They will then set The Floating Nose or The Shadow Nose on you, steal all your gear, and refuse to accept help from you even if the alternative is death.
- Heck, even normal elves have this problem. A double Feline from Star Munchkin is worse, because their curiosity allows them to kick down three doors every turn (provided one of the first two isn't a monster).
- In Shadowrun, the standard fantasy races (elf, dwarf, orc (spelled ork), and troll) are explicitly said to be human subspecies. Interbreeding is possible in any combination, but children always match one of their parents (or sometimes revert to human); there are no mixtures. There is flavor text to the effect that a dwarf carrying a troll fetus would probably need major medical assistance to complete the pregnancy.
- The prequel game Earthdawn added several decidedly non-human playable species, with interbreeding specifically labeled impossible (short of A Wizard Did It).
Video Games
- Dragon Age subverts this trope somewhat. Most species trying to mate will never produce an offspring. Humans and elves can mate successfully, but the offspring is always human.
- Unless you consider Broodmothers a result of darkspawn mating with another species. Best not to think about that overmuch, though.
- The early Dragon Quest Monsters games are the lords of this trope. While monsters are grouped into families based on type, any matchup will succeed as long as the prospective parents are of opposite genders. Dragons and birds, undead and plants, slimes and animated objects, and the offspring will nearly always be something other than either of its parents. On top of that, the child will have the potential to learn all powers of its species, all powers of both parents' species, and any powers either parent knew at the time of conception, allowing for some truly evil twinking.
- The latest entry in the series, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, seems to solve the problem. Instead of each monster being male or female, they can be Positive, Negative, or Neutral, and the process is known as Synthesis. Synthesis requires a positive and negative monster, with a neutral monster substitutable for both (However, you CANNOT synthesize two neutral monsters.) Imagine the two monsters you pick being pureed in a blender, then having the concoction froze into a new monster. This could explain why you lose your monsters after synthesis.
- In The Elder Scrolls, there are multiple sub-breeds of the cat-like Khajiit, with the phases of the moons determining which one they will become. At birth they're almost indistinguishable from plain old regular kittens but what they will become as adults becomes obvious fairly quickly. They range from being house cat shaped and sized, to roughly humanoid, to tiger-likes larger than a horse. They're all still the same species, and can all breed and give birth to any of them.
- In-game texts Hand Wave unions of different species, with the offspring generally being based off of the race of the mother, though traits from the father can easily be inherited. Bretons (magically-incline humans), for example, are believed to be the result of generations of interbreeding between the High Elves and human Nords.
- Oblivion even has a character who was the son of an orc and a vampire. The result is a non-vampiric, but very pale Orc.
- In Morrowind there is an in-game text titled Interspecies Phylogeny which treats the subject from a scholarly standpoint.
- There's also an in-game text titled The Lusty Argonian Maid which treats the subject from a ... different ... standpoint. (Argonians are humanoid amphibians.)
- Terra from Final Fantasy VI is a half-human, half-Esper hybrid. Madeline (Madonna in the SNES version) is an ordinary human female who wandered into the Esper World by accident; Maduin is an enormous Gigas/satyr-like Esper who barely looks humanoid. The narrative does away with the particulars by having the same-sized sprites perform a sparkly dance, at the end of which their sparks join together in the shape of a baby. Awww.
- Acquiring colored chocobos in Final Fantasy VII requires you to breed chocobos you've captured and leveled up. Despite the squickiness, breeding their children, this a mild example and pretty much what people do in real life. VG Cats examined this in its usual manner.
- And 8-bit Theater made it a minor subplot of more than a week's worth of comics, showing what happens when you try to play God (and happen to be more or less insane).
- This is also pretty much how real specialized breeding works. There's a good reason purebred dogs have so many genetic disorders...
- Forget Chocobos; Hojo tries to breed Aerith and Red XIII together! HSOWA and Mate Or Die in one scene!
- And actually succeeded, in a doujin. Luckily we are not shown the outcome of the child. *shudder*
- The monsters of Jade Cocoon can be merged with one another, creating an interesting Biological Mashup.
