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Maligned Mixed Marriage

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"Who can feel sympathy for Desdemona? A woman who, born and educated to a splendid and lofty station in the community, betrays her race, her sex, her duty and her country, and makes a runaway match with a blackamoor."
John Quincy Adams, on Desdemona from Othello

A common source of conflict for a set of married protagonists (or a couple of Star-Crossed Lovers) is for the couple to be of different races among very unaccepting folks. They will be pressured to break up/divorce by family and friends and community, ostracized, exiled or forced to flee, maimed, or murdered, etc.

Their children will be likewise persecuted, perhaps more so than the parents, for complicating racial relations and being inherently 'untrustworthy' due to not being fully one race or the other. Even if the adults are fine, other Kids Are Cruel after all. Expect the child to eventually pop the question about whether there's something inherently and incurably wrong with them because of their genetic heritage.

And of course, sometimes it's a mixed species marriage, or one between a muggle and a mage, complete with attendant prejudice. On the plus side the scifi/fantasy elements mean the kid is likely to be The Chosen One, a Half-Human Hybrid, a Dhampyr, or perhaps even a Hybrid Monster with really cool powers. That makes up for it, right?

Some examples of interracial marriages that earn disapproval can be found in Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow, Black Gal on White Guy Drama, and Where da White Women At?. For mixed species marriages, see also Vampire-Werewolf Love Triangle.

In Real Life, mixed-race marriages can be everything from completely accepted to something you only do if you've got a death wish. Thankfully, in many places it's skewed towards the "completely accepted" end of the spectrum, and a great way for someone to reveal themselves as a severe jackass is to show bigotry towards mixed couples. Mixed-race marriages seem to be one of the last bastions of racism. Many opponents of interracial marriage claim to oppose all other forms of racism including genocide, different legal rights, and the physical segregation of races to prevent cultural contamination (and some claim to have friends of other races). However, they generally argue that that it's cruel to have mixed-race kids because they see race as the sole/most important element of collective identity. This makes the existence of people who blur the boundaries between races distressing for people of those races, who will see their identity as being under threat and in their illogical rage target the unfortunate mixed-race children in their midst. Of course, race is just one element of collective identity and while it can be very important to some people this is by no means a given. In general, mixed-race children tend to have about the same level of trouble that their parents have — less if they look like one race or the other instead of an obvious mixture, or live in a society that doesn't care about race.

Related to the above is that, much more than most other manifestations of racism, Whites are almost as likely to be victims as perpetrators. In other words, most Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Blacks, Mestizos etc. might be happy to have Whites as friends or business partners, but intermarriage would be crossing a line. (And let's not even go into how members of different non-White groups may view each other).

In stories that take place in communities where "race" isn't a defining factor in classifying humanity (like ''some'' of the 19th century USA, East Asia, or Russia), a "mixed marriage" could mean many other different things: mixed ethnicity ("ethnicity" here being vaguely synonymous with "nationality"), mixed religion, or mixed class. Due to Values Dissonance, many of these other "mixed" marriages tend to be Dead Horse Tropes in fiction (at least in the Anglosphere), though they do surface occasionally: consider My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which mines humor from the "scandal" of a ('white') Greek-American woman choosing a ('white') Anglo-American man as her husband... a thing no longer scandalous in the late 20th century, but most certainly was just a few decades previously.

Truth in Television, of course, as there are still people who feel this way. Although anti-miscegenation attitudes are not only found in the classic cases of dominant, traditional, "purity"-seeking communities. Notably, some minorities also vocalize disdain for "disloyalty", stemming from the considerable culture-driven asymmetry in cross-race relationships — a subtle but persistent visual reminder of imposed inferiority — and frustrations in changing the narrative over discomforting perceptions of hyper-attractiveness or lack thereof. Then there are some who are simply pricks. But any of these justifications can end up invoking the trope. It is a testament to how far society has come that this trope is on its way to becoming a Dead Horse Trope, at least in much of the world (excluding Fantastic Racism examples, of course). Nevertheless, unfortunately, some mixed marriages are still maligned in real life even now, meaning it's not quite there yet.

To be clear, this trope can cover any romantic relationship, not only matrimony. We just like Alliterative Names here.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Beastars: The societal standard for all races. Interspecies marriage is heavily frowned upon, and same species marriages are subsidized by the government. Partially justified in that offspring of interspecies couples tend to suffer from health complications and in the case of Carnivore and Herbivore couples frequently end with the former eating the latter due to the connection between a Carnivore's appetite and their libido.
  • Van and Folken Fanel's parents in The Vision of Escaflowne were human and Draconian, much to the outrage of the royal court due to the racism against Draconians.
  • Inuyasha:
    • In the third film, Inu-Yasha's parents are shown to have struggled with resentment over their relationship. While his mother is giving birth to him, she is killed by a man who hated the fact she married a demon. When his father arrives on the scene, he restores her to life with his sword, Tensaiga, and fights the man who killed her. Because he has been mortally injured by a previous battle, he and the murderer perish in the battle, but Inu-Yasha and his mother manage to escape with their lives. The few memories he has of his childhood before his mother died consist of his mother being isolated and him being rejected by others because of the situation.
    • Shiori's parents, a human woman named Shizu and a bat-youkai father, suffered a great deal of persecution, even costing the father his life at the hands of his own father, Taigokumaru.
    • Jinenji's human mother was an outcast from the village and persecuted for having had a youkai husband and therefore a half-breed son. It's not until Jinenji finally has a reason to fight and ends up protecting the bullies as well as his mother and Kagome that the villagers accept both him and his mother. It's implied that Jinenji's mother's bitterness lasts a little longer, however.
  • A good part of the conflict in Lady!! comes from Lynn Russell/Rin Midorikawa being born from one of these. Her dad Sir George Russell is an English nobleman, her Missing Mom Misuzu Midorikawa was a Japanese woman. For that not only she's bullied by her distant cousins Mary and Thomas, but she's rejected by her paternal grandfather Lord Warbawn. At some point Warbawn promises to meet up with Lynn and fully take her into the Russell clan... but in the condition that George marries his prospect Meal Ticket, Mary and Thomas's Rich Bitch mother Madeleine. George ultimately refuses to be a Gold Digger, and Warbawn doesn't acknowledge Lynn officially until almost the end of the series, when she has proved herself to be a good addition to the clan.
  • Jun Hono from Great Mazinger, the sequel to Mazinger Z, is mentioned as having been bullied for being the child of a Japanese mother and an African-American father. This was especially notable for an anime during The '70s, when issues like racism were rarely discussed in the Japanese media at all, let alone in children's programming.
  • Also a major source of conflict in Ah! My Goddess. Its made clear early on that Urd's father is The Almighty and her mother is Hild, Queen of Hell, and that she faces significant issues because of her mixed heritage. Turns out a rule enforcing this trope is why, and that the protagonist's sex drive was suppressed without his knowledge at the beginning of the manga to keep him from breaking that rule.
  • In Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross (aka the second season of Robotech), the human Bowie and the alien Musica have a very difficult time with the opinions of others, much more so than Max and Miriya (Millia) did earlier in the Macross Saga.
  • Averted in Super Dimension Fortress Macross (aka season one of Robotech) with Roy (white male) and Claudia (black female). No one had a problem with them dating; the only drama was with Roy's reputation as a playboy.
  • In Haikara-san ga Tooru, Shinobu's parents weren't allowed to marry because the father was a high-ranked officer in the Japanese military and the mother was a German woman. She was forced to leave a very young Shinobu in the care of the Iijyuin family and leave the country forever.
  • In the original OVA series of Tenchi Muyo! this factors into the backstory of Yosho aka Katsuhito Masaki twice over. First, his mother and the Emperor's first wife Funaho was a native of Earth who was distantly related to Juraian royalty, but some traditionalist members of Jurai's upper class were not happy when he was made crown prince. Secondly, while officially engaged to his half-sister Aeka, in part to help quell those unhappy with his heritage, he entered a Secret Relationship with Airi, a native of the rival planet Airai, and unbeknownst to him she eventually became pregnant by him. He wound up fleeing to Earth, using Ryoko's attack as an excuse to disappear. Airi eventually tracked him down with their daughter Minaho in tow and the two got married on Earth using common law, with only a few people on Jurai knowing where he was.
  • In Endride, Louise's parents were forced to give up the work they were talented at to do hard labour because of their inter-species marriage.
  • Tweeny Witches: The witches are forbidden to have Interspecies Romance with humans, except for those exiled to the Human Realm for their failure to pass the witch evaluation at age 16. This becomes a plot point when it's revealed that Lennon is the Child of Forbidden Love between Atelia and Jidan, the latter of whom left the former with him to prevent persecution in the traditionalist society of the Witch Realm. With the encouragement of Arusu, Atelia chooses the family she's missed for 14 years over her duty as an honored leader, pulling a Zero-Approval Gambit to save her son from the warlocks.
  • Tales of Wedding Rings: Over fifty years before the start of the series, the elven princess of Romca, Smaragdi, fell in love with a human traveler. The other elves didn't approve of this relationship, both because the princess's lover was human and because they feared he was only romancing her to steal the Ring of Wind, the symbol of Romca's sovereignty. They drove the traveler away, but in doing so they turned Smaragdi against her people. She cursed her xenophobic kinsmen and abandoned Romca to seek out her lost love. Her younger sister and successor, fearing that Smaragdi might one day return to take revenge on those who wronged her, sacrificed herself to create the Vortex Barrier which cuts Romca off from the outside world.
  • A Bride's Story: Smith and Talas' betrothal becomes this once they return to his hometown, having both to deal with local gossip and his parents being disappointed and refusing to acknowledge it respectively. Not only are they of very different social standings, with Smith distantly related to British nobility and Talas a Turkmeni shepherdess, but as a foreigner in Victorian England, Talas gets looked upon as an exotic curiosity at best and as outright subhuman at worst. Finally, they got betrothed without letting his parents know in advance (and also outside the parents' religion) and thus his parents first only meet Talas when she's introduced to them as Smith's intended. Smith's mother ends up banning the pair from the family's house and countryside estate, forcing Smith to rent a house so they can stay together.

    Comedy 
  • Irish comic Dara O'Briain has a great bit in his stand-up parodying people's attitudes towards marriages between Catholics and Protestants. Can be seen here.
  • Comedian Dat Phan was criticized by his mother for dating a white girl. He's also made a video about it.

    Comic Books 
  • The 1954 version of The Comics Code stated "Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed." This could be, and probably was, used to effectively ban portrayals of interracial relationships in comics, in conjunction with other "perversions" such as homosexuality. Nevertheless, a few instances of interracial relationships were depicted under the Code by the 1970s — most prominently, that between white hero Iron Fist and black heroine Misty Knight, who first kissed in 1977.
  • Doctor Who Magazine: The Seventh Doctor comic strip "Fellow Travellers" has an old lady who is annoyed that the housekeeper (implied to be Tibetan-descended) married her son and had a child with him, considering it "not right". She ends up being transformed into a monster and trying to kill the granddaughter. It's implied that this is a regular thing.
  • In ElfQuest, white forest elf Cutter ends up choosing black desert elf Leetah as his lifemate. This is never commented on by anyone in the comics (although, in a novelization, Leetah initially finds the pale complexions of the Wolfriders unnerving and Moonshade is chagrined at the thought of tanning) as skin color is considered purely an "evolutionary benefit" (the elves evolve fast) and just kind of pretty. However, the fact that Cutter has animal ancestors (and is mortal as a result) is considered absolutely disgusting by some characters, including Leetah's former boyfriend Rayek, who tries to separate them. On the other hand, one of the reasons why the ElfQuest animated cartoon never took off was because the network demanded that this mixed marriage be changed, and the writers would have none of that.
  • An occasionally revisited theme in Horndog, played with a semi-metaphor (a white dog named Bob and his black cat girlfriend, Charlene), sometimes has this couple as targets of racism.
  • Marvel Universe:
    • Mantis from The Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy is the daughter of a German man and a Vietnamese woman. Her mom's brother was so disgusted by the notion that his sister had married a white man that he used his resources to try and have them both killed. Mantis and her father survived, but her mother did not.
    • Luke Cage had to deal with an heir to the Power Man name who was throwing all sorts of shade his way. When the second Power Man learned that Luke was married to Jessica Jones (a white heroine), and implied this made him less of a black man, punching ensued. Jessica herself runs into some of this in The Pulse, catching flak from a black nurse during the Red Skies Crossover with Secret War (2004) for dating Luke. Luke himself notes that they can't avoid the fact they're a biracial couple and they're likely to get some dirty looks when he proposes to her near the end of the series.
    • Downplayed in Ms. Marvel (2014) — the title character is from a Pakistani-American Muslim family, and her parents are momentarily upset when her older brother, Aamir, announces his engagement to Tyesha, who is also a Muslim but black. To be fair, this could partly just be attributed to shock and the fact that he bypassed the usual matchmaking traditions, and they drop their resistance pretty quickly after being called out on it. This is also part of the tension about Kamala herself possibly pursuing a relationship with her white, non-Muslim friend Bruno, though it's mostly a case of It's Not You, It's My Enemies.
      Aamir: Why don't we just admit what this is really about?
      Kamala: [holding up her hands] Let's definitely not admit what this is really about!
  • Saga: Alana and Marko's home civilisations (planet Landfall and its moon Wreath) have been at war for so long that no one can remember a time when they got on, and the war has effectively been outsourced to most of the galaxy, ravaging hundreds of planets and dragging billions of people who'd otherwise be minding their own business into the conflict. Alana and Marko consensually having a healthy child together is, thus, of interest to the highest political powers in the galaxy for all the wrong reasons.
  • Teen Titans: In issue #100 of the title New Titans, Dick Grayson and alien princess Starfire try out for marriage licenses, but they are denied. When they leave the City Hall, a mob is right there demonstrating against their union, shouting that humans don't marry alien monsters.
  • In Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, a comic book distributed in American Catholic schools, the "Chuck White" feature explores a mild religion-based version of this trope (Chuck's father was a Protestant).

    Comic Strips 
  • In Dick Tracy, Moon Maid's father, the Moon Governor, was not at all happy about her marrying a human. At the time, many readers agreed. Currently, the comic is openly making references to the "Moon Period" for the first time in many years, and the readers are being teased about whether Moon Maid may return. The new creative team is handling it skillfully enough that readers seem like they may be okay with it, after all this time.
  • In Safe Havens, Remora the mermaid gets disowned by her family because she married a human and chose to stay on land. They eventually realize how boneheaded they were and apologize to Remora and Thomas. Oddly, this is the only example of this trope, despite the fact that there are three other mixed-race couples (and if you include any animal-related couples, arguably more).

