Why is there both "Human Mom, Non-Human Dad" and "Half-Human Hybrid"?

A Half-Human Hybrid would either have to have a human mom and non-human dad, or a human dad and non-human mom. The description for the trope Human Mom Non Human Dad implies that there's a very specific gender dynamic when the father is non-human, but the title doesn't indicate that, and lots of examples say nothing about the dynamic. Then the page has a whole section for inversions, of which even fewer examples fit.

There are a lot of Half-Human Hybrid examples that were created artificially, which means the oher trope does not cover them.

Edited by Oculto on Jun 11th 2021 at 5:09:51 PM

Huh, for some reason the page history says it was made in 2020, but it's from 2010.

Anyway, older pages have this annoying habit of softsplitting Playing With, which you can undo yourself or ask the Softsplit Cleanup for help. I did that for Tenor Boy semirecently.

It doesn't change the fact that Human Mom Non Human Dad is pretty much The Same, but More Specific to Half-Human Hybrid.

Yeah, but artificial hybrid characters tend to be very different to those born of mixed parenthood and there are more than enough examples of both tropes to fill their pages.

Maybe the Half-Human Hybrid page could be changed to include only those who are not the product of mixed parenthood.

Edited by Oculto on Jun 12th 2021 at 1:03:16 PM

In what way are they different? Looking at the examples' write-ups, there are no significant differences of characterization/dynamics/story-arc between hybrids that are born of mixed parentage and those that are artificially created (whether by science or magic). Their hybrid nature might affect their physiology, psychology and how they are treated in the society, but the cause of their hybrid status isn't really relevant in most of these instances. The parenthood vs. artificial distinction is not even enough to soft-split, let alone hard split.

Seconding that this sounds redundant to Half-Human Hybrid. At best it's The Same, but More Specific.

Just looking at the titles alone, I would say these are absolutely redundant and should be merged into Half-Human Hybrid.

I think Human Mom, Non-Human Dad in practice is redundant and wouldn’t disagree with a merge.

However, I agree with the description that there’s a specific Women Are Delicate and Women Are Wiser aspect to the dynamic: the woman is ravished by some powerful creature, her child loves her because she’s kind and hardworking (esp if single mom), the dad is representative of some powerful force alien to the audience while the mom represents humanity. Many powerful Greek demigods of yore are sons of Zeus and some hapless woman. And just off the top of my head:

• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Demigod protagonist raised by single human mom, Audience Surrogate into the world of Greek myth, mom is representative of normality (that said many other characters have a goddess mom, but they aren’t the viewpoint and their family lives aren’t delved into as much)
• Castlevania (2017): Dhampyr main character disagrees with vampire dad’s decision to wage war on humanity because it’s not what human mom would have wanted
• Star Trek (2009): Half-“cold unfeeling alien” character’s empathy and care is attributed to his human mother

And so on. Gender inversions exist but because of the associations of femininity with motherhood, emotion, and care, and fatherhood being thought of as less “emotional”, I think this could be workable.

Again, in theory. In practice I agree this probably doesn’t show up.

Edited by Synchronicity on Jun 12th 2021 at 9:11:11 AM

Uhm, I wanted to delete this post as I have seen I was wrong, but I did not find an option.

Edited by Oculto on Jun 12th 2021 at 3:23:24 PM

I agree with the theory/practice divide. We might be able to salvage a "Hybrid embraces humanity because of loving maternal figure", but it would need to start without the baggage of HMNHD. A wick check and trip to TRS seems in order. (Perhaps the check will demonstrate correct use.)

This would be an example where we focused too much on giving a trope a description for a title instead of an actual name. The idea behind Human Mom Non Human Dad seems to be the idea of otherworldly figures leaving a child on earth, making it akin to Mars Needs Women and placing emphasis on the imbalance of the opposite with a human father and non-human mother. Half-Human Hybrid is for general hybrids of all kinds.

