Hybridization Plot

We all know that the Half-Human Hybrid and the Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid tend to have all of the strengths of their parents, and none of their disadvantages. Well, sometimes a character is Genre Savvy and catches on to this.

The mark of the Hybridization Plot is when characters make a conscious decision to acquire or create a hybrid. This of course can occur in several different ways

• In a universe where hybrids are rare, it may be performed either using genetic engineering or possibly even through magic. Anyone who tends to do this is generally an Evilutionary Biologist, although they may be doing it for more altruistic reasons (like hoping that the new traits would lead to the race learning to survive in a different environment).

• In a universe where hybrids are common, however, the person may try to impregnate some other person who is of a different species in order to have their hybrid child. In cases like this, they may be portrayed as a Stalker with a Test Tube or may be perfectly willing to do worse. If this is the case, then this trope only applies if the motive of said impregnation is that they want a hybrid child.

• Additionally, the person may themselves want to become a hybrid for whatever reason and try everything to do so.

• Finally, the person may intend to perform a Fusion Dance with another person of a different species, whether they want to do so or not.

Of course, this can backfire — in some cases, the hybrid may inherit the worst parts of each parent, and flounder as a result.

Note that not all series that involve super-powered hybrids are Hybridization Plots. With the vast amount of Interspecies Romance, there is no shortage of examples where plenty of hybrids exist, but aren't particularly important.

A Hybrid Monster may be generated as a result of this plot. Sometimes overlaps with Bio-Augmentation.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bleach: This turns out to be the secret backstory and origin of Ichigo, the protagonist. Each major race of the setting — Shinigami, Hollow, Fullbringer, and Quincy — has hard limits on how powerful they can become and the nature of powers they can wield, but a hybrid has the potential of both parent races, and a hybrid of all four, as Ichigo ends up being, has no limits to how strong he can get or the kinds of power he could wield. It's explicitly stated that Ichigo's conception and birth were manipulated in order to produce a potential heir for the Soul King, A.K.A. God.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: One of the more advanced forms of alchemy being actively studied is that of hybridizing creatures to form chimera. The foremost alchemist in the field is one Shou Tucker, who was able to create one that was intelligent enough to talk. It is later revealed that, in his desperation to gain his alchemist license, he violated taboo once, and fused his wife into said talking chimera. She ultimately commits suicide by refusing to eat and starving to death. When his license is once again threatened due to his lack of progress with other talking chimera, he fuses his daughter with her dog to create another.

Comic Books

• The Transformers Megaseries: In the Ultra Magnus Spotlight, Scorponok is introduced as an amoral Mad Scientist interested only in the advancement of technology, leading him to blithely ignore the Tyrest Accord ^note  an accord signed by both Autobots and Decepticons forbidding the sharing of technology with outside races, at least partially out of fear the technology will be turned on them. A recurring theme with his research is the value of hybridization, taking two different species and creating a hybrid with the strengths and advantages of both. When Magnus confronts him on Nebulous, Scorponok's collaborator Zarak is shown to have been modified with Cybertronian tech, and this leads Scorponok to develop Headmaster technology on Earth where humans are modified and given the ability to control lifeless Transformer bodies as their heads. Scorponok's endgame is eventually revealed to be attempting to find a way to use organic reproduction methods (which he finds very quick) to bolster the slowly dying Cybertronian race.

Fan Works

• Pokémon Infinite Fusion: Bill tries to turn himself into a human/Rhydon hybrid to see if it's possible to do so, seeing as the gimmick of the game is that you can use various Pokemon hybrids in battle. It works, but his claws prove to be too big to activate the machine again and separate him, requiring the player to fix it for him.

Films — Live-Action

• Jurassic Park:
  • Jurassic World centers on the creation of a hybrid super predator that escapes and wreaks havoc in the park. It was actually an attempt to make weaponized dinosaurs for the military.
  • Continued in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which the Indoraptor is created as an improved prototype. It too gets loose and stalks the humans around a rich guy's mansion.
• The Titan: With the Earth going down the tubes, a scientist tries using LEGO Genetics to create a new species of human that can establish a colony on Saturn's moon Titan. It doesn't go well.
• Underworld (2003): A major plot point in the franchise, considering the fact that these hybrids tend to run on Hybrid Power:
  • In the original movie, the major reason why the Lycans want Michael is that being a direct descendant of the common ancestor between the Lycans and Vampires, he is the only person capable of becoming a Lycan-Vampire hybrid, which they intend to weaponize to kill off the vampire leadership.
  • In Evolution, Marcus wants to turn his werewolf brother William into a hybrid in an attempt to restore his humanity, with plans as well to create a new race of hybrids to rule over alongside his brother, although he is killed before he can do so.