    Fan Works 
  • In The Black Sheep, Balthazar Smith-Rhodes was exiled from Rimwards Howondaland not for being a rogue and a confidence trickster, but for repeatedly breaking the Racial Separation Acts. In fact, he has left one officially unacknowledged mixed-race member of the Smith-Rhodes family behind him to further embarrass the whole family. Based in Sto Kerrig, he further appalls his countrymen by setting up home with Sissie, who claims to be a Zulu Princess. Neither they nor their more liberally minded Sto Kerrigian hosts give a damn about this, but expat White Howondalandians have their eyebrows more than raised. In a later fic, his niece discovers a town called Smithville in a neighbouring Black Howondalandian state. This is where Uncle Baal went immediately after his sentence of exile. Mariella discovers she has two cousins here, with far darker skins and the trademark Smith-Rhodes red hair.
  • In By the Sea, the merman Cody decides to come clean early and tell his people that he was rescued and nursed back to health by a human, knowing that it would throw all of their preconceptions about humans sideways, and then drops the bombshell that he intends to marry this man and take him as his spouse. Reactions are bemused at best, and one of Cody's enemies tries to have him declared insane and unfit for rule for not killing the human on sight, and when that fails, he sends some thugs after Obi-Wan to try and kill him instead.
  • A Changed World: One of several reasons given for time-displaced Bajorans to dislike Captain Kanril Eleya is her marriage to Commander Reshek Gaarra, who is of a higher caste than herself. Eleya counters that the caste system was abolished while the downtimers were trapped in a black hole's gravity well, years before she or he were born.
  • Played with in the case of Sirius Black and Aletha Freeman from the Dangerverse. Nobody, not even Sirius's legendarily bigoted mother, bats an eye at a marriage between a white man and a black woman. The pure-blood heir of the Most Noble And Ancient House Of Black marrying a Muggle-born? That's a different story.
  • In Delusions, Celestia and Luna's pony mother and donkey father lived in seclusion because mixed-species marriages were looked down upon. Even several thousand years afterwards, such relationships still hold a stigma.
  • Desert Gold: Half-Ishvalan couples get a lot of scorn. Kain remembers growing up nearby a family that had an Amestrian father and an Ishvalan mother. They were very reclusive and most of their neighbors found them distasteful. Eventually, Kain got past everyone's prejudices and ended up befriending the three children.
  • In the final three fics of Tammy Billingham's Emergency! series, John Gage faces this. His fiancé/wife's parents let go of their hate eventually, but the tribesmen who already tormented John as a child and adult with Half-Breed Discrimination due to his being half white won't let up until they nearly kill him and are arrested.
  • Fake (Vega62a): Sachiko is Catholic and her arranged husband is Buddhist. This is one of the issues of her marriage that makes her uncomfortable. Her husband being gay is another issue.
  • In Freedom's Limits, Madavi, a human, falls in mutual love with an orc, Smador, and has children with him. Madavi is eventually killed by orc hunters (led by Dellon) for being with Smador, they considering her to be 'tainted' by evil. They kill her son too, though her daughter escapes.
  • I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: Khannite-Velthian marriages (or less formal relationships) are quite common in Central. Since the Khannite Empire has strong Master Race beliefs, while the Velthian Empire teaches that it is their sacred duty to exterminate everyone of Khannite descent, Central is often the only safe place for such relationships or their offspring, and many multiracials end up as part of La Résistance.
  • A Little Angel on My Shoulder: In the plotline "The Sohryus", after Shinji and Asuka got married, Raye tried to talk Shinji into getting a divorce saying: "On top of that, think of the children. I mean, what will they look like?". It did not work.
  • In Something Always Remains, this is actually one of the catalysts for all the tragedies at Freddy's. In The '60s, Bonnie Wickes, a part Asian, part Caucasian woman and this universe's original owner of Fredbear's Family Diner, married Freddy Wickes, a black man. The fallout on her side of the family started with their wedding, continued on throughout the construction of the restaurant, during which Freddy disappeared, which in turn left Bonnie running the restaurant alone, where she's left vulnerable with almost no support and murdered in the Spring Bonnie suit by an old friend after she rejected his advances. He then goes on to become the murderer of the missing children.
  • In Chapter 11 of A Stack of Fresh Fried Parathas, a series of vignettes set around Kamala and Bruno in Ms. Marvel, Bruno overhears some of the Illuminaunties gossiping about that "goya boy that Muneeba took in" and is now dating Kamala. Kamala is understandably upset at the Illuminaunties. Averted with Kamala's family, as Muneeba and Yusef have nothing but love and respect for Bruno, and are overjoyed when he and Kamala get married.
  • In to Überwald and (hopefully) back again, Otto von Chriek (vampire) is engaged to Sacharissa Cripslock (human) and William de Worde (human). Otto's vampiric parents does not approve of the relationship. There is family history of vampire/human relationships that ended tragically, and they do not want this for their son.
  • Vow of Nudity: Ayrwyn's marriage to Petrichor shows that Genasi can marry non-Genasi, but are severely stigmatized for doing so. Haara gets under his skin by suggesting he married his slave only because nobody else would say yes.
  • Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse: A boyfriend/girlfriend example can be seen in Harumi and Miriam, male (if incredibly girly-looking) human and female tiger-shark wotan (giant/fishman hybrid). Bigoted humans have called Harumi a disgusting pervert for being physically affectionate with Miriam in public, and fishmen have twice called Miriam a Category Traitor (albeit, one of those was a Casanova Wannabe clearly ticked that Miriam wouldn't go on a date with him). Miriam finds the fishmen particularly annoying, perhaps especially because she's half fishman and half giant and she was raised by her giantess mom, so she identifies with her giant heritage far more. Luckily, their crewmates consider them an adorable couple and have their backs, though the two rarely need the help.
  • Two examples in What Hath Joined Together:
    • The noble unicorn Orion had his marriage to his childhood love forbidden due to her being an Earth Pony, and his pleading to Twilight Sparkle fell on deaf ears. He eventually grew so enraged he attacked her outright to make a point that true love isn't something you can stop and awaits his sentencing for assaulting royalty.
    • Just at the start of reciprocating an unrequited crush is Princess Twilight and Flash Sentry's relationship, which is again forbidden due to being of different social classes. That being said, Twilight starts investigating whether their caste system is truly justified and Princess Cadance isn't enamored with the idea of restricting true love, so there's hope for their romance yet.
  • A great many Zootopia fics — typically those that romantically pair up Judy and Nick — depict relationships between predator and prey species as being harshly discriminated against. Some stories take it a step farther and has any sort of cross-species romance be frowned upon.

