Half-Breed Angst

"I'm not one or the other. Not really a demon, not really human. I'm not either! That's all. There was no place for me, so I had to make one for myself. And then I realized, I had a place. But I was the only one in it. I didn't know any other way to live."

— Inuyasha, Inuyasha

Being a Half-Human Hybrid is tough. Aside from likely being one of a kind, they also have to deal with Half-Breed Discrimination, struggling balance both sides of their lineage, and generally feeling out of place wherever they go. Naturally, angst will ensue, complete with all sorts of identity issues.

May overlap with Half-Breed Discrimination, which is about how other people treat them. See also Freakiness Shame.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Beastars:
  • After myriad veiled hints, it's revealed that the reason why Legosi has been estranged from his grandfather, who helped raise him, is because of shame Legosi feels over being the result of an interspecies marriage. Though his negative feelings for his grandfather seem to have to do more with his mother killing herself when she grew scales all over her body than for his mixed heritage, and he has made efforts to reconcile with him later on.
  • Leano was a mix between a Komodo Dragon and a Grey Wolf, and while she looked predominantly like a wolf, she began to grow scales, show more reptilian features, and acquire her father's natural poison. She was so afraid of the future of her children that she deliberately sought out another wolf so her kid wouldn't have to suffer as she did, and later killed herself.
  • Melon faced a lot of discrimination for being a child of a Leopard and a Gazelle, leading to him being bullied at school. On top of that, his mixed heritage leaves him unable to react to strong sensations, particularly taste, since his carnivorous and herbivorous palates conflict with one another. The realization that he feels like he's broken as an animal, in addition to learning that his mother didn't see him as either predator or prey but refused to openly acknowledge it, made him snap and become the monster he is at present.
• In Delicious in Dungeon, Marcille is revealed to be a half-human, half-elf. While this lineage grants her the best traits of both races, being sturdier than humans and longer-lived than elves, it also gives her an unstable growth rate/lifespan, and prevents her from having children of her own. This condemns her to a life of loneliness, and Thistle accuses her of wanting to become the Lord of the Dungeon in order to escape this fate.
• Inuyasha: For most of his life, Inuyasha was feared by humans and looked down upon by full-fledged demons because of his mixed heritage. This is actually the reason why he wanted the Shikon Jewel to become a full-fledged demon at the start of the series.
• Tokyo Ghoul: Kaneki experiences a great amount of distress at being turned into a half-human, half-ghoul hybrid and forced to eat human meat to survive. The cutthroat nature of ghoul society, which he struggles to find his place in, doesn't help.
• Tweeny Witches: "Lennon's True Identity" reveals that Lennon is the Child of Forbidden Love between a witch and an ordinary human. Knowing his mixed heritage makes him an outcast, he resents his mother for supposedly abandoning the family out of shame and believes that humans would reject him even though almost none of them have ever known the witches, let alone him. He gets better some episodes later, though.

Comic Books

• Voodoo is part-Daemonite. The knowledge that one of her ancestors belonged to an Always Chaotic Evil race causes her no shortage of grief, especially when the other Wild C.A.T.s find out and shun her.

Fan Works

Crossover

• Resistance ris Rutile: Velma is rewritten as a Vulcan/Bajoran hybrid named T'Vel and her character profile describes her as "torn between Vulcan logic and Bajoran religious beliefs."
• The fact that Luz is half-human in Luz Belos: Princess of the Boiling Isles was kept a secret until Grom revealed it to the entire school, and her half-human physiology makes learning magic come less naturally to her than her peers.

Film-Animated

• Balto has it in Balto. He is picked on by the local dogs and he angsts over a group of wolves howling to him.
  Boris: Not a dog. Not a wolf. All he knows is what he is not. If only he could see what he *is*.

Film-Live Action

• Aquaman (2018): Orm and the elite of Atlantis look down on Arthur because he is half-Atlantean/half-human. Unable to cope with his mother leaving the family to return to Atlantis, Arthur himself rejects his Atlantean heritage, preferring to identify as human, refusing to visit Atlantis, and rejecting his birth right despite all attempts to persuade him to do otherwise.

