Basic Trope: A character's pregnancy is induced and/or complicated by supernatural means.
- Straight:
- Alice gets pregnant due to magical means.
- Alice's baby is hexed in her womb.
- Exaggerated:
- Everyone in the setting manages to get pregnant, even if they are virgins, infertile, post-menopausal, and/or biologically male because A Wizard Did It.
- The magic affects their pregnancies in outlandish fantastic ways and leads to the birth of super-magical children.
- Downplayed: Alice is just infertile and uses magic to increase her fertility and allow her to conceive a child.
- Justified:
- Alice is a witch who has been struggling with infertility. Using magic to conceive a child is a reasonable thing for her to do.
- Babies are more vulnerable to magic than full-grown adults.
- Inverted: A realistically complicated pregnancy is simplified using magical means.
- Subverted: The characters believe the pregnancy involves supernatural means, but turns out the pregnancy is perfectly normal and Alice gives birth to a normal kid…
- Double Subverted: …until the kid's abnormalities manifest themselves at puberty.
- Parodied: The character who becomes pregnant is a man.
- Zig Zagged: Alice thinks the her unborn child was conceived due to magical means, only to realize that wasn't the case… until she goes in for a sonogram and realized the child is a Fetus Terrible. The characters perform a ritual to make the baby normal and it seems to work… until Alice gives birth to a magical baby… but the baby loses its powers after a while.
- Averted:
- All pregnancies that appear have no supernatural involvement.
- No pregnancies are shown throughout the work.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: Alice's midwife gives her advice to protect her unborn baby from magicians. Alice brushes it off, and the baby gets affected by magic. When the midwife finds out, she chastises Alice for not following her advice. "I'm a midwife—I see this all the time! I know what I'm talking about! Why didn't you take the precautions I told you to?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice knows that her baby was affected by magic, so she aborts it.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane—Alice's enemy curses her and her baby, and her child is then born with hemophilia, but it's not clear if the curse caused it.
- Deconstructed:
- The pregnancy ends up leading to complications that hurt/kill the unborn child and/or the mother.
- The unnatural pregnancy leaves a lasting psychological impact on the mother, who develops emotional problems due to the ordeal.
- Alice has a boyfriend, fiance, or husband, and when he finds out that she's pregnant but not by him, he assumes she cheated on him and dumps her (and the breakup is really ugly). He might even kill her, or injure her.
- The pregnancy is a Teen Pregnancy, and Alice doesn't even have the means to take care of herself, let alone a baby. The gods/faeries/resident witch/resident Mad Scientist/etc. have no concept of child support.
- Reconstructed: Her unnatural pregnancy leaves a lasting psychological impact on Alice, who develops emotional problems due to the ordeal. But then Alice is an Iron Woobie—she Takes a Level in Badass, and her supernatural child form a Badass Family.
Back to Mystical Pregnancy