    Films — Animation 
  • Elemental (2023): Air, Fire, Water, and Earth elements live in Element City where they all live by one simple rule. Elements can't mix. But when Ember, a young fire woman, falls in love with Wade, a water guy, their love is frowned upon by Ember's parents, especially her father.
  • The Lion King II: Simba's Pride also features lovers from opposing sides of a conflict. Kiara is the king's daughter, while Kovu is the son of the leader of a banished pride of lions. What's more is that he was raised to act as a mole to bring the king down. To emphasise the difference, Kovu's pride are drawn with darker fur than Kiara's.
  • The Little Mermaid (1989): The driving conflict is Triton's disapproval of his mermaid daughter's fascination with humans. When he learns that she's fallen in love with a human prince, he does not take it well. This appears to be just his view, rather than the common way. A prequel film depicts his wife (and Ariel's mother) being killed by pirates.
  • Pocahontas has two Star-Crossed Lovers. One is a white English man, while the other is a Native-American woman. In this, the conflict is less because of their race — but because the English are invading her people's land. Nonetheless, there is surprise and outrage from both sides when their affair is discovered. They don't end up together but Pocahontas marries another white English man in the sequel. There was some opposition to the 13 year old Pocahontas's real-life marriage with adult John Rolfe by his parents, but not because of race. Not understanding how Native-American chief systems worked, they mistook the young child for royalty (her being The Chief's Daughter) and were worried about their son marrying so far above his station.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 13 Minutes: A woman is shamed for having a Jewish boyfriend in Elser's village by the Nazis.
  • Aaron Loves Angela: Surprisingly, the racial differences between black Aaron and Puerto Rican Angela barely factor into the plot, except for one scene. When Angela kisses Aaron outside her building, two of her neighbors chase him and try to beat him up, because "We don't like no outsiders fuckin' with our women, man!"
  • Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: Emmi, a German cleaning lady in her sixties, meets, falls in love with and marries Ali, an African immigrant half her age. 1974 Germany is then revealed to be super-racist. Upon receiving the news, Emmi's three children disown her, one going so far as to kick the screen to her TV in a fit of rage. Her neighbors mock her, her coworkers shun her, the corner grocer deliberately humiliates Ali, and the staff at a bistro simply stand and stare at the couple while they try to have lunch.
  • Amsterdam (2022): It's made clear that Valeria and Harold can't live openly together in 1933 America, as a result of her being white while he's black. The two depart for Europe to find a more tolerant place at the end.
  • In The Angel Levine, the Jewish Morris has disowned his daughter Ruth for marrying an Italian.
  • Aquaman (2018): Atlanteans mostly dislike Atlanna having had a relationship with a human, Thomas.
  • The Biopic Barry about Barack Obama's time in college at NYC features Barry dating the white Charlotte, an amalgamation of the three white women he's known to have dated in college. The reality of it is shown with a lot of complexity, with her family trying to be accepting, but coming off as clueless and insensitive, strangers (both black and white) staring but not directing confronting them, and Obama's own insecurity about his identity ultimately causing the relationship to break down.
  • The 1995 Indian movie Bombay tells the story of a Hindu man and his Muslim wife not only facing scrutiny from their respective families but also trying to survive during the Bombay riots.
  • Bones & All: Maren's white maternal grandmother says that she and her grandfather shunned their daughter, her mother, for marrying her father. It's not stated, but pretty obviously a result of his race, as he's black.
  • Born in the Maelstrom: Rebecca is stopped from dancing with a white boy she likes. It's not about her being biracial explicitly, though the fact members of her community don't like her heritage implies this.
  • Bridge to the Sun is Based on a True Story of a white American woman who marries a Japanese diplomat — right before World War II.
  • The backstory of the eponymous evil spirit in Candyman is that he was a wealthy black man who dated a young white woman whose father hired him to paint her portrait, and wound up brutally lynched when the father found out.
  • In Chocolate, the main character is the product of one of these between a Japanese Yakuza and an enforcer in the Thai mob. They eventually part ways in order to avoid their enemies, even though they still love one another.
  • Crazy Rich Asians is unique in that both partners are of the same race — they're both Chinese — but drastically different classes. Rachel is second-generation Chinese-American and the working class daughter of a single mother (but she herself has achieved middle-class status through her job as a college professor). Nick however is Singaporean-Chinese from an insanely wealthy old money family, and his mother disapproves of Rachel for not having enough traditional Chinese values. It's also revealed that the mother herself was in the same position— and she still hasn't won her mother-in-law's full respect.
  • Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, as a tribute to Bruce Lee, shows how Bruce and Linda's dating/marriage wasn't well-received by their families, and especially by Linda's mother, who even refers to their prospect kids as "yellow babies". Mrs. Cadwell relents later when Brandon's born, though not before Linda bitterly throws the "yellow baby" spiel back to her face.
  • The Exception: It's unstated, but Brandt clearly knows that he and Mieke can never openly be together under Nazi rule, given he's an "Aryan" while she's Jewish. He carries on their affair anyway however (indeed, the Nazis made sex between "Aryans" and Jews a crime punishable by death, called "race defilement"). The ending implies they may manage to end up happily together with their baby after the war's end, though it's uncertain.
  • Queenie and Jacob from Fantastic Beasts can't get married because it's illegal for wizards to marry Muggles (or No-Majs, as they call them) in America. Her sister Tina only disapproves because it's illegal, she doesn't care that he's a No-Maj. Grindelwald actually uses this to lure Queenie to his side in the climax of the second film as he says if he takes over and tears down the International Statute of Secrecy, the two of them will be free to be together.
  • This is subverted in The Feast Of All Saints (movie and book), as placage (an "official" relationship between a white man and a free woman of color in antebellum New Orleans whereby he was required to take care of her and any children in exchange for sex) was fully supported while marriages between people of color of different stations were seriously frowned on.
  • Flaming Star: Sam, who's white, married a second time to Neddy, a Kiowa. Their neighbors grow hostile towards them once the Kiowas start attacking, thinking they are somehow in on it. Neddy also gets insulted and nearly raped by two white travelers once she reveals to them she has a white husband.
  • Free State of Jones: Newt's relationship with Rachel, though technically they were never married. Plus their great-great grandson's, which results directly from the above as he qualifies as "colored" under Mississippi state law, thus barring him from marrying a white woman legally.
  • Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is about the daughter of white San Francisco liberals who brings her Black fiancé to dinner with her parents. Eventually, said fiancé's parents join them, and both sets of parents are forced to come to terms with their prejudices regarding the relationship.
  • Hairspray (1988) and its 2007 remake sort of emulate this trope between Penny and Seaweed, except they're dating, not married. Penny's mother is a racist who shows disgust at her inter-racial relationship, and it is mentioned that they'll have a lot of animosity from the residents of bigoted Baltimore, but don't care.
  • In Hancock, it's implied that the majority of troubles that have plagued Hancock and Mary's relationship is because of their races.
  • In The Haunted Mansion (2003), the owner of the titular mansion was going to marry a black woman, who died before their wedding. It turns out that she was murdered by the disapproving butler.
  • Higher Learning: The Neo-Nazis beat up a black guy for dating a white girl on campus, warning her to not do this again.
  • The Invitation (2022): It's strongly implied that a large part of the scandal Emmaline Alexander had caused by running away with a footman occurred because he was black while she was white. Later the butler Mr. Field comments negatively on this, although without explicitly mentioning race, as does Viktoria as well.
  • Jungle Fever: The relationship between Flipper and Angie is condemned by Flipper's father, along with his friends, while her father beats her after finding out about it and throws her out of his house. At least in Flipper's case though it's partly due to it being adultery.
  • Just Mercy: The black characters widely believe that McMillian first attracted police hostility by having an affair with a white woman. In real life, one of his sons was also married to a white woman, compounding this.
  • Keeping the Faith is about the romance between a Rabbi and a non-Jewish woman and the uproar that this causes among the rabbi's Jewish congregation.
  • Killers of the Flower Moon: Mollie's mother Lizzie Q mourns the Osage bloodlines being diluted by her daughters' white husbands. On the flipside, Mollie's in-laws coo that their grandson is white-passing, unlike his more visibly mixed sister.
  • The whole point of Lakeview Terrace. An interracial couple move in next door to a racist cop, who proceeds to terrorize them and try to drive them out of the neighborhood. Unusually for this trope, the cop is black, and resents the couple because his wife cheated on him with her white boss and died in a car accident trying to get to her boss' house.
  • In The Letter, Leslie is not embarrassed to say that she cut Geoffrey Hammond out of their social circle after finding out he'd taken up with a Chinese woman. Everyone else in Singapore cites this as the reason why opinion turned against Hammond (the murder victim) and in favor of Leslie (his murderer) in her trial.
  • Loving is Based on a True Story, specifically the Loving V. Virginia case whose ruling legalized interracial marriage across the United States, after Mr. and Mrs. Loving sued the state of Virginia to recognize their marriage and drop the unlawful cohabitation charges against them. They did not live happily ever after; soon after the ruling, Mr. Loving died in a car accident.
  • In A Man for All Seasons, the Catholic Thomas More objected to his daughter marrying a heretic. He eventually approved of their marriage when said heretic moderated his views.
  • Nina's Heavenly Delights: Kary fears his mom's will hate him for marrying a white Scottish woman, Janice, and keeps it secret for some time. After he finally comes clean however, she's surprised but accepting and sees how much they love each other.
  • The Spanish movie Palmeras en la nieve ("Palm Trees in the Snow") has an old man telling his daughters about their unknown brothers. Through flashbacks he reveals that he was an overseer in his father's cacao plantation in Equatorial Guinea while it was still a Spanish colony when he fell in love with a local woman who worked as a picker. Unfortunately, all of this happened in the years leading to Equatorial Guinea's independence, and she has to go into hiding. When she goes back to the plantation, she has born him a son, and he even sees her older son, fathered by another man, almost as his own. When Equatorial Guinea gains its independence, Spanish nationals are forcibly expelled, when he tries to take her with him aboard the ship bound for Spain, the soldiers guarding the dock force him to board but say she and the children must stay. When he says she's his wife, they threaten to open fire if he doesn't board by himself. After the massacre at the port, they manage to escape, they stay together for a few years before she encourages him to go back to Spain. Years later, after she died, her sons finally make the trip to reunite with their father.
  • A River Runs Through It: Paul's girlfriend is Native American. On that account, he gets hassled over going into a speakeasy with her (they have a rule against it) but talks them down. Later, he hits a guy for insulting her too.
  • In The Royal Tenenbaums, when Etheline (white) and Henry (black) are married, the mixed-race thing isn't a big deal except on the part of Royal himself, though he may just be upset about her (re)marrying anyone and simply playing up the race angle in order to offend and provoke Henry.
  • Savaged: The rednecks are very disapproving of Zoe, who's white, being with Dane, her black fiancé. After they meet him, some cruelly joke that she must be colorblind.
  • Save the Last Dance: Played with in the relationship between the white Sara (Julia Stiles) and black Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas). Sara's dad gives some meaningfully unpleasant looks but otherwise doesn't really try to counter it. Meanwhile, Derek's Alpha Bitch ex-girlfriend Nikki sharply disapproves because she thinks white girls are responsible for "stealing" the few decent black men around (as Derek is a good student who stays out of criminal activities).
  • Sayonara features an American serviceman falling in love with a Japanese woman. He marries her, but federal laws prevent him from taking her to the United States, and the Air Force has strict regulations against intermarriage. This was probably the first American film to depict racial intermarriage at all, much less depict it sympathetically.
  • Hinted at in The Sixth Sense, when Cole sees three hanged ghosts: a black man, a white woman, and a child who is clearly meant to be their own.
  • Something New has a successful black businesswoman falling in love with a white landscaper and her parents not exactly approving, as they'd prefer her to be with someone of her own race (and class).
  • Star Trek (2009): Spock's parents, to the point that even completely logical Vulcan adults (and children) are incredibly racist towards him and his parents. Spock also had some issues in the original series, but Amanda seems to have been fully accepted, even becoming an initiate of Vulcan's ancient mystical discipline. Illogical but understandable — a human choosing to live according to Vulcan ways is a compliment, whereas a Vulcan who isn't quite is kind of creepy.
  • Sweetwater: Josiah denounces Sarah's marriage with Miguel, a mestizo Mexican man, saying that his rape of her "cleanses" this sin.
  • Tevya has a rare example of this trope in which, as far as the work is concerned, the mixed marriage should be maligned. Tevye writes his daughter off as dead after she converts to Christianity to marry Fedye. Although Fedye sincerely loves his wife and respects her family, the rest of Khave's in-laws seem to regard her as a slave, and Fedye's father leads the effort to kick Tevye out of town. At the end, Khave leaves her husband, goes back to her father, and reclaims her identity as a Jew. This Adaptation Deviation may have something to do with the political climate in 1939.
  • The Toll of the Sea: The Chinese protagonist of this adaptation of the opera Madame Butterfly, is constantly bothered by her peers telling her marrying an American isn't a good idea, that he will leave her in the end. Lotus Blossom ignores them. Her husband does leave her for a woman back in America, though he didn't know that Lotus had a son with him.
  • This is the reason behind the Vampire/Lycan war in the Underworld (2003) series. Lucian, a Lycan, falls in love with and secretly weds Sonja, who happens to be the daughter of a Vampire Elder. Said Elder has Sonja (and her and Lucian's unborn child) put to death, Lucian swears revenge, and it's all downhill from there.
  • A United Kingdom is based on the Real Life love story of Sir Seretse Khama (the Prince of Bechuanaland (now Botswana)) and his wife, Londoner Ruth Williams Khama, a relationship not approved of by either of their families, nor by the British and South African governments, leading them to be exiled by both.
  • Volhynia: The Poles murder Vasyl and Helena for being in a mixed marriage, along with their child.
  • In the movie version of The Wall, Pinks's Hammer army attacks a mixed-race couple, viciously beats the black man, and rapes the white woman. This goes very well with the Nazi-esque themes that appeared in the previous song ("In the Flesh").
  • Wedding Season: One of the weddings Ravi and Asha attend is an interfaith Hindu-Muslim one, and it's mentioned that their parents were so against it they didn't even show up.
  • Where Hands Touch: Leyna's parents' relationship was despised by many people. Her own relationship with Lutz has to be kept secret as a result of this-and worse, that it's a capital crime under the Nazi laws.
  • The short mockumentary White Face is premised on the idea that performers who appear to be wearing white greasepaint (clowns, etc.) are not wearing makeup; that's a racial trait, and they suffer Fantastic Racism for it. In the film, various "Clown-Americans" are interviewed, including a Vietnam War veteran, a college professor, and a recent immigrant (who communicates in his "native language" with a bicycle horn). There's also a Racist Clown Grandma who is upset that her grandchild is about to marry... a mime.
  • Women Is Losers: Minerva and Calvin sympathize with Celina's struggles as a Latina single mom, due to being an interracial couple (she's white, he's black), and help her out, saying they've experienced discrimination too as a result.
  • The World of Suzie Wong is about a relationship between a white American artist and a Hong Kong prostitute. Early in the film while at a dinner with English expats, the host talks about a sister of his who married a Chinese man. Although it makes him appear quite liberal, his daughter reveals the story is made up and he later blackmails the artist when he dates the titular Suzie over his own daughter — stating that it'll be hard for him to get a good job if he's married to a Chinese woman.
  • The World Unseen:
    • Omar's sister Rehmat married a White man, which is prohibited under the Apartheid laws. This gets her in trouble with the police, which leads to Amina offering her shelter when she is being sought by them.
    • Jacob and Madeleine's romance is another example, as he's mixed race while she's White.
  • Zebrahead (1992) is about a white high school boy and a black girl controversially dating.

