Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?

Putting the love in Lovecraft.
Art by tohdraws

"I'm an intelligent woman. I know the difference between reality and my own dark fantasies. But I thrill at the idea of being taken by a great tentacled beast. My heart races as I imagine my frail and delicate body being controlled, being used by a force too powerful for me to deny. To feel helpless, vulnerable, it scares me yet it excites me. My body aches with desire as I imagine myself being forced to surrender in the most intimate of ways. Can this be so wrong?"

— Kiki, Ghastly's Ghastly Comic

This is what happens when you make love (in either sense of that phrase) with an Eldritch Abomination, or a Starfish Alien doing a passable imitation of one. Tentacles are a frequent feature. Can be played for sheer Squick, horror, fanservice, laughs or all of the above at the same time. In Lovecraft Lite works, they may well be an Adorable Abomination with genuine romantic chemistry with their mortal partner. In Cosmic Horror Stories, expect a lot more rapey or crazy cultist vibes to this trope.

Might lead to Fetus/Enfant Terrible. A common origin for the Anti-Anti-Christ, able to switch sides as a representation of the human side, but just as likely to become a monster.

Subtrope of Unequal Pairing and Interspecies Romance. Compare and contrast Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?, Mars Needs Women, Boldly Coming, and Divine Date.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• In Crimson Spell, Prince Haldrigue is possessed by the King of Hell himself. Said King of Hell has lost all interest in wreaking havoc due to having fallen in love with Haldrigue's boyfriend, the mage Havi.
• The OVA of El-Hazard: The Magnificent World. The Demon God destroyed the Precursors, brought ruin upon the land, and threatened to do the same to present-day El Hazard. Then she and the hero fell in love...
• In Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!, the protagonist Mahiro did this by accident, having a certain je ne sais quoi that made Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos fall in Love Before First Sight with him. Most guys would kill to have a beautiful Otaku girlfriend who wants to have sex at every opportunity,^note something Nyarko lampshades whenever he rejects her advances, but as a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, Mahiro is horrified because he's well aware that Nyarlathotep has 999 other forms, most of which could destroy his sanity if he so much as caught a glimpse of them (and also just plain finds her personality annoying). Later novels show that Mahiro's warming to the idea, with outright confirmation by a third party that he is in love with Nyarko, even if he's not willing to admit it yet. The series ends with them consummating their relationship, and Mahiro's screams imply that it's either horrifically painful, or Nyarko is just that enthusiastic in bed.
• Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea has Ponyo's human father and sea goddess mother. Granmammare is the personification of the sea and all life therein. Even though she can take the form of a somewhat normal sized human, it's still quite a lop-sided match.
• Chiho Sasaki from The Devil is a Part-Timer! has this as her ultimate goal, although it's currently one-sided (Maou likes her as a friend and subordinate, but he isn't interested in a relationship). Maou might not be the biblical Satan, but he's still the king of demons and capable of attacks so powerful that the aftereffects are visible from orbit. The funny part is that being let in on the Masquerade was a relief to her since it meant that Emi wasn't his jealous ex-girlfriend.
• Yuki Yuna is a Hero features a dubiously consensual one between fourteen year old Yuna and the World Tree, Shinju-sama. She must marry it and more-or-less die or the world will end.
• This is the central premise of the manga ''Ano Hito no I ni wa Boku ga Tarinai'' (Her Appetite's Too Big for Me Alone). Schoolboy meets sweet-but-gluttonous Eldritch Abomination, they fall in love, and he joins her on her quest to consume other Eldritch Abominations.
• The Elder Sister-like One features a boy accidentally summoning Shub-Niggurath and being offered a wish. Desperately lonely, he asks her to be his big sister, kicking off a rather touching slice of life story... in the safe-for-work manga version. Their later relationship as portrayed in the original hentai doujins is a lot more physical in nature.

