Super Breeding Program
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Overlord: You are to be the forefather of a new race, together along with Kar-La, this genetically perfect woman as your mate. As I said; I am experimenting with a new type of android that requires the seed of a specimen such as yourself to produce a new race... superior to these rather slow witted models. —Yor, the Hunter from the Future, as reviewed by Spoony.
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A character (or more) creates a "superior" being through the good old-fashioned way (i.e. sex (or at least something involving a womb, artificial or not)). This can take multiple forms, such as making it multi-generational or including supernatural/technologically augmented parents. This usually is an attempt to make Super Soldiers, but not always.
This shouldn't be confused with Designer Babies, which are artificially created to be better. Though, this is not to say that you can't have Designer Babies as part of the "experience". Stalker with a Test Tube is a more individual based Sub-Trope, while Super Breeding Program usually means creating many super people that may or may not take several generations. The Social Darwinist likes to use this trope since it's basically what they want.
See also Superpowerful Genetics and Transhuman. May be the result of crossbreeding two species, creating a bunch of Half Human Hybrids or Heinz Hybrids. Usually results in Superpowered Mooks. May require a Disposable Superhero Maker. Contrast Lego Genetics and/or Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke. Inevitably creates a Super Prototype. Usually works on the assumption of Evolutionary Levels.
Comic Books
- In The Invaders comic in the Marvel Universe, Adolf Hitler wanted to marry his two most perfect warriors Master Man and Warrior Woman to breed a race of Nazi supermen.
- In some versions of Spider-Man, Lizard was a reptile-supremacist Mad Scientist. This resulted in some wacky hijinks like cloned dinosaurs or poisoning humans with "instant lizardman" formulae.
Film
- The Super Mario Bros. movie's antagonist was attempting to create a new breed of soldiers by transforming the denizens of his universe into large mooks with tiny heads.
Literature
- All over the place in Dune, starting from the Bene Gesserit with their Kwisatz Haderach project and their, um, specialists in this area. They got their Kwisatz Haderach, alright. They just didn't expect him to lead an army of Fremen and take over the known universe.
- The imperial Sardukar, the Fremen, and the resulting "crossbred" army created by Leto from the two create some of the most impressive warriors in the Duniverse.
- Saruman's Uruk-hai in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
- In the Dystopian/science fiction classic Brave New World, a future society where people aren't even allowed to breed on their own, they use Uterine Replicators to genetically and biologically control the development of the fetus, and have multiple castes of humans, some vastly different in appearance and intelligence, based on what jobs they can have.
- In the Vorkosigan Saga, a Barrayaran Count sets up a breeding program using cast off female eggs and his own sperm in Uterine Replicators to create dozens of his own daughters, not as a bid to create some kind of pure or super race, but to...make more taxpayers for his county? The wife (who'd already given him a few legitimate children) whose consent he did this without wasn't very happy about it either.
- Barrayar had an unbalanced gender ratio; the Count was trying to lure male taxpayers with marriage opportunities. The Imperial government managed to find a culturally acceptable way of discouraging more of this without penalizing the innocent girls.
- The isolated Dunyain monks of the Second Apocalypse series have adhered to a breeding program for thousands of years. In the present of the story the Dunyain have superhuman capabilities.
- In Larry Niven's Known Space series, the "Teela Brown gene", which makes a human being who possesses it amazingly lucky, is the product of a very long-term breeding program performed in secret by the Pierson's Puppeteers on the entire human race. By the chronologically last story in the series, "Safe at Any Speed", the gene has spread to the point that nearly 90% of all humans in the galaxy are lucky.
- In the Future History stories by Robert A. Heinlein, the Howard Families are a breeding project for longevity.
- In The Witcher there's an not-so-Ancient Conspiracy of long-living sorcerers who bred their own uber-mage manipulating a few "interesting" ancestries via arranged marriages, "random" quarrels and love potions. One sorceress who was induced into the secret immediately expressed her opinion on the idea very graphically—by swirling the visual representation of the bloodlines into complete chaos and stating that's how this works outside the official genealogy books. As in Dune, they ended up with something too hot for them to handle—but weren't wise enough to drop it before some got burns.
- Counselors and Kings trilogy tells about Halruaan tradition of divining for good marriages and tradition of occasionally arranging the births of antimagical Jordain. The first was generally suspected to be a work of Ancient Conspiracy breeding the desired talents and preventing undesirable, the second turned out to go much deeper and darker than the public believed.
Live Action TV
- The Familiars from Dark Angel had been running one of these for millennia.
- Star Trek: The Original Series implied this is how Khan and his ilk came about. They were called the "Eugenics Wars," after all. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan retconned it to have been modern genetic engineering.
- The Psi Corps in Babylon 5, among other things, bred telepaths for psionic ability.
Tabletop RPG
- The Dragon-Bloods in Exalted tried to keep their blood "pure" by only mating with each other in an earlier time in the setting. This loosened somewhat as the Second Age rolled on, and they started sleeping with mortals, at a corresponding cost to their power. The Dynasty is noted to have the purest blood of the Terrestrial Exalted in Creation, since they descend from the Empress (who was either of unusual purity or completely pure-blooded, Depending on the Writer) and keep tighter track of their genealogies.
Web Original
- In the Global Guardians PBEM Universe, the People's Republic of China did this with their superhumans for nearly forty years, with the intention of creating an army of superhumans that were loyal to the People's Republic. They had about a 50/50 success rate.
Western Animation
- El Seed from The Tick (animation) had an ultimate goal of creating an army of super-strong animated plants.
Real Life
- Hitler's eugenics program to maintain a "pure" German race.
- Arguable. He was going for "Aryan", which was defined by an aesthetic look instead of a set of parameters based on performance. Any superiority was assumed to be in the Aryan model of human, which was not the case. His program was flawed from the beginning.
- Also, for it to work, with the tools/methods he had and were employing at the time, would have taken roughly 600 years to create this "Super Race." Making this extremely impractical.
- Even now, cutting edge test tube babies aren't going to be radically improved from the ones created using the methods available since the stone age.
- Arguable. He was going for "Aryan", which was defined by an aesthetic look instead of a set of parameters based on performance. Any superiority was assumed to be in the Aryan model of human, which was not the case. His program was flawed from the beginning.
- Eugenics in general.