- In Pokemon, the 493 Pocket Monsters are divided into 15 "egg groups" based loosely on biological niches, such as "Bug," "Mineral," or "Fairy." All Pokemon belong to at least one grouping; male and female monsters that share a group can breed, regardless of relative size or form. The resulting baby will normally be of the mother's species, but may inherit moves from the father. The shapeshifting Pokémon Ditto is a special case, as it has no gender but it can breed with anything to produce a new one of the other Pokémon, allowing you to (for instance) get eggs from non-gendered or male-only Pokémon.
- Very strange exceptions seem to be applied to this trope in the Pokémon games: Ditto used to be able to breed more Ditto only with other Ditto; now you can't breed new Ditto at all for game balance reasons. Nidoking and Nidoqueen, two Pokémon who are more or less opposite-gendered versions of each other, are unable to breed.
- This is because Nidoqueen, and the lower evolution Nidorina, can't breed, in what was probably originally a bug but has been preserved for continuity reasons. Only the basic female Nidoran can breed, while all steps of the male evolution are fertile, which leads to an entirely different trope if you think about it too much.
- Er...no. Nidorino and Nidoking are also sterile; like their female counterparts, male Nidoran can only breed before they evolve.
- The fact that the child Pokemon is always the same species as the mother is proof that the creators also thought about this too much. Imagine a Skitty giving laying a Wailmer egg...
- It was parodied in FredMSloniker's Lets Play of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, when the team rescued a Skitty. He wrote her a short piece of dialogue in which she was asked if her boyfriend was a Hitmonlee - she claimed they were Just Friends and showed the party a picture of her boyfriend, a Wailord. Later, we meet the boyfriend...
- And then both of them together.
Finally, we find Adexia's boyfriend Wallace and... wait wait, I'm sorry.
This does not make sense. The two bribe us with 1000 Poké and a Moon Stone to not report them to the police for violating the laws of physics.
- And once you add an Action Replay into the picture, there only becomes one rule: There must be a female parent. The other parent can be from a different egg group, genderless, nonexistent, or even female. And all of the rules about inheriting moves still apply.
- As far as the fanart goes, even the trainers are not safe from this trope - there's a particular piece that shows the baby of Crystal and a Suicune.
- Especially odd are the kind of pairings one needs for some of the more complicated breeding chains. One chain for Ursaring (a bear) includes Heracross (a giant bug), Paras (a spider with a mushroom on its back), Chikorita (a stubby little green thing with a leaf growing out of its head), and Rhyhorn (a rhinoceros with rock armour plates). And, of course, you can have as the final pairing Teddiursa (which, as the name suggests, is a cute little teddybear) and Rhydon (a huge bipedal rhino).
- Also, this image.◊
- Demons in the Shin Megami Tensei games can be fused with one another, or in some games simply sacrificed, to create new demons. As demons don't gain power through play, unlike the human characters, this is the only alternative to negotiating with more powerful creatures.
- Sonic Adventure and its sequel both include Chao gardens. Chao may be trained and any two may be crossed, with the usual Lamarckian mechanics coming into play. This doesn't affect anything outside of the garden, though.
- In those versions of the Sonic storyline based on the Saturday morning cartoon continuity, Sonic's girlfriend is the half-squirrel, half-chipmunk Sally Acorn. There have been a fair number of "future" scenes where the two of them are married and have kids.
- The pińatas of Viva Pińata could be bred (I'm sorry, romanced) to produce offspring—this was a key point of the game. In most instances, pińatas were disinterested in those outside their own species, which avoided such Skitty and Wailord moments, but in one instance apparently-unlikely cross-species breeding could occur. The swan pińata Swanana and the pig pińata Rashberry could have hybrid offspring when certain requirements were met, producing the winged pig Pigxie. Which the parent species were apparently so ashamed of that they'd start fights with it. Even the in-game encyclopedia refers to this offspring as a horrible mistake. Unfortunately, there were only a few clues in the game as to how to breed this hybrid pińata, leading to another instance of Guide Dangit to figure out how.
