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Baby as Payment
- 256 statements
- 48 feature instances
- 35 referencing feature instances
| Baby as Payment | type |
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| Baby as Payment | comment |
For one reason or another, cash isn't going to cut it for this transaction. Or perhaps a family doesn't have the cash needed to pay. Something else will surely suffice as payment. Something valuable, something priceless, like maybe... a child? A subtrope of Parental Abandonment. This is when a parent is either forced to give their baby away or does so voluntarily in exchange for something else. Oftentimes this is a case of "you owe me your firstborn child" as part of a Deal with the Devil or Leonine Contract, although sometimes any child will do. If someone makes this deal with the intent of never paying up, expect a Mystical Pregnancy to force the debtor into doing it. Expect Deliberate Values Dissonance in societies or factions that regularly use children as a form of payment. May overlap with Imperiled in Pregnancy, if the mother is captured and held until she gives birth as part of the deal. May lead to Changeling Fantasy. Compare Invasion of the Baby Snatchers (which deals with creatures that steal infants) and Switched at Birth (where babies are exchanged for one another). Compare Lost Him in a Card Game, where a person (sometimes a child) is bet instead of money and subsequently lost. Contrast Hostage Situation, where a baby is kidnapped to ensure the parents' compliance but is intended to be returned. No relation to And Your Reward Is Parenthood. Note that this trope is for when infants and younger children are traded away for something else. While characters trading older children and teenagers still occurs in media, they do not fall under this trope. noreallife |
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Dropped link to DoubleSubversion: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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Dropped link to FairyGodmother: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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Dropped link to InvertedTrope: Not an Item - IGNORE | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_12ce6b61 | type |
Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_12ce6b61 | comment |
GreedFall: Babies and young children are regularly used as a form of payment for the Nauts. Sometimes, governments will force families to give up their children in exchange for a contract with the Nauts. Other times, a noble family will give an infant as payment in exchange for their goods to be shipped to other countries — either of their own volition or as part of a Leonine Contract. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_12ce6b61 | featureConfidence |
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| GreedFall (Video Game) | hasFeature |
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| Baby as Payment / int_141a7410 | type |
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| Baby as Payment / int_141a7410 | comment |
Over the Garden Wall: Beatrice is tasked to deliver a child to serve Adelaide as payment for Adelaide undoing the curse that turned her and her family into bluebirds. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_141a7410 | featureConfidence |
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| Over the Garden Wall | hasFeature |
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| Baby as Payment / int_17ace8e1 | type |
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| Baby as Payment / int_17ace8e1 | comment |
Bioshock Infinite: Booker Dewitt's wife died in childbirth and shortly thereafter he lost his job and fell into debt. His only recourse was selling his daughter Anna when she was less than a year old to a man he discovers to be himself from another dimension. | |
| Baby as Payment / int_17ace8e1 | featureApplicability |
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| Baby as Payment / int_17ace8e1 | featureConfidence |
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| BioShock Infinite (Video Game) | hasFeature |
Baby as Payment / int_17ace8e1 | |
| Baby as Payment / int_1b386512 | type |
Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_1b386512 | comment |
Ranma ½: As it is revealed over the course of the series, one of Gemma Saotome's favorite cons during the time he took his son Ranma around Japan teaching him martial arts was to exchange Ranma (and/or the promise to betroth him to the daughter of whoever Genma was swindling) for random things he wanted (mostly food) and then running away. Two of the most notable examples are Uky� Kuonji (who becomes a recurring character after coming for Genma's blood because he stole her family's yattai which was going to be the union's dowry) and the fiancée of the "Martial Arts Takeout" arc (who quite [in]famously became a fiancée for the price of a bowl of rice and two pickles, shocking everyone in the Tend� home when they heard it). A latter arc revolves around the revelation that S�un Tend� pulled a similar scam on the French Chardin family when he was young. Understandably, Fanon tends to exaggerate this fact about Genma out the wazoo as a Fandom-Specific Plot. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_2268de37 | type |
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| Baby as Payment / int_2268de37 | comment |
Grimm: The Royals insist that Adalind give them her baby (conceived with a half-Royal bastard) to raise as a Royal. However, the Resistance kidnaps the baby from the Royals; but she doesn't know that the Royals don't have the baby, so she continues to do their bidding. When Adalind gets back to Austria, she finds out the hard way the resistance has her baby. Except that Nick's mom has hidden Adalind's baby to give her a chance to live an ordinary life. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_261c8d3f | type |
Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_261c8d3f | comment |
The Simpsons: In "Eight Misbehavin", Apu tries to pay Homer Simpson with one of his babies. In "Children of a Lesser Clod", Homer bets Maggie on a poker game and loses her to Moe. |
