Only You Can Repopulate My Race - Television Tropes & Idioms

Oh, boy.

Normally, this would be a fantasy come true for most men out there.

The fantasy of a beautiful girl actually wanting to have unprotected sex with you, with the explicit goal of becoming the mother of your child as a result. Be Careful What You Wish For, 'cause here's the catch: neither of you actually wants it, especially you, the bloke. Due to circumstances running the gamut of prophecies, genetics, curses, or just plain old writer viciousness, you, the bloke, are blessed (or, rather, cursed) to be the only man who can father the child of the female protagonist.

But wait! It gets worse: she is amongst the last, if not the last, of her species/people (or at least the last who can bear children), and the whole race will die if you refuse. And considering that the unfortunate aspiring young mother is more often than not a vampire, goddess, alien or equally super-powered being known for their short-tempers, politely saying "no" alone would drastically shorten your lifespan...

Even if she is reasonable enough to not get offended by refusal, there is always the good old guilt factor, especially if she is a Nakama or equally dear friend, making acceptance and refusal all the more awkward. Hilarity Ensues.

Of course, a lot of these situations could be fixed using artificial insemination, not that that ever happens. (Please note that repopulating the human race is not Truth In Television. Repopulation with one man and one woman would involve too much incest to work, due to the lack of genetic diversity. )

See also Gendercide; in these situations, the race in question is the human race, and it's never pretty for the last man or woman.

Compare Endangered Species, Last Of His Kind, Stalker With A Test Tube, What Measure Is A Non Unique.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Poor Aono Tsukune of Rosario To Vampire is the only male who can father the child of both a Succubus and a Snow Girl, both species of which are well known for their poor responses to rejection. To make matters worse, Snow Girls are an endangered species, and he's in love with a third girl.
- Well, there's a subversion in that he's not the only one who can, just the only one they want to. They could go find another man, they just... won't. In fact, a recent arc in the manga dealt with saving the Snow Girl from an arranged marriage being forced on her by her species attempting to speed up repopulation.
- Another subversion is that there's a moment that confirms that all but one member of the harem have no problem with a Tenchi Solution. The problem is that said member is the winning girl and she doesn't want to have said solution applied. Talk about complications.
Subverted by the end of the final Evangelion movie, as even though Shinji and Asuka are literally the last two people alive on a dead world, they absolutely hate each other.
- It's more complicated than that.
- Don't forget that the other humans have the option of returning (according to one interpretation of some very vague babble), so maybe it isn't that hopeless after all.
A rather disturbing adventure in Digimon Adventure 02: A group of borderline Eldritch Abomination Digimon (or are they?) summon 11-year-old (13-year-old in the dub) Hikari to the Dark Ocean with hopes that she can help them to resist the "Dark God who is not a god". Okay, that didn't sound too bad at first... Until they say how she'd be helping. In the dub, they ask her to be their bride; in the original, though, they explicitly say that they want her to bear their descendants so that they can fight the "Dark God".
This is what the Mina's cousins want to do to her (willing or no) in Dance In The Vampire Bund.

Comic Books

Played horrifically straight without a sliver of laughter or irony in Y The Last Man.
Gold Digger had an inversion of this in one issue. Brittany, Gina Diggers's adopted werecheetah sister, is the Last Of Her Kind. Just on her wedding day (to her feline-looking but apparently mostly-human alien boyfriend), what seems to be a male werecheetah suddenly shows up out of nowhere looking for her. Cue awkward. The new 'werecheetah' turns out to be fake but innocent; the ploy was launched by a jealous recurring character who wanted the groom for herself.
Played straight in Valerian: A quasi-human alien species relies on a single hive mother for its reproduction, and she must be impregnated once every generation. The job falls to Valerian. And there isn't even a catch, except for getting temporarily shrunk.
In Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, we learn, in typically cynical Dark Age fashion, that Silver Age superhero Adam Strange was teleported to the planet Rann not to defend them from monsters as he had been told, but because humans are more fertile than Rannians and they needed his DNA.

Film

Vic in A Boy And His Dog is lured from the nuclear-wasteland surface to "downunder" because the sterile men of the subterranean colony need him to inseminate their women. Unlucky for him, the insemination will be of the artificial sort, and he'll be killed after he's impregnated enough of them.
In Hell Comes To Frogtown, titular character Sam Hell is one of the rare fertile males after the nuclear war killed many and rendered most of the rest sterile. The government orders him to go to a city of froglike mutants and mate with a group of fertile females imprisoned there.
- Which is absurd, because the amount of radiation required to induce permanent sterility would kill you if it were applied to the whole body, which is what nuclear fallout would do. Only if applied directly to the gonads could radiation permanently sterilize a person without killing them. Temporary sterility, lasting up to a few years, however, is a possibility for radiation doses that are potentially survivable.

