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Apparently, the hottest thing in the Multiverse, above even the Cute Monster Girl, is the Human Female.

Sooner or later, no matter what the species looks like, you'll find a sample of the male that prefers human girls. It can be an alien, a swamp monster, a robot, a Non-Human Sidekick, or even a giant gorilla. (Sometimes it Was Once a Man, which makes the attraction less implausable.) Note that this is usually played straight, while the inverse is almost always played for laughs. Also, the male is far more likely to actually get the girl.

Usually the number one cause of Half Human Hybrids. See also Beast and Beauty.

Biologically, this is completely insane. Imagine a human in the real world falling in love with a squid and you'll see why. Of course, squids don't have that kind of complexity, which may be the difference here-- you can't see past their looks to their "nice personality". But Most Writers Are Male. It's more plausible with Rubber Forehead Aliens, however, since they look enough like humans and vice versa for there to be an attraction.

The fact that this trope was popularized in the fifties and sixties B-monster movies is no coincidence. Consider the racial context of the time, and this trope is a close cousin to the antiquated belief that Scary Black Men are always trying to steal white women. This would make the aliens a form of Space Jew.

A Discredited Trope in the "They're invading, and they want our women!" sense, but not in the more general "non-humanoid character attracted to a girl" sense. Very rarely, the species either culturally values the idea of human slave concubines, or is so sterile that this is the only means they have of avoiding extinction.

This is one of the reasons Aliens Are Bastards.

Named, of course, for the infamous B-Movie title. See also Touch of the Monster for how this is typically shown in a movie poster. Contrast Humans Are Ugly. Compare Face Full of Alien Wingwong (when the human gets pregnant), Interspecies Romance, Boldly Coming.

Not to be confused with British house act M|A|R|R|S, whose song "Pump Up The Volume" states that they need women.

Examples of Mars Needs Women include:


Advertising[]

  • This advert for Gallagher's 2000 (a strip club) shows aliens picking up an ad for it and liking what they see.


Anime & Manga[]

  • The Hentai manga Fiend Without a Face (no relation to the '50s B-Movie involving killer brains) uses this to subvert the classic Naughty Tentacles. The heroine in the comic happens to be in love with the blob of flesh and tentacley lovin' that lives in her home, and considers it her boyfriend.
    • It certainly is nice to have a boyfriend whose only problem will be food and not complaining about other psychological issues that comes with normal men. Having several hands for one single boyfriend helps a lot with the chores.
  • On Keroro Gunsou, the small froglike alien Giroro has a crush on human Natsumi that borders on obsession at times. In a reversal of this trope, human alien Angol Moa has a crush on Keroro.
  • Outlaw Star has the Silgrians, a race of bird-like people that as a whole, seem to like humans way too much.
    • They were just one of the only species that were really accepting of humans. A really friendly bunch them, albeit a bit too friendly.
  • Imber, a 50-ton Humongous Mecha in Idolmaster: Xenoglossia, is deeply in love with Haruka, who is both a human girl and his pilot. Haruka is in love with him too, so this goes both ways.
  • It is indicated in Blue Drop that the Arume want to conquer Earth since the fact that they only consist of women causes troubles for them in the long run, despite their technical prowess. Still they chase earth women and even interbreed with them. Obviously, old habits are hard to break.
    • Blue Drop: Tenshi no Bokura explains that at least one of the reasons for the invasion of Earth was that in the past the male Arume visited Earth, crossbred, and left their DNA behind in the human genome. They were trying to recover the male Arume that had died out long ago by breeding with human men, making it somewhat a gender inversion-- except that at least some of the now female only Arume seem to like the the whole lesbian status quo a bit too much and violently oppose attempts to restore the male Arume. To summarize, Mars needs men, but it wants women.
      • It also shows them more or less raising human girls to be sex slaves, with nightly orgies in their all-girls schools. This can come off as nightmarish even to the Girl-On-Girl Is Hot crowd.
  • Watanuki in XxxHolic has something about him that draws supernatural creatures dangerously close to him. While most of them just want to eat him (there was a massive scramble just for his eye), there's some like the Zashiki-warashi and especially Mugetsu who want him in that way.
  • In Kujibiki Unbalance, the alien males all look like tiny little green things while the women are all beautiful well-developed women. According to the show, the females find the males really attractive.
  • Similar to Idolmaster: Xenoglossia (it's by the same studio), Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo has the pairing of Akiha, a human girl, and Leopard, a Master Computer with a superiority complex. Unlike Haruka and Imber, they're closer to having Belligerent Sexual Tension in execution.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima has Asuna fighting some demons, who are pleased to discover that she's not wearing panties. Asuna doesn't take it so well.
  • Part Three of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure had an orangutan attempting to rape a human girl. Possibly justified by how the orangutan possessed the Stand known as Strength; animals with Stands (such as the dog Iggy and the falcon Pet Shop) are shown to be far different in behavior from normal animals.
    • Actually, orangutans have been known to attempt this with human females in real life, so justification isn't really necessary.
  • The same thing happened in the Ranma ½ manga except with the male Armie/Do-chan.
  • More Equal Opportunity: Ryo-Ohki from Tenchi Muyo! seems to like Tenchi as much as the girls in the harem do. Of course, she also happens to have a Cute Monster Girl form, too.
    • Fuku the cabbit from Tenchi Muyo! GXP doesn't have a Cute Monster Girl form, though, and the series is rather unequivocal about numbering her in the Unwanted Harem during the big wedding sequence. It's a little disturbing watching everyone talk about it so cheerfully... (Washuu did mention earlier that she'd get one eventually — it is still weird, though.)
  • Kir on King of Bandit Jing, who hits on every single Girl of the Week, and was constantly rebuffed. Oddly enough, this seemed to be more about his personality and choice of words, and not the fact that he's a bird.
  • This is the main motivation of the tentacled alien in Alien from the Darkness. Though, given that this is a hentai, that shouldn't come as a surprise.
  • The Hentai visual novel Youkoso! Sukebe Elf no Mori e? and its anime adaptation invert this tropes. Its elves are an all female Inhumanly Beautiful Race who were provided children from their mystical Holy Tree, but recently it lost the ability to create new elves, around which the war between the high elves and dark elves left both sides on the verge of extinction. The elves' solution was a prophecy about a male savior from another world who would save them from extinction, so they grabbed a man from Earth to mate with them and produce children.