Comic Books

• My Little Pony: FIENDship Is Magic #1 reveals that King Sombra is actually an Eldritch Abomination Living Shadow from Another Dimension... and once fell in love with a normal Unicorn mare. It didn't end well for either of them.
  • However, both of them eventually return in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (IDW) Issue 34 to 37 and even manage to invoke Earn Your Happy Ending.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, Dawn infamously does just this in cover art.
• In the Angel comics, Angel gets up to this with Illyria in Season 11. Then it's revealed in Season 12 she still has access to her original form.
• Averted in Teen Titans, where the Demon lord Trigon mated with human female Arella Roth. He raped her, mating only so she could give him a child that would serve as his portal to the real world, and she almost committed suicide after the act. The child grew up to become the superheroine Raven, who then focused on preventing her father from succeeding. Trigon himself is the offspring of The Devil and a human woman (in Another Dimension).
• Played straight, however, in the DC Alternate Universe DC Comics Bombshells, in which Trigon is an entirely good Nature Spirit and his relationship with Raven's mother was consensual and loving.
• Any of Dream's various romances in The Sandman (1989) could be construed as this; Dream's Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder, and since all of his seen relationships have been with human-looking women, they presumably see him (and, one assumes, feel him) as the handsome human man the reader sees. However, given his age, power and nature as an Anthropomorphic Personification this trope is applicable even with the goddess Calliope simply because his power is so far beyond hers, let alone the purely human Nada. Gods come from the minds of humanity and fade when humanity forgets them; the Endless simply are.
• Hellboy is the son of a human witch/nun and a demon Prince of Sheol. After he had been conceived, Hellboy did not exist in the real world but was considered to be "a power waiting to be born." Some 300 years later he was summoned to earth as an infant and grew up to be the Anti Anti Christ. His parents really seemed to like each other even though his mother did not want to be the demon's bride at first.
• The Incredible Hulk and Umar once had a fling, if you can call it that. Then she came back for seconds.
• Earth X posits that Cyclops was in love with the Phoenix Force rather than Jean Grey, which eventually resulted in her leaving him. There were probably other factors in their relationship breaking down however, such as the death of Professor X and Jean losing her telepathy which, given Scott’s poor social skills, would have severely hampered their ability to communicate. If you want to be shallow about it, the Phoenix Force takes the form of Jean as a gorgeous, physically perfect twenty-something while the actual Jean is middle aged and has put on a lot of weight.
• Duncan's mom in Firebreather. The first thing most people think when they show Duncan's monstrous, 100 story tall father is "How did that work?" Duncan, however, does not want to know.
• Nova, a former Herald of Galactus (not to be confused with Richard Rider or Sam Alexander) had a crush on the Planet Eater. Unsurprisingly, it went nowhere.
• In Monstress, it eventually turns out that the Monstra inside Maika had once been in a relationship with an Arcanic. This Arcanic turns out to have been the Shaman Empress, and that the Halfwolf line descends from her, with the Monstra passed down through the bloodline.

Fan Works

• The Legend of Zelda fanfiction Feel Good Hit of the Summer had a character forced to do this to Ganondorf.
• In Naruto: life is a Game when Naruto faces the Shinigami, he uses his dōjutsu to suggest that she become female and join his harem.
• Near Death Experience is all about the protagonist having... well, a near death experience before falling in love with the Grim Reaper.
• Touhou Project fics:
  • Maiden's Illusionary Funeral depicts Yukari as a nightmarish void of darkness and eyes that is simply masquerading in a human shape, and has her develop a tragic, doomed romance with Yuyuko, who is (mostly) human at the time.
  • Played for horror in Imperfect Metamorphosis with Yuuka's "affections" towards Team 9 and several other characters.
• In the Kill la Kill fic A Minor Miscalculation, it's established that Ragyo's one true love is the Original Life Fiber, which she also worships and considers herself unworthy to touch. Her sexual abuse of Satsuki and Nui is at least partly fueled by this. This is not at all portrayed sympathetically or romantically.
• In the Mass Effect fanfic Crucible, there were two couple that thanks to the non-mortal partner, also turn into two cases of Eternal Love. The first happened in the ancient time, a turian named Makern married Herz who is a living incarnation of the star Trebia (yes, that star of the Trebia system). They had 4 sons who created the four big clans of the North (one of which is the Vakarian).
  • Later, it's revealed that there was a human woman who married Sam Shepard, who actually was Death that was temporary sealed into a human form by Herz. They had only one child, Jane before Sam died and returned to his true form but he later came back to take his wife's soul with him.
• Any greentext written by a "Brogre" will inevitably feature an eldritch version of Shrek who, upon being summoned by children's prayers, shows up to gruesomely kill nonbelievers. These stories also always feature "shrexual" encounters between Shrek and his faithful underage worshipers. If you're really curious, you can read some here, but be warned: these greentexts are definitely Not Safe for Work (and probably not safe for sanity either).
  Shrek is love, Shrek is life
• Tumblr's answer to the Brogres is the fan community dedicated to Pennywise, the eldritch Monster Clown from Stephen King's It, as depicted by Bill Skarsgård in the 2017 film adaptation. There's a lot of Pennywise smut on Tumblr, as satirized in this (safe for work) cartoon.
• In Dragon Age: Inquisition fanfic Walking in Circles, we have Evelyn, a human mage and Solas, an Elven God. Solas fears the day she knows who and what he is but has tried to accept the fact that she may leave him upon knowing the truth. She doesn’t care, in fact, it just makes her more worried for him, not of him. She does admit that it's pretty foolish for her to do so but she just can't bring herself to care.
• The RWBY Alternate Universe story by Coeur Al'Aran White Sheep (RWBY) is more or less a world where the main protagonist Jaune Arc is the son of the Humanoid Abomination Salem and his human Huntsman father, after she found out that she quite enjoyed their first time.
• In the House fanfic "Invasion of the Cuddy Snatchers" House finds out he's been having sex with a shape-shifting alien who had been pretending to be Cuddy (and whose true form is never actually revealed); however, his reaction is "I've been having sex with an alien? Cool."
• In Our Eternity TogetherMystic's the target of the Cursed God's affections. The Cursed God is an eldritch abomination. The exact reasons as to why seem to vary throughout the series.
• Harry and the Shipgirls:
  • Gregory Goyle is currently in a relationship with Brigita Dunsany, a shoggoth.
  • Harry's great-great grandfather, Ian Potter, got into relationships with multiple Yōkai.
  • The Potters have their own version of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and their copy of the Tale of the Three Brothers indicates that Ignotus Peverell and Death were lovers instead of the friends that the more commonly used version depicted them as.

