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On my home planet, we can no longer breed
I've been sent as a receptacle to store your seed
The Lonely Island, "Incredibad"

Oh, boy.

Normally, this would be a fantasy come true for some 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. Therefore, she often has an "Entitled to Have You" attitude. 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... or maybe just your limbs. You don't need those, right? Of course, there is also a reasonable chance that said being's mating rituals might not conform to the human way of doing things.

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 True Companion or equally dear friend, making acceptance and refusal all the more awkward.

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; scientists estimate that you need a base population of at least 500 people to maintain proper genetic diversity.)

If this trope is utilized in Fanfic, expect coitus to ensue.

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?.

Sister Trope of Adam and Eve Plot.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • This is what the Mina's cousins want to do to her (willing or not) in Dance in the Vampire Bund. Is it any wonder Mina would prefer the company of a teenage werewolf to these asshats?
  • In DearS, male lead Takeya becomes this after leaving with Ren and the now fertile Dears on their fixed spaceship, and finding out this is going to be his main job.
  • A rather disturbing adventure in Digimon Adventure 02: A group of borderline Eldritch Abomination Digimon 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".
  • Karin has a variation on this. Instead of being the only vampire capable of having children, Karin's blood can grant fertility to other vampires.
  • In Monster Musume, the Lamia race are all women and need human males to procreate. In the past, they would kidnap men to make them into village "husbands" to breed with. With the Broken Masquerade cracking down on this, they've become entirely dependent on the cultural exchange program to bring in more men.
  • Poor Aono Tsukune of Rosario + Vampire is the target of 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 (their extremely short ovulation periods aren't helping matters), and he's in love with a third girl. There's no biological reason that it has to be Tsukune (theoretically, any other fertile man would be able to fill the role), it's just that he's the one they both fell in love with, and it comes off as Single-Target Sexuality for both girls. Also, in this world, Succubi gain their power by loving others, and a Succubus who cannot love (read: consummate with the one they love) will eventually die. This Succubus has fallen in love with Tsukune.
  • This is how Kurama is introduced into Urusei Yatsura. Ataru was chosen and isn't very reluctant.

    Comic Books 
  • In the comic book Brain Camp, human incubators are the only hope of repopulating a race of alien birds.
  • Played for horror in the story Beta-Eden published in Eerie #1.
  • Gold Digger has 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.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy, Yondu and Photon. That went badly, although the writer at the time had intended it to eventually turn out well.
  • In Invincible, most of the Viltrumites have no qualms about mating with humans to produce offspring that will eventually become the new Viltrumite Empire. Some of them have even fallen in love with their mates. Anissa however, refuses to mate with a lowly human. In #110, she approaches Mark and asks him to mate with her so she can fulfill her duty. Mark refuses. Then she clarifies that she's not asking.
  • The Metabarons: Castaka is really heavy on this trope. To make a long story short, one clan has doomed the other clan by making all males sterile, which will lead to inevitable decay. However, the chief's wife is pregnant (from a rape...), and it's a boy! So, the young prince has to repopulate the entire clan by himself. Which turns into a full-time job. Beginning when he was twelve.
  • Played for laughs in the 2009 Power Girl series. The Zardoz expy "Vartox" is a ladies' man from outer space... except his sense of style is stuck firmly in the discotheque-ridden 1970s. He wants Power Girl to help him repopulate his planet, but explains that she need not physically sleep with him — it is achieved by way of a pregno-ray. It's hilarious because Vartox really is a nice, if clueless and shallow, guy who means no harm to Kara, who is constantly amused by him. She eventually agrees, and they have a nice dinner date together before she lets him use the device on her before he goes home to check on his people. She doesn't get pregnant; the ray is aimed at his world, and she's needed as a conduit. No other woman could survive exposure to the overdriven ray.
  • Maxima when she is hitting on Kal-El in one Superman comic:
    Maxima: Together, we can make a new Almerac, and a new Krypton!
  • In Alan Moore's run of Swamp Thing, it's told, in typically cynical Dark Age fashion, that the 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.
  • One of the one-shot comics in Tharg's Terror Tales features a young man who, after being too frisky with his girlfriend and driving home afterwards, is beamed up by hawt aliens who want to mate with him. He eagerly agrees, only for them to morph back into their Starfish Aliens forms to rape him to death with their tentacle suckers.
  • Played straight in Valérian: a quasi-human alien species relies on a single hive mother for its reproduction, and she must be impregnated once every generation. After besting three other planets' champions, the job falls to Valerian. There isn't even a catch, except for getting temporarily shrunk.
  • XXXenophile hints that for one couple, this was a sexy role-playing scenario.
  • Y: The Last Man: Played horrifically.

