Mister Seahorse
Kif: Amy, isn't it wonderful? I'm pregnant!
Leela: And not one of those bogus everyday miracles like a sunrise. Aren't you a male?
Amy: Yes it's...great. A great miracle.—Futurama, "Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch"
A male character gets pregnant through Functional Magic, weird science, gender-bending, Bizarre Alien Biology, body swapping, actually being a seahorse or just plain bad writing. Usually played for laughs, but it can be done seriously or even tragically, especially when it's an Alien Impregnation from a Face Full of Alien Wingwong.
Especially common in Fanfic. The "Mister Seahorse" (or "M Preg") story is usually considered one of the scourges of fan writing, second only to Mary Sue, because it is done ridiculously often and almost always badly. It is often given no more explanation than The Power of Love overcoming fundamental biology. But then, do you really want to know which lower orifice the baby came out of? (Fanfic criticism circles describe such offspring as "ass-babies". Use the term with care around Mister Seahorse writers, who can get butthurt.)
Sometimes, Mister Seahorse is justified when the action takes place in the future or if the protagonists are aliens (especially if they are hermaphrodites). Or if it's somehow in canon. Regardless of how it comes about, though, fanfic with this often turns into Kid Fic.
In case you missed that class in Biology, the trope name comes from the fact that male seahorses have an egg pouch. In it, they receive and fertilize the eggs of their mates, and carry them to term.
This is theoretically possible in real life. A Scientist was able to implant an embryo in the abdominal wall of a male baboon, and others report that it is indeed possible to get a man pregnant if the embryo is planted at the proper spot, but only if the man is pumped full of pregnancy hormones. The embryo creates its own placenta, it turns out.[1] Unfortunately, the abdominal wall is not designed to detach from the placenta, resulting in massive bloody injury. Route of exit is also problematic, as neither anus nor urethra were designed to stretch at all (not to mention being our means of getting rid of body waste, with bad consequences should that waste get backed up), and a c-section would either be premature or need to wait for the baby to try to get out on its own first. Needless to say, human male volunteers, not wanting to risk their lives on it, have not been forthcoming.
May involve Bizarre Alien Biology and Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism. If the other parent is also male, you've got Homosexual Reproduction. See also Nightmare Fuel and Body Horror, men. Ladies, we respect you greatly for doing this for the species; please don't laugh too hard at how much this can freak us out. See also Chest Burster and Ass Shove for the potential non-C-section routes of exit.
Probably the most understandable reason to say "But I Can't Be Pregnant" If the character actually is a female (or at least has a uterus), that's Your Tomcat Is Pregnant.
Advertising
- A Dairy Queen ad ran in 2008 depicting a young couple enjoying their ice cream and fantasizing about the future. The man imagines that he is blessed with a son. The woman imagines she is the one holding the video camera while the man gives birth, screaming at her "you did this to me!"
- This cinema board, unintentionally so.
- I guess A Wizard Did It. *Rimshot*
- Yoplait once ran an ad campaign where eating the yogurt gave the consumer a vision of their greatest desire. For one woman, it was her husband giving birth (apparently without pain meds), screaming and cursing about how she did this to him.
- This commercial for Dream Ice Cream, via Imagine Spot.
Anime & Manga
- In Fullmetal Alchemist, Father, mid-way through ...comsuming... Hohenheim, appears to be pregnant, with parts of Hohenheim sticking out of him. It's not any better when Hohenheim completely disappears into Father, making Father look grossly overweight...
- In Genesis of Aquarion, the primary villain ends up pregnant after the 'dance of feathers', with the protagonist... and then later miscarries, though this is the least strange plot point in this series.
- In Futaba-kun Change, the main character learns that he and his entire family are all Gender Benders triggered by sexual arousal, meaning that the person he's always thought of as his father is actually his mother in the purely technical (or biological) sense. Naturally he finds this revelation deeply disturbing.
- Patarillo's Bishounen Maraich is somehow able to become pregnant twice despite being 100% male and human.
- Bancoran is just 'that' manly.
- This is more or less what the entire plot of the manga Sex Pistols (released in English as Love Pistols) is... a bunch of guys trying to get a seahorse boy pregnant with their baby.
- Not so much a seahorse boy as he is a kitty... Monkey... Hybrid... Thing. Other types of animal guys get pregnant, too.
- Played for laughs in CLAMP's Muri Kuri.
- In the Animal X series (Animal X: Daichi no Okite, Animal X: Aragami no Ichizoku, Animal X: Genshi Sairai) made by Sugimoto Ami in 1990, Yuuji, one of the main characters, a gender bender, has the ability to get pregnant and does several times through the series. The series is not only very mature, but provides an even more in depth view of MPREG than even Sex Pistols/Love Pistols.
- Humorously addressed in the Full Metal Panic! TSR comedy radio show. Yes, Full Metal Panic of all series. Gauron tries to get Sousuke to admit that he wants to bear his children. Even funnier is the fact that Sousuke thinks it's possible.
- Kämpfer may or may not have a really weird subversion. At the end of episode 12, a female adult Natsuru is seen reading a Christmas story to a little girl, her husband comes over... and it's revealed to be male Natsuru. With a mustache. Wut.
- A pseudo-example happens in Franken Fran. An experimental stem cell surgery caused a cardinal's brain to develop into a fully developed infant. The cardinal later convinces Fran to remove the baby so he can take his secret past life to his grave. The baby was then given to the nuns that tried to exorcise the cardinal.
Comic Books
- In the Infinity Gauntlet series, Adam Warlock goes through a Journey to the Center of the Mind Vision Quest in which he is turned female, culminating with her giving birth.
- Adam Warlock's female counterpart, Kismet, was artificially created by The Enclave, a group of mad scientists dedicated to creating the perfect being, as a male named Paragon. When Paragon learned of Adam's existence, he decided to transform himself into a female in order to mate with Adam and give birth to a perfect child. Adam wasn't responsive to the idea, so Kismet went in search of another possible mate. In an alternate timeline, she and Quasar (Wendell Vaughn) have a son named Starhawk. Oddly enough, Starhawk ended up sharing a body with his wife, Aleta.
- In the far future of Grendel, planetary emperor Orion Assante must carry his heir to term himself, as his wife's health is too fragile to handle a pregnancy. Justified in that futuristic medicine allows for surgical implantation of the embryo, as well as a Caesarian birth.
- Years later, male pregnancy is still kept as a sacred tradition to birth new rulers.
- Purple Planet Eater Galactus was recently revealed to have a daughter, Galacta, which led to some rife speculation about who her mom was. Turns out it was also Galactus. He also specifies that he was pregnant with her.
- In Nightmares and Fairy Tales, a character ends up pregnant after messing with an otherworldly creature. When he complains, another character points out that it wouldn't have happened if he'd simply left the creature alone.
Fanfiction
Fanfiction based on Anime & Manga
- In the Hellsing fanfic The Way To An Heir, Alucard attempts to impregnate Integra with a spell, but ends up getting himself pregnant. While somewhat bizarre, it actually makes sense (Girlycard duh!)
- Only slightly less disturbing are slash fics that use male pregnancy as a natural consequence of gay sex. One Death Note fanfic -- "Tears"—for instance has Matt getting Mello pregnant, and L forcing Mello to get an abortion because it's impossible to be pregnant and clever at the same time.
- THIS Death Note fanfiction averts and/or parodies the trope in a bizarre way when Beyond Birthday appears to L claiming to be bearing his child.
- In the Gundam Wing Fandom:
- This happens so often to poor Duo Maxwell that you could probably find such a fic in five random searches.
- Heero is popular too, by rape at times, since he was experimented on and all.
- Quatre sometimes gets pregnant too, how empathy relates to that, I haven't a clue.
- Mpreg is very popular in Axis Powers Hetalia, as states and provinces are often depicted as the children of nations. However, if you applied a bit of Fridge Logic to this, you would realize that a country's states are actually parts of their physical body, such as America's ahoge as Nantucket, and Korea's as Seoul, so the entire premise is built upon the MST3K Mantra.