Films — Animated

• In Justice League vs. Teen Titans Raven's mother was part of a cult that summoned a demon, Trigon. She immediately proceeded to have sex with Trigon, (he was in human form at the time; at least, he was when they started) which led to Raven's birth.

Films — Live-Action

• In Dagon, the protagonist has dreams about swimming undersea with a beautiful mermaid. Later, he actually meets her, but resists her attempt at seduction when he finds out that she has tentacles instead of legs. Later on, she turns out to be his sister, and also his destined bride. While featuring a village full of otherworldly interbreeding, this one gets super-bonus-points for being based (albeit very loosely) on a Lovecraft story.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean, Davy Jones fell in love with Calypso, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the sea. He hates and loves her due to her fickle nature, which led him to cut out his own heart to escape the conflicting emotions. Sao Feng aspired to this trope, having fallen in love with the sea and thus Calypso.
• The film Spring can be considered a Lovecraftian romantic comedy, as weird as it sounds. The plot is about a guy that travels to Italy to forget the Trauma Conga Line he was going through and then fall in love with a gorgeous Italian girl... that's secretly an Eldritch Abomination who has been alive since the Roman empire.
• In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Peter Quill discovers that he's the offspring of a human and Ego the Living Planet, who conceived him in a humanoid body with his mother. He also learns that he's the first such offspring of a union who also developed a spark of Celestial power, with all of the other offspring of such unions not having that power and ending up being killed by Ego, and that his mother's cancer was caused by Ego when he realized he was falling in love with Peter's mother and that these feelings were endangering his grand plan.
• The Shape of Water can be read this way, as the movie's romantic hero may well be one of the Deep Ones from Lovecraft's own The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Literature

• Cthulhu Mythos:
  • "The Dunwich Horror". Yog-Sothoth has sex with a human woman and produces the offspring who will be known as Wilbur Whateley. It's hinted that her elderly father was acting as the, er, vessel for Yog at the time.
  • Michael Shea's "Fat Face" involves a woman who becomes interested in a rather large, but kindly man. It's not a man, and it doesn't end well.
  • Played with Ramsey Campbell's "The Faces At Pine Dunes". The protagonist and his girlfriend investigate his parents' strange behavior. His father is a Human/Eldritch Abomination hybrid, and so is the protagonist.
  • Played for Laughs in Esther Friesner's "The Beau and the Beast". The Protagonist is supposed to be sacrificed to Lord Cthulhu but instead they run away to Gretna Green to get married.
• "The Dunwich Horror" was inspired by Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, which also features sex (or some kind of mating) between a human woman and an Eldritch Abomination. The resulting daughter is an eerily beautiful Humanoid Abomination whose unspeakable acts (strongly implied to be sexual in nature) lead to madness and suicide.
• Done as part of a Deal with the Devil in The Dresden Files when Harry takes up the mantle of the Winter Knight. Harry states that it wasn't sex, no matter what it looked like. You can't have sex with a hurricane, or make love to a storm. Nonetheless, he is still incredibly embarrassed when he realizes that Queen Mab essentially transmitted the entire act to every water surface in all of the lands Winter.
• In the Conan the Barbarian story The Scarlet Citadel, it is mentioned that the evil sorcerer Tsotha-Lanti is the offspring of a dancing girl from Shadizar who slept too close to some haunted ruins and awoke in the grasp of a black demon. From that unholy union Tsotha-Lanti was born.
• Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Luke has an encounter with Abeloth. She impersonates each of his previous girlfriends and then sets out to kill the ones that are still alive. Loving a Skywalker can be so complicated.
• Inheritance Trilogy has a romance between the human Yeine, and the god Nahadoth, the firstborn of the Three Gods. Nahadoth is not described as a human with powers (like some mythologies do) but as something entirely different than humans, with its own unfathomable motives.
• Appears in several works by Neil Gaiman:
  • In American Gods Shadow, the main character, catches the smitten eye of the Egyptian Cat Goddess, Bastet. It doesn't amount to much more than a one night stand and some minor flirting though. The implications of the trope are minimized when you learn that Shadow is in fact Baldr.
  • "A Study in Emerald" has Queen Victoria (reimagined as an Eldritch Abomination) and her human "consort" Prince Albert. Also Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia (another Eldritch Abomination) is said to have frequented brothels, and he ends up dying after Sherlock Holmes lures him to his death with the offer of a virgin kidnapped from a convent.
  • In "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" the narrator ends up at the wrong party with his friend, flirts with girls who turn out to be Anthropomorphic Personifications of planets, and is almost consumed by hearing a song from one of them. His friend tries to make out with a sun and inadvertently pisses her off, and the narrator never hears from him again.
  • In The Ocean at the End of the Lane an Eldritch Abomination disguised as a human woman seduces and makes love with the narrator's father.
• Awoken, a work that revels in exaggerating the tropes found in Twilight-like teen Paranormal Romance, has its ordinary female protagonist fall in love with Cthulhu. A Cthulhu who can take on the form of a gorgeous teenage boy, but still an amoral and murderous Cthulhu.
• The main premise of The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign is that the main character Kyousuke has managed to attract the attention of the White Queen, the most powerful being in the setting. It's completely one-sided, as she's a Yandere Eldritch Abomination who considers inflicting suffering on him to be romantic. However, it's later revealed that he originally reciprocated her feelings, and only broke it off with her after a chain of events caused her to become evil.
• While not exactly Eldritch Abominations, Thief of Time has a lot of human/Anthropomorphic Personification pairings: Time met a man and had a/two son/s—it's complicated, War and a Valkyrie (in another book we see their children: Fear, Terror and Clancy), two humans with truly bizarre parentage (one is the son of a human and Time, the other is Death's adoptive granddaughter) and a short-lived Ship Tease between a man (well, son of a human and Time, and technically the same as the previous one) and an Auditor who incarnated as a female.
• The One Who Eats Monsters: Ryn is an elder monster from the black places and the Long Ago, a being of wind and shadow, whose claws can kill anything that can die and a few things that cannot, and she ends up falling in love with Naomi Bradford, your average teenage girl.
• Part of the point of the anthology Eldritch Embraces, with some stories about this very subject, and others are about couples in a Cosmic Horror setting. The first story in the anthology, "When the Stars Are Right", seems like a normal Queer Romance between the narrator and a Russian man, until it's revealed the narrator is the Crawling Chaos, Nyarlathotep, in human guise. The story ends with Nyarlathotep bringing his lover back to life after he's sacrificed, and asking his lover to rule earth alongside him, which his lover accepts.