    Fan Works 
Examples by source:
  • In Dragon Ball, although not as common, either Goku and Fem!Vegeta or Vegeta and Fem!Goku fanfics do this. Even if Fem!Goku already has a child by Krillin or an Original Character.
  • Introduced in the remakes of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, Zinnia is one of two members of the Draconid tribe seen in-game, and the other is Zinnia's grandmother. This has spawned various stories and fanart where Zinnia must 'continue her people'. This is not a universal concept though, as some adaptions like Pokémon Adventures feature more Draconids with no need for such measures.
  • Hoo boy. Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog could be the subject of this with either Julie-Su, Tikal or Shade, depending on the shipper's preference.
Examples by title:
  • A variation happens in Blessed with a Hero's Heart. When Izuku uses Reincarnation on Wiz, she ends up turning into an Avariel, a species of Winged Humanoid elves favored by Eris who went extinct in the last great war. Chris the thief witnesses this, and immediately makes no secret her intent to use Wiz as a baby factory to repopulate the species. Naturally, Izuku and his party vehemently refuse.

    Film — Animation 

    Film — Live-Action 
  • This is what the all-female Lubi-Dubi tribe intend to do with the men they abduct in Carry On Up the Jungle. Walter Bagley (known to them as King Tonka the Great) fulfilled the role for ten years all by himself!
  • In Frankenstein Island, Sheila Frankenstein intends for the four captured balloonists to impregnate the Amazons so their lineage will continue.
  • 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, admittedly, not really how radiation works, but the title should have told you what to expect).
  • The very premise of Hundra. After her tribe is wiped out, the title character sets out in search of a man to impregnate her.
  • There's something of a subplot in Immortal like this, at least as far as "rare person who can mate with gods."
  • The Postman is asked by a young husband to impregnate his wife after it is established the Postman doesn't have any inheritable diseases.
  • Played with in Waterworld, as not a means of repopulation but inbreeding prevention: inhabitants of atolls (floating settlements) provide nubile females to visitors, such as nomadic sailors coming to trade. This brings problems to the protagonist when he's not willing to take the offer.