- Poor America seems to suffer the most from this, with a entire livejournal community dedicated to his pregnancies. Such is the popularity of giving America the seahorse treatment that someone actually did a chart detailing the most likely fathers of the respective states with comments on the circumstances of their conception (for instance, Alaska is "Most likely to have resulted from hate-sex").
- Although there is the canon presence of Hong Kong, a city in China, who's sometimes taken by the fandom to be China and England's love child. And Cyprus, another official (if yet-to-appear-in-canon) character, is often similarly viewed as Turkey and Greece's love/hate child.
- As Hong Kong is currently a Special Administrative Region operating with a government separate of China's, that might be why HK has its own personification, unlike the other provinces of China.
- There is the strip that shows Japan conversing with his provinces, depicted as fully grown and taller than Japan himself. Don't think about it too hard.
- There is actually a request in the fandom's Kink Meme asking for a parody of this, and the fills are hilarious. Though when you think about it, it actually sorts of makes sense. Especially when you consider that the Nations aren't even human to begin with.
- The Yu Yu Hakusho fanfic Cockroach by Thoth Moon is a brilliant Deconstruction of this trope. It features Sensui and Itsuki, the last two guys in YYH who should be having a baby and is presented as a very scary Body Horror story, with What Measure Is a Non-Human? added for good measure because of the characters involved. After numerous failed abortion attempts, Itsuki gives birth through a very painful dimensional rift between his legs. So painful, in fact, that he passes out for a few hours during labor in the bathtub. They end up keeping the dead baby in their freezer after Sensui's "Kazuya" personality slaughters it.
- Whenever mpreg isn't being deconstructed, however, Kurama's usually the one getting pregnant. Hiei's capability of getting pregnant has also been questioned, considering his mother's side of the family.
- Fruits Basket slash authors love doing this to Hatori, who transforms into a seahorse if hugged by a woman.
- A popular element of Pet Shop of Horrors fanfiction. Guaranteed to be a FOURTH of the total fanfics available of this fandom. Possibly justified with Count D, as he is not human... But Leon?!
- There are a lot of Dragonball Z fanfics that have either Goku or Vegeta pregnant with each other's baby.
- There's a xxxHolic fanfiction that can be found here that has Doumeki getting pregnant after eating a magic donut. Hilarity Ensues.
- Poor, poor Edward Elric. This canonically extremely badass teenage Child Soldier character seems to do nothing in Yaoi fanfics except get pregnant and suffer horrible Badass Decay every time he turns around. The other father is most commonly his commanding officer who is fourteen years older than him.
- In the Naruto fandom, Naruto would get impregnated (usually because of Sasuke) because of several reasons; the Kyuubi is a female (despite the fact it is basically just a mass of malevolent chakra with no real gender), the "fact" that demons can reproduce regardless of gender and this was carried on into Naruto (or other jinchuuriki like Gaara, opening up a whole new can of worms), there is a jutsu that enables males to get pregnant, Sexy no Jutsu somehow alters the user's entire biology, or Orochimaru is being his usual sick self and experimented on male pregnancies for some completely unknown reason. Take your pick.
- In the rare chance that Sasuke gets pregnant (in the NaruSasu pairings) it's usually because of the Kyuubi's chakra that causes his pregnancy. That or Orochimaru/Kabuto did some rather interesting experiments on poor Sasuke, leading him impregnated by everyone and anyone, including his own brother. Occasionally it's Sexy no Jutsu gone wrong, but since he has the Sharingan wouldn't he just be able to perfectly copy the jutsu?
- The second part of Sasuke's goal is to repopulate the Uchiha clan... but in Self Reliance, he doesn't trust any females he knows to carry his child. So he decides the logical course of action is to carry the child himself.
- Companion Crisis takes this to a whole new level, with Itachi, Hidan, and Deidara getting pregnant, as well as Konan. However, the author makes it plausible and it sucked this troper right in. One of the few I can say I would ever want someone to read.
- Kyuubi the Btch is a deconstruction of the biological aspects of stereotypical MPREG stories. You want to know what happens when a pubescent boy spontaneously develops a functional uterus without a vagina? He menstruates, and the pressure relieves itself by punching a hole in his rectum.
- That is also the story which has a fox trying to hump Naruto. Hilarity ensues. Repeatedly.
- In the rare chance that Sasuke gets pregnant (in the NaruSasu pairings) it's usually because of the Kyuubi's chakra that causes his pregnancy. That or Orochimaru/Kabuto did some rather interesting experiments on poor Sasuke, leading him impregnated by everyone and anyone, including his own brother. Occasionally it's Sexy no Jutsu gone wrong, but since he has the Sharingan wouldn't he just be able to perfectly copy the jutsu?
- This Fairy Tail fanfic, which manages to keep everyone in character for roughly three chapters before slowly derailing (though one character does have a justified, plot relevant character change).
- There's a Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu fic which involves a rare heterosexual version. What happens when a couple wants a kid, but the girl doesn't want to carry a baby? Usually, adoption or nothing. However, when said girl is a Reality Warper...
- This video features a couple of fangirls trying to get Johnny Yong Bosch to sign Bleach M-preg fanart.
- This Bleach Mpreg fic actually does some rationalizing...a bit. The author fully admits that it isn't really good science but that it works for her. She then takes it Up to Eleven by having the character give birth...in enemy territory.
- Parodied in the Code Geass fanfic Ambiguous wherein Suzaku mysteriously gets pregnant by Lelouch. The natural way. The biological impossibility of this is lampshaded, amongst other improbabilities found in Mpreg fanfics such as the credibility of the doctor to reach such a conclusion, and of course, male seahorses.
- Done many times in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Fanfic. Usually Justified by Jaden/Judai's fusion with Yubel granting him (some of) the necessary equipment.
Fanfiction based on Comic Books
- Based on a recent arc in the Mighty Avengers where Tony Stark was turned into a woman temporarily; a mpreg fic called Moth has been written.
- It counts because Tony is now back to being a guy and the other parent is Steve Rogers.
- A decent Affectionate Parody of the genre is That Damn MPreg, featuring the Young Avengers characters Wiccan and Hulkling. Oddly enough, these two characters are relatively easy to explain away in terms of an Mister Seahorse: Hulkling is a shapeshifter, and Wiccan can alter reality in a limited fashion (by way of example, the character who he is based off of, Scarlet Witch, got pregnant off a robot, which is on a level of insanity equal to Mister Seahorse).
- The universe also has Grace Summers, the daughter of Sean Cassidy-Guthrie and Christian Summers. Carried to term by Christian though the circumstances regarding what allowed the pregnancy remains a mystery.
Fanfiction based on Film
- This extremely frightening fic has the Joker knocking up Scarecrow. It's Nolanverse ... if that helps.
- Naturally, the Parody Fic series Sith Academy had a couple of things to say on this topic. In the first, no actual Mister Seahorse takes place; it is simply that an addled Yaddle assumes that all the patients for her free clinic are pregnant. The follow up to this involves Bizarre Alien Biology in the otherwise human-seeming Jon-Tra Volta, and a wild night with a wookie.
- Used in the The Rocky Horror Picture Show fanfic Parental Guidance in which it's Dr. Frank N. Furter who ends up pregnant. Most of the questionable aspects of Mpreg are Handwaved/explained via Bizarre Alien Biology. Long story short, Frank becomes pregnant (the "father" is yet to be revealed), grows really fat, and, instead of giving birth to live young (which is the standard for most Mpreg fics), ends up laying a clutch of eggs.
- X-Men:First Class, wherein just one hilarious macro image launched an entire wave of fanfics wherein Erik impregnates Charles. The science is usually handwaved using the idea of Charles simply having a second mutation.
Fanfiction based on Literature
- Harry Potter fanfic writers love this to death. At least the unpredictably of magic gives it a fair reason/excuse. Most of the time.
- It's perfectly common to see Harry knocked up with twins, usually, from Draco or Snape, or anyone really.
- A Snape/Lupin mpreg story can be read here It's not a slash story and surprisingly well written, despite the first chapter being a bit OOC.