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| Baby as Payment / int_2a13f04c | type |
Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_2a13f04c | comment |
The Parasol Protectorate: In order to end the attempts on (then-pregnant) Alexia's life, her husband and Lord Akeldama agree that the baby will be adopted and raised by Akeldama. (It's political.) Alexia isn't pleased but finally agrees to the deal ... though she has regular contact with little Prudence. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_2bca217e | type |
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| Baby as Payment / int_2bca217e | comment |
In Into the Woods, the Baker's parents are forced to hand over his newborn sister Rapunzel to their neighbor The Witch as punishment for stealing magic beans from the latter's garden. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_3138dd1 | type |
Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_3138dd1 | comment |
Bug Martini: One of the potential solutions in the "Website Woes" strip is to sell your child to fix the server. | |
| Baby as Payment / int_3138dd1 | featureApplicability |
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| Baby as Payment / int_3138dd1 | featureConfidence |
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| Baby as Payment / int_3a678ae4 | type |
Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_3a678ae4 | comment |
Faust: Love of the Damned: At the end, as Mephistopheles is torturing John for foiling his plans, Jade begs to let him go. He demands "the soul of your unborn child" for John's life. She reluctantly agrees to the deal, (wrongly) assuming that her infertility means he won't be able to collect. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_3c10f1d3 | comment |
Rumpelstiltskin. A dwarf helps a miller's daughter turn straw into gold and she offers one of her possessions the first two times he helps her out. After the third time, she has to promise him her firstborn daughter. Since she has no children yet, she promises this and forgets about it. The miller's daughter then marries the king, has a baby and Rumpelstiltskin reappears to collect. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_3e1e745c | type |
Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_3e1e745c | comment |
Enchanted Forest Chronicles: In Searching for Dragons, Cimorene and Mendanbar meet a dwarf whose grandfather (implied to be Rumplestiltskin) set up a deal with a princess, asking for her firstborn and part of the gold he had to spin for her in return for his aid, but if she could guess his name, she could keep the baby. Then he let her find out his name, and everyone went home happy. His grandson continues the set-up, making the same deals, but every single girl he runs into is too stupid to find out his name, so he ends up with the baby and the gold. And he's getting really tired of getting more children (he likes them well enough, there's just too many of them). | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_42ffb88e | comment |
SCP Foundation: When a man summoned the demonic entity SCP-3061-1 to bargain for wealth, it demanded his young son in return. When he immediately, enthusiastically accepted and offered to throw in his daughter, the demon gave up, since it couldn't tempt someone that amoral. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_4b1b3aeb | comment |
The Tale of Despereaux: Mig's father sells her to a crabby, cruel man to buy a few items such as a chicken and a red cloth from him. In the present day, he is shown to deeply regret having given up his daughter. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_4f3a33a4 | comment |
In The Nix in the Mill-Pond, the titular water sprite offers a poor man money in exchange for the youngest thing on his property, which turns out to be his newborn baby. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_524a632d | type |
Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_524a632d | comment |
The backstory (told in diary form) in the Point Horror story Funhouse features this. The parents of the protagonist and her friends practically ripped the local boardwalk out from a relatively poor entrepreneur, leading him to kill himself. His wife is too poor to raise the baby so one of the businessmen who took the boardwalk offers to buy the baby from her. Once she realizes what she's done, she kills herself. And the baby in question? Turns out to be the saboteur behind all the disasters befalling the protagonist's friends and he intends on killing both her and himself in revenge. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_5755b96a | comment |
The Order of the Stick: Played for Laughs in a Cutaway Gag showing why the Church of Loki's daycare service doesn't come highly recommended: | |
| Baby as Payment / int_5755b96a | featureApplicability |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_619a5135 | comment |
Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid: Su-a was sold to the Yeo family as a five-year-old because her father had debts to the Yeo patriarch that he could not pay. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_61d35088 | comment |
Pocket Mirror: In the backstory, this is part of what Elise paid to the Strange Boy for him to grant her wish for riches (specifically her future second-born child), thinking she wouldn't have any due to being a lesbian. Unfortunately for her, the Strange Boy magically brainwashed the local count into marrying her so she could get her money, and they ended up birthing two children; despite Elise's best and extreme efforts, the Strange Boy came to collect after Elise's death, making the first-born (Henri) his servant and trapping the second-born (Goldia, the heroine) in a nightmare world without her memories. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_6b463ee9 | comment |
Harley Quinn starts off Birds of Prey (2020) with her origin story that her father sold her as a baby for a six-pack of beer. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_6bef8832 | comment |