Literature

• Dragonlance: Tanthalas Half-Elven (Tanis) is a half-elf and spends much of the earlier books being torn between his human and elven sides, including taking both a human and an elven lover. His case is made worse by the fact that he is the product of rape and suffered a great deal of abuse at the hands of the elves that raised him.
• Soon I Will Be Invincible: Damsel's parents weren't even biologically compatible — her mother was closer to a fish person — and it took some major genetic tinkering to even make her. While technically an Opposite-Sex Clone of her father, Stormcloud, with some of her mother's DNA added in, she's still alien enough she failed the blood test to join the Super Squadron, which didn't accept off-worlders, a personal dream of hers. She has superpowers but requires medication to keep her body from tearing itself apart due to the conflict of her designer genes.
• Spork: The eponymous utensil is the son of a spoon and a fork. He feels useless and wishes he was just a spoon or just a fork until he's given to a messy baby who has some use for him.
• Silverwing: In the third book, Griffin is a hybrid Silverwing-Brightwing bat. He feels like a bit of a freak because he looks like a combination of his parents' species and doesn't completely fit in with the Silverwings that they live with.
• Warcraft: The Last Guardian: Garona Halforcen, a half-orc half-human woman, talks about how neither humans nor orcs view her as "one of them". There will always be something different about her that makes them not accept her, whether it's her green skin or her smaller hands.
• Dash from Fractured Stars is the son of a mundane father and a Starseer mother. He grew up in a Starseer enclave where his psychic powers weren't as strong as everyone else's, thanks to his diluted genes. He left the planet to become a pilot, but now he hides his heritage from everyone else, because in most of the system, Starseers are widely hated and oppressed and seen as dangerous threats.

Live-Action TV

• Farscape:
  • When D'Argo is finally reunited with Ka Jothee in season 2, it's revealed that, having been born as a result of a Maligned Mixed Marriage between a Luxan and a Sebacean, Jothee has been subjected to a great deal of discrimination throughout his life, even being sold into slavery at one point. It eventually got so bad that Jothee went so far as to mutilate his face and tenkas in an attempt to erase any signs of Luxan heritage.
  • Scorpius was conceived as part of a Scarran breeding program conducted on Sebacean prisoners and born with several chronic health disorders due to the species incompatibilities; Sebaceans can't stand high temperatures, while Scarrans thrive in it. As a result, Scorpius spent his youth being horribly abused for his "Sebacean weakness" before finally breaking out of captivity, fitting himself with an internal coolant system to control his condition, and seeking information on his parents out of a desperate need to find out "who I should be." As an adult, he deliberately conceals as much of his Scarran nature as possible — keeping his voice high-pitched, suppressing his temper, avoiding the use of his Super-Strength — and often appears embarrassed whenever he loses control.
• Power Rangers Mystic Force: Phineas introduced himself as a Troblin, half-troll, half-goblin, pointing out that neither side of his family was particularly interested in being near him. Of course, any actual exploration of angst kind of took a backseat to the resurrection of the army of evil monsters bent on destroying the world.
• Sesame Street: Blogg is half-troll and half-fairy, so he lives in a troll town but goes to a fairy school. He doesn't mind being half-troll at the fairy school, but when his classmates and teacher visit his hometown with him, he denies that he's half-fairy to the citizens and hides his wings.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Tora Ziyal is half-Cardassian and half-Bajoran, which causes a lot of angst for her because up until very recently, Cardassians oppressed Bajorans, so she feels out of place on both planets. It says something that the only people she seems truly comfortable around are Kira, a former Bajoran freedom fighter, and Garak, an exiled Cardassian.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • Deanna Troi's father was a human but her mother is a Betazoid, a type of alien with Telepathy. She usually doesn't mind, but some episodes have her angsting, such as in "Haven" when she doesn't want an Arranged Marriage despite it being the Betazoid way and in "The Loss" when her powers go away and she wonders if this is what it's like being fully human.
  • Alexander Rozhenko is a young boy who is three-quarters Klingon and one-quarter human, so he often has trouble deciding whether to have a Klingon culture or a human one.
  • K'Ehleyr was a lady who was half-human and half-Klingon. She hated Klingon culture and tried to suppress her anger whenever she got angry for fear of seeming "too Klingon" because Klingons are infamous in-universe for being aggro.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: When Spock was a boy, he was mistreated by Vulcans for being half-human and half-Vulcan, an alien species that suppresses emotions, and didn't know which species to live the lifestyle of. Although he chose the Vulcan way, and by the time of TOS makes every effort to act fully Vulcan, his own father rejected him for choosing Starfleet over the Vulcan Science Academy and Vulcan society continues to ostracize him.
• Star Trek: Voyager: B'Elanna Torres is half-human and half-Klingon. Her human classmates used to tease her for the ridges on her forehead and claim that her fiery personality was due to being half-Klingon. She also blames her Klingon side for driving her father away when she was a child. When she gets pregnant in "Lineage", she wants to defy this by genetically-engineering her future daughter so that she would have no forehead ridges and thus appear completely human, but her husband and the Doctor say no.

