Meta: Mpreg (RvB s4)-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

(CW: rape, body horror, transphobia, sexism)

This season we’re talking about mpreg, because for some ungodly reason it’s actually canon in RvB.

 

Mpreg is short for male pregnancy and generally describes the trope where men become pregnant, usually through supernatural or alien means (although just as often there’s no rational explanation given). Sometimes mpreg stories involve trans human men, but classically the trope is about aliens and/or cis human men, whether intersex or perisex. (Trans women getting pregnant isn’t as common a trope, though it does appear every once in a while.) Mpreg seldom occurs in mainstream fiction, but it is much more common in fanworks. Mpreg stories are almost invariably ‘about’ the pregnancy and are usually also kidfic. These are overwhelmingly crack or fluff, but sometimes authors do treat the trope seriously as either horror or drama. Mpreg fics “consciously and actively negotiate the concept of male pregnancy in ways that reveal the precise intersection of pregnancy and masculinity” (Ingram-Waters 1.3), and in some fandoms, such as SPN, they also allow for domesticity in a militaristic universe (Åström 1.4). Because RvB is a military comedy, it uses mpreg to both torture the characters for laughs and allow an otherwise unattainable degree of domesticity.

Mpreg is one of the more controversial tropes for several reasons, not least of which is the general squick many feel when thinking of cis perisex men being pregnant or giving birth (often this falls into the category of body horror). Pregnant men in fic also often undergo the rampant hyperfeminization common to cultural ideas of pregnancy that many feminists decry (see Beetham; wallace), though mapping that onto cis men could be read as a critique of that hyperfeminization of pregnancy. Meanwhile, in the trans community, mpreg is a whole can of worms because trans men can and do get pregnant, and some feel cis mpreg fetishizes trans bodies and experiences without including trans people (see the “Mpreg” Fanlore page for a distillation of this debate, a fight in which I have no dogs because I don’t have a uterus).

RvB is an intriguing example of the trope because of its positionality. It’s important to remember that RvB is itself a fanwork, thus its usage of a trope more common in fanworks makes sense. We could even say that the BGC arc of RvB is a crackfic of Halo, and the mpreg elements of s4 certainly bear this out. To summarize, at the beginning of the season an alien appears, usually referred to as Crunchbite in the fandom because that’s one of the names the characters try to give him (the language barrier means they can’t actually ask his name). Last season, Tucker found a glowing sword that works only for him and is ostensibly part of an alien prophecy. Crunchbite leads the Blues on a quest that among other things uncovers a banshee (an alien airplane) that is immediately shot down by Wyoming. During one of the nights of this quest, Crunchbite rapes and impregnates Tucker while he’s asleep. ANDY, the bomb who is also their translator, later explains that the aliens reproduce using parasitic embryos. In the season finale (and for a significantly long time loop in s17), Tucker births Junior through his dickhole.

On the one hand, this arc reflects the general homophobia, transphobia, and racism of 2000s shock humour (e.g. South Park, Family Guy, Archer). In s4, for example, ANDY makes a great deal of transphobic and lesbophobic jokes about Tex’s masculinity, and by this season Donut has become firmly and stereotypically queer-coded and not just a target for gay jokes because of his lightish-red armour. There are several rape jokes about the alien and its interactions with Tucker and Caboose. This is part of the metaphorical racism directed at the aliens and their inability to speak English, where foreigners are unintelligent, backwards, brutish, and sexually aggressive. There is no explanation for how aliens reproduced before contact with humans, implying that alien sexuality is inherently violative. Not only are the circumstances of Junior’s birth violent, but he needs to ingest a large amount of blood when born, almost completely draining Caboose. Church repeatedly refers to him as ‘it’ and loudly advocates killing him.

On the other hand, this arc critiques the performances of masculinity the sim troopers enact. Doc, the more liberal ‘politically correct’ member of the group, is seen as a quack for diagnosing Tucker with pregnancy, although O’Malley (Doc’s alternate personality created when he was possessed by Omega) makes fun of Tucker for it, perhaps showing Doc’s true feelings on the matter. Church categorically refuses to believe Tucker’s pregnant and thinks Junior’s an abomination that needs to be destroyed immediately. The show doesn’t interrogate the source of these beliefs, although he is presented as increasingly in the wrong as Tucker comes to embrace fatherhood. For his part, at first Tucker vehemently denies being the father as a force of habit from his projected lothario persona, despite the fact these objections are non-sensical when he’s the birthing parent. However, by the time Junior is born, he is fiercely protective of his child and somewhat excited about imparting fatherly advice on him, no matter how disgustingly unhelpful that advice may be (e.g. YouTube 360 episode “The Talk”). He clearly knows nothing about parenting, but he's insistent about staying in his life and is genuinely upset when Junior is kidnapped at the end of s5. Eventually, they reunite and become ambassadors of peace between aliens and humans, and Tucker carries around a picture of Junior on his adventures.

Honestly, Junior is one of my favourite characters, and I personally think he’s severely underutilized in canon. He often appears in human contemporary AU fic as Tucker’s kid. Sometimes, he has full custody instead of Junior’s proposed mom, but Tucker is also one of the characters more frequently portrayed as trans in fic because he’s the one who gave birth to Junior. In some ways, making Tucker trans is a sensible adaptation of the source material and allows for a kidfic without focusing on the mpreg aspect, but in other ways making Tucker trans, especially in Tuckington fic, can fetishize him, and it’s somewhat strange to make Tucker trans given how transphobic he himself is throughout the series (e.g. 8x1). At any rate, AU fic where Tucker gives birth to Junior tend to either ignore or change who the sperm donor is, whereas canon-compliant fic that address it nearly always emphasize that what happened with Crunchbite was rape. Interestingly, fic with Tucker and Junior tend to avoid many of the common mpreg tropes, probably because the canon story is such a straightforward example (and also because of the somewhat high proportion of trans RvB fans in my experience). I tend to forget that technically RvB is an mpreg fic because it happened so early in the series that it’s an accepted part of the fabric of the story: Tucker has a son he gave birth to himself, moving on… And I think that might be why it’s less squicky to me than other mpreg: the humour around it has grown past the initial shock of men giving birth to becoming something mundane, which in my circles it is.

Works Cited

Åström, Berit. “‘Let’s Get Those Winchesters Pregnant’: Male Pregnancy in Supernatural Fan Fiction.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 4, 2010, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2010.0135.

Beetham, Gwendolyn. “Where Is the Maternity-Wear for Queer Folks?” She Knows, 3 Oct. 2017, https://www.sheknows.com/parenting/articles/1136334/maternity-clothing-queer-moms/.

Ingram-Waters, Mary. “Writing the Pregnant Man.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 20, 2015, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0651.

“Mpreg.” Fanlore, 5 July 2022, https://fanlore.org/wiki/Mpreg.

wallace, j. “The Manly Art of Pregnancy.” Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman, Seal Press, 2010, pp. 188-94.