    Literature 
  • The Belgariad:
    • In the lands of Aloria, there is some tension between Alorns and the Tolnedran Empire. Once the long-awaited Rivan King returns, there is a great deal of upset that the Rivan King marries an imperial Tolnedran princess instead of an Alorn princess. As it takes many years for Ce'Nedra to begin having children, Alorns who object to the marriage take it as a sign that the marriage has been condemned by the Alorn god, Belar. The Bear-Cult is particularly infuriated by the marriage. As a result, those that know Ce'Nedra is also a Dryad keep that fact as quiet as possible. As Brand quietly observes to Polgara, it's hard enough getting Alorns to accept Ce'Nedra is Tolnedran without them discovering she's non-human, too.
    • Mallorea is made up of many different cultures and provinces. Generally, the Malloreon aristocracy is supposed to marry from very specific elite groups. Dalasia tends to be looked down upon by outsiders as a poor, agricultural, backward province full of farmers who have their own "weird" religion centred on the mysterious Seers of Kell. There's therefore a great deal of consternation in Mal Zeth when Emperor Zakath decides to marry the Holy Seeress of Kell. However, as Zakath informs Garion, he may have mellowed out from the man he used to be, but he hasn't changed enough to tolerate any objections to Cyradis being a Dal. Just as aggrieved Alorns wisely don't say anything to Garion's face about Ce'Nedra, no-one in Mallorea is stupid enough to let their complaints about Cyradis reach Zakath's hearing either.
  • From Lungbarrow, Leela and Andred's relationship. The other Time Lords find it rather embarrassing that Andred is with a "non-Gallifreyan". Leela and Andred, however, don't mind at all.
  • In the Timeline-191 series by Harry Turtledove, Achilles Driver marries Grace Chang, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, much over the objections of her parents. Said parents refuse to speak to either of them for years. Achilles says this is because he is black, but Grace says they would have reacted the same way had he been white; the important issue is that he's not Chinese.
  • Tolkien's Legendarium:
    • Beren and Lúthien: The very first such Man/Elf couple had to overcome the Fantastic Racism of Lúthien's father Thingol, who considered any mortal beneath his daughter and made totally impossible demands (go to Hell, cut a Silmaril from Satan's crown, and give it to me). Ironically, Thingol himself was married to an angel (one who didn't object to her daughter marrying a human). Admittedly, in the case of Beren and Lúthien the racial difference is unusually relevant: after Beren dies of old age, Lúthien's soul passed out of the world with his instead of joining the other elven souls in the Halls of Mandos. This made Lúthien the first elf ever to truly die, and Thingol knew, apparently due to some level of prophecy, that this would happen should Lúthien marry a human.
    • The Children of Húrin: Elf Gwindor warns Elf Finduilas to not fall in love with human Túrin, because a mixed-race marriage is something that is unnatural, and Gwindor could see that Túrin is not Beren. Even in this case, it's not so much that mixed marriages are morally or socially wrong — Gwindor is simply reminding Finduilas that falling in love with Túrin is likely to cause both of them grief, since one is immortal and the other isn't.
    • The Lord of the Rings: After Beren and Lúthien did the impossible anyway and got married, subsequent elf-human marriages met no opposition. Their descendant Elrond merely expected Aragorn to help defeat Sauron and make Middle-earth a safe place to live before agreeing to leave his daughter Arwen there for the rest of her life. And considering his wife was once abducted and tortured to death by orcs while on vacation, his concerns look pretty understandable. There was also the simple question of status: she was elven royalty after all, even if Rivendell isn't a traditional kingdom.
  • The parents from Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. eloped because Margaret's Christian maternal grandparents wouldn't accept their daughter's relationship with a Jewish man. Margaret's paternal grandparents weren't thrilled with the idea eithernote , but didn't reject it out of hand the same way and eventually accepted the marriage, however reluctantly. This is why by the time the story starts, Margaret has a relationship with her grandmother Sylvia but not her mother's parents.
  • In The Barrakee Mystery, the first Bony mystery novel, a white man falls in love with an Aboriginal woman; her family doesn't mind, but it draws opprobrium from all his white family and friends who find out. For what it's worth, some of them are as much provoked that in so doing he's ditching the woman he had been going to marry. The path is (somewhat uncomfortably) smoothed by the revelation that, although he was raised believing himself white, his own father was Aboriginal. This revelation comes along with another example of the trope from the other direction: his mother's brother, who knew his parentage, had been against his original marriage plan, considering that he wasn't good enough for a white woman.
  • In In The King's Service, predictably enough thanks in part to Fantastic Racism, the marriage of Lady Alyce deCorwyn and Sir Kenneth Morgan is condemned by both humans and Deryni mages. Hostile clerics and other humans don't like to see a wealthy and beautiful "sorceress" wed and reproduce; High Deryni Lords and Ladies who worry about protecting their heritage against hostile forces would prefer she wed another mage instead of a mere human, who will only father "inferior half-breeds".
  • In Discworld novels:
    • Some people, most notably the Dragon King at Arms in Feet of Clay, believe that Carrot being in a relationship with a werewolf should prevent him becoming king (not that he wants to be king anyway, of course).
      "The city knows how to deal with... inconvenient kings. But an heir to the throne who is actually called Rex?"
    • A patriarch in Lancre is named Miscegenation Carter as part of as due a misconceived naming tradition (as girls are often named for virtues, then boys should be named for vices; his descendants have names like Chastity and Charity for girls, and Bestiality Carter and Murder Carter for boys. Thing is, every single member of the lineage becomes the opposite of their name). This suggests the concept of miscegenation is known on the Disc and at least in the past attracted the same opprobrium and social stigma as murder, rape, bestiality, etc.
    • Mixed-species marriages are discussed in Raising Steam, and are condoned except by religious and racial extremists; a dwarfish version of the KKK is seen to disrupt a wedding of a dwarf woman to a human man. There's also a moderate-traditionalist dwarf present who seems to take the view that he might disapprove, but it's none of his business — and fights the grags on behalf of the wedding party.
    • And it is mentioned in Lords and Ladies that Elves and Men can interbreed — "as if anyone's going to be proud of THAT!" (Note that The Fair Folk on the Disc are Humanoid Abominations.)
  • Earth's Children: Joplaya and Echozar's bonding is looked down upon by most of their fellow Lanzadonii. It's mostly said that it is because Joplaya is a stunning, exotic beauty and Echozar is... not. The underlying issue is that Echozar is half-Neanderthal. Regardless, they have a good marriage.
  • In The Full Matilda by David Haynes, Rodrick is black and his wife Katie is white, and both their families disapprove. There even is a class element, with Rodrick coming from a middle class black family and Katie coming from old money. This causes problems for his son Jacob who is mixed and can't decide which race he identifies with.
  • A Fox Tail: In this world, interspecies relationships are about as controversial as homosexual ones. Making Vulpie (male fox) and Polar's (male wolf) marriage particularly newsworthy.
  • Song in the Silence has the kingdom of the Kantri going mad because their leader has fallen in love with a human woman, and consider forcing him off the throne because he's obviously gone mad. She attempts to defend herself in front of their council. It ends... well! Eventually.
  • In The Sharing Knife series, Dag Redwing's immediate family and to an extent his entire camp were more opposed to his marriage to Fawn Bluefield than her family and hometown, to the point of the couple being effectively exiled from the former.
    • The reaction softens somewhat according to region. In the (more conservative, less populated) north, a romance like Dag and Fawn's is completely unknown. In the south, where there are larger farmer communities, it apparently happens once or twice a year. However, while the southern Lakewalkers have given in to the inevitability of such things happening, farmers still are not allowed to live in Lakewalker settlements, so a Lakewalker who marries a farmer is leaving their society forever.
  • Harry Potter: There are severañ wizards or witches who marry muggles or muggle-borns.
    • Andromeda was part of the notoriously bigoted pureblood House of Black until she ran away with the muggle-born wizard Ted Tonks and was literally burned off of the Black family tree. A many-time-great aunt, Iola, was also burned off the family tree for marrying a muggle called Bob Hitchens.
    • Hagrid's parents, a human wizard and a giantess, split up when he was young and she remarried a giant with whom she had his half-brother, Grawp. His on-and-off girlfriend Madame Maxine is also a half-giant, but she hides it from even Hagrid because she doesn't want to face the discrimination Hagrid does.
    • Lupin initially rejects Tonks because he knows that being in a relationship with a werewolf would negatively affect her life. He was right. Voldemort himself brings up their marriage to mock Tonks's (estranged) family, and her aunt Bellatrix becomes even more determined to kill Tonks than she was before. And she was pretty determined already.
    • Surprisingly, Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour get a free pass even though Fleur is a quarter-veela and even worse, French. It isn't like Fleur is hiding it either, she freely admits to having a veela grandmother when the subject is brought up. His mother, his sister, and Hermione object to his marrying her, but because she's insufferable and arrogant, not because of her heritage, and they warm to her once she shows she cares deeply for Bill.
  • Hunter (W. L. Pierce) involves a lone serial killer targeting mixed race couples.
  • Island Beneath the Sea:
    • Doctor Parmentier is in a Common Law Marriage with a black woman and they have several children, but they've been hiding their relationship for decades because it would hurt his business.
    • Étienne Relais couldn't care less about social and racial prejudices and marries the mixed-race Hooker with a Heart of Gold Violette out in the open. His reputation as The Dreaded helps to keep unwanted attentions at bay.
  • The Son Of The Ironworker:
    • The protagonist Martín's parents faced discrimination because Catalina de Arcos was daughter of an aristocrat, and her husband was a low-born ironworker who was convinced that he would be hanged for the crime of eloping with a noblewoman.
    • Subverted when Martín falls in love with Itxicol and wonders whether he will be allowed to marry an Indian; though, Father Olmedo tells him his lover is a child of God, just like him, and if they are serious about their relationship, then they must get married.
  • Star Trek: Hollow Men features a Lissepian criminal mentioning his upcoming marriage to a Nausicaan woman. Her family are trying to put a stop to it, unable to accept the validity of a mixed-race marriage.
  • The Turner Diaries involves the "Day of the Rope" in which promoters of race-mixing are executed en masse.
  • Deconstructed at The Great Gatsby, when known cheater Tom suspects that his wife is cheating on him, he shows this kind of thinking:
    "Self control!" repeated Tom incredulously. "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white."
    Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.
  • From the Temeraire series, we have Tharkay, the product of a white Englishman marrying an Oriental woman, with the result that Tharkay was excluded from both societies and mistrusted on principle. He began acting subversive and would take on a mocking tone when talking to people so that people would have a reason to dislike him beyond his mixed-race heritage.
  • In Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw's English grandparents disowned his mother for marrying a Polish man.
  • Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series:
    • Maya Witherspoon, from The Serpent's Shadow, is the daughter of a British Army physician and a Brahman priestess. She and her mother are looked down upon in British society and barred from pretty much all of the social organizations among the British in India. And for all that, the British are still more accepting of the marriage than her mother's people, who essentially throw her mother out and refuse to have any more to do with her after she married Maya's father. It's strongly implied that her mother's twin sister actually had both of her parents killed in order to erase the shame of their marriage from the family line.
    • Bias against mixed-class marriages is brought up in Phoenix and Ashes — when Reggie tells his godmother that he loves Eleanor, her first reaction is that Reggie's mother won't approve because Eleanor is "common".
  • In Holes the backstory for the famous outlaw Kissing Kate Barlow is that she was once a school teacher in a town in Texas. She fell in love with Sam, the local handyman. As she was white and he was black, and this was Texas in the late 19th century, there was outrage when they were caught kissing. Sam ended up shot dead, so she became a bandit and took revenge.
  • Batiya and Chunru, the main leads of Across a Jade Sea are from two different parts of the world and of different races, which gets them met with disapproval from strangers and Chunru's family.
  • Chris and Starr from The Hate U Give have to deal with this — mostly Starr, as she's one of two black kids in her grade, and Chris is a popular white boy. She notes that a lot of girls at school give her dirty looks when she kisses Chris, as if Chris shouldn't be dating someone like her. On the other end of things, Starr's father, Maverick, disapproves when black people date white people, considering it to be a betrayal. So, Starr doesn't tell Maverick she's dating Chris. He finds out, of course, but while he's blindsided, he tries to give Chris a fair chance when it becomes clear how much Starr likes him. By the end of the book, Maverick has begun to warm up to Chris, since he's by then proven himself a thousand times over to really be in it for the long haul, and worthy of Starr.
  • Victoria has a mild example, with protagonist John Rumford's family initially unhappy with his relationship with Maria, a Spanish noblewoman. However, her conduct is so gracious and charming that she is eventually accepted by everyone.
  • Ben and Danielle's relationship in the Kamal and Barnea books - one between a Palestinian and an Israeli - is met with disapproval by just about everyone. Similarly, Ben's brother never approved of Ben marrying an American woman before the events of the first book.
  • From Danielle L. Jensen:
    • In Malediction Trilogy human girl Cecile is abducted to marry troll prince Tristan because of a prophecy that their marriage would break a curse. In troll society, marriages to humans used to be forbidden and humans are generally treated as lesser creatures, so many trolls treat Cecile with contempt.
    • In The Bridge Kingdom Archives Aren, king of Ithicana, and Lara, princess of Maridrina, get married as a part of the peace treaty between the two nations. However, many Ithicanians, especially those from older generations who still remember the war and cruelty of Maridrinian raiders, treat Lara with distrust and some even suggest that Aren should arrange an accident for his new wife.
  • In Orlando Furioso, Bradamante (a Christian) falls in love with Ruggiero (a Muslim), who opts to convert from Islam to Christianity so they can marry. However, their union is obstructed by Bradamante's parents - specially her mother Beatrice - because of Ruggiero's Saracen heritage.
  • Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey has a Fantastic Racism version of this trope. As far as we know, Chromatacian society has no taboos against interracial marriage (though it's not entirely clear whether Homo coloribus even has separate ethnicities of the sort Homo sapiens does). Instead, their taboo is against relationships between people who can see complementary colors (i.e. a relationship between someone who can see red and someone who can see green, or between a Purple and a Yellow). This is so ingrained that when Tommy offers to procure Eddie a prostitute of whatever color he likes, he immediately specifies that of course that doesn't include complementary-color relationships. Likewise, despite explicitly being dissidents and rebels against Chomatacian culture, Jane and Eddie immediately break off their engagement upon discovering that they're complementary, and Eddie feels nauseous for having so much as had romantic thoughts towards Jane.
  • In Chance And Choices Adventures the marriage between Caucasian Ann Williams and half Native American Noah Swift Hawk becomes a major source of strife thanks to the racist Judge Hall, who attempts to annul their marriage, then dedicates himself to destroying them when they refuse to acknowledge his order to separate.
  • X-Wing Series:
    • The Imperials, as speciesists by and large, naturally are less than pleased by Humans who have relationships with members of other species. In Wedge's Gamble, a stormtrooper on Coruscant tells an undercover Nawara (Twi'lek) and Rhysati (human), who by now are a couple, that "Your kind makes me sick." Without missing a beat, Nawara retorts that the stormtrooper's "kind" makes him sick. The man then none-too-subtly threatens Nawara's life assuming they don't knock it off.
    • Bothan leader Borsk Fey'lya also disapproves of Bothan pilot Asyr Sei'lar having a relationship with Human Gavin Darklighter, not only because he dislikes Humans, but due to feeling she's setting a poor example with other Bothans as a result. He pressures her into breaking their relationship off by threatening to use his political power toward this if she doesn't. Before this, the pair had discussed marriage and adopting children (since they can't reproduce naturally). Asyr reluctantly complies, but both she and Gavin still bear a grudge against Fey'lya for this many years later.
  • The Julie Donaldson/Axel Schiffer picture book The Smeds and the Snoos is set on an alien planet, home to red, semi-aquatic Smeds and blue, hill-dwelling Snoos. When Janet the Smed and Bill the Snoo form a childhood friendship, their respective grandparents tell them how terribly weird the other group are. When they fall in love, they decide to leave the planet together. The Smeds and Snoos gradually make peace over the course of searching for them, and are eventually delighted to meet their purple great-grandchild.
  • The Beast Player: The Ahlyo are forbidden to marry outside their people. Outsiders don't seem to think highly of marrying them either, so much so that they call the result of such a union Akun Meh Chai, a devil-bitten child.
  • One Jedi Quest book has bounty hunters Floria and Dane mention that there parents came from rival neighboring clans and were shunned over their marriage, and eventually murdered for it when Floria and Dane were young children.
  • Every Shiny Thing: Anne is black, and Carl is white. Anne tells Sierra how angry her now-dead parents were when she married a white man. It reminds Sierra of how her Nan used to get upset when her mom dated black men.
  • Born Behind Bars: Kabir's parents married in secret because his appa was Muslim and his amma was Hindu. Appa was planning to tell his family later, but then Amma was jailed for a theft she didn't commit, and then Appa was killed in a plane crash, leaving Kabir and his amma in jail with no help.
  • What to Say Next: Kit's mother is a second-generation Indian immigrant whose parents tried to assimilate her into American culture as much as possible when she was a kid, and then were surprised when she married a white guy. Kit's grandparents accepted her, but always disapproved of her father. After her father's death, her mother didn't even tell her parents until after the funeral, which Kit thinks is because she knew they wouldn't come.
  • The Zodiac Series: This is the general opinion on inter-House marriage—legal, but frowned upon.
  • The Mermaid's Mirror: Lena is the product of a forbidden romance between a human man and a mermaid. Mer society is highly xenophobic, and pains are taken to make sure merfolk learn as little about life on land as possible. When her mother, Melusina, went on land to live as a human woman, Melusina's father Merrow vowed that as punishment for taking his wife, Melusina's husband could never go in the ocean again, or Merrow would give the order for sharks to attack him and his loved ones. Even after Melusina returned to the ocean, she was never considered the same as other mermaids - because she had been "Riven," she had to sleep in a different cave than the others so that her dreams wouldn't contaminate anyone. When Melusina takes Lena down to meet her family, the other merfolk are accepting at first because they think Lena is going to live as one of them, but when Lena says she'd rather live on land, Merrow forbids her from contacting her mother ever again.
  • Twelve Days: Indra Gupta's mother was Brahmin, and was disowned for marrying a Siddinote  man. After Indra's parents were killed, she was left homeless.
  • The title to Trevor Noah's autobiographical Born A Crime refers to the fact that his parents were a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German father, which in The Apartheid Era was outright illegal when he was born.
  • In Lost Voices, all contact between mermaids and humans is strictly forbidden, and any human who hears a mermaid sing must die. However, in the first book Luce secretly rescues the human boy Dorian Hurst from a wreck, and in Waking Storms she falls in love with him and starts meeting him on the beach in secret. Nausicaa tells Luce that she's seen hundreds of mermaids fall in love with humans, and it always ends tragically. Most of the time, the mermaid tries to go on land to be with the man, only to die of shock from the agony of having her tail dry out and turn into legs. Sometimes the man will leave the mermaid to be with a human woman, which usually results in the mermaid drowning him before dying of grief. Nausicaa has only known two mermaids who successfully turned back into humans, and one of them told her that leaving the sea was her greatest regret. In the end, none of those things happen. Dorian moves on and falls in love with a human girl. Luce can't make herself drown him, so she moves on with her life.
  • L.A. Confidential: Detective Ed Exley has a long affair with Inez Soto, whom he meets during an investigation. He never marries her, because it's the 1950s, and marrying a Mexican woman would hurt his police career.
  • The Mermaid Chronicles: Wade is a selachii, with the ability to turn into a shark. His mother, Christina, disapproves of his relationship with the mermaid Cordelia, and is constantly pushing him to get back with his ex Stephanie. Although she likes Cordelia, she doesn't think Wade can be a leader his people respect unless he marries another selachii.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Averted in the British Television/Music of the last forty years segment of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, where an interracial couple (black father, white mother), their children,note  and in-laws was presented as the producers' idea of the average British family.
  • The 4400: Richard, who's Black, was nearly murdered by White fellow soldiers who'd discovered he'd been with a White woman. Later he is quite pleasantly surprised to find that interracial relationships have grown to be far more acceptable in the future, and gets into one with Lily (who's White).
  • In AfterMASH, Klinger indicates that he's faced widespread rejection due to marrying the Korean Soon-Lee (who is looked down upon in general for her race).
  • The Aliens: Many people, on learning that Lewis' parents were an alien and human, are pretty disgusted by the idea.
  • Played somewhat straight in the Lifetime series Any Day Now- Taking place in Montgomery, Alabama and highlighting events and sentiments from the 1960's as well as the present day, it's easy to see why the protagonist's sister's marriage to a Vietnamese man is not well taken by her parents at first. Mind you, said sister was portrayed as very bigoted (at least toward African-Americans) during the 1960's flashback segments.
    • It gets better. Near the end of the series, her teenage daughter becomes pregnant by, and later marries, her African-American boyfriend. Mom was unhappy about it, but just from the "you're too young to be doing this" angle. Her usually easygoing and racially-tolerant husband on the other hand, was so enraged, he threatened divorce. He got better, though.
  • Around the World in 80 Days (2021): Jean Passepartout (black Frenchman) and Abigail Fix (white Englishwoman) develop a mutual attraction and Almost Kiss in episode 6. They draw some raised eyebrows when they journey through the American West in episode 7, and Colonel Abernathy takes Phileas Fogg to task for not "protecting her honor"—though since Abernathy is a Klansman who's currently under arrest for terrorism against freedmen back east, Fogg is disinclined to listen.
  • Astrid: Laure Gana in "Haunting" was involved with a French neo-Nazi group but fell in love with a Tunisian immigrant who got her pregnant. The other members murdered him, which—coupled with ergot poisoning—drove Laure into a dissociative fugue she's been stuck in ever since.
  • The relationship between Delenn and John Sheridan in Babylon 5 gets a lot of flack from both humans and Minbari (with the Fantastic Racism rather justified in that a mere ten to fifteen years before, the two species had fought a war in which the Minbari kicked the humans' asses and then surrendered, satisfying nobody), but they make it work; being two-thirds of The Chosen One helps. They eventually have a son named David and lead the galaxy together.
  • Helo and Athena from Battlestar Galactica. Mention that Helo is in love with a Cylon, and everyone thinks he's crazy. Athena's initial seduction of Helo is part of an elaborate Cylon plot, and only later did she betray her kind and tell the truth and fall in love with him for real. Their daughter Hera is the only known successful progeny of a humanoid Cylon; the Cylons literally consider her a "miracle from God". The finale also reveals she's the mother of modern humanity.
  • Bewitched:
    • Samantha's mother Endora and several other members of the witch community opposed Samantha's marriage to Darren Stevens, a mortal.
    • Played with in one episode, where a client of Larry Tate's advertising firm threatened to drop the firm after mistakenly believing that Darren was married to a black woman (their daughter Tabitha was playing with a black girl and they were pretending to be sisters). When the client learned that Samantha was white he apologized to Mr. Tate and offered to renew their contract. Realizing that the client was a bigot, Mr. Tate (much to his own surprise) told him to take his business elsewhere.
  • Bones:
    • In "The Man in the Fallout Shelter" the Squints determine their victim was a white man who started a relationship with his African-American cleaning lady. When he got her pregnant, he promised to take her to Paris where they could get married away from the charged racism of '50s America. Unfortunately he was killed for his collection of valuable coins before the two could emigrate.
    • One episode features the discovery of early Neanderthal and Homo sapiens remains. Brennan and Clark discover that the bones belong to a mixed couple, their interracial daughter, and another Neanderthal. The evidence indicates that the family was forced to live outside either society and the parents and the other man died when the Neanderthal attacked the family and the father fought back. Though the team might be projecting modern ideas onto why the separation and attack happened. There's really no way to be sure.
  • Call the Midwife set in 1950's and 1960's London, portrays period-typical prejudice against both mixed-race and mixed-religion marriages:
    • In season 3, Trixie is midwife to a young couple from Belfast, who elope because she is Protestant and he is Catholic, and their families did not approve of their marriage. The difference in their religious views, or rather, the ceremonies involved, cause some marital issues in the weeks before their child is born, but when it looks like their son may not survive, the husband tracks down Poplar's Protestant reverend to baptize the baby in accordance with his wife's wishes.
    • Later in season 6, Phyllis is the midwife to a Jamaican husband and his white English wife, expecting their fourth child. The midwives discuss the racism the family's boys face for being mixed-race and how the wife's family did not approve of the marriage. Phyllis ends up hitting one of the children with her car when he leaves the cordoned-off play street and dashes into the main road to avoid the bullying. He makes a full recovery, and brings his new baby brother to the Cubs' show-and-tell event.
  • Carnival Row: It's made clear via racist remarks that many Burguish people disapprove strongly of humans marrying or having relationships with Fae.
  • In Charmed (1998) Piper fell in love with her whitelighter; this was initially forbidden, but Piper managed to out stubborn the Powers That Be into accepting a marriage. Throughout the series, the problems with this marriage kept coming up. Not to mention Phoebe falling in love with not only a demon, but the Source of All Evil.
  • Charmed (2018): Relationships between whitelighters and witches are forbidden. Those who engaged in them, and their children, are shunned.
  • Criminal Minds: The episode "Fear and Loathing" features a serial killer targeting black girls who also killed one of the girls' white ex-boyfriend. Initial speculation is that it's a hate crime, especially once they find out that the girl received a threatening note ordering her to break up with the boy. Ultimately subverted. The note was sent by the boy's other black ex-girlfriend who wanted him back, and the unsub only killed the boyfriend because he happened to be in the way.
  • Dear White People: AltIvyW, the Internet troll in Season 2, horribly insults Sam's dad (who's white) for having Sam with her black mother. This causes her to cry, and inspires Sam in taking up anti-racism again.
  • Doctor Who: "Demons of the Punjab" presents Umbreen (Muslim) and Prem (Hindu), who are planning to get married just as the Partition of India is happening, resulting in an increase of sectarian tensions. Prem's brother Manish is so fanatically against it that he ends up arranging his brother's death.
  • In Downton Abbey, Rose meets a nice man named Atticus, who turns out to be Jewish. After a while, they decide to get married, despite the constant dirty looks and comments they keep getting from both sides. Prior to the wedding, their parents meet, and it turns out that neither Rose's mother Susan nor Atticus's father Daniel wish for the union to take place. Rose's parents are about to be divorced, but her father Hugh insists that they keep the truth from both Rose and their future in-laws, for the time being. Susan even stages a scene during Atticus's stag party to imply his infidelity, but this fails to dissuade Rose. Daniel claims that Atticus is renouncing his Jewish heritage by marrying a gentile woman and that, by Jewish tradition, their children cannot be considered Jewish (the mother must be Jewish), although Atticus claims they can convert. At the altar, Susan reveals the truth about their upcoming divorce as a last-ditch effort to stop the wedding, only for Atticus's mother Rachel to thank her for the revelation and urge the event to continue. When Daniel moves in to say something indignant about this, Rachel warns him that he will be the one facing a divorce if he so much as utters a word in protest.
  • In the second season of Empire, Lucious becomes distant from eldest son Andre. When Andre confronts him about it, Lucious says Andre turned his back on his family by marrying a white woman, his wife Rhonda. What makes this a little odd, however, is that the entire first season came and went without Lucious giving any indication that he had a problem with her, and by all accounts, he respected Rhonda as his daughter-in-law and included her in private family functions. Especially compared to how he treated Jamal's boyfriend Michael.
  • On Farscape, D'Argo (Luxan) married Lo'laan (Sebacean), and they had a child, Jothee, together. Macton, a Peacekeeper and Lo'laan's brother, disapproved of the relationship (Peacekeepers believing interspecies unions to be "evil"). This ended badly, as Macton's attempts to convince Lo'laan to leave D'Argo resulted in his accidental murder of her. His framing of D'Argo for the murder, however, was not accidental.
  • The First Lady: Discussed when Michelle Obama is urging Barack to now publicly support same-sex marriage, noting that when he was born, his black father and white mother couldn't even be married in much of the US, with many states making it a crime. By his expression, her point hits hard.
  • First Kill: Juliette's mother Margot has been shunned by her family for many years over marrying Juliette's father Sebastian, a human she eventually turned, rejecting her prior arranged marriage. Some still dislike it though since he wasn't born a vampire, unlike the legacies.
  • On Flash Forward, it is implied that Demetri's parents do not approve of his impending marriage to Zoey because she is not Korean.
  • In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, when Will's aunt Janice introduces the white Frank Schaeffer as her fiancé, the family goes on planning the wedding once the initial shock dies down. Except for Will's mom, Vy', who tries to talk Janice out of marrying Frank citing that they will face unnecessary hardship for marrying outside their race, and for having mixed race children. When Janice doesn't call it off, Vy decides to boycott the wedding, and tries to guilt Will into not being the best man.
  • In Game of Thrones, King Robb Stark married Talisa Maegyr, a Volantanese noblewoman which ruined his supposed Arranged Marriage with one of Lord Walder Frey’s daughters. This led to the infamous Red Wedding, where Robb, his mother, his wife and unborn child, and his bannermen were massacred. The Freys’ reasoning is that Robb rejected a political alliance with them not for marrying a foreigner. But in Season 6, some Northern houses, such as House Glover, refused to join Sansa and Jon’s mission to reclaim Winterfell from Ramsey Bolton because they’re bitter of Robb’s bad political decisions most especially his marriage to Talisa which Lord Glover called her a "foreign whore". This is in contrast to the books where Robb married Jeyne Westerling, who is from a Westerland house under the Lannisters, because he took her virginity while having Sex for Solace after learning his younger brothers’ supposed deaths. While the Freys’ reasoning is the same, the Northern houses are more willing to reclaim Winterfell from the Boltons because the perpetrators of the Red Wedding are indeed traitors who broke Sacred Hospitality. They have no issues of Robb marrying a Westerland noble from Lannister territory.
  • Played with in an episode of The Golden Girls, where Dorothy's son Michael is engaged to a middle-aged black woman, Lorraine. Both Dorothy and Lorraine's mother object, but for opposite reasons. Dorothy not because Lorraine is black, but because she's twice Michael's age. Meanwhile, Lorraine's mother objects not because Michael is so much younger, but because he's white. Michael and Lorraine make Dorothy and the others come around rapidly when they reveal that she's pregnant and that their family is a package deal.
  • In Grimm, Monroe's parents (well, mostly his dad) are very traditionalist Blutbad, and while Monroe assures Rosalee that they won't have a problem with him marrying a Fuchsbau, he turns out to be completely wrong. By the end of the two-parter that introduces them, they've accepted the situation, but his dad still isn't happy about it. They're fine after the marriage, but the marriage then hits an even bigger snag in the form of an ancient Wesen order who strives to preserve the "purity" of the bloodlines. After threatening the couple for some time, they kidnap Monroe and nearly have him Impaled with Extreme Prejudice and burned for good measure. Thankfully, pretty much everyone shows up in the nick of time to save him: Nick, Hank, Rosalee (who proves that Fuchsbau are not to be messed with), Captain Renard, Wu (who finally learns the truth), and Juliette (who uses her newfound Hexenbiest powers to kill a Blutbad).
  • Guerrilla: An activist is sold out to the police by other black radicals who dislike that he's involved with a white Irishwoman. To them, this is "protecting the movement".
  • On The Hour, we have Sissy and Sey – she's white, he's black, it's 1950s Britain. All the main characters are very accepting, but Sissy's father and some of their less-than-friendly neighbours aren't, and they have to deal with rude messages scrawled on their door and constant harassment. When they get married in the second season, Sissy's dad refuses to give his blessing and it ends up a very small affair. For all that, they do seem to be genuinely happy together.
  • Subverted in the House episode "Fools for Love". A young white man has married a black woman, even though his dad absolutely hates the idea (to the point of beating his son). As it turns out, the dad doesn't hate his son dating a black woman because of her race, but because said woman is a product of an affair he had, making the relationship incestuous.
  • The Indian Detective: Inverted. Gopal compliments Singh about his broad-mindedness as a Sikh in letting his daughter marry a Hindu.
  • The Jeffersons had Tom and Helen Willis, an interracial couple (white man, black woman) whose daughter Jenny dated, and later married, Lionel Jefferson. George's distaste for this arrangement was a recurring theme, especially in the show's early seasons. But the trope also became a theme in other guest stars that had much darker storylines, such as "Sorry, Wrong Meeting", where a racist, upon learning Tom is married to a black woman, calls him a "nigger".
  • Kung Fu (2021):
    • Mei-Li disapproved of Nicky's relationship with the white Evan and sent her on a matchmaking trip to China to find her a Chinese husband. When Nicky found out, she ran away and joined the monastery. Surprisingly, when Nicky returns home, she learns that her mother and Evan are now friends.
    • Averted with Ryan bringing Joe to meet his parents. Not only they are okay with him bringing a man, they don't mention him being a black man at all (to be fair, this is after their Character Development).
  • Law & Order: Organized Crime: Manfredi Sinatra never liked his son's marriage with a Black woman, which Richard holds a violent grudge about even after they divorce.
  • The Mandalorian: In "Guns for Hire" the Mandalorian mercenaries who stop the Quarren ship in the opening have been hired to bring back a Mon Calamari male onboard, whose sister views him as having been kidnapped by their leader, a female Quarren. It turns out they're a couple though, which his sister is opposed to (the Quarren and Mon Calamari have had a long conflict which only just ended, as the Quarren mentions). The Mandalorian leader Axe Woves sympathizes, however he's set on taking him back (though noting he'd be free to run off with her once again after that).
  • The Man in the High Castle:
    • The "regular universe" counterpart of Trade Minister Tagomi, who is a Japanese immigrant in San Francisco, was apparently deeply disapproving of his son's relationship with Juliana and thinks he is giving up his cultural heritage. His son counters that in America he can be both an American and Japanese.
    • White American Robert Childan's marriage to Yukiko, who's Japanese, is clearly disapproved of by her people too. They refuse to let him travel on the boat with her even after he gives the guard a hefty bribe. He has to bribe the Yakuza to get on another boat in hopes of meeting her there later.
  • Prince Arthur and Gwen are essentially this trope in Merlin because Arthur is royalty while Gwen is a servant girl and King Uther won't hear of a romance between them. Though Arthur is white and Gwen is mixed-race, race is not a factor in Uther's disapproval.
  • mixed•ish has Paul and Alicia, who are white and black respectively. They didn't feel this aspect until the commune was shut down in which they and their mixed race kids are constantly judged, sometimes by their own family members. The show is set in The '80s, and it wasn't even a full two decades that interracial marriage was fully legal, thanks to the Loving v. Virginia decision.
  • Mo (2022): It's a point of contention that Mo's Muslim Palestinian family doesn't exactly approve of his girlfriend Maria, a Catholic Mexican, even though a marriage would actually help their immigration case. Mo claims that such a union would still get less flak than his sister Nadia's marriage to a white Canadian (which got her semi-estranged from the family) because Arabs and Hispanics at least share some culture.
  • Mohawk Girls:
    • Most Mohawks really dislike anyone of their people dating a white person, due to the history of mistreatment by white people they've suffered over the years. Bailey hesitates to be with Jack, who's white, as a result. After she does and brings him to the reserve, they react with open hostility over this. Anyone who has children with a non-member and or marries them will also be kicked off the band roll, which lets them vote. Anna (whose own ancestry isn't Mohawk enough for membership) is appalled by it and calls this out.
    • Non-Mohawk spouses or children of Mohawks also aren't allowed to live on the reserve, with many mentioned as being evicted during Season 3. In Season 4, some Mohawks protest outside the home of a mixed family, demanding that the man's wife (who is white) be evicted.
    • It turns out if a Mohawk lives with a non-Mohawk off the reserve, the band will deny them the right to burial with their ancestors there after they die.
  • Motherland: Fort Salem: It's mentioned that Raelle's mother was punished for marrying her father, because he was a muggle and civilian. Her father later relates that he was denounced to his face for fathering her, since this would make his daughter "weak". The military pressures witches to marry each other, so powerful bloodlines will continue, and thus their arranged marriages for this end are standard.
  • My Name Is Earl:
    • Joy and Darnell. Lampshaded several times during the series (including at their wedding, where they had a "cake" made of Hostess Twinkies and Cupcakes).
    • In one episode Joy convinced Earl to pretend to be still married to her, because she was scared of how her father may react to her being married to Darnell. It wasn't so much that he was a racist, it was that he had numerous affairs with so many black women that he feared she may fall in love, and marry any one of her unknown half brothers.
    • Another episode (from Earl's stint in prison for a crime Joy committed) featured a couple consisting of a black man and a Latino. They were from rival gangs, but eventually fell in love during a month in the hole, and decided they would stage gang fights (which their gangs thought were real) so they could be together. Earl has to get them together in order to restore some semblance of peace to the prison yard.
  • New Amsterdam (2008): John has a relationship with a black woman in the early 1940s, but the racial segregation of the time makes it difficult for them to have anything other than a Secret Relationship. The woman's father gives John an earful after she loses her teaching job because the principal doesn't approve of mixing, scornfully describing how he watched her use the service entrance pretending to be a maid to get into his hotel room. When Lily becomes pregnant she breaks off the relationship without telling John why, and a heartbroken John, who had been about to propose to her, enlists in the Army. But, when John's secretary (and daughter) tells him about the baby, he rushes to Lily's side and openly acknowledges his son, with the strong implication he marries her given that her grave has the last name he'd been using at the time. (New York State never passed anti-miscegenation laws, so the issue is clearly just social pressure, but that was a powerful force at the time.)
  • Noughts & Crosses: Interracial relationships are illegal. They still occur clandestinely-a whole motel caters to illicit liaisons among such couples. Elaine is jeered by the Cross cadets after Lekan reveals she was there (though nothing happens to Barnaby, whom she'd been with). Sephy and Callum try to keep their relationship a secret because of this. Kamal is also quite keen to conceal the fact he had an affair with a Nought woman in the past, and they have a son.
  • October Faction: Fred's dad doesn't explicitly say he objects to him marrying Deloris because she's black, but it was strongly implied as being a factor.
  • The Outpost: Nedra opposes Blackbloods being with Humans, saying they need people to continue the Blackblood species, with Zed later agreeing. Wren and Talon, both in relationships with Human men, take this badly of course and tell them off.
  • Penny Dreadful: City of Angels: Tiago's family greatly disapprove of his relationship with Molly, because she's white and he's a Latino. He's accused of not thinking a Latina is good enough to be with. Josefina acts personally betrayed, as Molly's her spiritual leader/mentor. Later he breaks off their relationship, because they could never be together publicly (simply holding hands would not be acceptable, let alone anything else).
  • The Plot Against America: Evelyn's affair with Angelo is maligned by her family as much for the fact that he's not Jewish as that he's married.
  • The Practice: In "The Lonely People" a White racist who preaches that interracial relationships are forbidden by God is revealed to have been involved with a Black woman years ago, and fathered a son with her. He refuses to let this be used at his trial on charges he ordered a Black man murdered, even when this could be used to argue the shooter (his son) did it to impress him rather than having been ordered to.
  • Played for laughs in ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?. The Peñas are a Cuban family living in Miami. When a cousin comes to visit along with her American (meaning, Anglo) husband, the Peñas talk about how a marriage between an American man and a Cuban woman might just work, but the opposite (American woman and a Cuban man), not so much. Pepe makes it clear that he would disapprove of his son marrying an American woman. His daughter Carmen perks up:
    Carmen: Does all this mean that it is OK for me to marry an American?
    Pepe: No. It only means that it is more "not OK" for Joe than it is for you.
  • An episode of Reno 911! featured a KKK member who proposed marriage to his African-American fiancé. The joke of course was that the two were somehow so madly in love that the woman's race and the man's bigotry were made completely irrelevant.
  • In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina's mother and father had to divorce because of the Witches Council's ban on Witch/Mortal relationships. Sabrina also had to live with her aunts because the ban prohibits Sabrina from seeing her birthmother, unless she gives up her magic, and because her father lives in a book.
  • Scrubs: Conversational Troping when JD and Turk once treated a gay white man who was marrying a black guy.
    Turk: Tell the truth, how pissed are your parents?
  • She's Gotta Have It: Dean, who's White, mentions his mother refuses to accept his Black wife or their mixed race daughter. He says she's dead to him as a result.
  • Star Trek:
    • Averted with Worf (Klingon) and Jadzia Dax (Trill). Everyone is happy for them. At least until they are about to get married and the matriarch of his Klingon House announces she doesn't approve of an alien joining their family. She gets over it pretty easily once Jadzia swallows her pride and kisses the other woman's boots.
    • In Star Trek: Enterprise, T'Pol brings Trip Tucker with her for a visit home to Vulcan. T'Pol's mother immediately clocks that the two are in a relationship and is bluntly disapproving. She doesn't believe that any human and Vulcan relationship could succeed, is certain any resulting children would be subjected to great shame, and is skeptical that it would even be possible for Vulcans and humans to have children.
  • Happens in the backstory to the Supernatural episode "Route 666". Dean gets a call from his mixed-race ex-girlfriend, Cassie, who suspects a racist ghost just killed her father. Once in Missouri, Sam and Dean discover that the ghost is that of Cassie's white mother's white ex-boyfriend, who had always been racist but turned violent after she left him for a black man. Among other things, he burned down the local black church to prevent their marriage. Eventually Cassie's father killed him in self-defence, and conspired to cover up the incident because he feared lynching. The writers Fail History Forever, though: interracial marriage was illegal in Missouri at the time that the backstory took place, so rather than burn down the church, the ex-boyfriend could've just called the police! In the episode's present, the trope is averted with the Dean/Cassie relationship. No one objects or even comments on the race difference and, in fact, they are the subjects of the series' first sex scene.
  • The West Wing has Charlie Young, the President's personal aide, and Zoey Bartlet, the President's daughter. Although they never marry in the show, they still get similar backlash-up to and including an assassination attempt, which ends up with the President and Deputy Chief of Staff getting shot. But no one in the Bartlet family or his staff object to the interracial relationship. President Bartlet just objects because Charlie's dating his daughter.
  • The hidden camera show What Would You Do? has a few bits where actors pose as interracial couples and other actors harass them. The camera crew then interviews bystanders about their reactions.
  • Wizards of Waverly Place: Jerry Russo was the winner of the family wizard competition, but because he married a non-wizard, Theresa, he had to give his powers up to his younger brother, Kelbo. This becomes a plot point in the final season as Alex has to win to be the family wizard in order to stay with her werewolf boyfriend, Mason.