Literature

• Books of the Raksura: Several Fell flights have tried to interbreed with the Raksura, who are descended from the same Precursors, to create new magical abilities or to produce hybrids that are capable of using Precursor Magitek. Given the Fell's Always Chaotic Evil nature and the Raksura's utter enmity for them, this always involves kidnapping Breeding Slaves and usually backfires catastrophically on the Fell.
• In A Million Adventures, one of the chapters in the Random Events Plot's first part focuses on Pashka trying to create a mosquito/goose hybrid so that mosquitoes would become migratory. His attempt results in a ferocious goose-sized mosquito that tries to attack the children and animals at the research station and is killed by Heracles before anyone can learn if it inherited the migratory instinct from geese.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • The motive of the Cult of Skaro in "Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks" — Dalek Sec in particular wants to become a human-Dalek hybrid, both in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Dalek race alive and in an attempt to harvest humanity's hatred, ambition, and propensity for war. However, Humanity Is Infectious, and he instead decides to create a new race of Dalek-humans so that the Dalek race can rebuild themselves as a race of pacifists instead of the space Nazis they normally are. Too bad the other three, who wanted to put Dalek minds inside human bodies to Take Over the World instead, don't appreciate this.
  • In "The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar", Davros mentions an ancient Gallifreyan prophecy that states that a hybrid would destroy the planet. Reckoning it would be a Time Lord/Dalek hybrid, he decides to pull a Wounded Gazelle Gambit on the Doctor to take his regenerative energy from him and turn his Daleks into hybrids capable of Time Lord regeneration. Too bad this awakens the rotting Dalek mutants which line the sewers of Skaro as well, causing the younger Daleks to be destroyed by them.
• Earth: Final Conflict: One episode involves the intentional producing of Atavus hybrids. Rene's boyfriend is badly hurt trying to shut down the production facility, and she makes a last-ditch effort to save him by hybridizing him. Sadly, his body rejects the DNA and he dies.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: One two-episode arc towards the end of the series involves anti-alien extremists stealing the DNA of Trip (a human) and T'Pol (an alien; specifically a Vulcan) to make a cross-breed baby girl, who they name Elizabeth. The extremists cite Elizabeth as the kind of thing that will happen if aliens interact with humans and therefore as a reason why they shouldn't, as the baby has genetic defects and dies shortly after being found by her parents. Doctors later observe that the death was due to flaws in the process that created the child rather than any clear indication that hybrids are inherently flawed.
• The Vampire Diaries: Klaus Mikaelson, the Big Bad of season 2, is one of the Original Vampires but also carries a werewolf gene that can't be activated due to a curse put on him by his mother. For centuries, he's been trying to break the curse to unlock his own werewolf potential and create a hybrid army that could defend him against his Archnemesis Dad. Even after killing the father, he's determined to build his pack of hybrids, partly because he thinks that's the only way he can have a family he can control.
• The X-Files: A large part of the series revolves around the Syndicate working to produce successful hybrids of human and alien DNA (theoretically to produce a slave race to work under the aliens after they colonize Earth, but covertly to develop a vaccine against the aliens' ability to infect humans). Their methods include gene therapy, cloning, or conceiving via a hybridization process. The results vary in wild ways; some hybrids (like the Samantha Mulder clones) are indistinguishable from humans, while others can develop both mental instability and preternatural abilities.

Music

• Seamus Kennedy's offbeat song "Iditarod" recounts his fictional effort to assemble a sled dog team of huskies hybridized with a veritable zoo of creatures to compete in the famous real-world endurance race in Alaska.