Comic Books[]

  • Subverted in the Mars Attacks (Film) Image Comics, where a Martian scientist overseeing the forced insemination of a captured superheroine is disgusted that there were volunteers for such "bestiality" and skeptical that it will actually produce functional hybrids.
  • Given an amusing nod in Ultimate Marvel's "Ultimate Galactus" series; Hawkeye, Iron Man and a few others have sneaked onboard a (alien) Kree ship, being aided by Mar-Vell, a Kree Defector From Decadence. Hawkeye easily kills a group of guards, to Mar-Vell's annoyance:
Cquote1

 Mar-Vell: Remind me again why I defected?

Iron Man: Was it human girls?

Cquote2
  • Fone Bone of Jeff Smith's Bone, one of a race of short, bald, cartoony, big-nosed, bone-white creatures that resemble nothing so much as animated blobs of marshmallow, develops a crush on the thoroughly human woman Thorn. Thankfully, or sadly, it never goes anywhere.
    • It is hinted that Fone Bone gets into "girl problems" back in Boneville often so it isn't just Thorn.
  • Rather frighteningly and repeatedly mentioned (though not shown) in the second arc of The Authority--the Blue, an alien race who came to a parallel Earth and began interbreeding with humans centuries ago, eventually took over the planet and turned China, among other places, into a rape camp to try and father more offspring, because they actually did need women. Then they try to expand their territory into the Authority's Earth. This is a mistake.
  • In the erotic comic Ironwood, dragons are all male, or more precisely asexual in their natural forms and shapeshift into human males in order to seduce human women for the perpetuation of the species. Apparently they enjoy this so much, the rest of their time is mostly spent hunting down most dragon-offspring they can find to prevent extreme overpopulation.
  • In the XXXenophile story "Time Piece", Franz claims that there are no females in the future as Mars stole them all and Earth fought back. With nukes. The whole "time travel" scenario turns out just to be a really elaborate roleplaying sesion between the two lovers.
    • However, he still managed to blow the Rigellian's cover when he spoke to the cat.
Cquote1

 Cat: [looking bewildered] Mow? [thinking] He knows!

Cquote2
    • In another XXXenophile story ("My Favorite Oitling") it's inverted: Martian females decide that sex with sentient males is new and interesting.
  • Fred Perry's Gold Digger once again plays Equal Opportunity with this trope: When the villain Fauntleroy acquires powerful living armor, he discovers that the armor in question is not only female, but pretty damn horny, too. She's just as likely to hump his shoulder as she is to sit on it.
  • Very oddly played with in a classic Uncle Scrooge comic. He got in a fight with the post office about them delivering someone else's mail to him by mistake, and the postmaster general just gave him his job to shut him up. (Why the head of a multi-fantasticalillion dollar global empire would accept a public services job is never explained). He finds the job simple enough, until he gets a letter from a 10 foot tall teenager to be delivered to the world authority on Venus. On his second trip (he accidentally went to Mars on his first - no-one let the irony escape him), he arrives to and finds that the planet is inhabited exclusively by 10 foot tall teenage girls (Mars, on the other hand, being occupied by scaly green winged letterboxes).
  • In one issue of Green Lantern Corps (pre-Parallax), a huge fleet of ship appears in the skies of the severely overpopulated world of Malthus, which is under the protection of Guy Gardner.
Cquote1

  "People of Malthus! Our world was devastated in the Crisis, and your ability to breed is legendary! Palomaris needs women!"

Cquote2
    • Guy destroys the entire fleet. The entire unarmed fleet. They'd apparently come looking for volunteers.
  • In Empowered, Emp is captured by a galactic "Pimpotron" who is going to kidnap her for "erotiservitude." He says that this was the fate of Amelia Earhart as well.
  • ROM Spaceknight: One of Hybrid's goals is to create more Dire-wraith hybrids like himself by establishing rape camps with mutant women. In his debut he tried to kidnap Kitty Pryde during the confusion of the X-Men's fight with Rom. In a later story, Hybrid's alliance with a group of female mutant villains was undone when the hero revealed that Hybrid was planning to turn them into breeding stock. In Avengers Academy he's expanded his field of interest by planning to use all of the girls for his sick purposes.


