Basic Trope: A human variant resulting from evolution or genetic modification.
- Straight:
- Bob is a Homo variare, a subspecies of humanity (Homo sapiens) resulting from genetic engineering. Bob can breathe underwater and ages slower than us.
- Homo extraordinarius an offshoot of humanity that are squat, bulky but far stronger. They are the descendants of H. sapiens after living millions of years on a heavy gravity planet.
- Bob is a H. troperis, who like H. sapiens was descended from Homo erectus.
- Exaggerated: UberHomo superior, a variant of humanity that as a result of both evolutionary processes and scientific developments. They are hyperintelligent and superstrong, have mind powers, can regenerate, can do things like flying without using wings.
- Downplayed: H. sapiens superior are mentioned to be a human subspecies, but they are functionally just like H. sapiens sapiens.
- Justified: Bob is from the future were either technology or the passage of time has resulted in evolutionary divergence.
- Inverted: Bob was once a H. superior, but was modified to become H. sapiens
- Subverted:
- Human Aliens.
- Bob thinks he's a more evolved humanity, but despite his strength and intelligent from genetic enhancements, Bob's is merely a regular H. sapiens just with selected genes.
- Double Subverted: Those Human Aliens you've mistaken for humans? Turned out they weren't that alien after all.
- Parodied: H. superior looks like a cross between a duck and a frog, has eight arms but only one hand, is strong as an Olympian athlete but slow as a sloth, and was a result of H. sapiens drinking too much Coca-Cola. They can however finally figure out how to set the time on VCRs.
- Zig-Zagged: Whether or not a human looking being was a human, a human subspecies, an human-looking alien, or never human to begin with changes throughout the story as it becomes a mind screw.
- Averted: A work is set billions of years in the past or future, yet all there is are H. sapiens sapiens even when natural history shows otherwise.
- Enforced: It's a sci-fi movie featuring merpeople. To avoid being too silly for their audience, the writers make them genetically-modified human subspecies.
- Lampshaded: "It's nice to see some Neanderthals here, we humans were starting to get lonely without some cousins."
- Invoked:
- The Mad Scientist uses his research to develop a human subspecies who can live longer, think faster, and immune to illness as to survive an oncoming cataclysm.
- Humans develop subspecies in order to provide sturdy labor to colonize alien worlds too dangerous for them to live on.
- Exploited: The Evil Empire uses the fact the human subspecies exists as a scapegoat that abuses biology in order to further their pseudoscientific racial theories.
- Defied: The Mad Scientist thinks he is creating H. superior, only for the heroes to point out that using existing genes from the human genome is not going to create a new species. Scientist realizes the error and just gives up.
- Discussed: The characters wonder if there's any real difference between H. sapiens and H. superior, as the two still retain the same social and cultural traits.
- Conversed: Two fans talk about their comics, and how the story's conflict between humans and the empowered human offshoots is a reflection of their own world's social concerns.
- Implied: Alice is said to be half-human and half-merperson. This indicates that humans and merpeople are able to interbreed; however, since Alice has no biological children, it cannot be confirmed if humans and merpeople are biologically the same species.note
Back to Human Subspecies.