- There was a Harry Potter fanfiction in which Ron and Draco had a fertility potion spilled on them during a private detention in Snape's dungeon, leading to Ron becoming pregnant by Draco, who left him, so Ron ran off to have sex with Harry, who dumped him after finding out Ron had slept with Draco; then Ron started going out with Gary Stu!Neville, who just so happened to have a crush on Blaise, leading to Ron and Neville making out in front of Blaise and Draco in order to make them jealous, which preceded Neville finding out about Ron's pregnancy and declaring that he wanted to be the baby's father, while Mentor!Snape helped them along. There wasn't a female character in the fic.
- There is a Harry Potter fanfic where Harry gives birth to a kitten, after having gay sex with Voldemort while transmuted. Couldn't make this up if I tried, people.
- My Immortal unintentionally references this in the line where Harry fends off two peeping toms by yelling "ABRA KEDAVRA!" and "pointing his womb".
- The Lord of the Rings:
- The creators of Bag Enders are also known for comedic mpreg, and described it thus in their "Horrifically Honest Guide to Fanfiction Terms": "Since there exists no fanfic genre of ‘M-PMT’ or ‘M-bloody awful period pain’, this is one outlet to make your characters get all the suffering of being female with none of the benefits. Bwahahaahahaa!"
- Feel free to alternate between cringing and cracking up while reading the ultimate Legolas/Aragorn. "My assumption is correct: your birth canal has formed." NO. WORDS.
- One Redwall fanfic unintentionally references this. The Mary Sue heroine's sidekick was supposedly the daughter of the canon characters Brome and Keyla. Brome is a male mouse, and Keyla, despite the Gender Blender Name, is a male otter. As they didn't appear in the fic, one can only assume the author forgot the gender and/or species of at least one of them, but the mental image wasn't fun. Unless you're into that.
Fanfiction based on Live Action TV
- This Star Trek: Voyager fanfic is a classic parody of mpreg fanfic cliches.
- A number of Heroes fanfics feature Mohinder giving birth to Sylar's baby. This is normally justified by the good doctor's experimentation with a defective Super Serum. In an alternate future, the formula transformed him into some sort of bug mutant, so who's to guess what all else it might have done to him. Though, one has to imagine it could just as easily be written the other way around since Sylar is a shapeshifter.
- I've Heard Nothing If It Wasn't the Wind, an Alternate Universe CSI: NY fanfic that treats the trope as horror and features Danny as Mister Seahorse and Mac as the father, sort of (via a vengeful and very nasty demon).
- There is an Andromeda fic (NSFW) where Tyr finds himself a highly evolved lover who cannot have children due to her body rejecting the sperm. So, her eggs are implanted into Tyr (no operation - a subconscious desire come true). Her nanobots even rebuild him so he gives birth the natural way.
- There's a House fanfic that fits the trope, with a crackfic-ish inspiration. Read it here.
- Star Trek: The Original Series slash writers are fond of this trope, often utilizing Spock's alien-human hybrid status or random alien-induced mutations as a justification for some truly bizarre biology.
- This Doctor Who fanfiction has the Doctor revealing that he became female during his last regeneration and getting pregnant with Jack's baby. Twice. And the second time, Jack isn't there. It's explained fairly well, though. The title is "57 Academics Just Punched the Air". A cookie if you know where that's from.
- There are a couple of fairly squicky Doctor/Master slash fics involving the Master (usually in a position of some power) forcibly impregnating the Doctor through magic Time Lord science. Whilst these rarely raise the question of why he would make the Doctor carry a fetus to term only to have to surgically remove it, some are well-characterized enough to point out that the Master is bat-shit insane. Here it is.
- This trope has finally, officially reared its ugly head in the Big Bang Theory fandom with this charming little tale. If you can't face it, but are still curious as to who the victim is: It's Sheldon.
- It's not exactly surprising that Torchwood fanfic authors latched onto Jack's throwaway line "Well, at least I won't get pregnant. Never doing that again," while talking about oestrogen in the rain from contraceptives getting in the water supply. And considering that he's from the 51st century, this is less ridiculous than in most fandoms.
- It happens in the Merlin/Arthur-ridden Merlin fandom, and is parodied in Caught in a Slash.
Arthur: "You think that my male manservant is PREGNANT?"
Gaius: "Yes, Sire."
- And when Gaius reveals that there's something worse
Gaius: "It's yours, Sire."
- Arthur is understandably horrified... Considering that they've never had sex.
- An extremely long American Idol fanfic titled Cambios narrates the entire life chronicles of David Cook and David Archuleta's kids, beginning with their daughter Reyna who was conceived accidentally during their time at AI (meaning Archie was 16, people!), with very little explanation (something about some guys being able to get pregnant). The two go on to have four more children, and Archie looks 'exactly the same' a decade later. It ends with Reyna auditioning for American Idol, and the judges proceed to tell her that she looks like both Archie and Cook, and her singing voice is a mixture of the two.
- ... there's American Idol fanfiction? What.
- Very common in the Glee fandom with Kurt/Blaine shippers. Finn supossedly utters the line 'don't get my baby brother pregnant' a lot.
- Numerous Sherlock fanfics. Usually Sherlock/John By far the weirdest one is this one.
Fanfiction based on Music
- There's a Dragon Force (video game) fanfic where Sam Totman gets "womb implant" surgery while drunk in Paris. And it will never stop being funny. Ever.
- Aren't you supposed to be sober to consent to surgery like that?
- And there's one (by the same author) where a hermaphroditic Fred Leclercq conceives sextuplets after being raped by one of his bandmates from Maladaptive. It's significantly less funny.
- There's even a Beatles mpreg fic in which Paul gets pregnant.
- As if Twincest wasn't Squick enough (YMMV), many Tokio Hotel fanfics involve Tom impregnating Bill somehow.
Fanfiction based on Video Games
- The Kingdom Hearts fanfic 'Repercussions of Femininity' has one of these once it hits Atlantica. It's literally Mr Seahorse.
- Surrogate [dead link] is a Team Fortress 2 fanfic dedicated to deconstructing Mister Seahorse. It didn't end well.
- Used to be a fairly common speculation about draenei among the WoW fanbase (due, for what it's worth, both to their extra-Azerothian origin and to the males of the race being so much bigger than the females). While this is now pretty much Jossed by Garona's canonical origin, the more-or-less tame—and evocatively titled—fanfic Hippocampi is nonetheless worth a chuckle.
- This Mega Man Battle Network fanfiction applies this to Megaman, but does a surprisingly well job in explaining it.
- There are also other Megaman fanfics [dead link] that involves Robot Masters getting pregnant for unknown reasons. These fanfics were made by Shadowshinobi.
- Magicrat of Deviantart has written several of these, mostly for Final Fantasy VII and Team Fortress 2. The Team Fortress 2 ones make it plausible (at least in the Team Fortress 2 verse) by explaining it as an implant and an attempt to remove women from the process.
Fanfiction based on Web Comics
- Toby "Radiation" Fox, one of the composers for Homestuck, wrote "I'm Having A Baby And The Baby Is You", a deliberately So Bad It's Good "Rock Opera" about Dave giving birth to John (a thirteen-year-old John is also there at the time and has to help deliver the baby). This was written to protest a new forum rule saying that no depictions in fanfic or fanart of the child characters may show sex or imply sex has happened, including (specifically) pregnancy. While it's completely stupid, the mods clamp down pretty hard on any discussion on it at all.
- One of the plot devices in the Crack Pairing thread in the Order of the Stick forums. It doesn't get used very often, though, but when it does, it is hilarious.
- Even Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is not immune. Definitely Played for Laughs and Fan Disservice.
Fanfiction based on Web Original
- This is a suprisingly well-done (and Nightmare Fuel-ish) Dark Fic about The Nostalgia Chick getting The Nostalgia Critic pregnant with an Eldritch Abomination. Better Than It Sounds.