Fan Fic[]


Film[]

  • Mars Needs Women, starring Mouseketeer Tommy Kirk and Yvonne "Batgirl" Craig, is the Trope Namer, directed by Larry Buchanan of Attack of the The Eye Creatures fame. It has the same low production values, bad acting, and bad writing as all of his films, but at least one of the characters states, "Mars needs women."
  • King Kong is, of course, one of the most famous examples of this. "'Twas beauty that killed the beast!"
  • This entry would not be complete, of course, without a mention of Jabba the Hutt's apparently sexual desire to chain scantily-clad human and humanoid females to him, as seen in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
    • The Expanded Universe has an inversion, however. Female Twi'leks are considered sexually attractive to males of most humanoid species--especially human men. Zeltrons are less famously so, but those who know of them tend to think they're even better, partially due to their use of pheromones and a more humanlike skin tone.
      • Twi'lek girls, in fact, find themselves on the wrong end of this trope despite they aren't human. Everyone in the Star Wars Galaxy needs Twi'lek women.
    • The EU also establishes that Jabba keeps the dancers in order to show 'lesser' species that he can have what they want, even when he doesn't want them himself. There's also speculation that he really is interested in them...and this suspicion makes other Hutts view him as being a sexual deviant.
  • Variation: In The Fifth Element, Leeloo, the "Perfect Being" of presumably the entire universe, is a thin, scantily clad Milla Jovovich who conforms almost perfectly to Western ideals of beauty and apparently dyes her hair. The Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who created her have curiously specific tastes.
    • This could also be explained by the fact that after being blown to smithereens at the start of the movie, human scientists recreate the perfect being based on a sample from one of the — armoured — alien hands. Presumably, the clone-lab can only do humans.
    • Alternatively, one might assume the aliens made her that way for obvious reasons, given what happens.
  • Gillman in Creature from the Black Lagoon kidnaps human women twice because, as the last of his kind, is pretty lonely. Thankfully it never goes past The Screaming stage once they're rescued.
  • The Beast in Krull, a giant, reptilian monster, has conquered many worlds but wishes to be wed to the human princess Lisa.
    • By the end, though, it's apparent that what the Beast really wants is the flame-thrower power that Lisa will transfer to whoever marries her.
    • The Deep Ones of H.P. Lovecraft's work usually got much further. So did Yog-Sothoth. However, it is not strictly an example of Mars Needs Women - female Deep Ones mate with males, not vice versa. Also, Whateley served a purpose for Yog-Sothoth, to call back the Old Ones, and was the son of a half-mad cripple, so aesthetically it does not match the trope.
      • The works of H.P. Lovecraft could also be considered an inversion. The Shadow Over Innsmouth has men mating female Deep Ones (the captain marries his sons to the Deep Ones for profit). If they are indeed female...
      • This trope is played straight in the movie Dagon which is a loose retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth set in the present day.
  • Inverted in Galaxy Quest with Crewman Fred Kwan falling for one of the female tentacle aliens--who transforms part-way to her original non-human form while they're both making out. Fred doesn't mind this and, in fact, seems to rather enjoy it. The Plucky Comic Relief Guy, however, is in the area when they begin, and is absolutely disgusted.
    • Also parodied in a deleted scene. When Jason Nesmith and Gwen DeMarco are attempting to shut down the reactor, they are held up by two of Sarris's men. One of them is strangely attracted to Gwen, which disgusts the other one, who claims that he'd sooner mate with an animal. ("Yes... I know.") Gwen is disgusted by the first one's attraction — and pissed off at the second one's insult, so she makes the ship's computer squash them underneath a blast door.
    • In that deleted scene, she shows off her cleavage to distract one of them.
  • The famously awful B-Movie Robot Monster actually justifies this - Ro-Man's attraction to the human girl Alice shocks him, and he spends much of the film trying to work out why he feels that way. When he fails to understand it, and his master orders him to kill Alice, Ro-Man's mind falls apart, and he is reduced to constantly muttering "I must... but I cannot...".
  • Howard the Duck, as in the comic, establish Howard and Bev as a romantic couple.
  • Species is a Gender Flip of this, and alien (in the form of a human female) seeks men to impregnate her (before they die a hideous death).
  • The 1908 silent film When the Man in the Moon Seeks a Wife by the Clarendon Company was probably the first example of this in alien form, making the filmed version Older Than They Think.
  • Dean Koontz's Demon Seed, a film about Proteus Four, a Master Computer, imprisoning a woman in her home so that she can bear his child/avatar. In the film he does this only through necessity, while in the book he confesses to being in love with her.
  • In Spaceballs, Barf, the half man, half dog "I'm my own best friend", seems to like human women. But then that's not really surprising, as he appears 99% human, and we all know dogs hump people's legs anyway.
  • I Married a Monster From Outer Space is a 1958 SF movie where aliens are replacing human men in a desperate attempt to perpetuate the species as their females all died out. One of the aliens (the husband of the protagonist) does say that they've been working on making interbreeding possible. IMaMFOS is also rare in that the aliens are rather sympathetic, especially as compared to the Jerkass local guys who keep refusing to marry their girlfriends, preferring to spend all their time drinking and whoring.
  • Subverted in Star Trek Generations
Cquote1

 Lursa: Human females are so repulsive!

Cquote2
    • Although when Soran punches one of the Klingon sisters for nearly getting him killed, she jokingly suggests that he may have been initiating a courtship.
  • Played straight and inverted in the 2009 movie Star Trek. Kirk was seen in bed with a Green-Skinned Space Babe and said to have not even humanoid conquests under his belt.
Cquote1

 Spock's father: You once asked me why I married your mother. I married her because I loved her.

Cquote2
  • The whole premise of 1985's Breeders. Exploitation at it's sleaziest.
  • Battlefield Earth also inverts the trope, as Terl agrees that he thinks Johnny's mate is "the most repulsive female I've ever seen," which is odd, because the only differences between Psychlos and humans are height, fingers, tongue, and dreads.
  • Justified in The Brain From Planet Arous - Gor, possessing a human body, wants to get horizontal with his host's fiancée because he wants to indulge all the possible senses; being a disembodied brain, having any sensation at all is a novelty.
  • Earth Girls Are Easy is a comedy based on this trope. When the three furry aliens are given a makeover, however, they resemble date-worthy guys - where in star Julie Brown's original '50s-esque song, the alien is slimy, bug-eyed, and looks "like a cross between Flipper and Alan Thicke".
  • One of the short stories in Heavy Metal centers around a Pentagon secretary being abducted by aliens and the sex robot that falls in love with her.
    • Judging from the following quote, this trope is pretty common in that 'verse:
Cquote1

 Edsel: Whoa, typical robot. First Earth chick we see in ten years, and he's gotta make a play for her.