    Literature 
  • The Alfred Bester short story "5,271,009" explores this scenario (and a few other cliched-even-in-1954 science fiction wish-fulfillment scenarios) for the sole purpose of poking holes in it.
  • After Doomsday handles the need for a gene pool. A handful of women survive, and when they find a ship of men, discussion almost immediately begins about the way they will need to practice polyandry to maximize the number of genes they save for the next generation.
  • In Mikhail Akhmanov's Ash, a bomber pilot named Hadas Kewm crash-lands on Garuda, the colony Earth is bombing to hell for at least a decade. He is captured by a group of Garudan colonists, who live in a subterranean city. Most of their population has degraded due to radiation, underground living, and cannibalism. Hadas is told he'll be impregnating females in order to inject fresh, uncontaminated DNA into their gene pool. At first, Hadas thinks it may be fun, but he finds out that the brutally efficient Garudans aren't about to leave such an important thing to chance. They artificially "stimulate" him with electricity and collect the semen for artificial insemination. Occasionally, to help him get excited, they bring in a naked woman without letting him touch her. Needless to say, he doesn't enjoy the experience much.
  • In The Belgariad and Mallorean, the Marag people were wiped out long ago by their neighbors because of gold. Centuries later, the protagonists find a Marag woman as a slave in another neighboring country, referred to in prophecy as "The Mother of the Race That Died"; she becomes attracted (for several reasons) to a zealot sworn to celibacy, who returns the affection (despite himself) but holds to his vow... right up until his god tells him that isn't what the god had in mind. By the end of the series, it's mentioned they have a small army of children and counting. (Mara is implied to be giving it a push.)
  • In A Boy and His Dog, Vic is lured from the nuclear-wasteland surface to "downunder" because the sterile men of the subterranean colony need him to inseminate their women. Unluckily for him, the insemination will be of the artificial sort, and he'll be killed after he's impregnated enough of them.
  • 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...
  • Discworld:
    • Spoofed in 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).
    • Parodied in Eric, where Eric has typical adolescent male fantasies of all-female kingdoms in the jungle that regularly kidnap men and make them live with them for certain services only men can provide until they die of exhaustion. However, these "certain services" are more along the lines of mowing lawns, changing lightbulbs, killing spiders, and sorting out strange noises in the attic.
  • Galápagos 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.
  • Played for Horror in Goblin Slayer. The goblins are always male, and they can breed with women of other races. The children are always goblins and not hybrids. They cruelly abduct and rape female humans, elves, and members of other races so that new goblins are born.
  • Heralds of Valdemar: A female variant appears in the "Oathbound" stories. An oath-sister of the last survivor of a Shin'a'in Clan agrees to physically reestablish the bloodline (with great success). She doesn't provide all the clanmembers, though — many were immigrants from other clans. They just needed a core of people from the original clan, and evidently unrelated oathsisters count (the survivor herself cannot contribute genetically because she's a warrior priestess whose vows include a divinely enforced oath of celibacy that rendered her asexual). 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.
  • There is a race of witches in His Dark Materials. They enter into romantic or sexual relationships with human men in order to have children with them. Because there are no male witches, they need human men. If the child so born is a boy, it will be an ordinary human. On the other hand, if it is a girl, it will be a witch. Later, it turns out that there is a parallel world in which there are also male witches. However, they do not appear in the plot but are merely mentioned.
  • Inheritance Cycle: Saphira 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.
  • Appears during a hilarious incident in Journey to the West. 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.
  • Also dealing with the Unfortunate Implications, in Lilith's Brood, humanity has been basically sterilized by aliens who intend to interbreed with them. A small pocket of runaway humans is surprised when a young girl becomes pregnant after a sexual assault by a passing stranger. Deciding that this is the only way to perpetuate the pure-human species, the rest of the group separates the mother and child, raising the baby until puberty, when they then force him to impregnate his mother. By the time anyone finds this little colony, the resulting generations are suffering nasty mutations.
  • The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: 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...
  • In the sci-fi novella The Night Faces, the folklore of a Lost Colony attests that the planet's population descends from just one man and two women, one light-haired and one dark-haired, who survived a starship crash. Justified in that the story turns out to be a metaphor for the colonists' Jekyll & Hyde nature, as they periodically change from peaceful to violent in response to a psychoactive spore in the atmosphere.
  • In Old Kingdom, it is revealed at 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 protagonist of "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" falls in love with a woman of the dying Martian race; he doesn't learn until afterwards that the whole thing was this trope and that the woman was not happy about having to sleep with him (each of them fulfilled a described role in a Martian prophecy about the only way to save their race, even her not being in love with him was part of it).
  • The Shadowhunter Chronicles:
    • The fairies have to refresh their bloodlines regularly, otherwise their children will get sick and wither away. Because of this, they swap human toddlers for their own. Some fairies also lure humans into the fairy realm in order to seduce them there and have children with them. The shadowhunters don't like the fairies to do this, but they understand that if they don't, there is no way for them to survive. However, they prefer it when the fairies exchange small children than when they lure adult humans into the fairy realm and then no longer release them.
    • Warlocks and witches are always half-demons. They cannot arise in any other way than when a demon and a human mate. With a few exceptions, the father is a demon and the mother is a human. Some demons can change their shape and then seduce a person, but most demons cannot change their shape, which doesn't stop them from mating with humans anyway.
  • A very nice example from The Witcher: 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."
  • At one point in the backstory of Xanth, the harpies had no men. Since harpies are half-human and half-vulture, they survived by capturing each of those species in alternate generations and breeding with them; however, the offspring were always female. Eventually one male harpy is found magically preserved with the Brain Coral, and he apparently manages to father sons by the main events of the series.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In 3rd Rock from the Sun, when Sally sees snow for the first time, followed by a blackout, she becomes convinced that the world is ending. She's alone with Dick's student Leon at the time, who explains that he will have to impregnate her in order for the human race to survive. Much to Leon's disappointment, the lights come back on just when they're about to go at it.
  • 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. Oddly, the Nietzschean who is also present (from a society where being a father is considered the highest honor achievable) doesn't bring it up when she announces that choosing Hunt was essentially random.
  • 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".
  • 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. Although the original plan was to play it straight, what they ended up doing was using his genetics to get her pregnant and then just lying that her actual boyfriend was the father.
  • The Outer Limits (1995): In "Flower Child", a plant-based alien named Violet is driven to mate with a human male, namely Chris, so that her race can survive and take over the Earth.
  • In the Red Dwarf episode "Psirens", the titular GELFs attempt to lure Cat down to an asteroid by claiming that they are part of a Dying Race where only women are left and that they could only be saved if he made love to all of them. The others are incredulous that anyone other than the Cat would be dumb enough to fall for this line.
  • In an episode of Sliders, the heroes land in a world where most of the male population of the world was wiped out during the Gulf War by a bio-weapon Saddam Hussein unleashed that attacks the Y chromosome. The remaining men have been put into forced "breeding camps" to repopulate the world. When Quinn, Arturo, and Rembrandt (with Wade) arrive and are seen walking down the street, they create quite a stir. Apparently, this world never developed artificial insemination, needing the act to be done the old-fashioned way. Arturo exclaims that he could get the population up to speed if they would care more about his IQ instead of his sperm count.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • A slight variation in the original pilot "The Cage", in which the Talosians are breeding a race of humans as slaves to rebuild their planet for them. When Captain Pike resists mating with the only female available, they bring down two of his crewmates so he can choose from a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead (although logically, they wouldn't have wanted him to pick just one; this was network television in 1965, after all).
    • In "Wink of an Eye", a species of Human Aliens has become hyperaccelerated until Time Stands Still for them, but it left their males infertile, and so they kidnap spacemen for breeding purposes. Their leader takes a shine to Captain Kirk, leading to a Duel of Seduction between the two.
    • "The Mark of Gideon" has 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 a disease to her people and increase the death rate, no kidding. They even inexplicably build a huge copy of the Enterprise interior to 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...
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Favorite Son", a Lady Land convinces Harry Kim that he's a native of their world. Turns out there are very few men born among their species, so they infect passing spacemen with their DNA, lure them to their world, and harvest it — that is, all of their DNA.