    Music 
  • The folk song "I'm in Love with a Big Blue Frog", first recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary uses a Fantastic Racism version of this. It's also been performed by The Muppets.
  • The Smothers Brothers' "Crabs Walk Sideways", in which Herman the Lobster's hopes of romance with Sally the Crab are dashed by this trope and his own parents' bigotry.
  • The song "Embarrassment" by Madness, Based on a True Story: the sister of one of the band members was ostracised by his family after she became pregnant with a black man's child.
  • The Cher song "Halfbreed" is told from the perspective of a child of a maligned Native American and white marriage. The very first line is 'My father married a pure Cherokee/My mother's people were ashamed of me'.
  • "Society's Child" by Janis Ian.
  • "Brother Louie" by Hot Chocolate.
  • "Long Way to Go" by Gwen Stefani.
  • "Interdite" by Monsieur Nov.
  • Merle Haggard's "Irma Jackson", from 1972's Let Me Tell You About a Song, denounces prejudice against interracial relationships, as does Tommy Collins' "Go Home", which he covered on 1967's Branded Man. Interestingly, Haggard was planning to release "Irma Jackson" as his next single after "Okie from Muskogee", but Executive Meddling, afraid of alienating his audience, nixed the idea, despite the fact that he had already released "Go Home". Haggard later admitted that releasing it when he was originally planning to could have hurt his career.
  • "The Orange and the Green" or "The Biggest Mix-Up" is about an Irishman whose father was a Protestant ("Orange") and whose mother was a Catholic ("Green") and how "mixed up" he became as a result. The song is mostly comedic, though it ends on a surprisingly somber note; the narrator mentions that although his parents have both passed away, he is still caught in a divided culture with no real place.
  • Similarly, Ed Sheeran's song "Nancy Mulligan" is a Real Life example of this trope, telling the true story of how his grandparents William Sheeran, a Protestant from Northern Ireland, and Nancy Mulligan, a Catholic from The Republic of Ireland, met during World War II, fell in love, and ran away to get married after her father disapproved.
  • "Straight to Hell" by The Clash is partly about the unwanted children of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers:
    Let me tell you about your blood, bamboo kid
    It ain't Coca Cola, it's rice.
  • Fantastic Racism in the Flanders and Swann song "Misalliance", about the doomed relationship between the "right-handed honeysuckle and the left-handed bindweed", which twine in opposite directions.