Live-Action TV

• In Smallville, only Chloe Sullivan could get involved with Doomsday.
• Elvira denies that she worships the Devil, but admits that she dated him once.
• While the TARDIS from Doctor Who is not eldritch in a negative or scary sense, she is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and bizarre entities on the show. She's a pandimensional Genius Loci in the form of a blue police box with an infinite Pocket Dimension on the inside, and she exists simultaneously at every point in time and space. In "The Doctor's Wife" (written by Neil Gaiman—see the Literature section above), when she briefly possesses a woman's body and comes face-to-face with the Doctor... epic flirting ensues, with the heavy implication that the Doctor wasn't aware they've always been in a relationship. It doesn't go any further than flirting, though. (At another point in the episode, the TARDIS flirts with Rory.)
  The Doctor: Do you have a name?
  Human TARDIS: Seven hundred years and finally he asks.
  The Doctor: What do I call you?
  Human TARDIS: I think you call me... Sexy.
  The Doctor: Only when we're alone.
  Human TARDIS: We are alone.
  The Doctor: Oh. Come on then, Sexy.
• In Angel season 5, something develops between Wesley and Illyria, mostly because she reminds him of Fred, and much angst ensues when she impersonates her. It isn't clear until the series finale that Illyria returned his affections, as evidenced by her compassion and grief at Wesley's death.
• In season 11 of Supernatural, a spontaneous, quasi-romantic connection develops between Dean and the Darkness, apparently due to the fact that he was the bearer of the Mark of Cain, the lifting of which unleashed her. This leads Dean to have UST with a primordial force of destruction who turns out to be God’s frickin’ sister. Of course, his brother Sam has already banged both a demon and a werewolf at this point, but that’s relatively mundane for this series. Obviously, she appears to him in the form of a very attractive woman.
  • Dean also had a romance with the Fallen Angel Anna, who had an attractive human form but has an Eldritch Abomination true form, and he spent twelve seasons generating Ho Yay with an angel who has a male vessel, Castiel. In fact, his involvement with Amara comes off as a Love Triangle with Castiel.

Music

• The song "Width of a Circle" by David Bowie describes a consensual encounter with some sort of Eldritch Abomination. Remember, kids, Drugs Are Bad!
• Norm Sherman's "Heartache Over Innsmouth", which is just what it sounds like.
• The music video for "Peacebone" by the experimental rock group Animal Collective shows a blossoming romance between a human woman and... something else.
• The music video for "Starry Eyed" by Ellie Goulding reveals that her boyfriend has a Celestial Body, which certainly explain the fantastical elements in the video.
• Lemon Demon's song "No-Eyed Girl" is about falling in love with a girl made of Antimatter from a realm incomprehensible to humans.
  Knowing what we know
  Knowing we do not know
  This is gonna change our world
  I might go insane
  If I learn your full name
  If you'd be my no-eyed girl
• "Jolene, A Cautionary Tale" [1] by Pip King is a re-imagining of the Dolly Parton song "Jolene" — in the original, the singer was begging the beautiful Jolene to not seduce her lover, whereas this version has the singer telling of Jolene's captivating beauty, horrible eldritch capabilities, and how she's been terrorizing the town with her immense powers. She begs Jolene to not take her man away, presumably to to eat him, and ultimately resolves that if she tries to take him, she'll go after Jolene herself in revenge. In the second installment, "Jolene Part 2 (Take Me Instead)" [2] we hear the singer again describing Jolene's unfathomable power and bewitching features, and she now asks to be taken in the man's place, but as she begins to wax poetic about how she's been dreaming of "lying bare" beneath her "unblinking, countless eyes" and how she longs to be held in her embrace, she invokes Take Me Instead verbatim, but only to mean that she now wants Jolene to forget her man because she wants the two of them to be together.
• The Filk Song "My Apologies To H.P. Lovecraft (I Fucked Cthulhu)" is pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin — the singer picked up the Necronomicon, summoned Cthulhu, and had sex with him.