Cquote2
  • Progeny has a setup like this, though making use of the more common reports of artificial insemination via alien technology. Which is then horribly subverted when it's revealed this is just A Form You Are Comfortable With, the entire "ship" is one creature.
  • Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has Wheelie describe Mikaela Banes as "hot" and he even attempts to hump her leg later in the film. The film takes this trope one step further too, as Wheelie is not only an alien from another planet, but also a Mechanical Lifeform.
  • In Rubber, a living car tire with deadly psychic powers comes to have a strange obsession with an attractive female motorist. At one point the police have her chastise the tire for "his" sexual fixation.
  • The Golem in the silent movie The Golem temporarily shows a fascination with his creator's beautiful daughter Miriam, though he loses interest soon.
  • Monsters (Humanoids from the Deep)[1]: Genetically engineered salmon mutate into humanoid amphibians, who then go around raping human women. They "why" is explained: according to the independent female scientist who's really independent and does lots of science, they mate with human women in order to continue their "evolutionary advance". How salmon-men can reproduce with homo sapiens is not explained. Tits are shown instead.


Literature[]

  • In David Gerrold's Chess With a Dragon, the Earth is horrendously in debt to a galactic information-brokerage, and its leaders are desperate to find a way to pay it off. Unfortunately, other alien races will only assume Earth's debt in return for either strip-mining rights to the planet, or for millions of humans as slaves/food/hosts. One of the offers considered is a deal to hand over a mere several thousand humans, for payments that will significantly reduce Earth's debt ... but these aliens only want females. Partly subverted in that the aliens in question aren't exclusively interested in human females: it's the same deal they offer to any sentient race that meets certain physiological parameters. The Earth's leadership turned this one down, and opted not to ask why the women were needed.
  • Equal Opportunity again: The Vanishing by Bentley Little centers around the modern descendants of 19th-century couplings between humans and a secret race of monsters who, despite being hideous 8 foot tall Mix-and-Match Critters who speak in Black Speech, have a practically supernatural sexual appeal that makes them irresistible to humans. As a result, they don't need to chase or abduct human women or men; the humans tend to seek them out, usually just for a quickie, but sometimes going on to abandon their families to go live amongst the monsters.
  • Robert Silverberg's "Ishmael In Love" is told from the perspective of a superintelligent dolphin in love with his trainer. Unlike most examples of this trope, he's actually surprised by this attraction and considers it unusual.
  • Donald Tyson appears to have a fetish for this trope. His work of Lovecraftian Meta Fiction, Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred necessarily incorporates it when it mentions the Deep Ones and Yog-Sothoth, but he uses it even when it is not part of the original canon. For instance, Tyson's Alhazred claims that Nyarlathotep assumes his human form in order to mate with women, that the Yithians exchanged their minds with men to get at the women on Earth, and that Shub-Niggurath is similar to a hideous alien succubus.
  • The draconians of the Dragonlance universe originally had their female members remain unhatched, leading to a Justified Trope where they are attracted to female elves and humans as substitutes. However, when encountering female draconians in the book Draconian Measures a group of male draconians has a member who comments that female draconians would be no fun because, as he tells his fellows, "Hugging them would be just like hugging one of you guys!"
  • E.E. Knight's Age of Fire novel series has (male) Western dragons who find the scent and shape of human females alluring, seeing it as a strange compulsion whose farthest extent is apparently the source of the devouring-maidens myth, or, alternatively, keeping a bunch of hot female human servants around.
  • Artist Cireulo's coffee-table Book of the Dragon conceives of dragons as a species where females are extremely rare and beautiful female humanoids often become favoured servants and a source of companionship. Not to Squick levels, though it's mentioned that a maiden sent to be devoured by a Water Dragon has often become the "Queen of his heart" instead.
  • Subverted in Joe Haldeman's novel The Forever War; a Mind Probe produced by the Earth military portrays Tauren soldiers raping human women with gigantic purple members, an entirely fanciful depiction as at the time the film is made nobody on Earth has the slightest idea what a Tauren looks like, in order to get the human soldiers angry enough to kill. The hero is aware that it is totally false but his subconscious makes his teeth start grinding in readiness to KILL! Ultimately they turn out to be an androgynous clone species who have no interest in human women.
  • Explored in Octavia Butler 's 'Xenogenesis' trilogy: Mars needs 'everybody.' Specifically, gene trader aliens who travel throughout the universe mixing their DNA with other species in order to create new, stronger breeds. In a twist, this makes them value life so much that they can't leave self-destructive humanity alone, even if it's what the humans want. Much of the conflict comes from humans being less than thrilled with this.
  • Treated quite soberly and gender-flipped in "A Rose For Ecclesiastes", in which all male Martians and most females have become sterile, not long before humans visit their world. Unusual in that the female who has an affair with a human linguist didn't realize he could impregnate her, and because her lover then has to talk the other Martians out of their prior resignation to extinction. How often does Mars have to be convinced it needs women/men? [2]
  • Averted in the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. In the X Wing Series novels, one of the recurring sub-plots involves Gavin Darklighter (cousin of Biggs, the friend of Luke's who died in the attack on the original Death Star) and his relationship with Asyr Sei'Lar, a Bothan. This is inverted in that the relationship, while unusual, is not seen by most to be Squick. Granted, there are some people who might not see anything wrong with that relationship.
  • In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Black Colossus", the Eldritch Abomination wants the princess. Then, it Was Once a Man.
Cquote1

 "But thou shalt be my queen, oh princess! I will teach thee the ancient forgotten ways of pleasure. We—" Before the stream of cosmic obscenity which poured from the shadowy colossus, Yasmela cringed and writhed as if from a whip that flayed her dainty bare flesh.

