Doro is a spirit who can inhabit other people's bodies, killing anyone and anything in his path, while Anyanwu is a woman with healing powers who can transform herself into any human or animal.

Anyanwu is the Wild Seed's black female protagonist that is born in an Igbo (or Ibo as Doro says) village in Africa with genetic mutations that endow her with immortality and physical strength.

Anyanwu is a "shape-shifter," someone who is capable of altering her cells to create a new identity such as a different body, sex, age, or even species− metamorphoses she calls upon when needed to assure her survival.

Long ago he became singularly fixated on breeding superhumans to form a psionic society that will provide him with the human bodies he needs, as well as sexual partners.

Isaac is very keen on the pairing as he likes Anyanwu a great deal and found her attractive, but she viewed the match as near-incestuous because she was at the time married to Doro, his father.

As a parasitical entity, Doro is a breeder, master, killer, and consumer of lives while, by being grounded in her body, Anyanwu is a nurturing "earth" mother, healer, and protector of life.

Some critics read their struggle as that between "masculine" and "feminine" perspectives with Doro as the patriarch who controls and dominates his people and Anyanwu as the matriarch who nurtures and protects her own.

In spite of its classification as fantasy fiction, Wild Seed has been considered as a major exponent of Butler's interest in eugenics as a means to further human evolution.

[5] Maria Aline Ferreira goes further, describing both Doro and Anyanwu as "protogenetic engineers" whose deep understanding of how the human body functions help them remake themselves and transform others.

[6] For Andrew Schapper, Wild Seed is an entry point to the "ethics of controlled evolution" that permeate Butler's novels, most obviously in the Xenogenesis trilogy.

As an early novel on the subject, Wild Seed betrays Butler's anxiety that eugenic manipulation and selective breeding could lead to an unethical abuse of power and thus she counters it with a "Judeo-Christian ethical approach to the sanctity of human life" represented by the character of Anyanwu.

[7] Gerry Canavan argues that Wild Seed challenges conventional fantasies of race by having Doro's eugenics project supersede that of Europe's by millennia.

Strong-willed, physically capable, and usually endowed with some extra mental or emotional ability...they nonetheless must often endure brutally harsh conditions as they attempt to exercise some degree of agency.

As Elyce Rae Helford explains, "[b]y setting her novel in a realistic Africa and America of the past, [Butler] shows her readers the strength, the struggles, and the survival of black women through the slave years of United States history.

[12] As L. Timmel Duchamp argues, Wild Seed as well as Kindred provided an alternative to the "white bourgeois narrative, premised on the notion of sovereign individualism" that feminist writers had been using as the prototype for their liberation stories.

By not following the "all-or-nothing struggle" of Western fiction, Wild Seed better represented the hard compromises that real women must accept to live in a patriarchal, oppressive society.

[12][13] Anyanwu's hybridity, her capability to represent multiple simultaneous identities, allows her to survive, to have agency, and to remain true to herself and her history in the midst of excruciating oppression and change.

[14] For Gerry Canavan, Anyanwu's obvious pleasure and joy in cannibalizing the Other into the Self (especially animals, and particularly, dolphins) presents us with an alternative to the cycle of violence and desire for power offered by the superhuman Patternists (and, by metaphoric extension, human history).

Butler's novel is minimalistic in its West African backdrop, but nevertheless manages to convey the rich ethos of Onitsha culture through its Igbo heroine, Anyanwu.

As Elcye Rae Helford contends, the novel is part of Butler's larger project to "depict the survival of African-American culture throughout history and into the future.

"[4] Indeed, as the origin story of the Patternist series, which follows the exploits of a race of genetically-mutated black superhumans who eventually rule Earth in the 27th century, Wild Seed revises our sense of human history as directed by white supremacy.

Scenes in the novel depict the capture and sale of Africans; the character of European slave traders; the Middle Passage; and plantation life in the Americas.

[16] Doro also resembles a slave master because his program of forced reproduction aims to produce individuals who are exceptional at the cost of degrading the humanity of its participants.

Butler does this not as a medium to change the tides of history, but to ultimately work through the ways in which Western modernity employs racialization, as well as patriarchy, to build and maintain colonial projects.

[24] In an interview, Butler acknowledged that writing Wild Seed helped lighten her mood after finishing the grim fantasy that was her slave narrative Kindred.

[25] Among the sources Butler consulted for the African background of her novel were The Ibo Word List, Richard N. Henderson's The King in Every Man and Iris Andreski's Old Wives Tales.

[22] As Butler told McCaffery and McMenanin, "Atagbusi was a shape-shifter who had spent her whole life helping her people, and when she died, a market gate was dedicated to her and later became a symbol of protection.

[2] Wild Seed received many positive reviews, especially for its style, with the Washington Post's Elizabeth A. Lynn praising Butler's writing as "spare and sure, and even in moments of great tension she never loses control over her pacing or over her sense of story.

"[15] Lynn also remarked that "[Butler's] use of history as a backdrop to the struggles of her immortal protagonists provides a texture of realism that an imagined future, no matter how plausible, would have difficulty achieving.

"[16] In April 2019, news was announced that Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor would co-write the screenplay of a TV adaptation of Wild Seed with Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu for Amazon Prime Video.