Myths & Religion

• In some versions of Arthurian Legend, Merlin was a Child by Rape when a demon (possibly even Satan himself) defiled a mortal woman. Fortunately, the woman in question had her child baptised as soon as he was born. This cleansed the evil presence from Merlin but still let him keep his nifty magical powers, so he became an Anti-Anti-Christ and decided to help some guy become the King of Britain.
• The Bible has the Nephilim, which are the product of angels falling for and lusting after human women. Seems like standard Interspecies Romance, until you read the Book of Ezekiel and realize angels are far from "pretty boys with wings" (although they likely took human form during their affairs with mortal women).

Podcasts

• Taako, an elven wizard from The Adventure Zone ends up in a committed relationship with Kravitz, AKA the Grim Reaper, an undead being who has the task of taking wayward souls to the afterlife, can rip holes in reality, and can turn from a handsome man in a suit into a robed skeleton with glowing, red eyes at will. Taako is very into the latter.
• Ain't Slayed Nobody: In the final two episodes, Kate — whose mind was swapped with a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath — behaves very affectionately towards Johnny, calling him pet names like her "little twig". Johnny even makes a Twerp Sweating joke, asking if Kate's mother — the Outer God Shub-Niggurath — would approve, but it flies over Kate's tentacles and she bluntly replies that Shub-Niggurath couldn't care less.

Radio

• Quiet, Please (1947): The most famous episode, "The Thing on the Fourble Board", ends with this, revealing that the narrator's wife "Mike" is actually the Eldritch Abomination that he pulled out of the ground.

Tabletop Games

• Call of Cthulhu:
  • Yog-Sothoth can mate with human females, creating the Spawn of Yog-Sothoth.
    • Lesser Great Old One Nyogtha can also breed Spawn with humans.
  • Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. A woman named Hypatia Masters apparently mated with a Great Old One (she became pregnant and had its child).
  • Supplement The Fungi from Yuggoth, adventure "The Thing in the Well". After donning a pair of magical glasses a woman is raped by an other-dimensional monster and becomes pregnant with its child.
  • The Cthulhu Now adventure "Love's Lonely Children" adventure features a couple who are Y'Golonac cultists. Y'Golonac is the Mythos entity of Squick incarnate. The husband is possessed and bodily transforms into Y'Golonac, while his wife... worships. And they got their daughter involved in it, too...
• Exalted:
  • In one of the more contested passages in the guide for Infernals, it's suggested that new Infernals are passed around the Yozis for... "initiation." The Yozis are crippled godlike entities that take forms such as a city of brass and basalt, a hundred thousand crystalline spheres of fire, and an ever-twisting river. The sheer physics alone... But, for good or ill, the actual process would be a bit less mind-hurting, as the Yozis can create humaniform avatars called jouten. This is not necessarily an improvement.
    • The Ebon Dragon is stated to only have one Jouten because he would betray himself. The form he uses: A several miles long oriental dragon made of darkness
  • The Yozi Adorjan (who mostly appears in the form of an extremely violent wind) also mated with a Solar Exalt (through a dream...) and conceived daughters by him (three were normal human children, while the other four shed their mortal bodies when they reached maturity and became living winds like their mother).
  • The god(dess) Luna was created (partially) for the purpose of seducing the Primordial Gaia (and fell in love with her instead). Gaia's most commonly seen form is her humanoid jouten, but mentions are made of her other, greater forms, that are vast, primal and slightly terrifying to the gods (although Luna, while typically humanoid, can take some pretty eldritch forms herself, so the line between regular romance and romancing Cthulhu is a bit blurred).
  • The Fair Folk are vortices of chaotic energy pretending to be people, and half-fae are a well-established bit of setting lore.
• Pathfinder:
  • The "aberrant" bloodline—-which eventually turns your character into a Humanoid Abomination-—implies something like this in a sorcerer's ancestry.
  • The 4th bestiary includes the Spawn of Yog-Sothoth mentioned above as a monster-type, and notes that some of Yog-Sothoth's half-mortal children take more after their humanoid parents, becoming aberrant bloodline sorcerers instead. A later adventure gives stats for the Scion of Yog-Sothoth which is like the spawn, but can pass for humanoid (assuming they conceal their tentacles).
• This is practically the point of F.A.T.A.L., which has many mechanics for humans mating with demons, abominations, and the like. FATAL being, well, FATAL, most of these matings are non-consensual.
• In Dungeons & Dragons this is the standard backstory of half-dragons, half-demons, half-celestials, planetouched and the like. Special credit goes to the Half-Farspawn, birthed when unknowable horrors beyond Good, Evil, and the Multiverse itself breach the walls of reality to land some sweet cultist nookie.
• Daemons of Chaos in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 are sentient (and sometimes even sapient) agglomerations of mortal emotion from a parallel dimension known as the Warp, and while their hunger for extreme emotions of their particular aspect means that their interactions with the real world are usually hostile and destructive, there have been some mortals who've been brave or foolish enough to attempt more... cordial relations with them. In particular, the daemons of Slaanesh, the Chaos God of pleasure and excess, are always down for a bit of fun and games, consensual or otherwise, although there's no guarantee that it'll be fun or even physically and mentally survivable for even the toughest, best-prepared, and most open-minded prospective partner.