Cquote2
    • In "Shadows in the Moonlight", Conan deduced the gray ape-man attacked out of lust for Olivia.
  • Inverted in The Inverted World. The human inhabitants of the City, due to a highly-skewed gender ratio, realize that the only way to keep the City's population up is to interbreed with the (apparently human) natives of the strange world they're trapped in. They thus begin bringing native women to the City to bear children — willingly or otherwise.
  • In Raiders from the Rings by Alan E. Nourse, radiation in space destroys sperm with X chromosomes, so Spacers can only have male children. After a war between the Earth and the Spacers, Earth cuts off emigration, so if the Spacers don't want to die out, they have to periodically raid the Earth and kidnap brides for themselves.
    • Keep in mind that the Spacers are fully human, so their attraction to human females is understandable. There is a very good scene where one of the captured women, who has up to this point resisted the abduction, is startled into understanding and almost sympathizing with it.
  • Inverted in Terry Pratchett's Strata, in which male kung, a Humanoid Alien species, are so overwhelmingly sexy to human females that they must sometimes resort to physical force to discourage the more-susceptible women from trying to jump their bones in public.
  • Fat Fred, the Gaean "angel" from Wizard. His nickname stems not from his appearance, but from the fact that he's a bit of a Chubby Chaser. And as angels have next to no body fat (in order to be able to fly), even a fairly slim human woman is just his type by angelic standards.
  • Gender-reversed in Gary Ghislain's amusing YA novel, How I Stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend. Inhabitants of the all-female planet Vahalal periodically dispatch a beautiful/formidable 'Traveler' to Earth to bring back a male 'Chosen One', with or without his consent. The title reveals whom the latest Traveler has set her sights on... which is kinda understandable.
  • In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Monster Men, Number One abducts Virginia. To be sure, they were attempts to create actual men.


Live Action TV[]

  • Parodied in the Doctor Who episode "The Christmas Invasion"; the aliens demand our minerals, our cattle, and our women. The reference to women was edited out of the spoken dialogue, but one of the characters has a translator and the text can be seen on its screen.
    • Parodied again in "The Stolen Earth":
Cquote1

 Wilf: Get back inside, Sylvia! They always go after the women!

Cquote2
    • Subverted in "The Vampires of Venice". While the aliens are indeed after our women, by their standards, humans look like food. They're actually converting the women into females of their own species to generate a viable gene pool.
  • Battlestar Galactica: If you're an evil race of robots, what's the first thing to do after subjecting humanity to a nuclear apocalypse? Round up the survivors and put them in "farms" to produce your Half-Human Hybrid offspring, of course. While the one we saw was an all-girl institution, Word of God has it that there were stud farms as well.
    • And in fact, the only successful union was human male-cylon female.
  • Sliders: Wade is Put on a Bus... to a Kromagg breeding camp. Ewww.
    • The Kromaggs really did Need Women, as their own females had been rendered infertile by an attack on their homeworld, and since they're hominids, interbreeding isn't nearly as genetically far out as most examples on this page. Even then, the hybrids are implied to be mostly sterile.
  • In Babylon 5, the Narn Ambassador, G'Kar, regularly rents human prostitutes and even attempts to bribe the station's telepath into sleeping with him--for purely reproductive reasons, of course. (His species has no telepaths.) It seems to be viewed as a personal fetish of his, though, rather than a normal preference for his species.
  • It's rather convenient that the patrons of Quark's bar (and Quark) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine all prefer slim women with features that are traditionally attractive to Western viewers. It seems far more likely that he would keep a diverse group (of women and men) around to spin his Dabo wheel in order to appeal to all of the species that pass through the bar.
    • Not surprising though, as appealing to the viewers is far more important than to fictional "customers". Quark is Genre Savvy enough to know where his bread is really buttered, and selling fruity drinks in a replicator-based society ain't it.
    • Homaged in the episode "Far Beyond The Stars", where Captain Sisko dreams that he (and several other characters on Deep Space Nine) are writers for a 1950's Weird Science pulp called "Incredible Tales". The illustrator comes in with his latest set of drawings (which the writers have to think up stories for) one of which shows a Bug-Eyed Monster crawling over an apartment ledge towards a buxom woman sunbathing in a towel. One of the writers, Herbert Rossoff (actually Quark without his makeup), instantly derides the picture as garbage...then quickly says he'll write the story for it.
    • In one of the novels, Quark is persuaded (after much foot-dragging and whining) to hire a Dabo boy.
    • There were a couple of Dabo girls with non-human facial features, although they did still have conventionally attractive humanoid figures.
    • The whole thing may say more about Quark's own taste than that of his customers Indeed, an early episode opens with one of the Dabo girls having come to Sisko asking for help getting out of a particular clause in the "Ferengi Print" of her contract (and presumably all the Dabo girl contracts) requiring her to have sex with Quark (heavily implied, but not stated out-right, it's 'Trek after all).
    • Standards of beauty/sexy among the station's residents seems to be similar for humans, Bajorans, and a number of other Human Alien races, so Quark's hiring practices may just be him milking the biggest share of his potential customer base. For all we know, he might have some non-humanoid dabos who come in one night a week, to appeal to his more exotic-looking customers.
  • Parodied by Punt and Dennis, in a sketch where they explore various science fiction tropes. Hugh Dennis plays the alien:
Cquote1

  Our world is dying. A mysterious space virus has wiped out all our females. We wish to take three hundred thousand of your Earth women for [leers] breeding purposes.