- Some of the requirements for the Swanana, which include building it a house, setting up a fountain, and giving it an expensive necklace, led to the remark, "The things I have to do for a pig's trophy wife."
- Two Words - Chinchilla Bhaalspawn.
- In the NiGHTS series of games Nightopians and Nightmarens, two completely different species, can create an unholy Mepian hybrid. Try not to think about it too much.
- Related to World of Darkness's aversion to this trope, people in The Matrix Online have roleplayed Exiles which were a mess of hybridization, including a part vampire, part succubus, part Valkyrie mongrel. Might be justified since it's all code in a virtual world.
- Half-Ogres from Arcanum Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura, like the Top Ten example above, plays the size differences between the two races in a rather dark light... If the female's the human, at any rate. The pre-created Half-Ogre player character is described as the offspring of a human male and an ogress with 'exotic tastes'.
- Speaking of exotic tastes, there's a brothel in the game which the player can visit. If you turn down the normal offerings, you can be introduced to Bella. A sheep.
- Warcraft 'verse has Malorne the stag god falling in love with Elune, the night elven moon goddess. Their offspring Cenarius, a stag/elf demigod, was then raised by Ysera the dragon. Cenarius' son Zaetar then fell in love with the earth elemental princess Theradras, which led to the birth of the brutish centaur race.
Web Comics
- 8-Bit Theater recently had a "Hot Monster on Red Mage action" with the result, that Red Mage himself was turned into the monster's offspring. The monster, of course, was a lot taller than RM, so that it first looked more like it was trying to squeeze him, rather than to rape him. It was explained by the monster having a third gender to "impregnate" (or, better, transform) other species.
- And the less said about the Hot Witch on Dragon-God-King Action that occurred earlier, the better. Notable for horrifying the protagonists, individuals who are most commonly horrifying others with their actions.
- Lich, a animated skeleton, has an apparently human wife and his son Vilbert is a vampire. This is eventually called into question and it's mentioned it involved Mind Control at some point.
- Averted in a couple of ways in 21st Century Fox with minor character Veronica, who is a vampire bat. It's stated she was in an internet relationship with Cecil, a giraffe, before the beginning of the series. She explains a few times that why a more physical relationship wouldn't be feasible. Later in the comic she gets in a relationship with another minor character, a mouse, and they discuss children opportunities...adoption or getting the father's genes transferred gene by gene to the mother's species.
- Chainmail Bikini (now dead) had the Munchkin character Josh create a character that was one-third human, one-third Drow and one-third Ogre. The other players note that this is physically impossible, which Josh himself doesn't care about (though included at the last panel is a fairly Squicky image of how it'd work).
- Limit of an infinite series. By the 8th generation, you could have an 86/256 human, 85/256 Drow, and 85/256 Ogre, which is pretty damned close to 1/3 (within 1/1000). By the 16th generation, the difference between 21845/65536 and 1/3 is beyond the precision of a scientific calculator.
- Or it could be done exactly, in two generations, by a time-traveller.
- A human female can be impregnated by two different males, it's just not common. Works the same way as it does with cats, both father's genes are used.
- Lampshaded in Dan And Mabs Furry Adventures in an exposition strip which mentions a dragon and an anthro-canine who got married and have two children. The author vociferously refuses to answer the inevitable question, though there's an obvious answer given that the one known dragon in the series, Pyroduck, has been passing himself as a humanoid being for most of the series.
- The same kind of explanation is used for half-dragons in Drowtales: The Moonless Age , and various Tabletop Games settings.
- Also in Dan And Mabs Furry Adventures, a character in the story is a Kangaroo Rat, and has several half-Kangaroo Rat sisters. The "half", however, is taken both ways, as his sisters are all Kangaroos. Their parents are a Kangaroo Rat and Kangaroo (see Marshmallow Hell for details).
- In Jack, almost every character is an anthro, so crossbreeding is just expected to happen. Oddly, though, it seems not only mammals, but also amphibians, reptiles and insect anthros can crossbreed freely, and the parents features somewhat scramble in the offspring. The obvious result is that few of the "mortal" characters are totally "purebreed".
