History Main / PickyPeopleEater

* ''ComicBook/{{Batman}}'' foe Cornelius Stirk operates under the delusion that he needs the nutrients and hormones from people's hearts in order to stay alive, and these are best prepared with norepinephrine by inducing fear in the victim prior to death. In other words, he scares people, then kills them and eats their hearts. You can probably guess [[UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks what era of comics]] decided they needed a DarkerAndEdgier people-eating version of [[Characters/BatmanTheScarecrow the Scarecrow]].

** ''ComicBook/{{Venom}}'': In the UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks, Venom was given the trait that he needed to regularly consume dopamines, meaning he could either become a huge chocoholic or else gorge himself on [[BrainFood human brains]].

* ''WesternAnimation/MenInBlack'': In the opening of "The Inanimate Syndrome", Kay and Jay save a girl being preyed upon by a [[LiteralManEater shapeshifting alien who eats hearts]].

* ''VideoGame/RuneScape'': The flavor of human blood to a vampyre is affected by what emotion the human it came from is feeling. The in-game book "A Taste of Hope" reveals how each of the vampyre houses preferred to harvest blood and how it would affect the taste. For example, Clan Drakan would harvest blood flavored with hope by letting prey escape and then suddenly striking and draining them at the moment they thought they had gotten to safety. This is a clue for solving puzzles in Castle Drakan involving locks that can only be opened by the correct flavor of blood by assigning the person feeling the correct emotion to give blood to each lock.

* ''VideoGame/RuneScape'': The flavor of human blood to a vampyre is affected by what emotion the human it came from is feeling. The in-game book "A Taste of Hope" reveals how each of the vampyre clans harvests blood to get their prefered flavor. This is a clue for solving puzzles in Castle Drakan involving locks that can only be opened by the correct flavor of blood by assigning the person feeling the correct emotion to give blood to each lock.

* What do cannibals call <insert AcceptableTargets here>? "[[CrossesTheLineTwice Junk food]]".

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** Toxoplasmosis is capable of infecting many different kinds of hosts, but it prefers to infect cats because cats are the only host in which exist the right conditions for it to reproduce sexually, otherwise it can only reproduce asexually, so it modifies the behavior of its hosts to make them more likely to spread the infection to cats.
* While most carnivores will more than freely pick a corpse clean, predators that have to compete with [[AlwaysABiggerFish something bigger]] that will run them off from a kill (IE, a Cheetah avoiding lions or hyenas, wolves avoiding a bear or a larger pack) go directly for the liver and other organs where carbs and nutrients are richest.

* Orcas, aka killer whales, have been known to hunt and kill large sharks before squeezing out and eating their livers (and occasionally some other organs) while ignoring the rest of the body. This is because large sharks pack their livers full of fats and oils from their own meals to sustain them when migrating large distances across the ocean. This however, also makes their livers a very nutrient dense food for the hungry orcas.

* ''Series/{{CSI}}'': One perpetrator has her attack dogs kill people, then converts the most blood-rich of their internal organs into a milkshake-like slurry. She suffers from porphyria, a metabolic disorder that caused insanity in her case, and was convinced that consuming such organs was the only way to self-medicate.

-->-- '''Dr. Hannibal Lecter''', ''Film/TheSilenceOfTheLambs''

* ''Film/TheSilenceOfTheLambs'': Hannibal Lecter, but only as an extension of his gourmet tendencies when it comes to all his food. For example, he'll often take delicacies such as sweetbreads, kidneys, the liver or oyster meat -- a tendency which first clues Will Graham in to the notion that his suspect is a cannibal, and ultimately leads to Lecter's capture. He's also picky as to ''which'' [[AssholeVictim people he'll eat]].

->''"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver, with some fava beans and a nice chianti."''

* In ''Manga/InuYasha'' while demons tend to feed on people, many of them have specific preferences, including a Mantis monster that'll feed on innards, Juromaru (one of Naraku's creations) who was fond of livers and a giant, skinned Salamander demoness who needs to eat the skins of male people or demons in order to regain her form. There's also the Zushi Rat, who leaves the flesh to his countless rat children and takes the bones for himself.

* Franchise/CthulhuMythos: Some monstrosities have weird dietary preferences for blood, brains, marrow, etc.