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  • One part of Disney's Mars And Beyond was about an evil robot (who looked exactly like the one that later appeared in House of Mouse) from Mars who kidnapped a beautiful secretary.
    • The secretary's boss is a pipe-smoking egghead. She defeats the evil Martian robot and comes back to earth and the office just in time for him to opine that he can positively state that there is no life on Mars.
  • Inverted in an episode of Red Dwarf where a female G.E.L.F marries Lister in exchange for a replacement for Starbug. He runs away out of terror just before the wedding night, thankfully.
  • Rife in The Muppets franchise, where interspecies dating is the norm. Kermit and Miss Piggy, Gonzo and Camella, and once, on Muppets Tonight!, even Cindy Crawford and Bobo the Bear.
  • The Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Terror from the Year 5000 features a human female from a post-apocalyptic world going back in time to find an uncontaminated man to bring back to her own time for breeding purposes. Radiation has made the human race pretty ugly by the year 5000, so the female has to disguise her appearance by ripping the face off of a nurse and wearing it over her own.


Music[]

  • Rob Zombie's song "Mars Needs Women" is just this... But not just normal women. Mars needs angry, red women.


Mythology[]

  • Older Than Feudalism: Classical Mythology has all manner of male deities, satyrs, centaurs, and demi-gods falling in lust/love with and/or abducting/raping female humans. The reverse was very rare, partly because centaurs and satyrs are One Gender Races.
  • It happened after the sons of men had multiplied in those days, that daughters were born to them, elegant and beautiful. And when the angels, the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamored of them, saying to each other, "Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children". - from the Apocryphal Book of Enoch in the The Bible.


Tabletop Games[]

  • The Paranoia mission "Clones in Space" features the shmegegi, except they can't bring themselves to actually follow up on their lust and wind up just reciting tepid poetry instead.


Theatre[]


Video Games[]

  • Star Control II has Admiral ZEX, a hideous tentacle alien whose species, the VUX, finds humans completely repulsive and all except the strongest stomachs amongst them projectile vomit violently as soon as they see one. However, ZEX is different. He...'enjoys' humans.
    • Though in this case his specific obsession is with the male Captain.
    • Heck, at the end of the game, you wind up marrying an alien girl... somehow...Admittedly, she looks mostly human, but... How exactly... does that...? Well, best not to think about it.
  • Subverted in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, where a group of orcs come across quillboars - a race of bipedal boars that only barely qualify as "anthromorphic" - and one of them remarks that "at least they're prettier than humans". (It could be said that the Orcs have a somewhat porcine appearance, so...).
    • Warchief Thrall was long believed to be a case of this trope, since his best childhood friend was a human girl the same age as him (a lot of people assume they were more than friends), and he's had a good friendship with Jaina Proudmoore (with whom he's commonly shipped). However, Chris Metzen has stated that Thrall just plain isn't into human women and has recently married an Orcish woman.
  • Played straight in the Duke Nukem game Land of the Babes. Earth has been taken over, all the other men have been killed, and the "human babe" is the hottest commodity in the universe.
    • Also, of the other Duke Nukem games, starting with 3D.
Cquote1

  "Nobody steals our chicks... and lives."

Cquote2
    • In fact, killing one of the women in 3D results in more enemies spawning. They're serious about getting those women.
    • Duke Nukem Forever has Duke himself Lampshade the frequency of this trope.
Cquote1

 "Damn it, why do they always take the hot ones?"