Video Games

• Final Fantasy VII:
  • The main idea behind the Jenova Project is to create human-Cetra (or human-Jenova, to those in the know) hybrids. The goal was to use the hybrids to help lead them to The Promised Land, which is said to be abundant in Mako.
  • Early in the game, Hojo attempts to breed Aerith with Red XIII to create a research subject with Aerith's Cetra powers and Red XIII's lifespan. No one is entirely sure how Hojo thought this would work between a human woman and a sapient but non-anthropomorphic wolf.
  • Due to the Fridge Logic of Hojo's attempt to crossbreed Aerith with Red XIII, Final Fantasy VII Remake instead has Hojo plan to forcibly breed Aerith with SOLDIER members to create SOLDIERs with Cetra powers. He even briefly considers forcing Aerith to have children with Sephiroth, and talks in a disturbingly dehumanizing way about his own hypothetical grandchildren.
• In Final Fantasy XIV, the mastermind of the events of the Pandæmonium raid series intends to fuse mankind with mythic creations to create "hemitheos", or demigods, to transcend the limits of humanity and Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. Unfortunately for everyone involved, all of the hybrids are created by brainwashing the warders of Pandæmonium into fanatical subservience before fusing them with monsters into horrible monstrosities.
• In StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, it's revealed that Amon plans to ravage the galaxy with his Protoss/Zerg hybrids, massively powerful creatures combining the Zerg's physical adaptations with the Psychic Powers of the Protoss. The Tal'darim are a Renegade Splinter Faction of Protoss willingly working for Amon in the hopes of being similarly uplifted... until they learn the hybrids are lab-grown so they can't become hybrids, at which point they defect and work with the heroes as the Token Evil Teammate.
• Xenoblade Chronicles: The High Entia have been purposely having children with Homs for centuries in order to eventually breed the curse of being forcibly transformed into Telethia out of the species, Princess Melia Antiqua being one such example. It's only because of this that the High Entia as a people manage to survive upon Zanza's revival, as only those High Entia with Homs ancestry avoid sharing the fate of their full-blooded fellows of being forcibly transformed into Telethia.

Web Original

• Hamster's Paradise: After the more technologically advanced tundra harmsters are able to use superior weapons and tactics to subjugate their more primitive relatives, the savannah and matriarch harmsters (and outright eradicate the peaceful mountain harmster) they are still able to recognize the physical advantages they possess and forcibly breed with their captives to gain better adaptability and strength. To add insult to injury, they selectively breed them into non-sapient animals afterward.

Western Animation

• Ben 10:
  • In Ben 10: Alien Force, the Highbreed are dying out from inbreeding due to their xenophobic isolationism, and intend to take out the rest of the universe with them, so Ben uses the Omnitrix to transform their entire species into hybrids of assorted species.
  • During Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, a group of human/alien hybrids are introduced called the Amalgam kids. However, although they had initially been presented as coming from several Interspecies Romances, Ben 10: Omniverse gives a different explanation for their hybrid states — they were originally normal children until Servantis used Kevin's powers on them to turn them into human/alien hybrids, mainly under the belief that it was one of the only ways to stop Ben from destroying the universe.
• Parodied in the Futurama episode "Roswell That Ends Well" when President Truman asks Zoidberg if he's on Earth to create a human-alien hybrid, which Zoidberg interprets as coming onto him.
• Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Baron Draxum's goal is to use his oozesquitoes to mutate all of humanity into mutant animal hybrids in a bid to save the Yokai. This results in newly mutated humans wreaking havoc across New York as many turn to crime. The Turtles were all subject to his experiments and Draxum points out that without him, they would not have existed as they do now.
• The Simpsons: When Bart finds out that the teleportation machine that Homer bought in "Treehouse of Horror VIII" is capable of creating multiple hybrids between two different creatures, he tries to become a human/fly hybrid under the belief that it would turn him into a superhero. It doesn't work — he comes out as a normal-sized fly with his head on it, whilst the fly comes out as Bart's body with a fly head on.
• South Park: In the episode "An Elephant Makes Love To A Pig", Kyle gets the idea to crossbreed his newly-acquired Elephant's DNA with Cartman's pot-bellied pig, Fluffy's DNA. The apparent aim is to create a species of tiny elephant called a pot-bellied elephant that's much smaller than Kyle's own. It even becomes his project for their genetic engineering science class. At the end of the episode though, Fluffy the pig gives birth, but the piglet looks more like Mr. Garrison than it does an elephant.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "The Krusty Bucket", Plankton creates a hybrid clone from his and Mr. Krabs' DNA in yet another attempt to get the secret formula for the Krabby Patty. The resulting clone, PlanKrab, has Krabs' business sense and Plankton's intelligence and is able to quickly take over the Krusty Krab and win over even SpongeBob and Squidward. However, he now has no need for Plankton and kicks him out of the restaurant. Krabs and Plankton then have to team up to get rid of PlanKrab and his new business.
• Transformers: Animated: Prometheus Black's biotechnology company was constantly outperformed by Isaac Sumdac's robotics, and when a last-ditch attempt to sell his technology as a viable alternative failed he went into a rage and accidentally turned himself into the supervillain Meltdown. When he next appears, he's gotten it into his head that biotechnological hybrids might be powerful enough to battle even the likes of the Autobots and demonstrates with a fish monster and a bat monster created from two of his former employees. He intends to create even more but is stopped by the Autobots and police captain Fanzone.

Other

• Many people who claim to be alien abductees report being subjected to breeding experiments by their captors. Some speculate that The Grays are suffering from Clone Degeneration and are resorting to hybridization with humanity to refresh their gene pool, while others fear that they are breeding an army to invade Earth.

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