Roleplay

• The Light of Our Solus: The protagonist, Mordin, is the eldritch abomination, and he falls completely head over heels for Ruby Rose.

Video Games

• Arknights has Skadi the Corrupting Heart as a Bad Future Skadi that succumbed to the influence of her Seaborn blood and awakened as the Seaborn God Ishar-mla. She is very interested in trying to get the Doctor to join her beneath the sea, and a scenario in "Mizuki & Caerula Arbor" shows Ishar-mla sparing the Doctor due to Skadi's feelings for them.
• First Encounter Assault Recon II: Project Origin infamously has Alma, being the Stalker with a Crush to tough soldier Sgt. Becket throughout the game, subvert this in the ending when she finally traps him in the Amplifier and rapes him (possibly using the dead/dying body of Keira Stokes to do the physical part of the deed). One of the scariest and most disturbing moments in a game with a lot of disturbing imagery before.
• Cthulhu Saves the World. Umi falls in love with Cthulhu at first sight, but he considers them "strictly in a rock star-groupie relationship." By the end though, he comes to return her feelings.
• In the good ending of Disgaea 2 Adell delivers a Cooldown Kiss to Zenon, God of all Overlords. It works because their Belligerent Sexual Tension kept increasing as they traveled together, and it's implied that they eventually made the relationship official. By the time of their cameos in the later games of the franchise, most characters who summon them into the new game assume they're married.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3:
    • In Portable on the Female Main Character's route, you're given the chance to initiate a romantic S.Link with Ryoji Mochizuki, the human form of Nyx Avatar. That is, you can make the personification of Death itself fall in love with you.
    • While it's not an official social link, a male main character is asked to show Elizabeth what sex is like during their last outing. The female main character can similarly win the affection of, and have an Optional Sexual Encounter with, Elizabeth's younger brother Theodore. It's not clear exactly what Elizabeth and Theodore are, but whatever they are, it's not human, and as the game's Superbosses they are just as if not more powerful than the above mentioned character.
  • Persona 4:
    • You can fulfill the requests of the big sister of the aforementioned Elizabeth and Theodore, Margaret. If you do, her comments toward you become more and more flirty and, if you finished them all, she will steal a kiss towards the end of the game and tease you about meeting again in the future.
    • Marie in Golden is a bona fide romantic social link and an alter ego of the Japanese goddess Izanami, the former mate of the Japanese god Izanagi (who, incidentally, is your alter ego).
• In The Bard's Tale, you're unknowingly setting free (or not) a Demon Queen. You guessed it, Caleigh. Though she does keep her promise to you.
• Dragon Age:
  • One of the potential love interests in Dragon Age II is an Abomination, a human who has been possessed by spirits/demons. Several characters discuss and lampshade the squickier aspects of the relationship. (This means that every intimate encounter Hawke shares with his/her Abomination Love Interest is technically a threesome.)
  • Played For Laughs in Dragon Age: Inquisition when Blackwall asks local Fade expert Solas if he's ever been intimate with a Fade spirit. Solas grows flustered, and insists that nothing in the Fade is ever simple, but seeing as he never actually denies the accusation...
    • A female elven Inquisitor romancing Solas is unwittingly engaging in this, as he is really Fen'Harel, who can be compared to Loki in his role in elven mythology.
• In Diablo III, Adria conceived Leah with Aidan while he was possessed by Diablo, and she knew it. Adria had consensual sex with the Lord of Terror.
• Helltaker revolves around a man who decides he wants a harem of demon girls, and manages to win over several including Lucifer herself.
• In Mask of the Betrayer, you play as a soul-eating abomination whose mere existence poses a threat to those around you. This does not stop you from getting a Romance Sidequest.
• In Fire Emblem: Awakening, a Male Avatar can marry Tiki, who was put to sleep by Naga to keep her from degenerating into madness, which would destroy the world. Furthermore, all of the Avatar's romance options boil down to "Did You Just Romance The Avatar of Grima?" The latter is downplayed as Avatar is basically a normal human when not possessed by Grima.
• Justified in the "good" ending of Eversion: Princess Nehema is revealed as an Eldritch Abomination in the bad ending, but in the good ending Zee Tee is one too.
• You can cause this in Super Scribblenauts and Scribblenauts Unlimited by summoning Romantic Cthulhu and Romantic [Anything Else].
• In the backstory of Brütal Legend, the hero Riggnarok and the Demon Emperor Succoria traveled to the future (Eddie's time). Succoria had a Villainous BSoD when she saw that humanity was the dominant species and the Tainted Coil was extinct, meaning her people were destined to lose. Riggnarok pitied her and decided to care for her instead of slaying her. Eventually, they fell in love. Sadly, Succoria died in childbirth, and Riggnarok raised their son Eddie Riggs by himself. Assuming Eddie's demonic form takes after his mother, Succoria looked every bit as monstrous as the rest of the Tainted Coil when she and Riggnarok kindled a romance.
• Several takes on this appear in Dark Souls II. The Children of Dark are a group of women born from the fragments of Manus, Father of the Abyss. Their mission is to find great kings, seduce them to become queens, then topple the kingdom from the inside out to help usher in the Age of Dark. One (Nashandra) succeeded and set a plan in motion to extinguish the First Flame so dark could rule forever. Another (Elana) also brought down her kingdom but was content to bide her time and grow stronger. The third (Nadalia) arrived at an already-fallen kingdom whose king had managed to royally screw things up all by himself, and went mad from her loneliness and failure, killing herself and leaving pieces of her soul in various idols. The last (Alsanna) truly fell in love with her king, and decided to pull a Heel–Face Turn to help him fight the army of demons his kingdom faced.
• A House of Many Doors gives you the option to woo a sentient murder of ten million conjoined crows by feeding them the corpse of a god. You can also pursue a romance with an oil rig.