Baldur's Gate III: Mayrina's husband Connor died while she was still pregnant, and fears that she won't be able to raise her child without him. So she ended up striking a deal with a green hag named Autie Ethel to bring Connor back to life in exchange for her child for Ethel to raise as her own. Unbeknowst to her, Ethel only wants the child so that she can eat them to give birth to her own hag daughter while giving Mayrina the means to raise her husband from the dead... as a zombie. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_6bf150d5 | comment |
Vow of Nudity: Princess Gloria's explanation for winding up in the Faewilds is that her father, the king of Duskvale, sold her to the Horned Queen to save his kingdom from a horrible plague. She turns out to be lying; he had far more personal reasons for getting rid of her. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_7072f3c0 | comment |
In For Biddle's Sake from The Princess Tales, the fairy Bombina demands that the parents of a child who will only eat parsley (the only parsley around grows in her garden) give the child to her. She privately thinks to herself that this will both punish the theft and make her come off better to the fairy queen, given that the situation could be spun as an adoption. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_78dd42f4 | comment |
Rapunzel ends up in the tower because her father promised a witch his firstborn in exchange for herbs from her garden. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_79620aaa | type |
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| Baby as Payment / int_79620aaa | comment |
Sandra and Woo: Richard didn't Read the Fine Print on his internet provider contract, which includes a clause giving up the customer's firstborn child. | |
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| Baby as Payment / int_79ae65c0 | comment |
This trope kicks off the plot of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance when the main character is forced to give the antagonist her child and go to prison or risk the death of her daughter. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
| Baby as Payment / int_7a8eea7e | comment |
In The Scholomance, a variation occurs: El winds up with the Golden Stone sutras—one of the most valuable books of lost spells in the world—and can't figure out why a semi-sentient spellbook would choose her, a wizard supernaturally gifted with destruction, to hold these extremely powerful spells of creation. In the third book, she learns why. Her mother and father attempted to summon the book to themselves, but were desperate to do so: all magic requires a "payment" of effort to work, but they left the payment open. They had not known that El's mother was pregnant at the time. While El herself obviously lived, she realizes that the horrible dark magical powers she's burdened with, and the prophecy that she will destroy the enclaves, must be the payment enacted. Her mother having doomed her daughter to a life of suffering in order to summon the book—as El muses, her mother hadn't even known at the time she had a daughter to pay with. However, there's a further twist: El wasn't the payment after all. She has horrible dark powers of destruction because she needs them in order to wield the Golden Stone sutras. She IS destined to use her great powers of destruction to destroy old enclaves... so she can build them back better than before. | |
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Broker: The film is about brokers who try to sell an abandoned baby to adoptive parents for a large sum of money. | |
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In Blood Brothers, Mrs. Johnstone, desperate for money after discovering that she's got twins coming (she's already got seven other children), agrees to sell one of the unborn twins to her employer, Mrs. Lyons, who desperately wants a child. When the twins are born, Mrs. Johnstone has a change of heart, but Mrs. Lyons comes to collect the baby anyway. | |
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The Sailor Moon fanfic All I Can Do has Nephrite make a Leonine Contract with Topaz. If she fully resurrects Naru, Naru must stay until she bears a son to give to Topaz as payment for her life. | |
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The Magicians (2016) does a variation of this when Margo strikes a deal with the Fairy Queen in season 2 — in return, the fairies take her eye and her Platonic Life Partner Eliot's wife's baby. | |
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Secret Histories: The Awful Truth behind the Drood family is that each member was born with a twin who was absorbed, body and soul, by the otherworldly entity that powers their signature magical armor. Fortunately, they find a replacement otherworldly entity with less objectionable demands by the end of the first book. | |
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A Song of Ice and Fire: Craster and his daughters live deep in the Grim Up North where the frozen, omnicidal White Walkers haunt the woods. The price for his Keep's safety is the infant boys he fathers on his own daughters. | |
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Futurama: In exchange for an army, the Robot Devil asks Bender for his first born son. Bender complies immediately, shocking and impressing the Robot Devil with his ruthlessness. | |
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In The Bible (specifically the Books of Samuel), Samuel's mother Hannah prays to God for a son and promises that she will give him to the priests to raise when he's old enough. Sure enough, she gives birth to Samuel and keeps her promise. This is related to the Jewish practice of pidyon haben, "redemption of the firstborn", in which a priest is paid 5 silver shekels (or an equivalent value) to symbolically redeem a firstborn male child (it is considered unnecessary if the boy is preceded by a girl or a miscarriage, born by caesarean section, or the father is himself a priest). | |
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Oglaf: "Rattleplank" is a Rumpelstiltskin Parody that goes sideways when the woman proposes an alternative to her firstborn child: | |