Fanfiction based on Western Animation
- There's male pregnancy as horror fanfic. There is a Teen Titans animated series fic where Robin was used (quite unwillingly) for a Mad Science experiment...and impregnated with several hundred sea monster embryos. Monsters in the Closet - it can be found here in all its debatably wonderful, Nightmare Fuel glory.
- The Mind of a Hero. The circumstances behind it, while Weird Science, are far from happy. It involves an odd device to bring Danny's inner shadow forth... and his first words: "Why my mother?!"
- The same writer has also done Mister Seahorse for Ben 10, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Invader Zim, Xiaolin Showdown, and Transformers Animated.
- Well, the Transformers thing is kinda understandable, since the robot characters (obviously) don't really have genders. As to how a robot would actually get pregnant in the first place...
- Pregnant nothing, they explicitly reproduce by MacGuffin in that season, and one of 'em needs Brain Bleach after being told where human babies come from.
- Well, the Transformers thing is kinda understandable, since the robot characters (obviously) don't really have genders. As to how a robot would actually get pregnant in the first place...
- The same writer has also done Mister Seahorse for Ben 10, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Invader Zim, Xiaolin Showdown, and Transformers Animated.
- Some Avatar: The Last Airbender slash writers have the disturbing tendency to get Zuko knocked up, usually with Jet's spawn. Worse, one particular author wrote two fics on the subject using the dreaded Rape Is Love plot device (as if Zuko hasn't already suffered enough in canon, jeez). But to be fair to her, she did at least give semi-plausible explanations for Zuko's ability to carry children.
- This Invader Zim fanfic shows an interesting take on this trope.
Film
- The 1998 Godzilla film (the one with GINO). GINO is allegedly a male lizard, who is pregnant, and yes, does lay eggs.
- The Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito vehicle Junior, in which Arnold plays a scientist who is willing to get pregnant. The movie is a comedy, but the pregnancy is played surprisingly seriously here, leading to some emotional development in Arnold's character.
- Rabbit Test, a 1978 film directed by Joan Rivers and starring Billy Crystal.
- A slightly squickier variant happens in the Alien movies, wherein people of any gender and presumably any species can be impregnated with baby aliens. The first victim in the series is, notably, male. In fact, it was John Hurt.
- John Hurt was alien-pregnant again in Spaceballs.
- Louis Gossett Jr. is a pregnant
malehermaphroditic and naturally parthenogenetic alien in Enemy Mine. - The 1940 Gender Bender comedy Turnabout ends with a husband and wife seemingly returning back to normal after spending most of the film in each other's bodies...until the ancient Indian idol that made the initial switch confesses that he's screwed up and informs the husband that he's now pregnant.
- It happens, in an extreme Body Horror way, to a few of the brainwashed townspeople in Slither. It almost happens to the main character but he escapes it due to a technicality.
- Male Kabiijians in Evil Alien Conquerors.
- The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, wherein a group of janitors become guinea pigs for a new type of self-warming cookie. The chemicals used to create said cookie cause a sort of fishlike creature to grow in the males who eat them, which are later "birthed" through the anus.
- This short, produced by the Biola University Guerrilla Film Initiative: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheFilmInitiative#p/u/4/KykDrrb9ZVg
- One of the posters for A Nightmare On Elm Street 5 The Dream Child depicts Freddy Krueger this way. Lord of nightmares indeed.
Literature
- In the Wild Cards series, Dr. Tachyon has his mind swapped by his Ax Crazy grandson Blaise, who leaves him a teenaged girl's body. Blaise rapes her repeatedly, eventually getting her pregnant shortly before leaving Earth (with the girl trapped in Tachyon's original body in tow). By the time Tachyon has gotten back into his original body, s/he had not only given birth, but had gotten pregnant again.
- In the short story -All You Zombies- by Robert Heinlein an intersexed woman gives birth then gets a sex change and travels back in time and impregnates herself. By the end of the story the mother, father, baby, and narrator are all revealed to have been the same person. Aren't time travel loops fun?
- Jack Chalker's transformation novels, such as the Well World series, often feature this happening to assorted characters, usually through Bizarre Alien Biology.
- One was even transformed into an actual seahorse. He didn't actually get pregnant, but the possibility was acknowleged.
- Played straight with the titular alien species in Chalker's Web of The Chozen: Female choz lay six eggs and both males and females incubate them in brood pouches. The sex of the offspring is determined by the sex of the incubating parent with the normal ratio being 2 males to 4 females. The hero of the story is the only male choz who produces female offspring.
- An Anne McCaffrey short story in which an alien prostitute impregnates half the male population of a small town. The title, A Horse From A Different Sea, references the seahorse analogy.
- An exceptionally icky example is present in Iain M. Banks' Excession, where a Gender Bender husband and wife store sperm while both male and then fertilize themselves with each other's sperm when female to both give birth at the same time. While this is an accepted practice in the far future society portrayed, the wife goes Ax Crazy with a knife and kills the fetus (also nearly killing her husband) when the (now female) husband has an affair with a woman while pregnant, the husband then separates from the wife while the wife goes nuts and stabilizes her pregnancy to remain pregnant for the rest of her life. This sequence of events so disturbs the AI of the colony ship they lived on at the time (which had watched millions of people live and die on it over its career) that it resolves to fix their broken psyches as a personal preoccupation. The story ends “happily ever after” with the couple reconciled before once again going their own ways, the wife giving birth and then being allowed to raise the child she'd gestated for the last 20 years, and the husband gone off to join a species of Straw Men.
- In The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper, some aliens temporarily stranded on Earth pick on a group of powerful conservative American men to incubate their young, reasoning that since the men are opposed to abortion, they'll agree that it is their duty to help the aliens out. The men are not happy, especially when it turns out the young aliens will have to eat their way out of their bodies. The whole incident provides an Anvilicious moral: don't force others to do what you aren't willing to do yourself.
- Of course, the proper response to this idiocy is to transplant the parasitical young to a cow or something, execute the parents for attempted murder, and call it a day. A classic display of The War On Straw.
- "Execute the parents for attempted murder"? Without torturing them first?
- That would assume the human hosts were to die - they all (except one suicide) were returned largely intact after the experience - the aliens even trained them in meditation techniques to help them through the 'birth'.
- Human males were the only nearby species with the right hormonal mix - on their home planet a bovine-esque animal was the usual incubator. The aliens were 'caught short', due to needing to intervene to help humanity, and had to breed-or-die IIRC.
- Of course, the proper response to this idiocy is to transplant the parasitical young to a cow or something, execute the parents for attempted murder, and call it a day. A classic display of The War On Straw.
- Parodied in the last A Series of Unfortunate Events book, where Count Olaf's ultimate disguise is of a pregnant woman. Even the people he's trying to fool think it's ridiculous.
- The Yilanè in Harry Harrison's West of Eden trilogy are one of the best uses of this in fiction. The race function in much the same way as seahorses. Few males survive more than three brutal pregnancies, and the society is dominated by females who keep the males solely as breeders (despite them being every bit as intelligent as the females).
- In Walter Jon Williams's novel Aristoi, the (male) protagonist's boyfriend voluntarily becomes pregnant with the protagonist's sperm, using the commonplace technology of the far future (it's so far in the future that people have godlike powers and can do just about anything).
- Briefly mentioned in Diane Duane's High Wizardry.
- Occasionally mentioned in passing in some of S.L. Viehl's books; for example, a rumor circulates in Stardoc that Cherijo has impregnated Kao. And then, there's this exchange in Blade Dancer:
Thgill: I'd love to have your offspring. How about we get intoxicated, go back to my place, and you impregnate me?
Jory: Doesn't work that way with my kind, pal.
Thgill: Pity.
- One science-fiction story (the author of which clearly had issues with men) involved a matriarchal society in which males were implanted with embryos. The last third of the story was a graphic, description of the baby tearing its way out of the male's body.
- In Cordwainer Smiths short story The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal the once-human klopts reproduce by implanting a lump of cells in the gut and give birth by C-section. Plot of which can be found here.