Literature

Spoofed in Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times. Rincewind is stuck on a tropical island and is found by a tribe of lovely Amazons (a regional curiosity for their white skins and blonde hair) who have lost all their men to a highly specific plague and require him to repopulate their tribe. Sadly, Rincewind is magically "rescued" before he can obtain his greatest fantasy (potatoes).
A female variant appears in Mercedes Lackey's "Oathbound" stories. An oath-sister of the last survivor of a Shin'a'in Clan agrees to physically reestablish the bloodline (with great success). Though she doesn't provide all the clanmembers - many were immigrants from other clans. They just needed a core of people from the original clan, and evidently unrelated oathsisters count.
- Since the oath itself is agreed to by the Shin'a'in goddess, it's probably a case of a goddess did it. Plus the fact that not only do other clans exist for the blood to be introduced, but the clans are bound as much by tradition as blood, not to mention that most are inter-married anyway.
Appears during a hilarious incident in Journey To The West, making this trope Older Than Print. Slight subversion: while the women are still able to reproduce, Xuanzang was still the first man ever to come to their kingdom. Pity he's a monk.
- Since this was published ~1600 CE, it's actually younger than print. Of course, the folk tales that made up the book may have been older than that.
- Not that that stopped most of them.
Variant: In Garth Nix's Old Kingdom trilogy, it is revealed as the end of Lirael that Lirael's mother Saw her child in a prophetic vision, and knew two things: 1. The child had to be fathered by the Abhorsen, and 2. The entire world would end if this child did not exist. Fortunately, the Abhorsen seemed to be a rather... understanding gentleman about it all...
The Unfortunate Implications of this trope usually never enter the picture. The Metamorphosis Of Prime Intellect is an exception. Having just wiped out the rest of humanity by Logic Bombing the titular sufficiently advanced AI, there is only the female lead and one male left on Earth. After having a son and daughter, she implements her repopulation plan, which starts out with the father impregnating the daughter and her son impregnating her and somehow goes from there...
After killing off most of the members of his father's race, including all the men, Cal Leandros finds out that the only surviving Auphe are females, and guess what they want him for now...
French comic Castaka (by Jodorowsky) is really heavy about that trope. To make a long story short, one clan have doomed the other clan by making all males sterile, wich will lead to an inevitable decay. However, the chief's wife is pregnant (from a rape...), and it's a boy! So, the young prince have to repopulate the entire clan by himself. Wich turns into a full-time job. Beginning when he was twelve. Squick.
Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos isn't a completely straight example, but it is notable for averting both the lack of artificial insemination (done by hand, literally), and actually showing the effects of the implied incest and genetic bottleneck.
Saphira in The Inheritance Cycle is painfully aware that she's one of the last dragons in the world, and the only male she's aware of is the partner of the Big Bad. When she finds out there's another surviving male dragon, she approaches him, but he refuses. She doesn't take it well.

Live Action TV

Some elements are averted in the Doctor Who episode "Delta and the Bannermen". Delta and her daughter are the last of her species, but don't take any action to do anything about that. Billy secretly takes Chimeron royal jelly to transform himself into a Chimeron-Human hybrid without Delta's knowledge so that he can mate with Delta. The variation here is that he is perfectly willing to go through with all this, whereas Delta is reluctant — aside from Billy's sacrifice, the transformation is not entirely safe, and, as the Doctor points out, even in his new form, inter-species breeding could result in "the most terrible mutations".
Star Trek The Original Series had "Wink Of An Eye", where a species of Human Aliens has become hyperaccelerated until Time Stands Still for them, but it left their males infertile, and so they need to steal Kirk et al for breeding purposes.
- And another episode had the inversion of this— A massively overpopulated planet that doesn't believe in suicide or contraception and is immune to sterilization tries to get Kirk to sleep with a local girl to spread an disease to her people and increase the deathrate, I kid you not. They even inexplicably build a huge copy of the Enterprise interior to ~~save on the shooting budget~~ make him feel "at home". Really, there are much less embarrassing ways to get help. Like actually asking for help. But Kirk's gotta get his recommended weekly allowance of poontang...
- A Star Trek Voyager episode has perennial Chew Toy Harry Kim kidnapped by Lesbian Space Vampires for breeding purposes.
On 3rd Rock From The Sun, when Sally saw snow for the first time, followed by a blackout, she became convinced the world was ending. She was alone with Dick's student Leon at the time and explained that he would have to impregnate her in order for the human race to survive, which he decided to let think. Much to Leon's disappointment, the lights came back on just when they were about to go at it.
The Farscape three-part episode "Look At The Princess" hits most points of this trope, replacing "repopulate my species" with "continue the royal lineage". The Sebacean princess was the victim of "DNA poisoning" by her scheming brother, which made her incompatible with Sebaceans, but fully compatible with John. Drama and politics ensue.
Played completely straight in one episode of Andromeda. This is complicated by the fact that the alien queen who successfully mates with Hunt also needs her planet to pass through a gas cloud which the crew, presuming it to be a bad thing, temporarily moved out of the planet's path.

Video Games

This was going to be Penn's eventual job for the Nereids once he grew up in Soul Nomad And The World Eaters. It became a moot point once the Nereids became the hosts of refugees from the nearby kingdom of Raine when Feinne destroyed it — apparently, quite a lot of the surviving males got on well with the nereids, as Juno's ending reveals.
A very nice example from the The Witcher saga. Dryads are an elven subrace, and they need men, but they hate humans as a species. Geralt actually offers the kidnapped man some tips: "Don't think of yourself as a sex god, talk about trees and weather, when you are not needed, go away."
Raidou Kuzunoha Vs King Abaddon has a female example, where the Tento Lords who live near Tsukigata Village need human women to reproduce, and they offer the use of Luck Locusts to the villagers in exchange for women of the Tsukigata family.