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In The Outer Worlds, it's not unusual for a worker's children to be property of their employers. Downplayed for Parvati, who was raised by her engineer father, because the company decided her mother's skills (implied to be something along the lines of a software engineer) couldn't be spared. Implied to be played completely straight elsewhere, with children never knowing any family but the foster parents they were placed with to suit the needs of their employers. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
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In Excalibur, Merlin agreed to help Pendragon disguise himself with an illusion spell to take on the appearance of his enemy Gorlois and bed Gorlois' wife Igrayne. In exchange, Merlin wants the first thing that comes out of that affair. That thing is their child - the future King Arthur. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
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L'Enfant: Bruno sells his baby to try and make some cash, and doesn't realize this is a bad thing until he tells his girlfriend what he's done and she faints. The criminals he sold the baby to want him to pay them as much as they were expecting to make on the kid for him to get him back. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
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Into the Woods includes the Rapunzel story, with a baby taken as payment for a man stealing from the witch's garden for his pregnant wife. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
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Rumplestiltskin is a main character on Once Upon a Time, and this has played out twice with him: In "The Price of Gold," he takes the place of Cinderella's Fairy Godmother and his price for helping her is her firstborn child. When she becomes pregnant, she has him magically imprisoned to try to get out of the deal, but this causes her husband to disappear. When the baby's time comes, birth is complicated until Emma makes another deal with Rumplestiltskin to release Cinderella; with the deal released, Cinderella is also reunited with her husband. In "The Miller's Daughter," Cora makes a deal with Rumplestiltskin: He'll teach her to spin straw into gold in exchange for her firstborn. As they work together, they fall in love and Rumple amends the deal to their firstborn, which never happens because she marries someone else. After Rumplestilskin's son, Baelfire was dying of an illness, Rumplestilskin made a deal with a healer to give him his future child if he were to save Baelfire. Even though he doesn't have another child until centuries later, the healer was Hades in disguise and he very much intends to collect. |
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In Sixes and Sevens, The Faustian Queen heals Emily's father of a fatal illness, but promises to take her firstborn child in exchange. | |
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The Real Boy has an example with an older child. Callie was born on the east side of Aletheia, where there is no magic. Her younger brother Nico had a problem with his immune system, which the local healer couldn't do anything about. Her parents hired Mariel, the healer from the west side of the island, who told them that their son would need regular treatments from her in order to stay alive. They couldn't afford it, so Mariel agreed to treat Nico in exchange for taking Callie back to her village. Now Callie works as Mariel's apprentice. Mariel has told her that she can never go back to her family, or even contact them, or her brother will be allowed to die. Two years later, she learns that Mariel scammed her parents, and Nico is long dead. | |
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Half's Saga: King Alrek of Hordaland resolves to divorce one of his two wives Signy and Geirhild because they are constantly squabbling with each other, and declares he will keep the wife who will brew him the best ale. When brewing, Geirhild calls on Odin to let her win the contest; Odin appears, spits into the yeast, and tells Geirhild he will come back "for what was between the tub and her". Geirhild's ale wins the contest, but it turns out Geirhild was pregnant and the thing "between the tub and her" was her unborn child. Many years later, when Geirhild's son Vikar is already an adult, Odin insidiously causes Vikar to be killed by hanging as a human sacrifice, thus collecting the prize promised to him. | |
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Mage: The Awakening: The price for a deal with the Courtesan, a malevolent Abyssal entity, is that it undergoes a Mystical Pregnancy and spawns a new Abyssal entity resembling the deal-maker. | |
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Baby as Payment | |
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Hollow Knight: Hornet's conception is a rare mostly ethical version of this trope. Herrah the Beast agreed to become a Dreamer to keep the Hollow Knight's seal intact. Her payment was that the Pale King father a child with her to pass on her legacy, presumably so that their offspring would possess the powers of both her parents. The Pale King complied. Astoundingly, all signs point to Herrah being a perfectly decent parent to Hornet, in contrast to how the Pale King treated the rest of his brood. | |
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The Witcher: Hospitality dictates that a man who has saved another may invoke the Law of Surprise as reward, requesting either "the first thing that comes to greet you" or "what you find at home yet don't expect" as repayment. This is often children. Ciri became Geralt's ward this way. Lambert was recruited as a witcher after another witcher saved his father and claimed him. | |
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In Da Vinci's Demons, Vanessa gives birth to the bastard son of the city's dead ruler and is pressured to immediately sign the baby over to his family. | |
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