Visual Novels

• Saya no Uta has a particularly disturbing example, as the story is about the main character (unknowingly) romancing one of these. He suffers from a condition which caused him to view everything as gore-drenched Eldritch Locations and everyone as Eldritch Abominations, which is why Saya, who herself is an actual Eldritch Abomination, was the only one to look normal in his eyes. It's also an extremely dark example, as his use of Saya as a Living Emotional Crutch can eventually cause him to cast aside his humanity and cross the Moral Event Horizon to perform such acts as murder, rape and cannibalism. Saya, with a flimsy grasp on human morality and herself possibly suffering from Sanity Slippage, makes exactly one attempt to stop his downward spiral by offering him the chance to return to the normal world by curing his condition. If he refuses and vows to stay with her no matter what, she happily helps him along down the slippery slope until he too begins sharing her Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• In Dra+Koi the protagonist starts a relationship with a dragon that is along the lines of an eldritch abomination: It casually breaks the laws of physics and is hinted to spread madness.
• Demonbane has quite a lot of this going around. First, Al Azif, aka the Necronomicon, is romanceable. The sequel reveals that, in at least one universe, the protagonist and she had children... don't ask how that works. One of the main antagonists, Master Therion, is the result of another: he's the offspring of one of the most powerful sorceresses to ever live... and Yog-Sothoth. It is also possible to trigger sex scenes with such beings as Atlach-Nacha, Cthugha, Ithaqua, and Nyarlathotep.
• May I Take Your Order: Hendrik has been dating the pain-consuming Talaiporia for hundreds of years, with full knowledge that she is an eldritch monster.
• In Monster Prom the Player Character can unlock a secret ending where they take Eldritch Abomination Z'gord to prom, inspiring her to live as a high-school girl named Zoe. The Second Term DLC adds Zoe as a normal (and often dorky) romantic option.
  • Player character Oz is an Anthropomorphic Personification of fears and nightmares, so playing any route as him/them is this trope.
• Cupid: Guilleme turns into a strange demigod monster half-way through sex with Catherine.
• This is the entire premise of Sucker for Love, in which the player summons dark gods from beyond the veil in order to romance them.

Web Animation

• In Dr. Crafty, this is the relationship between Crafty and Sasha. While something happened in their past that resulted in them splitting up, they still have feelings for each other as seen by Crafty reminiscing about Sasha by the ocean, and Sasha having a Crush Blush while watching Crafty's show.
• Vaggie from Hazbin Hotel is a Demon of Human Origin and she is in a relationship with the Princess of Hell, Charlie. Worth noting that Charlie is just about the only person that Vaggie is friendly with.
• The twist of "Wilhelm Park" by redminus.