- In The Stress of Her Regard, silicon-based vampiric lifeforms from Earth's primordial past are roused from torpor when one of them, resembling a small statue, is implanted in the body of a living man. To send them back into hibernation, the obstetrician protagonist must perform a forced Caesarian section to extract the statue (which has grown since the first surgery!).
- Mentioned offhandedly in Charles Stross's Iron Sunrise.
- Journey to the West
- In The Whims Of Creation, by Simon Hawke, the baby incubators on a generation starship are believed to have been compromised by a rogue computer program. Several characters speculate that any existing fetuses may have to be gestated the old-fashioned way for the first time in centuries. When a female character takes exception, her husband reminds her that technology has advanced far enough to allow him to do all the hard work. Although the incubator issue is resolved, the book ends with him giving birth to their daughter.
- In the William Schoell sci-fi/horror novel Dragon, several workers helping to uncover an ancient temple become sick and are taken to the local hospital. After doing exams, the stunned doctor declares that somehow, they're pregnant. It turns out this is one stage of the temple's secretly super-advanced defense system. The men are "pregnant" with hideous monstrosities which, like in Alien, burst out of them and proceed to kill everyone in the hospital.
- In a variant, the Thomas Disch short story "Emancipation" featured a man who gets surgically altered so he can breast-feed his child, in a future where gestation routinely occurs in People Jars. Counts as Did Not Do the Research since hormone treatments would be all that was necessary.
- In the Prince Roger series, the "women" of Marduk are by the strictest definition male. The "men" of the species have an organ which resembles human male genitalia, but it's actually an ovipositor. When a Mardukan man ovulates, he implants the ova into a woman, who fertilizes the egg and carries it to term.
- Stanley Pottinger's "The Fourth Procedure" features a VERY pro-life Strawman Politician being impregnated (very much against his will) by a VERY pro-choice surgeon.
- Mentioned in Lucian's True History. The people of the moon are a One-Gender Race (all males) and their sons grow inside the calves of the men.
Live-Action TV
- Monkey, a comedic adaptation of the (very old) Chinese novel Journey to the West, has an episode where two of the main characters Zhu Bajie and Xuanzang unknowingly drink magical pregnancy inducing river water flowing through a town filled with nothing but women and Sun Wukong has to retrieve an antidote.
- Lister in Red Dwarf, through having sex with his counterpart from a gender-reversed Alternate Universe.
- Seeing as how the parents were the same person with a different gender, is this a case of Lister being a Truly Single Parent?
- Considering what ELSE Lister's got going on, Truly Single Parent's being the tip of the iceberg.
- Seeing as how the parents were the same person with a different gender, is this a case of Lister being a Truly Single Parent?
- In Alien Nation, Newcomer males have their children transferred into their bodies before they fully come to term, in a more literal seahorse-like way.
- While Tenctonese females incubate the pod until it is time for transfer, the males experience the majority of the pregnancy, including massive hormone changes, mood swings, sensitive nipples, nursing the pod, carrying the extra weight, and (lest we forget the reeeeally fun part) the actual act of giving birth. Ouch.
- Similarly seahorse-like, in Babylon 5, all Narn males have a pouch like that of an opossum or other marsupial, in which newborn babies are placed until they are old enough to go out into the world. Although this biological tidbit never factors into the plot of the series, G'Kar has been known to reference his own body part in unusual euphemisms and refers to some naïve Narns as pouchlings.
- Merton in Big Wolf on Campus after an alien abduction.
- There's even a shout out to Alien in it.
Merton: So, how do you think the baby will make its way into the world, my anatomy being a little different from the average child-bearer.
Alien: Are you familiar with the film Alien?
Merton: Are you kidding? The 1979 Ridley Scott classic, featuring Signourney Weaver in a career-defining role?
Alien: Uh-huh!
Merton: Oh! Remember the part where the alien bursts out of John Hurt's stomach? That was disgusting...you mean?
Alien: Uh-huh.
Merton: *gulp*
- Capt. Jack Harkness has a throwaway line in the first episode ("Everything Changes") of Torchwood "Oh well, at least I won't get pregnant, I'm never doing that again."
- Harkness' home era is the 51st century. The first episode he appeared in showed a nanotechnology that repaired all physical injuries almost instantly and another one that changed humans into monsters and back. Having a male gestate with that level of technology should be trivial.
- In Star Trek: Enterprise, a particularly irresponsible Green-Skinned Space Babe assumes that the mpreg-inducing Green Rocks used by her people won't work on a human, and invites chief engineer Trip Tucker to play with their mind-linking capabilities. Her assumption proves wrong, and Hilarity Ensues. The Klingons were especially amused.
- T'Pol later notes that Trip is the first Earthling male to get pregnant. He wasn't very happy.
- Considering how Earth governments probably banned all research into human augmentation and assisted reproduction in the post-Khan era, that's probably justified, despite Enterprise-era medical advances.
- And later when Trip gets friendly with another alien babe, T'Pol is quick to bring this up once more.
- Considering how Earth governments probably banned all research into human augmentation and assisted reproduction in the post-Khan era, that's probably justified, despite Enterprise-era medical advances.
- The whole episode makes light of what is essentially a rape, with a resulting pregnancy. Tucker is disbelieved, laughed at, and roundly mocked by pretty much everybody. The space babe never told him that sticking their fingers into a bowl of rocks together was their culture's equivalent of having sex. Hilarity Ensues indeed.
- T'Pol later notes that Trip is the first Earthling male to get pregnant. He wasn't very happy.
- In the episode of Quantum Leap titled "8½ Months", Sam leaps into a pregnant woman. Billie Jean Crockett is a pregnant teenager who will make the second biggest mistake of her life - giving her baby up for adoption - unless Sam, as Billie Jean, can convince someone to help her raise her child... before he goes into labor.
- Would've been nice if they'd ever decided whether Sam actually takes over the body of his "hosts", or if he just looks like them. This episode seems to argue for the former, but there's another featuring an amputee in which Sam stands on legs an antagonist can't see.
- They've explained it. Sam is always in his own body, and the person he swaps places with ends up back in the Waiting Room, though both people inhabit an outward aura of the other. After one leap where Al got droolingly distracted by Sam as a blonde bombshell, Project QL tweaked Al's "tuning" so that he would see through Sam's appearances from that point on. Hence why Al argues that Sam can't be pregnant—Sam is still technically in a man's body. Yet, Sam experiences several physical symptoms of pregnancy, including sudden nausea, cravings, backaches, swelling feet, hot flashes, frequent urination, bouts of sleepiness, and mood swings. He also insists that he felt the baby kick. And, when Sam goes into labor, the infant mysteriously vanishes from Billie Jean's womb in the future, while in the past the doctor is somehow able to see "a head of curls" and encourages Billie Jean to push. All the while, Sam is begging Al for help and screaming to "Get...it...out!"
- On The Cosby Show, Cliff once went through a pregnancy along with every other man in the cast- except Grandpa Huxtable, obviously - apparently due to some odd contamination in the water supply. The women were very sympathetic. Clair was wheeling him into the delivery room and Bill stopped to ask another man how it had gone - and, specifically, how much pain it had been. The description almost made Bill find the strength to run away. The show ended with Cliff delivering a six-foot sub sandwich and a two-litre bottle of coke; Denise's husband Martin delivered a toy sailboat. Theo, the unwed father, delivered a red convertible. Guess it was All Just a Dream.
- The official explanation as to how Grandpa Huxtable didn't end up pregnant was due to the alien spores not reaching New Jersey; which would make sense...except for the fact that Sondra and Elvin are established as residing in New Jersey at this point and Elvin was still pregnant.
- Grandpa had to be at least 70, old enough to have gone through man-opause.
- It was All Just a Dream. Did it have to make sense?
- The official explanation as to how Grandpa Huxtable didn't end up pregnant was due to the alien spores not reaching New Jersey; which would make sense...except for the fact that Sondra and Elvin are established as residing in New Jersey at this point and Elvin was still pregnant.