Cquote2
  • An inversion of similar is found in Zone of the Enders: Dolores, i, in that Humongous Mecha Robot Girl Dolores' affection for her human "Uncle" James seems to be a little more than that of a niece.
    • The implications of this are even more disturbing when one takes into account the placement and general shape of the cockpit on... Well, just about every manned mech in the series, sometimes its best not to think about it...
    • Likewise, this trope gets used a bit in ZOE. Pharsti is Myona's emotions and feelings for Cage in AI form and Leo has an infatuation with the ADA AI.
  • In the second game of the Ace Attorney series, the third case involved a 'assumingly' living puppet that has a romantic obsession with one of the female characters in that particular case... even with intents on marrying her someday.
  • Given a nod in the twelfth level of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, titled "Mars Needs Cheerleaders," the character's first encounter with Martians and their space saucer.
  • Averted in X-COM: UFO Defense. The aliens do kidnap earth women (and animals) but it isn't an act of eroticism - they simply use them in genetic engineering, both to mix human DNA with the other subject races in their civilisation (to produce even better warriors etc.) and to breed them (note that the woman isn't necessarily alive at the time).
  • Daxter of the Jak and Daxter series. Although he has an excuse in the fact that he used to be human (or the local equivalent thereof), he also manages to actually get a girl during the series, who eventually gets turned into an Ottsel like him.
  • Equal Opportunity again: Ruby, Hiro's sidekick in Lunar 2: Eternal Blue who looks like a flying cat, happens to have a crush on him. Equally creepy, for those who somehow haven't played the first game, is the fact that the Human character Nall seems to have a crush on Ruby. But as it turns out, Ruby and Nall are both dragons.
  • The Gerudo in The Legend of Zelda series are a race almost entirely made up of women with only one male being born every one hundred years. (The sole male Gerudo ever shown was Ganondorf) If you talk to one of the gossip stones in Ocarina of Time you'll learn that Gerudo often come into Hyrule in order to look for boyfriends.
  • Bowser of Super Mario Bros. is a Stalker with a Crush on Peach. Bowser is a giant somewhat-dragon-like tortoise (he also has eight children, but the identity of their mother(s) has yet to be revealed). And it's not just Bowser; a computer falls for Peach in Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door.
    • Also Rosalina from Super Mario Galaxy. According to her backstory, the main reason why the Lumas (an entire race of star people) kidnapped her is because a young Luma thought that she was its mother, and as a result all of the younger Lumas wanted her to be their mother too. But then Rosalina discovered that her real family on Earth is now long dead, and as a result she agreed to be the Lumas' mother from then on.
  • The description for Orthros in Final Fantasy Tactics a 2 claims it has "an inordinate Fondness of comely Maidens." Orthros only appears in Final Fantasy XII if you have an all-female party. Orthros is apparently an Expy of Ultros from Final Fantasy VI. If his battle dialogue is to be believed, the latter is also an example of this trope.
  • Played with in Mass Effect. The main character can romance four aliens, and gets flirted with by several others regardless of Shepard's sex. Three of the alien romances (Liara, Tali and Thane) seem attracted to you. It's reasonable, since they're all from fairly humanoid races: Liara is an asari, a blue skinned space babe. Tali, a quarian, is clearly humanoid under her all-covering Hazmat Suit, save for oddly shaped legs, feet, and hands. Thane, a drell, looks like a green human with scales and large black eyes. Garrus the least humanoid romance of all; he's kind of a dinosaur/bird person with metal plates growing out of his face, and flat out states he doesn't find humans attractive. He's in it all for the personality. (S/he is also propositioned by Krogan women, regardless of sex, but that's only after killing a thresher maw). It's the asari that the vast majority of the universe finds (sometimes inexplicably) attractive.
    • However, for Tali and Garrus, there is the iffy issue of having different amino acid types. Quarians are also more vulnerable to illness while Turians' idea of "courting" is fighting one another and being a worthy combat partner as Garrus had zero clue on romance with Shepard when he finally spends the night with her.
      • Garrus details that this happened in an isolated incident in his Backstory. There is nothing that says this is common practice among the Turians. His awkward come-on to Female Shepard is because it's Shepard, a woman he idolizes so much he can overlook that he finds humans women ugly. In most other cases where we see Turians flirting with another species, they do not act this way. See General Septimus from the first game, any Turian who has background chatter with an asari, and the sweet Turian flirting with the oblivious Quarian on Illium. Whether or not Turians act this way amongst their own kind is never answered in the games. Krogan women, however, are absolutely In Love with Your Carnage.
    • Regarding asari, it's implied that each of the three remaining major species sees something familiar and desirable in them: for humans it's the body shape, for salarians it's the skin color, and for turians it's the head tendrils.
    • There's also an easy to miss conversation with Ashley and Kaidan on the Citadel:
Cquote1

 Ashley: Maybe they just don't like humans.

Shepard: Why not? We got oceans, beautiful women, this emotion called love. According to the vids, we have everything they want.

Cquote2
  • Absolutely horrifically played straight in Dragon Age, where the darkspawn take women (any women, whichever species) to their caves so they can become Broodmothers, where they will give birth to thousands more darkspawn; the process by which the women become this is just pure Squick.
  • In Superfrog for the Amiga, Superfrog's girlfriend is a human princess, and at the end of the game he's not at all pleased when she turns into a fellow frog after he kisses her.
  • In a rare Fantasy example, the Ruloi from Lands of Lore, who are invaders from another world, kidnap females, although not necessarely humans - in one cutscene they abduct a huline woman. What exactly they do with them is never explained, although one Ruloi telepathically tells Copper in the third game that "We need vessels."
  • Pastiched in Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse, in which the alien gorilla Skun-ka'pe is romantically obsessed with Girl Stinky (who isn't exactly human, but appears perfectly human and comes from Earth). Skun-ka'pe's whole character is a big Shout-Out to zero-budget 50s sci-fi B Movies such as Robot Monster, so everyone's fairly Genre Savvy about this. Also, Girl Stinky is romantically involved with Sal, a six foot tall Cockroach.
  • In Brutal Legend, Eddie and his army, Ironheade, befriend and recruit an Amazon Brigade known as the Zaulia. They like to abduct "mates," and have something called "The Mating Challenge" they invite men to.


Web Animation[]

  • In the Homestar Runner toon Date Nite, The Cheat (a Pikachu-esque Speech-Impaired Animal) goes on a date with Marzipan (a... human being? Maybe? She's a lot closer to human than The Cheat, anyway).
    • To be fair, Marzipan is the only female character in the series. Who else is he going to go out with?
    • Strong Bad is also attracted to humans.


Webcomics[]

Cquote1

 Jevee Ceeta: The thought of you having romantic feelings towards human females makes me crawl inside, Sergeant.

Schlock: Why? It's very natural and normal.

Jevee Ceeta: I can explain it in two words, and they rhyme with 'Pentacle Rex.'

Cquote2
    • As tends to be the case with this comic, however, it's Justified Trope. Carboscilicate Amorphs are effectively asexual, and reproduce through a form of mitosis. Through observation, character-traits and parts of the personality of the 'mate' is imprinted on the proto-amorph... and as such, Amorphs are attracted primarily to strong personalities and character-traits, regardless of the physical form. In fact, it turns out that Schlock's grandmother is a human.
    • Averted (though only subtly alluded to) in this strip. Ellen Foxworthy is held captive by alien pirates, and desperately says she will do "anything" if they do not kill Kevyn (her boyfriend). It has strong overtones of insinuation, but the pirate scoffs that she has "nothing with which to negotiate".
  • Digger parodies this when Digger, a wombat, is joining the hyena tribe for complicated reasons. One of the (matriarchal) hyenas says "What's she going to do? Move into our huts, eat our food, and seduce our menfolk?" "It could happen..."
  • Cat and Girl: Mars Needs Envelopes.
  • Freefall: Parodied here.
  • In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, it's been established that Nemesites really do care mainly about personality over anything else, and so interspecies romances are not that uncommon; Ahem is quick to point out that this fact is also a convenient excuse for arranging otherwise preposterous political marriages.