Music

• Played for Laughs in Anthony Murphy's song "The Orange and the Green," sung from the perspective of an Irish man with an Ulster Protestant ("orange") father and an Irish Catholic ("green") mother. He was baptized twice, went to two churches every Sunday, and was homeschooled because his parents couldn't agree on what school to send him to.
  They've both passed on, God rest 'em, but left me caught between
  That awful color problem of the Orange and the Green!

Video Games

• Castlevania: Alucard sees his vampiric half, being Count Dracula's son, as a curse.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Dante resents being half-human, half-demon, seeing his demonic heritage as a curse.
  • Vergil also resents being a half-human, half-demon. But unlike his brother, he views his human side as a form of weakness and got pissed off in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening when Arkham mocks him as an "incomplete being" because of it.
• EverQuest: The entire race of half-elves feel like they're stuck in between human and elven culture. In 1, the half-elves mostly live among humans and wood elves, but are often nomadic. In EverQuest II, they have taken to wild hairstyles, hair dye and facial piercings to emphasize how they don't quite fit in, basically becoming a race of disaffected teenagers.
• Final Fantasy VI: Terra is half-human and half-Esper. She has to contend with the fact that as half-Esper, she is viewed as a weapon of mass destruction that both sides of the conflict want to use.
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance: Soren is one of the Branded — half-Laguz, half-beorc. Soren was ostracized and abused by beorc and laguz alike since he was a child, and as a result has severe trust issues, expecting people to reject him upon finding out what he is. This is all despite the fact that being a Branded means virtually nothing.

Webcomics

• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic: Glon is half-human, half-orc, though he believed himself to be half-elf at first. He had issues due to being Raised by Humans, which goes against his more violent orc instincts and since he'd never met a Token Heroic Orc before meeting his mother, he was in denial about his heritage as well.
• The online comic Puppity has the titular character experience the stress (and joys) of being a half-dog, half-cat.

Western Animation

• Blue Eye Samurai: Mizu is the child of a Japanese mother and white father, as evidenced by her blue eyes; this being the Edo period when foreigners even being in Japan was a crime punishable by death, she's subjected to extreme prejudice and discrimination, being seen as less than human for her entire life. Her main goal is to find and kill any of the men who might be her father (as there were exactly four white men in Japan at the time she was conceived, and she's got a list).
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Zigzagged. While Kipo does love being an half-human, half-Jaguar Mute hybrid as result of her parents creating her as a "living science experiment", there are times where she is afraid that her shapeshifting powers would scare off (Wolf) or accidentaly hurt (Benson) people she cares about.
• Steven Universe: Steven generally enjoys being a Child of Two Worlds, but even at the start is afraid being half-human will hinder his abilities as a Crystal Gem. As time goes on, Steven starts to feel more insecure about his status as the only Gem hybrid in existence and struggles to find balance between his human half and Gem half.
• Alfred J. Kwak: The major villain Dolf is the son of a crow and a blackbird, and the blackbird parent dies when he's young. He's mostly able to pass for a crow, but is left with a yellow beak he dyes black with shoe polish. This causes him many psychological issues down the road
• The Ghost and Molly McGee: Molly, who's half-Thai, half-white, experiences this in "100% Molly McGee" when her mom's side of the family visits and she feels disconnected from her Thai heritage. The fact that her brother and even her white father speak Thai better than her doesn't help either. Molly tries to immerse herself in Thai culture as much as possible to make up for this, but eventually her relatives tell her she's perfect the way she is.

---