- The Case Of The Travelling Corpse points out that most species prefer to breed/interact within their own species like the killer. Still, crossbreed families are pretty normal. The child of a mammal and an insect usually ends up looking cute, green and mostly non-insect, for example.
- Given the backstory, this becomes more plausible as all the anthro races were deliberately engineered by humans some time in the past, and are probably human inside with cosmetic changes on the outside.
- In Kevin And Kell, it seems that even being of the same taxonomic order or class is not necessary for successful cross-species matings. The fox/wolf cross (Rudy) almost seems ordinary when seen with the rabbit/wolf cross (Coney), the wolf/sheep cross (Corrie), the fennec fox/formerly human rabbit cross (Francis), or the tortoise/weasel cross (not named in the strip, to the best of this editor's recall).
- Last Res0rt gets in on it too; the Celeste apparently consist of nothing BUT Hybrid Monster people who breed with all the other species within the comic to make more hybrids.
- And then they add WINGS on top of all that.
- Averted in Tally Road- after several sexual exploits that are plainly cross-species, the first time any sex with like-species individuals occurs, the guy's seen putting on a condom. Apparently cross-species pairings are infertile.
- Averted to a degree in the Rescue Rangers fancomic, Of Mice And Mayhem. During the prologue, Chip acknowledges his feelings for Gadget, but refuses to act on them, because he believes she will one day want to have children, which wouldn't be an option for them since he's a chipmunk and she's a mouse. This is later worked around, as a previous gene splice between Dale and Gadget left Gadget the ability to mate with chipmunks.
- One Order Of The Stick comic showed the inherent Squick of family life as a half-orc, the joke being that, in D&D, half-orcs are considered a little bit squicky because they're implied to usually be the result of rape, while in the comic, the kid is squicked because her parents are sickeningly, mushily in love.
- They also contemplated the origin of the legendary Owlbear. When Elan suggested that an owl and a bear mated, Belkar expressed hope that the owl was the male in the relationship, as otherwise certain problems would surely arise.
- Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has one instance where the lonely minotaur character decides to stay and live with the lonely gynosphinx character ten times his size. In his own words, "With magic, anything is possible." Though this was less about mating and more about companionship (and the Sphinx's gazongas being big enough that the minotaur could fit his whole body between them).
- And don't forget Gren (a goblin) and Bob (a Beholder), how does that even work? I don't wanna know
- Sabrina Online has this in spades. Sabrina's boss is a skunk with stripes because her grandfather was a white tiger. Thomas is a part wolf, part fox hybrid. And when Amy becomes prengant with his child...
Amy: Back in prehistoric times, when we were little more than animals, a squirrel like me would only be prey to a wolf like you. But today, we're two different species, but we're also a couple, and I'm carrying our child. Kind of interesting, zoologically speaking.
Thomas: Zoologically speaking, shouldn't this also be impossible?
- But if that wasn't disturbing enough already, Tom's lupine father drops this piece of advice for Amy:
Hope the kid doesn't take after my side of the family, or you're in for a ride, girl!
- There is also the side-character, Carly the Chinchilla, who also married a wolf much taller and broader than her.
- And Sabrina recently started dating a raccoon.
Western Animation
Other
- There's a trio of Mons-based web roleplaying games, unofficially known as the Hidden Crossroads, that use this trope. The first such site alows for any two creatures to breed via a special item; the results are Mix And Match Critters. The other two sites have several different types of Mons that can only be obtained via breeding, but they're all variants on the same species.
- Pretty much all Half Human Hybrids in fiction if you think about it. We're talking about species that share no common ancestor, or at most a common ancestor billions of years back (in a panspermia universe). A human would probably have much more in common biologically with a mushroom than with an alien. Yet somehow you have examples of them mating and producing viable offspring. The mind boggles.
- Spock, of course, being the most famous example. Given that two humans can have a problem if they are of blood types, say, A+ & B-, how the heck do beings with copper- and iron-based globin get anywhere? Though some material mentions it took some technical intervention.