    Myths & Religion 
  • The Bible:
    • The Jews in New Testament Biblical history were so racist that if any Jew married a non-Jew, particularly a Samaritan, he/she was immediately given a funeral by his/her family.
    • There's the story of Phinehas, a priest who simultaneously speared an Israelite man and a Midianite woman he was having sex with in one thrust. Some interpret this to be an anti-intermarriage story. However, the killing may have had something to do with the fact that they were having sex on the steps of the Tabernacle. For what it's worth, Jewish tradition claims that Phinehas' mom was a Midianite (a daughter of Jethro), so the race thing was presumably not that important. This has not stopped the racist interpretation, of course.
    • Way back in Old Testament times the Jews were of the same ethnicity as most of the surrounding peoples they were forbidden to marry but 'intermarriage' was forbidden in order to stop their assimilation of local religious practices (there were positively regarded cases of intermarriage where both spouses practiced Judaism or at least reverence of Yahweh). As with many other laws the restriction was progressively emphasized over the years while the reasons and context faded into obscurity.
    • And of course, there were exceptions— Joseph married Asenath, the daughter of an Egyptian priest, without raising any eyebrows; Moses is described as being married to a Midianite woman named Tzipporah and a Cushite (possibly the same person, possibly a case of polygamy), while the Moabite Ruth married two Jewish men. Both cases were controversial, but God never disparaged Moses and Ruth is the ancestress of King David.
    • Then, of course, there is Solomon and his many paramours, who include an Egyptian princess, other pagans and (in popular tradition) the Queen of Sheba. In the First Book of Kings, this intermarriage is said to be the reason why his regime eventually turned bad (since they are blamed in leading him to worship other gods).
    • And this is still a huge issue among Jews, in particular in Israel, where there were state-sponsored commercials made to avoid having Israeli Jews leaving the country to marry a non-Jewish foreigner. Fortunately there were a lot of protests against those, but the problem is still incredibly prevalent.
  • This is prominent in small religious minorities in the Middle East. In particular, Druze and Yazidis who marry outside of their religion are promptly excommunicated, since they are considered to be converted to their religion of their spouse. This is particularly bad, as they are usually Arabic speakers, which makes settling in Jewish areas (if they’re Israeli) much more difficult if not altogether impossible, and settling in an Arab (for the Druze) or Kurdish (for the Yazidi) area would subject them to stigmas (since Muslim majorities of the Arab and Kurdish populations view these sects with suspicion if not hostility).note 
  • Also in the Middle East: Many Arab or Arabic-speaking Christian communities seriously frown upon marriages outside their community—even to other kinds of Christians. One example would be the Assyrians and Copts, who are currently in diaspora and the reason why they marry inside their faith is to preserve their distinct culture and marrying to an Orthodox Greek (who shares a similar denomination) or even an Armenian or Ethiopian (whose church is in full communion with the Coptic, at least) would be disapproved of.
  • Until relatively recently, this same stigma was attached to Catholics who married non-Catholics.
  • A Christian marrying a non-Christian is known as being "unequally yoked." Some Protestant churches have been known to refuse to marry a Christian to a non-Christian, though this policy varies from church to church. Christianity not being limited to race though, most churches avert judgmental attitudes towards racially mixed marriages. However, the issue was of course different in say the Southern US before the 1960s, when such marriages were not only refused by most white churches, but also illegal. The same was true in South Africa up to 1985, when interracial marriage was decriminalized.
  • Islam is a bit complicated on the subject. Let's have a rundown:
    • The only clear statement in the The Qur'an on the subject forbids Muslim men from marrying idol worshippers. It's generally accepted that the inverse applies for Muslim women.
    • Nearly all Muslims accept that Muslim men may freely marry women of the "People of the Book" (i.e. Jews and Christians at a minimum).note 
    • It's less clear whether Muslim women can marry "People of the Book" like their male counterparts. While there is nothing in the scripture that explicitly forbids it, the `ulema have had a wide variety of opinions on the subject. Broadly speaking, Sunni `ulema hold that Muslim women can only marry Muslim men, while Shia `ulema say they can marry People of the Book, but there's a lot of room for variation. And none of this covers more modern movements.
    • Of interest is that in both Islam and Christianity, there are verses that explicitly state that there is virtually no racial or national border for marriage.
  • The small remaining community of Zoroastrians discourages mixed marriages not so much for religious reasons as because the community fears that the religion is so small that it might become extinct through too much intermarriage. (The Atlantic ran an article on this subject in 2016 that it has periodically reposted on social media ever since.)
  • A similar case within the Sikh community; mixed marriages between Sikhs and non-Sikhs are not well received.