I think that "hybrid is raised among/as one species" could be a trope in its own right.

Merge. Cases of artificially created human hybrids can be additionally listed under Artificial Hybrid.

The way I see it, Human Mom, Non-Human Dad is specifically about the noticeable tendency among half-human hybrids for the father to be the non-human one. It is not about the hybrids themselves.

In theory, yes. But as a trope function, they're used interchangeably.

This thread inspired me to launch Hybrid All Along to cover some cases of a hybrid being raised by only one of their parent species.

I did a wick check for this at Sandbox.Human Mom Nonhuman Dad Wick Check. As expected, the wicks don't do much more than list the parents' species, and 1/5 of the examples that do so are "inverted" (human dad, nonhuman mom), further evidence that it is functionally Half-Human Hybrid. I'll put it on the TRS Queue.

What about examples of nonhuman mom, human dad that still keep the otherworldly, detached parent vs supportive, present parent dynamic? There are some Percy Jackson universe characters that have it, such as Piper and arguably Anabeth.

I don't see why that additional information can't just be included in Half-Human Hybrid. Or Interspecies Romance, if it's focused more on the parents' relationship/dynamic.

Edited by Adept on Feb 5th 2022 at 12:06:26 AM

Duplicate.

Edited by Adept on Feb 5th 2022 at 12:06:36 AM

Eh, I feel like there's been something of a tendency lately to declare what might be valid concepts not tropeworthy because the current usage is largely interchangeable with something else. Tropers very frequently don't read definitions (or anything beyond the page title) - that doesn't necessarily mean anything about the tropes themselves.

That's true, but it's kind of hard to do anything about that unless we change the title or something to force people to use the trope properly.

I started digging and this is just... weird. Half-Human Hybrid pre-dates Human Mom Non Human Dad. The page says HMNHD was created in 2020 but the TLP archive and archived discussion shows it was launched in May 2009. Dhampyr, which apparently inspired HMNHD, was created in January 2009. This evidently started as a very simple trope, just observing the fact that the father tends to be male while the mother tends to be female. The TLP discussion talked about the overlap with Half-Human Hybrid:

My first thought is, of course, "O the irony!" but it looks like the original distinction was meant to be that this trope concerned the parentage, perhaps as a plot point or other significant element to the narrative, while Half-Human Hybrid was more about the offspring.

An important fact to keep in mind is that there was an open question about the validity of this as a distinct subtrope that was left hanging by Lullabee, the launcher, saying:

This just sounds like someone who didn't want their trope idea or their work to "go to waste." The discussion should have continued for a while.

There may be a missing supertrope for these hybrid tropes, which HMNHD may have been trying to fill, but at this point we may need to simply merge with Half-Human Hybrid (due to the overlap) and then create (or yard) a trope for Hybrid Parentage / Hybrid Parentage Plot. We have other tropes regarding parentage like I Hate You, Vampire Dad, Dhampyr, and Monster and the Maiden. We even have Interspecies Romance. I'm not seeing the point of HMNHD considering all of this, and we'd probably need to look more deeply into trope relations to see if there really is a missing supertrope.

To be clear, I know this is not TRS. I'm trying to find this sort of information before we take it to TRS so we have more context for the problem, and a few possible solutions from the get-go.

At best, HMNHD could be a Trope in Aggregate where there is a tendency, when creating a Half-Human Hybrid character, to have the female be the human. This is especially true if the "non-human" side is of a more "monstrous" race, such as vampires, demons, orcs, etc (if the non-human side are from a more "beautiful" race such as elves, angels, fairies, etc. it's usually the other way around, and the human parent will be the father).

This is probably based on the mindset that Females Are More Innocent or Women Are Wiser that led to the Female Angel, Male Demon trope.

If we want to keep the idea, I think making it into an example-less TIA page could work. Or we can just fold it into Half-Human Hybrid's Analysis page and cut this one.

Edited by Adept on Feb 19th 2022 at 11:34:45 PM