Basic Trope: Aliens have very unusual reproduction cycles.
- Played Straight: The Xenonians reproduce by parasitism, laying their eggs in other animals while they're alive.
- Exaggerated: The Xenonians reproduce by thinking up babies in their mind and then manifesting them.
- Downplayed: Xenonians reproduce in relatively similar ways to humans, but they usually give birth to six babies at once, rather than one.
- Justified:
- The aliens are Starfish Aliens and come from another planet, and they evolved different methods of reproduction.
- The aliens were created by precursors instead of evolving. Thus, their reproduction requires a high degree of technology and actions like purifying solvents and testing its properties.
- Inverted:"Oh Xamaz, is the female carrying its baby inside its body!?""Yeah. That's messed up."
- Humans upon first encountering how simple Xenonian reproduction are flummoxed as they realize in retrospect just how needlessly complicated the reproductive processes of everything on Earth is.
- Subverted: While a Xenonian birth may superficially look gross, and perhaps downright Lovecraftian, it is essentially just a cosmetically different birth which many analogs to human biology.
- Double Subverted: Upon further research, however, human scientists find that it's still parasitic.
- Parodied: Xenonians produce offspring by disco dancing for twelve days straight.
- Implied: The Xenonians' reproduction is never shown nor stated, but they are squicked out by the mere idea of carrying a baby within the parent's body until birth, suggesting they don't reproduce like us.
- Discussed: "I guess it makes sense that aliens wouldn't reproduce like we do, but it's still weird to see their babies burst from another animal's skin."
- Conversed: "The aliens in this show lay eggs in other animals like parasitic wasps. Sounds weird, but I think it's a clever way to make them seem more alien."
- Played For Horror: Xenonian eggs start out extremely small, then rapidly grow larger in a few hours before finally hatching. The babies burst through the host's skin, causing excruciating pain and eventually killing them. When invading humans wage war on the Xenonians, the aliens fight back with stingers. Or at least, they're believed to be stingers, until a human biologist discovers the truth: They were ovipositors, and the humans only have a few hours to surgically remove the eggs from their bodies before they hatch.