- In an extremely short-lived NBC comedy from 1979 called Turnabout, Sharon Gless and John Schuck are a married couple whose bodies are switched (à la Freaky Friday). In one episode, the husband, who is in the wife's body, thinks the body is pregnant. She/he isn't, but John Schuck gets to deliver some of the worst dialog in TV history when he rambles on about how she (remember, he's the wife) can't wait to feel their child growing inside him.
- Also used in an episode of Charmed when Piper and Leo have their powers magically switched while Piper is pregnant. Leo also somehow got all of Piper's symptoms. And again in the Sandman episode in which Leo ended up pregnant with Piper's baby until he felt the baby kick.
- In Mork and Mindy, Mork gets pregnant and lays an egg bigger than he is, due to Bizarre Alien Biology. It eventually hatches to reveal Mearth, played by 56-year old Jonathan Winters.
- (deadpan) "Look at that poor man, he's been screwed by a giant eyeball and now he's giving birth."
- The Pregnant Man was one of the recurring characters on the Australian sketch comedy programme Australia Youre Standing In It.
- In the Round the Twist episode "The Big Burp", Pete becomes pregnant by holding hands with a dryad after peeing on her tree. He then proceeds to experience an Express Delivery.
- Used as a one-off joke in one of Scrubs' many fantasy sequences. Carla is asked what she would do if she won the lottery, and she imagines Turk being pregnant instead of her.
Turk: Stupid lotto.
- One episode of My Hero (TV) revolved around extraterrestrial George Sunday carrying an alien baby, and hilarity ensued when Dr. Piers Crispin saw the ultrasounds and thought it was Janet's father. (Just to make it a little crackier, the baby is revealed to be a gorilla. Yes.)
- Subverted in another episode, where he decided to give "sympathetic pregnancy" a go by inflating his stomach. Janet was pleased at first, but quickly got sick of it. "I've heard of sympathetic pregnancy, but not with stretch marks."
- In the infamous Funny Aneurysm Moment of a season in Married... with Children where Peggy and Marcy get pregnant at the same time, in one episode, Jefferson has a "sympathetic pregnancy".
Jefferson: My ovaries hurt!
Peggy: Wow, he is really good!
- Subverted in The Young Ones – Vyvyan’s pregnancy turns out to be the BIGGEST CASE of trapped wind on record.
- In the Farscape movie, "The Peacekeeper Wars", Rigel locates and ingests the remains of John and Aeryn so that their bodies can be reintegrated(don't ask). The process works, but Rigel discovers that he's carrying John and Aeryn's baby. The fetus is transplanted back into the mother so she can deliver the child normally. Or as normal as things get on Farscape...
- Grey's Anatomy has a episode with a pregnant man that Izzie, Christina, and Meredith steal from the psych ward. He has the bump and all the symptoms, even a positive pregnancy test. Turns out that he had a tumor-with teeth and hair, no less-growing inside him that produced the pregnancy hormone, thus the positive pregnancy test result. It was removed in surgery
- An episode of iCarly features a scene with Carly and Sam offering a picture of a pregnant man, along with a steaknife and BF Wangs gift certificate, for anyone who can find Sasha Striker.
- In the House episode "Skin Deep," a subplot involved a man dealing with couvade syndrome, to the point of experiencing labor pains along with his wife. House was amused, though the couple were not. Incidentally, it triggered a clue to the main story's problem. Also, see couvade in the Other category.
- Dans Une Galaxie Pres De Chez Vous had an episode where Brad became pregnant with an alien. After it was born, he became very over protective of his offspring, but it all ended with a Crowning Moment of Sadness when the alien baby vanished from existence at the end of its life, making Brad teary eyed of his lost "child".
- Continuing after an episode of when Carmen runs away, one scene of George Lopez shows Carmen (his daughter) returning home, but with a twist -- she is pregnant! After this, George then realizes not only his daughter is pregnant, but also is his wife and his mother. Then, his son Max walks into the room with a large belly as well. After asking his father, "Where is this going to come out?", George abruptly wakes up and responds aloud, "If you are lucky, your bellybutton!" I suppose it was All Just a Dream induced from all the stress of worrying to where Carmen ran away.
- Rembrandt Brown from Sliders suffered this when the team went into a world where the males get pregnant.
- Actually, it was a world where a global epidemic made women unable to carry to full term so men were fitted with vaguely marsupial artificial wombs to insure the child is fully developed.
- The Jaffa from Stargate SG-1, who carry Goa'uld larvae in pouches on their stomachs, are a particularly seahorse-like example, since both genders have pouches—but special credit goes to Jack, who once got turned into a Jaffa and nearly ended up carrying Daniel's larva.
- Jake from The Troop gets bitten by a Snark and impregnated. Afterwards, he has to raise the baby snark briefly, making him miss out on the b-plot and providing a thinly veiled Aesop on the issues of teen pregnancy.
- Aside from the time(s) Colin got stuck with this—what with all of those female roles he ends up playing—there's at least one Irish Drinking Song from Whose Line Is It Anyway? that invokes this... which is promptly forgotten, next verse.
When I got home that night
My ovaries did swell
I puffed up like Jiffy Pop
I'm a dude-- what the hell!?
- Choujuu Sentai Liveman Episode 31: "Mama! The Parasitic monster's cries": Junichi got impregnated by a Zuno beast, and out of it came a Cute Monster named Vega Baby, who sees Junichi as the mom. However, when the baby dies, He got a newfound respect for mothers.
- In one Sex-Ed PSA after two teenagers get magically transported to a gameshow style realm. After declaring that pregnancy is solely a girl's responsibility among other creeds, they temporarily made him pregnant to teach him some respect. It was certainly one of the more bizarre Sex-Ed videos out there.
- Max Sweeney in "The L Word" plays this trope for Drama. In a story literally ripped from the headlines, Max, a trans* man becomes pregnant after having sex with cis-gendered man, Tom. Just because it's not fanfic, doesn't mean it works particularly well (although the article is clean, the site may be considered NSFW).
Machinima
- In Red vs. Blue, Tucker is impregnated by an alien as part of a prophecy. Tucker gives birth at the end of season four, although we do not see the birth take place (thankfully). This also means that we have absolutely no idea which orifice the baby emerged from (again, thankfully).
Music
- The video for Will Young's newest single, Hopes and Fears. Pass the Brain Bleach.
- And cue jokes from Top Gear shippers that Jeremy Clarkson's the father. Er...sperm donor? Whatever.
- The Decemberists' The Tain LP, based on Táin Bó Cuailnge, presumably makes reference to the Curse of Macha (see Mythology below).
Chaplain: and now stricken with pangs
that tear at our backs like thistle down
the mirror's soft silver tain
reflects our last and birthing hour
- The theme song for Bill Nye the Science Guy is sometimes parodied like this:
"Bill Nye, his mom's a guy!"
Mythology
- Done by both Zeus (if a fully grown and armored warrior woman bursting out of your skull AND stitching your pre-term half-mortal son into your thigh counts).
- Also done by Loki (if transforming yourself into a mare in order to distract a horse so that the Æsir will not have to pay its owner for his work and the giving birth to eight-legged steed Sleipnir counts).
- Then Loki ate a woman's half-burnt heart (Don't ask why) and... somehow became pregnant with the first trolls because of that.
- An alternate version of the legend claims that the woman involved was the giantess and witch on whom Loki fathered the Fenrir Wolf and the Midgard Serpent. And also that the result of Loki's pregnancy was Hel, Queen of the Dead.
- There are references to a possibly lost myth where Odin too gave birth (according to Loki).
- Then Loki ate a woman's half-burnt heart (Don't ask why) and... somehow became pregnant with the first trolls because of that.
- Another semi-example is the Welsh text the Mabinogion, in which two brothers, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy, are successively turned into a stag and a hind, a boar and a sow, and a pair of wolves. They are in these forms long enough to bear an offspring from each transformation. After the brothers are turned back into redeemed humans, their animal offspring are then turned into humans and baptized.