Web Original[]

Cquote1

 "It's about time Dyorbid actually hired an attractive waitress," Morgan said. Grif laughed.

"Well, hold on," Grif said, "let's be fair. The Murdec who worked here a few months back was very attractive... to other Murdecs."

Cquote2


Western Animation[]

  • Scooby Doo's attraction to Sandy Duncan.
  • There are a small handful of minor examples in Transformers. And then there is Kiss Players.
  • Amy and Kif's romance on Futurama... but on that show, nobody seems to give species a second thought in romantic pairings anyway (just as long as you aren't dating a robot).
    • Or, conversely, as long as you're not dating a human: "If anyone asks, you're my debugger."
    • In one episode dealing with evolving robots, apparently after 1 billion years of robotic evolutionary history (about 2 days for humans), robotic Neanderthals thought that, despite humans being made of substances they’d never seen before, Leela and Amy were hot enough to kidnap and make their wives.
  • Brian the dog on Family Guy has the hots for Lois, the (human) wife of Peter Griffin. When Peter is thought to have died, Brian and Lois get married, and almost consummate their relationship, until Peter ends up being found. He also has a relationship, and, evidently, quite a lot of sex with Jillian, a character voiced by Drew Barrymore, and had sex with Lauren Conrad, which gave her worms as a result.It's probably best not to think too much about that.
    • We've been forced to all think about it again with the recent resurfacing of one of Brian's past (human) girlfriends, who revealed to Brian that he had a son (!!!) with her. The son, creepily, appears to be entirely human, and all problematic aspects of his existence are handwaved away — even the most basic ones. (Stewie: "But how can your son be thirteen when you yourself are only seven?" Brian: "Those are dog years." Stewie: "...That doesn't make any sense." Brian: "You know, Stewie, if you don't like it, go complain about it on the Internet." Once again, Rule of Funny, or the attempt to obey it, wins the day on Family Guy)
    • Seth McFarlane's other show, American Dad, has Klaus the goldfish lusting after Francine Smith. Although, he was human, but had his brain put into a Goldfish's body by the CIA because...ya know, it's just easier not to explain the whole situation. Roger the alien also has a crush on Hayley and/or Francine in one episode. OK, so it was just a scam to get a free T-shirt, but still.
  • Jiminy Cricket of Pinocchio seems to have a fascination with human-ish women: from fairies to marionettes to music box ornaments shaped like 'em, but he is pretty damn human-ish himself, to the point of not even being immediately recognizable as any sort of anthropomorphic insect.
  • In the Justice League series, Gorilla Grodd is known for his three companions, the Hot (and Mad) scientist he met on the internet, Giganta (a size-changing ape-turned-human) and Tala (a witch). He's got taste.
    • Also, shortly before the end of the last season, J'onn decided to go on hiatus for a while. A few episodes later, as he reappeared for the last battle, it was pretty clear he spent that time living with a middle-aged Chinese woman.
  • Against her will, Thumbelina is very popular with other species.
  • One one episode of King of the Hill, Hank Hill goes to a swim with a dolphin event, rubs the dolphin's belly, and well ...
  • Inverted In a later episode of Johnny Bravo, where the title character is abducted by an all-female race of space aliens who then proceed with making him their king. Everything goes fine, until Johnny has them install cable TV. The aliens immediately lose interest in him after seeing Mel Gibson.
  • Bugs Bunny has an infatuation for human women, a couple of notable examples: in "Bugs Bunny Rides Again" in the climax he fights Yosemite Sam for a train full of women heading for Miami and after he wins he waves good bye to him while covered in lipstick, in "The Slick Hare" he avoids Elmer Fudd who wants to cook him for a sandwich for Humphrey Bogart, in the end he reveals that he wanted the sandwich for his girlfriend Lauren Becall whom he refers to as "Baby" when Bugs hears this he says "Anything Baby wants Baby gets" and he delivers himself on a platter for her while ogling and howling at her.
  • Forms the basis of Mars Needs Moms. Referenced right in the title.
  • Time Squad: Larry 3000, a robot who has a humanoid body structure but is non-human in appearance, is rather unabashedly interested in human men: not only does he harbor a frustrated attraction to his beefy teammate, Buck Tuddrussel, but he spends an entire episode ogling naked British soldiers.


Real Life[]

  • There is a bronze statue of a gorilla kidnapping a woman prominently displayed in the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois.
  • There have been documented cases of amorous dolphins trying to get it on with human swimmers of both sexes. Dolphins don't really care who they're doing it with.
  • The results of this study imply that chickens can not only tell the difference between an attractive human and an ugly one, but they actually prefer paying attention to attractive humans.
  • Male orangutans rape human women when they can, just check the other wiki. Julia Roberts was almost raped by one. Yes, really.
    • Despite gorillas being more associated with this trope in fiction, according to Koko, gorillas think Humans Are Ugly.
  1. Yes, there are parentheses in the title
  2. She knew/believed she would get pregnant, based on an ancient Martian prophecy describing how someone who met the description of her accomplishments (something about mastering "the 1,000 dances") would get pregnant by a man from Earth (who would convince the Martians to live) and thus save their species. She just hoped it wasn't true because she didn't love him back (but did her duty for her people) and, like most of the Martians, was resigned to the extinction of her people
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