    Music 

    Radio 
  • Alien Worlds plays with this trope in the episode "Seeds of Time", in which the last survivor of an extinct alien race reconstitutes in a body that happens to be a genetic duplicate of Maura Cassidy's old flame and wishes to have Maura Cassidy help him repopulate his race, much to her disgust. Fortunately, the alien is content with creating a genetic duplicate of Maura, so she doesn't have to come with him to his home planet.

    Theater 
  • Parodied in Ride the Cyclone. Ricky Potts' signature song, "Space Aged Bachelor Man," recounts the seafood-induced fever dream of a hormone-addled Sickly Neurotic Geek surrounded by his family's 14 felines. In his dream, he is approached by the sexy cat-people of the Zolarian Galaxy, who need his "seed" to save their race. During the course of the song, the female Zolarians (played by his classmates in Halloween masks) beg him to save their galaxy by making love to them, while the elderly male Zolarians (also played by his classmates, this time with vocoders/ autotune) graciously thank him for "laying with their daughters".

    Video Games 
  • Panne and Yarne from Fire Emblem: Awakening both are the last of the Taguel race, and as mother and son they really shouldn't be doing it with each other, so naturally they hold this opinion towards whomever they marry. Yarne even lampshades it in his confession quote:
    Yarne: I love you! Let's repopulate my species! ...Uh, sorry. Was that awkward?
  • Khameleon and Reptile from Mortal Kombat are the last two living Saurians, female and male, respectively. Reptile is pressed into the service of Shao Kahn, the one responsible for the extinction in the first place, and Khameleon has made it her life's goal to kill Shao Kahn, rescue Reptile, and repopulate the Saurians anew.
  • A G-rated example in the Pikmin series: the titular creatures are near constantly under threat from the fauna of PNF-404, until Olimar crash-landed on the planet and enlisted their help in fixing his ship or other tasks in return for providing their Onions the means to create more Pikmin with the bodies of defeated creatures or Pellets and being a good leader. This becomes more prominent in Pikmin 4, as it's implied that Pikmin are parasitic at heart out of a desire for a good leader to carry out the above tasks for their survival, which results in them turning Olimar into a Leafling after his life support failed in an attempt to save him and retain him as a leader. In the end, Moss takes up the role as their Captain due to being a native Leafling pup and the Ancient Sirehound joins as their protector, providing the Pikmin their means of survival.
  • Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon has a female example: 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.
  • This was going to be Penn's eventual job for the Nereids once he grew up in Soul Nomad & 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.
  • In one of the endings to Star Fox Command, Fox apparently ends up filling this role for Krystal's race, if their son's fur coloration is any indication.

    Webcomics 

    Websites 

    Western Animation 
  • In the Futurama episode "A Bicyclops Built for Two", Leela meets a fellow Cyclops and realizes that she has to marry him to continue the species, even though he quickly turns out to be a coarse, egotistical jerk. It turns out to be a scam —the male Cyclops is actually a shapeshifting alien who pretends to be from her species, and actually has four other oddly shaped fiancées he's tricking the same way. It later turns out that Leela's actually a human with a minor mutation, so this wouldn't apply anyway.


 
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Alternative Title(s): I Cannot Self Pollinate

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Pound That Panda!

Learning that the last Male Red Panda died in the San Diego Zoo, Marco of the Animorphs is sent in to save the species since one of the animals he can transform into is a Red Panda.

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Main / OnlyYouCanRepopulateMyRace

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