- A variation occurs in Celtic myth. A wealthy landowner casually brags to Conor, King of Ulster about how his wife could outrun the King's best horses. Conor is less than pleased with this, and out of spite demands the woman compete in a race. If she fails, her husband will be killed on the spot. To make matters worse, the wife is heavily pregnant. She manages to win the race anyway, before collapsing on the ground and giving birth to a pair of twins. Enraged at how she was treated, she reveals that she is the goddess Macha. Before vanishing, she places a curse: whenever there is a threat to the city of Ulster, every adult male within will spontaneously go into labor for 9 days, leaving the city defenseless.
- Later on, Queen Maeve exploits this weakness when she goes after the Brown Bull of Cooley, leaving the hero Cuchulain to fight her armies singlehandedley.
- In Inuit religion, the first two humans were Aakulujjuusi and Uumarnituq, and were both males. Being the only two humans, they got lonely and decided to mate. Uumarnituq got pregnant, but obviously, he couldn't give birth. So a spell was put on to give him a vagina, and he became the first female.
- Older Than Dirt: In a Hittite legend, Kumarbi wants to overpower Anu, bites off his genitals, and becomes pregnant with his children. Kumarbi being male, they can't get out, so the gods have to cut Kumarbi open, or realize a magic ritual, Depending on the Writer. One text states the three new gods exited through Kumarbi's "good place."
- The Sumerian water god Enki once somehow impregnated himself.
Newspaper Comics
- In Safe Havens, mermen get pregnant.
- Parodied in Baby Blues. When watching a nature DVD which (correctly) explains male seahorse anatomy, Wanda simplifies it by telling Zoe that the male seahorse has the baby. Wanda then offhandedly asks if male seahorses do household chores as well.
- A Dilbert sequence involved Dogbert convincing Dilbert he had made him pregnant by giving him fertility drugs. Dilbert became visibly larger and greatly increased his eating to feed all the multiple babies he thought he had in their until Alice pointed out that a) it was impossible and b) the only evidence he had was his weight gain.
Tabletop Games
- In Exalted, Luna, the shapeshifting goddess of the moon and patron of the Lunar Exalted, has a form called the Two-Faced Bride, an aspect that apparently represents fertility and deceit and which usually appears as a pregnant human of any age and gender. Its apparent preferred form is a pregnant male youth, and it's mentioned that one city was actually visited by the Two-Faced Bride in the guise of a pregnant boy. The various bits of Shapeshifting Squick that are detailed for the Lunar Exalted implies that they, too, are capable of this.
- In Eberron, Changelings physically transform themselves due to doppelganger lineage. The transformation is so complete that females who take on male form can father children, and males who take on female form can become pregnant (but are apparently locked into female gender, if not neccessarily the form they became pregnant in, until they give birth).
- Horribly, horribly deconstructed in Night Horrors: The Wicked Dead. A Dhampyr can be produced regardless of gender, the only requirement being the parents must be a human-vampire couple, although either participant can get pregnant. Since this is a horror story, it gets worse.
- GURPS Technomancer (a world background where science and magic co-exist) has spells for transferring pregnancy, which includes the production of a magical "womb" for males. And the Bio-Tech supplement includes science and super-science for male pregnancy.
Video Games
- In The Sims 2, adult male Sims who are abducted by aliens get their Face Full of Alien Wingwong, and become pregnant when they are returned to Earth. The result of this pregnancy is the same as the result of a human pregnancy in the game, except that the baby will have alien features, including green skin, black eyes and extreme personality traits.
- A cheat mode allows you to make them pregnant of other characters: people they're living with (males, females; can't remember if children too), people passing by at the moment right outside the house, etc...; Squick?
- There are also hacks out that let men get pregnant by their male partners (it also lets a woman get pregnant by another woman).
- Some Pokémon games have glitches where two male or two female Pokemon can breed.
- Brutal Legend. Hoo boy. There are more examples of this in a video game than there probably should be. The Warfather and Overblesser are living Mook Maker demons that can produce units in the middle of the battlefield...by getting pregnant with nothing but his master's say so. Then there's the Ratgut, a Eurotrash zombie whose belly houses dozens of plague infested rats. Yuck.
- Most of the cast of Zeno Clash all seem to believe that this is the reason they were all born, from a character known as Father-Mother. It's not. While Father-Mother is male, he has in fact been stealing infants to raise them as his own.
- Jokingly referenced in Left 4 Dead 2, where Ellis comments on his personal hero, Jimmy Gibbs Jr:
"If the laws of nature allowed it, I would bear that man's children!"
- Yoshi is supposed to be male, but he lays eggs.
Web Comics
- The Bomberman Land Parody webcomics by Hienfan involves a man named Emon getting pregnant with twins. This was played for comedy like most of the other stuff in that webcomic
- In Narbonic, the Where Are They Now? Epilogue strip shows that it is Dave who carried Gamma to term, rather than Helen (they are mad scientists, after all). This had been suggested earlier.
- In Sailor Sun, Honey is Bay's time-traveling future daughter. This dismays the gender-bending Bay to no end, since it implies that she never goes back to being Brad.
- El Goonish Shive has a few strips which discuss the ramifications of the Gender Bender settings on the Transformation Ray in this regard, though it hasn't happened to anyone yet (apparently, this overrides the beam's time limit).
- This is explained as the one of the many safeties built into the device (its magitech), a partially transformed being is incapable of pregnancy, a pregnant person cannot be transformed, a gender switched individual who becomes pregnant is permanently changed to a woman, and food is handled in such a manner that shrinking/enlargement is harmless (even if you enlarge, eat food, then shrink due to the effect wearing out rather than a second hit).
- The aforementioned Luna appears here in Keychain of Creation, although he appears to be in an adult male form.
- This is pretty much how Akihiko and Fuuka justify both the existence of Ryoji and the MC's weird cravings in Persona 3 FTW: he was pregnant the whole time.
- Done as a false story-arc in Boxer Hockey. A character named Charles (often called Chuck) gets pregnant via virtue of a character Rittz' semen-stained toilet seat.
Ritz: You're a g.. g..
Charles: Yes, that's right... I'm a gay person.
- Kronar, Son of Man, from Oglaf, and his entire tribe of woman-hating barbarians.
- Vinci and Arty: Arty's coworker Arkie Illions is an actual anthropomorphic seahorse, and apparently unaware that he's expecting.
Web Original
- As part of their mocking of Fern Gully's really stupid G-Rated Sex, The Nostalgia Chick and The Nostalgia Critic held hands and she gleefully got him pregnant. Fangirls left this alone.
- "Babies" by Weebl's Stuff.
- For a long time, Gaia Online fans thought Gino would be pregnant after his possession by the Overseer, especially after the release of the "Overseer's Gift" minicomic. Even after Word of God said otherwise. Of course, this being Gino, it'd hardly have been the weirdest thing to happen to him.
Western Animation
- It's subverted in an episode of Ozzy and Drix, where Ozzy initially thinks he's pregnant (and is oddly happy about it too), but it turns out the "baby" is actually a parasitic virus that's been injected into him.
- In an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, best-friend Carl gets impregnated with an alien baby during an interstellar visit. There are a bunch of allusions to the biology of it, but most of the subject is covered by the stereotypical motherly personality Carl begins to develop, even letting some of the girls in his class throw him a baby shower. The "birth" is non-explicit and the newborn simply appears outside of Carl's body. Oh, and this his pregnancy occurred on his backside, not the typical belly region. Make of that what you will.
- One episode of American Dad has Steve being accidentally impregnated with Roger the alien's baby (while giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation - the foetus is passed via the mouth). Before the baby is born, however, Steve accidentally impregnates his girlfriend with the alien baby by kissing her. Her conservative parents never provided her with a decent sex education, so she had no idea alien biology was involved.
- In an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Meatwad believes he is impregnated by Jesus Christ, when he actually has billions of spider eggs encased inside his body.
Meatwad: I've been touched by the power...on my unit. In broad daylight.
- Done on Futurama with the alien Kif... but his species apparently has a strange method of reproduction.
- Another episode has Bender "pregnant" with home brewed beer. Complete with "birth". "It's an ale! 5 gallons, four ounces!"