Webcomics

• Ow, my sanity combines this with Unwanted Harem.
• Sluggy Freelance has a hint of this in a TV show actually called "Unholy Concubine Connection". (Before that comic, the show showed someone "merely" involved with Satan.)
• Downplayed in El Goonish Shive. The Immortals usually present themselves as humanoid entities with long ears - no different from elves. But going by Pandora's sleeping form, well. Hasn't stopped her from romancing a human and having a son.
• In Grim Tales from Down Below, it turns out that years after The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Grim and Mandy married and had two kids. Though actually the boy is an abortion from an unknown father, and the girl's father is Nergal Junior, as Grim can't actually father new life, because he's Death.
• The title character of Erma's parents are a normal man and an Expy of Sadako. Erma takes after her mother.
• Drow Tales:
  • Any drow who has a relationship with a Vel'akar, or a sentient demon from "beyond the veil". Snadhya'rune is heavily implied to have had a sexual relationship with her protector twin Khaless^note who was not actually related to her, meaning it wasn't technically incest before the latter got possessed by one, but it's not certain if their relationship continued after it happened.
  • Chapter 46 gives us the rare sight of one Cthulhu (the aforementioned Khaless) romancing another Cthulhu (Kharla'ggen) and the results are pure Fan Disservice.
• The Lord King^note The Erlkönig/Widow Norrington^note Fully human pairing in Roommates is either this trope or Divine Date depending on what you think about The Fair Folk. The guy also refuses to be categorized by hunting with Odin but playing poker with The Slender Man.
• Implied in Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: "Say My Name", where a woman accidentally says the name of her former lover (Hziulquoigmnzhah of Cykranosh, the dread spawn of Cxaxukluth) instead of her current lover (John).
  Woman: It was just a slip of the tongue!
• This is the premise of Eldritch Darling, showing the life and times of Ina, a Humanoid Abomination who falls in love with CJ, an ordinary human woman.

Web Original

• This is the in-universe reaction to the women Blue has a relationship with. Yes, that kind of relationship.
• Cracked uses this as one of the potential next Twilight-style monster/teenager romance trends here.
• /tg/ likes these.◊
• The Nostalgia Chick and her sidekicks Nella and Elisa plus a few ghostwriters (under the Portmanteau pen name Serra Elinsen) released a "crowd-sourced" Paranormal Romance novel that they originally described as "Twilight with aliens." By incorporating the suggestions of their fans, they eventually make the story about an ordinary teenage girl and a Lovecraftian Eldritch Abomination who fall in love. The book is out under the name Awoken, and given it goes right with Lovecraftian names such as Cthulhu and Azatoth is apparent that they're going all the way.
• In the Whateley Universe, Sara Waite is a Humanoid Abomination, so anyone she has sex with counts. For that matter, her father Gothmog is by all accounts still quite popular with the ladies.
• Tumblr user illicticsart has posted pictures of such relationships (with direct image links here◊, here◊, and here◊). Another user by the name of spacemarines100 has posted a meme to this effect too (here's◊ a direct image link).

Web Videos

• Played for Laughs during one of Failboat's livestreams. While fighting Chaos Elfilis, his live chat (playing as Bandana Waddle Dee) attempt to this and starts hitting on it, much to Failboats's amused shock and confusion. Chat continues to do this to more Kirby bosses in future streams.
  Chat: Hey Kirby, is it just me, or is Chaos Elfilis kinda fine tho? Like, hey what you doing Elfilis? Should we get married and lay waste to this forgotten land?
• Parodied in one of Markiplier's videos of Five Nights at Freddy's 3, when he pretends to be in love with Springtrap when Springtrap is about to kill him.
• One possible intepretation of Cecil and Carlos' relationship in Welcome to Night Vale. Especially after their marriage.

Western Animation

• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Billy's aunt marries Nergal, a tentacle demon from the center of the earth who apparently aimed for a form humans are comfortable with and missed.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Star’s ex-boyfriend Tom, the Prince of the Underworld, is the son of a mewman father and demon mother. His mom isn’t a succubus or something either, she’s twenty feet tall and looks like a Khornate Bloodletter in a dress.
• In the Rick and Morty episode "Auto Erotic Assimilation", Rick has a romance with Unity, an extraterrestrial hivemind. He knows how to get the most from it.
  Rick: We need a hang glider, and a crotchless Uncle Sam costume, and I want the entire field of your largest stadium covered end to end with naked redheads, and I want the stands packed with every man that remotely resembles my father.
• Futurama: Yivo from "The Beast with a Billion Backs" is a planet-sized Eldritch Abomination from another universe with No Biological Sex and covered in tentacles. Shklee (yes, that's the pronoun used to refer to Yivo) has sex with nearly every living being in the universe, dates them all, and invites them to stay with shkler.
• Love, Death & Robots: The big twist in the short "Beyond the Aquila Rift" is that the entire space station is an illusion, and Thom's Old Flame "Greta" is in reality a spider-like Starfish Alien, terrifying in appearance but humanly empathic in nature. She caught his ship in her hive by accident and plans to subject him to comforting psychic illusions until he passes away peacefully, as it's all she can do for him.
• The Distant Finale of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic strongly implies that Fluttershy, a normal pegasus, and Discord, a reality warping Dimension Lord with Blue-and-Orange Morality, have entered some sort of long-term romantic relationship at some point during the Time Skip.

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Guard: Very well, madam, but that is the aquarium's octopus, not yours.

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