    Puppet Shows 
  • The Muppets:
    • In The Muppets (2015), Fozzie is dating a human woman named Becky. Becky's parents (especially her dad) are presented as mildly disapproving, and occasionally using offensive ursine stereotypes. ("Oh, what a surprise, he liked the salmon!")
    • In a 2011 interview, Sam the Eagle says that his daughter is dating an owl, and he'd rather not talk about it.
    • In the Sandra Bullock episode of Muppets Tonight, there's a sketch parodying While You Were Sleeping with Bill the Bubble Guy in the Peter Gallagher role. His family are shocked when she claims to be his fiance.
      Bill the Bubble Guy's Mom: Do bubbles come out of your head?
      Sandra Bullock: No, but I'm willing to convert.
  • In a 1990s episode of Sesame Street, Gina (white) and Savion (mixed race) go to see a movie together, and then have to deal with a harassing phone call at Hooper's Store. They have to explain to Telly that there are some stupid people in the world who don't like people who are different being friends. No allegory using monsters or whatever, just straight up "This happens, and it sucks."

    Roleplay 
  • In The Gamer's Alliance, Omaroch (demon) and Delora (human) fall in love, get married and have two half-demon sons. Their respective clergies support rival gods and thus see the marriage as well as the offspring as utterly irredeemable. It escalates into a full-blown conflict as both factions actively hunt the family, which eventually results in Omaroch's capture and subsequent torture and brainwashing by demons, Delora's apparent death at the hands of human clerics and one of the children being sold into slavery. The tragic chain of events later repeats itself when the aforementioned couple's half-demon son Refan marries the human warrior Skye. The human clergy sets its eyes on the couple not only because they once again see such a union as taboo but also because they want to capture and use Refan and his son for a more sinister purpose.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Members of noble dog families in Pugmire are expected to marry within their breeds so as to avoid producing Mutts. As a result, Star-Crossed Lovers from different breeds running away together is a popular trope in Pugmire's literature.
  • Eberron:
    • Marriages between Dragonmarked members of two different houses are forbidden, as it increases the chance of children being born with an Aberrant Dragonmark which, according to superstition, brings destruction to the bearer and everyone around them.
    • Not a marriage, but the pairing of Minara Vol (elf woman) and the Emerald Claw (green dragon male) to produce the half-dragon Erandis Vol was so appalling to both elves and dragons that they took a break from fighting one another to exterminate both House Vol and every half-dragon that existed.

    Theater 
  • This trope was taken to ridiculous extremes (ridiculous for 20th and 21st-century audiences, at least) in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: Millie (the heroine) is scolded by one of her sisters for deciding to elope with Adam (the hero, whom she has just met) because "you don't even know if he's Presbyterian!"
  • In Fiddler on the Roof, Chava marries Fyedka, who isn't Jewish. Her parents sit shiva (mourn) for her as if she were dead.
  • In Robert Bolt's radio and stage play A Man For All Seasons, Sir Thomas More is a Roman Catholic (this was just before King Henry VIII broke England away from allegiance to the Pope) who at first objects to his daughter's fiancé, William Roper, because he's a Lutheran. The two men have a fairly bitter row about the matter early in the story: More declares that the man whom Roper now follows, Martin Luther, is an excommunicant; and Roper retorts, basically, that it's a mark of pride to be excommunicated from a bastard church. Ouch.
  • And of course one of the most tragic mixed marriages in all of literature is that between Othello and Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello. Iago and his friend Roderigo apparently consider Moors to be subhuman, because they ask Brabantio, a senator and Desdemona's father, if he is prepared to have animals as in-laws.
  • Tony (Polish-American) and Maria (Puerto Rican) from West Side Story are in love and have a mock wedding. They never do get their real wedding due to racial prejudice from friends and family, being too young, and Tony dying on Maria out of spite.
  • In the musical Violet, the title character (a white woman) and Flick (a black man) attract some unfriendly attention while dancing at the Beale Street music hall in Memphis.
  • Once on This Island is the story of a black peasant girl who falls in love with a rich Frenchman (himself the descendant of a French planter and a black peasant woman) on an island in the French Antilles. Described as the Caribbean version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid (not the Disney version).
  • In South Pacific Nellie (who is from Little Rock, Arkansas) is dismayed to learn that her love interest Emile has fathered a number of children due to his relationships with local Polynesian women, though she does eventually overcome it, accepting both him and them.
  • Annie Get Your Gun features a secondary romance between the half Native American Tommy Keeler and the white Winnie Tate, which Winnie's older sister Dolly opposes. The film version and the 1966 revised version of the script cut this subplot, but the 1999 revival brought it back.

    Video Games 
  • Bayonetta: The union between an Umbra Witch and a Lumen Sage is forbidden. Bayonetta's parents are punished by their respective clans for marrying and having a daughter together; Balder gets exiled by the Lumen Sages while Rosa is imprisoned by the Umbra Witches, and in fact, has to raise a young Bayonetta from inside a jail cell.
  • Dawn of Crafting: When it comes to competition between Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, and Neanderthal tribes, tribes and villages don't really support the idea of humans of different races being coupled together in general. A Neanderthal and Sapien couple can be encountered, and if they are told on, their tribes will send them to their deaths. Alf is the one of the few people who notably opposes these prejudices. This proves more significant later when you learn from Alf's diary that he had an Erectus lover named Margira, who died saving their son, Itaku, from people raiding their original home village to kill off runaways and interbreeds.
  • Dragon Age:
    • If Alistair becomes the king of Ferelden in the first game he will break-up with a non-Human Warden because he knows that the ruling class and people of Ferelden will not accept a king with a non-Human partner but if he has been hardened he can be convinced to continue the relationship with the Warden becoming his mistress. However, they won't be able to get married.
    • Thanks to Fantastic Racism, human-elf couples are looked down on in Dragon Age. One issue is that half-elves don't exist in this setting — all children born to human-elf couples are humans. So there's pressure in elven communities for elves to stick with elves to keep the race from dying out. If Merrill in Dragon Age II is romanced, she will bring this up and worries that this is yet another way she is "failing" her people.
  • Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth: One sidequest chain concerns an engaged couple consisting of a Therian woman and a Celestrian man. The Therian's father won't allow it, because he feels that her fiance is not strong enough to protect her. Eventually he does come around, with the caveat that the to-be husband trains under him to become stronger.
  • There are two of these in the backstory for Final Fantasy X, Yuna's parents were of two different cultures (Yevonite and Al Bhed). This created a huge scandal when they married, but after Braska defeated Sin, everyone just seemed to ignore that fact that his wife had been from an undesirable race. Seymour's parents were also of two different races (human and Guado), which caused problems mostly for Seymour and his mother. They were both shunned and abused, mostly by the father's people.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas features a relationship between African-American Kendl and Hispanic Cesar. Her brother Sweet has trouble with the relationship. The fact that Cesar is from another gang does not help.
  • In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, Beorc (human) and Laguz being is a relationship highly looked down upon, and their children are considered outcasts in both societies. This ends up setting up a lot of plot in Radiant Dawn.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, Lyndis's mother Madelyn got a Parental Marriage Veto when she fell for a Sacaean Warrior Prince, Hassar. She then ran away from home with him, though it took her a while to get used to a nomadic lifestyle. Once that was resolved, she and Hassar lived happily with their daughter Lyn... until the Lorca tribe was wiped out and Lyn was left as the Sole Survivor. In the meantime, Madelyn's father began to regret his treatment of his daughter, but was sadly unable to see her one last time.
    • Similarly, if Lyn gets together with Eliwood, it's mentioned that some nobles got up in arms because of her heritage. Curiously, it's not the same if she marries Hector, though the fact that Hector is the most powerful man in the Lycian League and an already well-known Rebel Prince may have something to do with it.
    • Two of Eliwood's three love interests go up in arms if he marries them (Lyn as mentioned, as well as Fiora, although it's more because she's a commoner), but bizarrely, nobody seems to mind that one girl he can marry is Ninian, a human-dragon hybrid who looks a bit strange, even by series standards.
    • In Binding Blade, Eliwood's son Roy (who can be potentially Lyn's son) gets exactly the same spiel from other Lycian nobles if he marries Sue, Rath's daughter/Dayan's granddaughter and the princess of the Kutolah tribe. (Who alternately could be Lyn's little girl. That's how these prequels roll.) And bizarrely (again), nobody bats an eyelid to him potentially marrying either Shanna (a commoner and a mercenary from Ilia like Fiora) or Sophia, a young woman who comes from the desert and who like Ninian, is a human-dragon hybrid with highly unusual looks).
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening:
    • If Chrom's daughter Lucina marries a guy like Yarne (Taguel), nobody raises an eyebrow. Similarly, Yarne's full-Taguel mother Panne and the dragon girl Nowi can marry almost all of the guys in the army (save for Chrom but that's more because of gameplay, and those who can only marry a Female Avatar) and no one really objects to either girl's heritage. Nowi's daughter Nah, on the other hand, reveals that she was on the receiving end of Fantastic Racism from her foster family in the future.
    • It's also averted for the four (or five) women that Chrom can potentially marry, although it helps that three of them are Ylisseans of repute: Sumia is a Pegasus Knight-in-training and hinted to be at least of noble rank, according to Gaius' supports with her, Maribelle is the daughter of a duke, and Sully is the latest of a long line of respected Ylissean knights. While Olivia is a Feroxi dancer, she's technically Basilio's ward, and he's one of Ferox's two rulers. Not even a Female Avatar, despite having shady origins, will warrant any objections, although it probably has to do with the fact that the Avatar is the Shepherds' tactician.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: This is averted because, despite the fact that Fantastic Racism is a fairly big part of the setting (The Thalmor, for example, run on it, and the Stormcloaks are fairly vocal about it as well), no one in Skyrim seems to have an issue with people of two different races, or even species marrying. As an example, one series of quests allows you to help the Love Goddess's temple get people together. One part has you pay someone to write a poem on behalf of an old High Elf wizard addressed to a human Redguard woman because he Cannot Spit It Out.
  • Mass Effect:
    • Inverted with the asari, who prefer that members of their race mate outside their species (as they can reproduce with any other species and gender) for the purposes of reproduction. Asari view asari-exclusive pairings that result in offspring similar to how contemporary society views incest, especially since these pairings have a greater chance of producing dangerous genetic disorders. It's also mentioned in the Flavor Text for the planet Tevura that asari are strongly exogamic, inclined to seek mates who are outside of their kinship group to prevent mating with relatives. What could be less related than an alien?
    • Mass Effect 3, an asari who has married a krogan comes under fire a little bit, though it's more about how krogan are considered mindless brutes than the relationship itself.
    • In the third game there's an overheard conversation between a (female) human soldier and asari embassy staff. The human is trying to get the asari to give refuge to her young daughter before she goes into combat, as her asari wife has already been deployed. When the staff ask why the daughter can't stay with the human's family, the soldier retorts that they disowned her for marrying an asari; did the staffmember think there was any chance they'd take in her asari daughter?
    • Averted in two of the Romance subplots. The humans don't get along very well with the turians, because humanity's first contact with them resulted in a small war (an incident, really). A female Commander Shepard can enter a romantic relationship with a turian, but no protests are ever heard. The same is done with the quarian romance. Quarians are normally depicted as universally despised Space Romani, but male Shepard and Tali don't get any flak from anyone, though Tali does confess that her father would probably have disapproved of her being in a relationship with a human. It's implied in both of these cases that Shepard is simply so highly respected by his/her crewmates that even the more bigoted members of the Normandy crew wouldn't dare insult his/her relationship. Regardless, Shepard is the commanding officer of the ship. Any active-duty Tropers are welcome to ask such questions of their CO.
  • In BioShock Infinite, Booker DeWitt gets the dubious honor of being the first to throw a baseball at a Negro-Irish couple being paraded on stage through a backdrop set of monkeys while "Here Comes The Bride" plays in the background to mock the couple, basically to set an example about "proper marriages and race relations" within Columbia's social structure. Unsurprisingly, most players take the option to chuck the ball at the man hosting the event instead, and not because the couple will be grateful and give them an item later on.
  • In The Elder Scrolls Online, there are numerous interracial and interspecies couples that go without comment. However, some couples still run up against this:
    • In Grahtwood, you can get a quest from an Altmer who's Khajiiti husband ran off after eating too much moon sugar candy. When asked about her marriage to him, she talks extensively about what kind of reaction she got in The Summerset Isles. Needless to say, it was quite negative, with many other altmer insinuating she had married a savage.
    • In Rivenspire, one dungeon's story centers around an Orc woman who fell in love and married a Redguard man, against the customs of her tribe (which dictated that she would be betrothed to the chief's son). The chief's son sent attackers to hunt them down and kill them. To say the Orc woman is angry at potential harm to her mate would be an understatement.
  • In Supreme Commander 2, Maddox is a UEF Commander married to woman from the Illuminate. His parents disowned him, and died before they could reconcile. His commander Colonel Rodgers despised it, as he hates anyone not UEF, and was planning to attack the Illuminate on the planet she is in.
  • Mentioned during the Final Fantasy XIV quest to open one of the endgame Hard Mode dungeons. You're directed to a pair of adventurers that tried clearing out the dungeon once but were patched up by the Tonberries when you managed to clear it out first in the normal mode. It's quickly stated that the two are lovers and are adventurers because they were kicked out of their home village due to one of them being a Miqo'te and the other Hyur and that the tonberries are nice people and need help for not caring about this. What is NEVER mentioned in dialogue however is the fact that both of them are male. Apparently mixed species relations are more taboo than homosexual ones?
  • Averted in Fallout Shelter: black, white and brown Vault Dwellers have no problems having children with each other, which is mildly surprising when you remember that Fallout society is like 1950s USA, only more so. The developers probably decided that dealing with MMM wouldn't fit in a Lighter and Softer iOS game.
    • Also averted in Fallout 4. In the pre-War sequence at the beginning, as you're running towards the Vault with your family, you may notice that one of the neighbouring houses is owned by a lesbian couple where one partner is white and the other is black. It's unknown if they made it.
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: While not focused during the story due to Talion's wife Ioreth being dead at the start of the game, its revealed in the background (as detailed by loading screens) that their marriage faced scrutiny from her father Hallas because she was of Numenorean descent like most nobles of Gondor, while Talion was a lowborn Northman that was born and raised in their kingdom.
  • Super Paper Mario: According to Carson, the Tribe of Darkness lived in seclusion to protect their magic from foreign contamination out of pride. Ironically, this brought their own downfall when Blumiere took the Dark Prognosticus in an attempt to avenge his human fiancée's Disney Death.
  • Downplayed in Cyberpunk 2077. Mama Welles doesn't really enjoy the fact that her son, Jackie is dating Misty (The Welles family is latino, while Misty is Polish). She doesn't seem prejudiced agains Poles specifically, she'd just prefer it if Jackie found a nice latina girl instead. After Jackie's tragic death, V can encourage Mama Welles to bond with Misty, which ends up with Mama Welles essentially adopting Misty as her daughter.
  • Downplayed in Lamplight City. Due to the differences in the timeline, 19th century Vespuccia is on a whole implied to be somewhat more progressive on racial issues than its real world counterpart, 19th century USA, as Vespuccia stayed a part of the British Empire, and does was affected by the Empire's anti-slavery laws, resulting in slavery ending much earlier than in the real world. That said, racism does in many ways still remain a societal issue, especially amongst the nation's rich elite, and it extends to inter-racial relationships too. Case in point, the main character, Miles Fordham, is a white man married to Addy, a black woman. When he talks to the bi-racial Albert Martin, who is overtly subjected a nasty bit of Half-Breed Discrimination, he gets Albert to trust him by referring to his marriage and implying that he has at least some kind of firsthand-knowledge about being subjected to prejuice. Albert reacts with surprise at the story, futher implying that that Miles' marriage is at least somewhat out of the ordinary.