- Zapp Brannigan technically has this happen to him in one of the comics. Captured by a species of alien he was leading a war against, they secretly implant larva in his body and stuff him with food, intending to use him as a kind of combination unwitting suicide bomber and troop transport. Basically, the oblivious Brannigan would be returned to his side when the larvae were near complete development, enabling them to rip their way out of his body and start killing the other high-ranked officials.
- In the The Fairly OddParents TV movie Fairly OddBaby, Wanda explains that in the Fairy World, male fairies carry the offspring in response to Timmy's inquiry about Cosmo being pregnant with his and Wanda's baby, Poof. Why female fairies even exist in the first place, if this is the case, is never revealed.
- This happens in the Dilbert TV show, when Dilbert launches a rocket that is supposed to go to other planets and bring back alien DNA, but it malfunctions and circles around the town after getting a sample of alien DNA, picking up random bits of Earth animal DNA (and robot parts), and then hits Dilbert and lodges itself in Dilbert's body. The result is that Dilbert becomes pregnant with a mutant being.
- Of course, in the actual comics, there was a short plot where Dilbert thought he was pregnant. 'Turns out, he was just eating way too much.
Dilbert: I figure I have about five or six, it's hard to keep them fed.
Alice: Is the only evidence of your pregnancy your weight gain?
Dilbert: Here comes another hogie, kids.
- In Rocko's Modern Life, Filburt (a turtle) and Dr. Hutchinson (a lion) get married and have... an egg. As a result of various events, Filburt has his friend Heifer (a steer) incubate it for him, causing Heifer to become possessive of it and develop maternal tendencies. When the egg hatches, out comes a lion, 2 turtles... and a steer.
- "It's a boy!" "It's a girl!" "...IT'S GOT THREE HEADS!!!"
- In an episode of Ben 10 Alien Force, Ben ends up giving birth while in one of his alien forms. With no accompanying Squick and/or Heroic BSOD on his part (though the audience may differ). This might not be due to the Mister Seahorse so much as when/how the implied impregnation occu-- Who Writes This Crap??! The alien in question is said to be asexual.
- Ben later tries to use to bond with an alien criminal who is trying to steal earth's oceans to clone an army of her children. It works fairly well until he lets slip that his offspring took off for deep space as soon as they hatched.
- In an episode of MIB: The Animated Series, Jay gets pregnant by ingesting an alien zygote that was undergoing fertilization at MIB's lab.
- When all three of the kids in Home Movies plump up at the same time, they show a montage of their "fat" movies, one of them is called "The Pregnant Monk meets the Pregnant Buddhist”
- One episode of Superjail has the Warden literally giving birth to a manifestation of his own bitterness... which looks appropriately grotesque, dangling umbilical cord and all.
- Separate throwaway gags in Drawn Together imply that Xandir and Captain Hero are both capable of pregnancy.
- Perhaps not exactly the same thing, but the Looney Tunes short Golden Yeggs ends with Daffy Duck laying a golden egg for gangster Rocky. As Daffy himself puts it, "You don't know what you can do 'til you've got a gun against your head!"
- The Venture Brothers Season 1 finale had Dr. Venture rushed to the hospital to extract a large growth in his stomach that turned out to be his twin brother living inside him since before birth. His sons are clueless enough to conclude he's conventionally pregnant.
- The Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon episode "Stimpy's Pregnant". Although at the end, it's revealed that he wasn't really pregnant, just constipated.
- The same thing happened in an episode of Beavis and Butthead.
- The animated series Fish Hooks not only plays this trope straight, but plays it literally, as one of the teachers, Mr. Baldwin, is a seahorse, and explicitly pregnant (despite the fact he lives alone and apparently lacks a social life); oddly enough, this is a Disney Channel show.
- Webstor lays eggs in He Man and The Masters of The Universe as a side effect of eating something not meant for him, so he eats more and raises an army.
- The Trap Door has Drut, who's either this or Your Tomcat Is Pregnant (considering the male pronouns used by the rest of the cast, Drut's gender is unclear).
- Parodied in South Park in the episode "More Crap". Randy is trying to break a record that involves him taking the biggest crap ever taken. This inexplicably involves him and his male friends cooing over the poo growing inside him. This is complete with an ultrasound.
Real Life
- Just so it doesn't get added here again: There was a hoax/art-project about actually accomplishing this a while back by a guy called Lee Mingwei. It never happened. You can be forgiven for thinking it did, though:
- Turns out this is apparently based on real science! See for instance here (the Snopes article debunking the hoax) and here (the Popular Science article "Male Pregnancy: A Dangerous Proposition".
- In the mid-eighties, following up on some work he had done on the topic, popular-science writer Dick Teresi wangled $500,000 from the publisher of Omni Magazine to work with prominent fertility researcher Cecil Jacobson on the first human male pregnancy (and secure a multi-million dollar book deal in the process). Unfortunately, he had second thoughts when he realized (a) how dangerous an ectopic pregnancy [dead link] would be; and (b) that Cecil Jacobson had been arrested for artificially impregnating dozens of women with his own sperm.
- What interested Jacobson in the idea is that he claimed to have successfully impregnated a male baboon in the 1960s, which carried the fetus for four months. No, not like THAT!
- Jean Drapeau, Mayor of Montreal from 1954-1957 and 1960-1986, said "The Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby." Political cartoons showed him as very pregnant following the 1976 Olympics, which left Montreal with a 1 billion dollar debt that took them a full 3 decades to pay off.
- Female-to-Male trans people can get pregnant in various ways:
- ABC News reported in March 2008 about Thomas Beatie, a transgendered female-to-male resident of Bend, Oregon who never had genital reconstructive surgery (since it is not necessary in order to legally change one's sex in that state). Since his wife could not get pregnant and his own biologically-female reproductive system was still functional, he offered to carry the child himself. Using artificial insemination, Beatie has given birth to a girl and a boy as of this edit (June 17, 2009) and is planning to have a third child.
- Discovery Health ran a special called 'Transgendered and Pregnant' recently. A married couple consisting of a trans woman[2] and trans man[3] get pregnant during the latter half of their hormone therapy. The dad of the pair is the one carrying the child.
- Also the condition of Fetus in Fetu, in which a baby develops a second (at least partial) twin inside itself. The result is that the outer human can appear pregnant.
- Science fiction Author Larry Niven actually suggested this as the only safe way Superman and Lois Lane could have a baby in Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex. Superman would have to carry.
- This little comic parodies this with cute little seahorses.
- Many different species of fish can change gender back and forth in order to maintain population ratios. Hyenas also had a reputation for being of only one gender that impregnate and birth through their penis, although science has shown that they're actually just androgynous. Cross reference Hermaphrodite at The Other Wiki.
- They do, however still give birth through their demi-penis, an enlarged genital structure that resembles a penis. There's a reason the infant mortality rate is so high.
- There is a condition known as couvade syndrome (aka sympathetic pregnancy), in which men with pregnant spouses will experience symptoms of pregnancy themselves, such as morning sickness or weight gain. It was originally assumed to be an old wives tale, although recent research has found that men actually do experience hormonal changes during pregnancy, possibly as the result of phermones given off by the mother or some sort of physiological trigger.
- The rare case of a successful abdominal pregnancy, in which a fertilized egg travels through the Fallopian tube in the wrong direction and implants itself outside the uterus, suggests that having a uterus isn't 100% mandatory for carrying a child to term. Given the risks inherent in ectopic pregnancies, it's unlikely that fertility clinics will be offering this option to men any time soon.
- Sooner than we develop the medical procedures to make male pregnancy safe, we're very likely to develop the artificial uterus, though we're still working out the kinks of both environment and transition process.
- Made worse in that with the right hormone treatments, a biological male can actually nurse a baby. Turns out male nipples aren't totally vestigial after all.
- A fact milked for gross laughs on the series finale of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (titled "Man Milk").
- ↑ http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2005-07/male-pregnancy-dangerous-proposition
- ↑ Male-to-Female.
- ↑ Guess.