- This is mostly justified in that in one episode of TNG, the crew finds evidence that all the factions, including klingons, and romulans, were tampered with by an ancient race with traits of all races. They found planets with evolving life and decided to step in, and force their evolution in their image.
- Lampshaded in Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy:
"Then why is her belly not distended with a squirming brood of grubspawn?"
"Because I'm not from this planet! Our biochemistry is totally different! He'd have more chance trying to impregnate a native plant than he would me!"
"And even that would be impossible! I used to do it with fruit all the time and nothing came of it!"
- The online Flash incarnation of You Dont Know Jack had Nate the Intern leaving the show to marry Tiny the Elephant at the end of Episode 60. No known offspring resulted, though.
Cookie: Are you registered anywhere?
Nate: Yeah, Home Depot. We could really use a ladder.
- On the Neopets website, there's even a book that lampshades the oddity of Neopian family lines, such as a Skeith and a Zafara having a Lupe, an Ixi, and a Gelert as their offspring.
- Neo Quest II has this with pretty much every NPC that has children. For example, in a village in Chapter 3, one family is made up of an Acara (a cat/goat hybrid) father and a Wocky (fox) mother, who have children who are a Cybunny (rabbit) and an Uni (unicorn).
- The Brobdingnagian Bards song Do Virgins Taste Better? wonders why dragons prefer kidnapping virgins to any other kind of person.
"Dragons and virgins. Dragons. And virgins. The mechanics alone boggles the mind."
- Two Mad Scientists talk about their latest experiments:
"I crossbred a hedgehog with an earthworm. The result was: One yard of barbed wire!"
"Interesting. But I managed to cross a pig with a letterbox. The result: A piggybank!"
- There is a joke about a man who crossed a cockroach with a watermelon - now, there is no bothering with getting the seeds out.
Real Life
- Entered into an Ugly Dog competition was a Golden Retriever/Dachshund mix. Which looked exactly like a goldie, except for the nine inch legs. We can only assume that the mating required scaffolding...
- There are rumours of a Great Dane/Chihuahua hybrid. The mind rather boggles...
- The bigger breed is normally the mother in those cases...she lies down...I've seen it happen...
- No offspring resulted (or was even possible), but the thought was there. Researchers in South Africa stumbled across a 100kg fur seal attempting to rape a 15kg penguin (the BBC has the story here).
- Since birds in general are externally pratically identical there's some chance that the penguin in question could had been male. Granted, the result wouldn't be any different if it were a female, but still the seal is naughty
- This is wrong beyond belief. But actually happened. Seriously. Not safe for work. Or anywhere else for that matter.
- Lions and tigers can mate, producing Ligers or Tigons.
- In fact, quite a few of the panthera felines can interbreed. particulary ouchy-sounding is the Leopard-Lion cross, specifically male lion on female leopard. The latter weighs around 50 kg, the former can easily gross in excess of 200 kilos (!). Imagine a 7-foot-tall wrestler sleeping with a pygmy or dwarf woman. Perhaps fortunately, the even bigger tiger males cannot successfuly interbreed with leopards, and the even bigger yet Liger males are entirely sterile.
- Ther worst of above description is the knowledge that there is some furries out there who enjoyed it.
- They're bred for their magical abilities, you know.
- Female horse + male donkey = mule. Interestingly, if you cross a male horse with a female donkey, you get an animal called a hinny, which is smaller (and cuter) than a mule but looks and moves more like a horse.
- Well, provided the mother manages not to explode during the pregnancy, anyhow.
- The half-donkey, half-zebra hybrid is a Zebronkey.
- Cama (half-camel half-llama) are currently being raised. Possibly fertile, too. They don't occur naturally, by any definition of the word.
- Heck, there are a lot of these. Go to the Wikipedia page for any of these, and at the bottom they'll be a guide to yet more hybrids. In fact, just go to the hybrid main page.
- Though no offspring resulted, Kevin Smith described in "Sold Out: A Threevening With Kevin Smith" how his brand new Dachshund Shecky went into heat, and was...attacked by his Golden Retriever Mulder. He went into detail on the physical ramifications on poor Shecky...
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