    Web Animation 
  • There she is!!, features a rabbit and a cat who begin a relationship in a community that is against the two species mixing. The negative sentiment against such romances is initially played for laughs, but is treated far more seriously in the second half.
  • In Rainbow Dash Presents My Little Dashie Jokermort (a monkey) falls in love with Rainbow Dash (a pegasus). Unlike most examples, Jokermort has the inventiveness to try to end the maligned part of the mixed marriage by inventing a device that turned the whole world into ponies. Unfortunately, by the time his device kicked in, Dash had already returned to Equestria.

    Webcomics 
  • In Avialae, Gannet's mother was a member of a Winged Humanoid race who fell in love with a human man and was exiled from her society as a result. Gannet, who was raised by humans and initially didn't even know he was a Half-Human Hybrid until his wings started sprouting, similarly falls in love with the fully human Bailey and has to fight to secretly keep him by his side when he enters the avialae's hidden city.
  • Bad Moon Rising has Nike and Dale, a mixed hunter/werewolf pair who are ostracized in both communities, though on the werewolf side, it may have more to do with Dale having previously shot Nike's mother with silver bird shot.
  • In Blood Bank, the vampire elite hold humans in contempt, using them as underpaid workers, slaves and even disposable blood supplies. When the daughter of an influential vampire genuinely falls in love with a human slave and ends up pregnant with his child, they are forced to run for their lives.
  • Cirque Royale: Quinn is frequently insulted for having run off and married the "harlequin" Kingston because he is clown/mime mixed. This is also seen with Kingston's own parents Charles Sr. and Claudette Sr.; King George once referred to Claudette as a "deranged mime harlot" within earshot of Kingston, and she was never truly accepted by Charles' friends.
  • The main protagonist in Goblin Hollow is a bear. His wife is a cougar. Certain people don't approve. Only her grandparents on her mother's side truly disapprove. Her parents understand the problem since the same grandparents had a fit when Lily's mountain lion mother married her African lion father.
  • Kevin & Kell:
    • The premise of the comic is about a multi-species family headed by a rabbit (Kevin) married to a wolf (Kell). Society at large doesn't get it. While interspecies relationships are fine (except for the particularly extreme Institute for Species Purity) — the taboo comes from intermarriage between predator and prey species. Other controversial pairings feature a wolf and a sheep, and a cat and a mouse.
    • One of Kevin's sisters who originated in a parallel reality (of Humans) said that his marriage to Kell is just as controversial back home (though the mix is left unstated). Danielle also notes how interesting it is that diet is the arbitrary distinction that causes these type of pairings, after seeing no one raise an eyebrow at lesbian couple Rachel and Joan (who are both herbivores, so an 'acceptable' pairing in Domain society).
      Danielle: I guess a society can only use one pointless, arbitrary division at a time! Anyway, I guess I'm just raising more questions than I'm answering.
      Kevin: Like, what's an eyebrow?
    • Of note is that there were actually two wolf/sheep pairings, the first leading directly to the conception of the sheep in the second pairing. And that second pairing got extra controversy because the wolf converted to herbivorism and now presents as a ram. Him being trans-diet gets him extra scrutiny from the social worker on his adopted daughter's case.
    • Angelique and RL (another rabbit/wolf pairing) got around the taboo part. Since Angelique's rabbit license was revoked for spilling secrets to RL, she was now considered a long eared rodent. So she got plastic surgery and posed as a rat.
    • Of course, there's also a carnivore supremacy terrorist group that doesn't want any hybrids of any sort, even within the same dietary categories, which is why they targeted Fenton (a bat) and Lindesfarne (hedgehog and born human): they had a hybrid daughter.
    • Zigzagged with Aby and Mark. While MOUSCAR played up the fact that he was a mouse dating a cat to the hilt, other mice treat Aby with suspicion, and they had to jump through hoops before the social worker (same one mentioned above) would let them adopt Mark's nephew Tyler.
    • And now a lion/rhino pairing can be added to this list, as Carl (the rhino), who was projected to go in the third round of the professional gardening draft, was only taken in the sixth round (And by the worst team in the league) because other teams refused to sign him because they thought he was taking a risk in being engaged to Leona (the lion). An outraged Carl vows to make them regret it by taking the Tidewater Pitchforks to the top. Time will tell if he makes good.
    • And one more: a lion/rabbit pairing with Edgar and Miranda. Miranda was worried what her dads would think, and later the prejudices of the Gardening League are brought up again, when Miranda is told their relationship could cost her a major award. Both times, Edgar solved this by using his theatre skills to pose as a really big mouse (although it turned out her dads weren't fooled, and weren't as concerned as she expected). After Miranda lost the award anyway, Edgar's deception was exposed, but in such a way that nobody's likely to make a fuss about it just yet (saving her from a predator and then proposing = good publicity, therefore criticising that = bad publicity).
    • At one point a law was proposed to ban these sorts of marriages, and at the same time it was discovered that Kevin and Kell weren't legally married because an acting-out Rudy didn't send the paperwork in, not considering what consequences there might be down the line. Lindesfarne angrily points out that if the marriage ban passes, it set a precedent that could eventually lead to banning cross-species marriages, like, say a wolf (Rudy) and a fox (Fiona). Kevin and Kell, meanwhile, race against the clock to get legally married before the vote passes, and their devotion to each other spurs the congressmen to vote against the proposal.
    • Rabbit society really didn't like rabbits marrying outside their species, back in the day. They blocked Dorothy from marrying Rudy's gardening coach (a pig) by threatening to fire her from being the Easter Bunny if she did, and straight up threw Kevin out of rabbit society for marrying Kell, only letting him back in because they were desperate for him to take over as the Easter Bunny. They seem to be a little more relaxed about it now, as they didn't object to Miranda's marriage to Edgar, or Dorothy's second marriage to Douglas Squirrel.
  • Fuschia receives a good bit of this from Seymour in Sinfest for her relationship with Criminy (although it's more for her just being a Devil Girl than anything else). Blue is also disapproving but willing to accept it because Fuschia is happy. While the strip indicates the Devil doesn't know about it yet, the implication is that it will not likely be pleasant for them when he finds out. Otherwise generally averted.
  • Due to the Forever War between angels and demons in Slightly Damned, there is quite a bit of tension between the two. It's so bad that one particular Knight Templar tried to kill Kieri, an angel, just for being friends with Buwaro, a demon — so their later Relationship Upgrade is regarded as odd at best. While this trope has yet to actually occur in the comic, Kieri expresses fear about what will happen when her family finds out about it.
  • One comic in Housepets! has Bruce telling Roosevelt that his parents probably won't approve of him being in a relationship with a grey kangaroo.
  • One Arthur, King of Time and Space strip opened in the medieval arc, where Argrivaine was complaining about marriage across class lines, offering the familiar Slippery Slope Fallacy that people would marry horses next. Arthur says that if the horse is sentient and can give consent, why not? Cut to the space arc, where Agrivaine is watching in horror as a woman marries a humanoid horse.
  • Zigzagged and averted in Sabrina Online in which there are a number of such pairings, all with their own issues. Carly the Chinchilla is seriously worried about having a baby by her wolf husband Spike, given the size disparity (he is routinely depicted with his head out of the top of the panel, to demonstrate his height), but it is never resolved. Sabrina and her boyfriend, later husband, RC the raccoon, don’t really encounter this, except from her mother - her father is much more accepting, given that RC is actually quite a good husband. Amy Squirrel and her boyfriend, later husband Thomas Wolfe go through various “fourth wall” issues about how unfeasible it all is.

    Web Originals 
  • Surprisingly averted in Malê Rising, especially in regards to the Abacar and Souleymane families. Paulo Abacar the Elder (Brazilian ex-slave) married Aisha (Fulani) as he founded the Sokoto Republic, while Souleymane (Senegalese) married Chiara (French-Italian Jew) as he settled in Paris. Their sons and daughters continued this tradition up until the present day. It also helps that most of the spouses had no (or few) close family members around when the vows were said. It should be noted that there are a few people who do think badly of mixed marriages, most notably Tsar Alexander, who fell out with his daughter Anastasia after she resolved to marry Prince Tewodros of Ethiopia.
  • StarDestroyer.net creator Mike Wong argues here that the Star Trek franchise's trope of Half Human Hybrids that are "torn between two worlds" comes off as an attack on interracial marriages (noting his and his wife's own history with a racially motivated Parental Marriage Veto attempt).

    Web Videos 
  • Out With Dad: Vanessa's mother kicked her older brother out for him marrying a woman because she was a Muslim, a person of color, or simply not Catholic (Vanessa isn't sure).

    Western Animation 
  • The Animals of Farthing Wood has Charmer and Ranger, foxes on opposite sides of a feud. In the original books, they were both ordinary red foxes, and the only problem was that their families hated each other, but the animators decided to make Ranger's family blue foxes so the viewers could easily tell the two sides apart, and took the opportunity to add a dose of Fantastic Racism.
  • Family Guy has Nate Griffin (Peter's black slave ancestor) and Lois-Laura Bush-Lynne Cheney-Pewterschmidt (the daughter of Nate's owners). They end up having three biracial babies that look like Chris, Meg, and Stewie. Ironically, Peter would not be related to him at all, despite looking like him, since one episode reveals Francis Griffin was his stepfather.
    Carter: Lois, how, in God's name, could you embarrass the family like this?
    Stewie: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Sitting right here.
  • In Miraculous Ladybug, Marinette's father is a white Frenchman and her mother is Chinese. This is never directly addressed, but is implied to be the reason why her paternal grandfather had cut off all communication before Marinette was born. (His official reason was that he'd "corrupted" their family's traditional bread recipe by adding a foreign ingredient, rice).
  • This is averted for the most part in The Owl House due to things like racism, sexism, and homophobia being foreign concepts on the Boiling Isles, with even a Hate Sink like Odalia not caring in the slightest that her daughter's new girlfriend is a human (she's only bothered by the fact that Luz is a "criminal"). However, there is one major exception. Roughly 400 years prior to the start of the series, The Witch Hunter Philip Wittebane discovered that his older brother Caleb had fallen in love with a witch. In his anger, he attacked the couple and murdered his brother with a knife. Pretty much every horrible thing that happened in the series after that point can be directly traced back to Philip being unable to accept the guilt of killing his brother and trying to enact genocide on the witches for "corrupting" him.
  • Rocko's Modern Life: Cats and turtles don't mix. That doesn't prevent Filburt and Dr. Hutchison from marrying. It turns out Hutchison's father is a turtle, giving her mom a Freudian Excuse.
  • Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Eclipsa Butterfly, Star's distant ancestress, is known as the Queen of Darkness for all the terrible things she did — most famous being the part where she abandoned her duties and her mewman husband in order to run off with a monster. It eventually became clear that, other than inventing some Dark Is Not Evil spells, that was the only thing she did "wrong". Eclipsa loved Globgor far more than the Upper-Class Twit she was forced to marry, but severe Fantastic Racism meant she would never be allowed to be with him openly. The Powers That Be were so disgusted with her actions that they got rid of her actual daughter, Meteora, and had a random peasant girl adopted as her supposed daughter with her mewman husband. Then they imprisoned Eclipsa and Globgor in crystal and perpetuated the lie that they were horrible villains.
  • Paul and Jean Baptise from Superjail!. The two are a very loving and devoted couple despite the fact that Paul is a black gangbanger and Jean Baptise is a former white supremacist. The episode "Gay Wedding" chronicles their rocky but ultimately successful attempt to get married. It should be noted that they are two of the handful of characters to survive every episode.
  • Young Justice (2010): In Martian society, inter-caste romantic relationships are heavily stigmatized. M'gann's mother J'ann (of the majority G'arrunn caste) was disowned by her family (save for her brother J'onn) when she married M'aatt M'orzz, an A'ashenn, and the only priest they could find willing to officiate their wedding was elderly and knew he wouldn't have to deal with the social backlash for long before he died. M'gann's own impending marriage to Connor Kent, while happily accepted by her parents, is the subject of varying levels of disapproval from even within her own family. Their officiant, S'yraa S'mitt, is sympathetic to their plight because she herself (a G'arrunn before she joined the Y'ellonn priests) had been in a relationship with Prince J'emm (of the ruling B'lahdenn), which was cruelly ended by his father who, despite actively working to end the divisions between the G'arrunn and A'ashenn, still believed that the B'lahdenn should remain separate and superior.

 
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This Is Scandalous!

Vince McMahon makes a skit parodying and mocking a controversial ad for having a white woman seducing a black man.

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4.65 (20 votes)

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Main / MalignedMixedMarriage

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