* In ''Literature/TalesOfMU'' demons and their part-human descendants need to consume specific human parts which vary by the individual. Half-demon Mack drinks a pint of virgin's blood once a month while her father eats ovaries, a more human part-demon mentions she gets by on blonde hair.
* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'':

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* ''Website/SCPFoundation''
** [[http://scp-wiki.net/scp-953 SCP-953 ("Polymorphic Humanoid")]]. SCP-953 is the basis for the Korean legend of the [[AsianFoxSpirit kumiho]] (9-tailed fox). It can reach inside a person's abdomen, extract their liver, and swallow it whole. It has a particular tendency to attack anyone who refers to it as a (Japanese) kitsune, although that's unlikely to have anything to do with the taste.
** [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1049 SCP-1049 ("The Bonetaker Owl")]]. By biting a human being with its beak, SCP-1049 can suck the person's entire skeleton out of their body and consume it.
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* In ''WesternAnimation/TheSmurfs'', a monster called the Creepodile lived in the Pussywillow Hollow swamp, usually in a deep slumber; if it ever woke up, it would not return to sleep until it found and devoured a king. Naturally, King Bullrush of the wartmongers -- whose kingdom ''was'' the swamp -- was terrified of what might happen if it awoke, and when Vanity actually did so, Bullrush made him king so it would go after Vanity instead. (The Smurflings were able to save Vanity by fooling the beast into eating a gourd dressed up in royal clothes.)

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* ''LightNovel/TheWeaknessOfBeatriceTheLevelCapHolySwordswoman'': Kallikantzaros is a vampire who only feeds on the blood of Iberian Orcs (and hence will only make new vampires out of them). This is because she hates the taste of any other kind of blood. Unfortunately, at the time of the series there's [[SoleSurvivor only one Iberian Orc because the others were all killed]], but fortunately Kallikantzaros is willing to wait until the population builds back up (Iberian Orcs can interbreed with other races and the offspring are still Iberian Orcs).

** The ''Literature/NightLords'' series has Uzas, who shows a great fondness for eating geneseed, preferably from the still living flesh of loyalist marines. One could take it solely as a sign of his status as the resident AxCrazy, but even the hero Talos makes mention of the practice, and later eats the heart of a Blood Angel he killed in act of revenge.
** A ''Literature/BastionWars'' novel shows a rebel insurgency of Chaos cultists trying to liberate their planet, and they have a tendency to cut out and eat the livers of their Imperial counterparts.

* ''Videogame/SouthParkTheFracturedButWhole'': [[spoiler:[[Literature/CthulhuMythos Shub-Niggurath]]]] subsists on a diet of dark meat and cannot stomach white meat, meaning that it only eats black people and white people will make it violently ill. Its boss fight consists of you forcing its worshipers [[spoiler:(the South Park Police Department)]] into its feeding range. Inversely however, if it eats [[TokenMinority Token]] or the New Kid if they're black, it gains back its health.

** Perytons crave humanoid hearts over everything else, as female perytons need to eat them before being able to reproduce. Their first action after making a kill is to tear out the desired organ, after which they abandon the carcass and fly off. They're also fairly picky about the provenance of these hearts; they prize human ones above all others, but never eat those of elves and fairies.

* ''Manga/Bleach'': The more spiritual power a person has, the more tasty they are to hollows. Aside from that, most hollows are indiscriminate about who they eat since they have little control over their compulsion to eat people and so act mostly like animals. But some of the more depraved hollows do have specific kinds of people that they prefer to eat, making them more like serial killers. One example was Grand Fisher, who preferred to eat children in the manga, or women in the anime.

** [[http://scp-wiki.net/scp-953 SCP-953 ("Polymorphic Humanoid")]]. SCP-953 is the basis for the Korean legend of the [[AsianFoxSpirit kumiho]] (9-tailed fox). It can reach inside a person's abdomen, extract their liver, and swallow it whole.

* ''Series/{{Angel}}'': In "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco", Tezcatcatl ate only the hearts of heroes. This gave Angel a bout of low self-esteem when it didn't want his, though a couple of people pointed out that maybe it just didn't want to eat a heart that had technically been dead for over two hundred years.
** A vampire in "Power Play" specifically requests virgin blood. VirginSacrifice is nothing new, and it is long established that vampires prefer human blood to animal; but this is the first vampire to be shown to have a preference for virgin blood.
** There's a small RunningGag through the show where people refer to the blood Angel drinks as "O Pos(itive)". What's curious is that Angel is a VegetarianVampire, so it should be pig's blood rather than O Positive human blood. Taken at face value however, different blood types apparently have different flavors, leading to preferences.

** [[VillainOfTheWeek Eddie Mays]] from "Blood Hungry" ate a body part believed to contain the soul. Of course, so many religions believed the soul existed in a body part and they were all different, so Eddie just wound harvesting a different one from each victim (liver, stomach, and heart).
** Then we have Floyd Feylinn Ferell, who did not like to eat junkies because "they tasted funny".

* ''Series/{{Fringe}}'': "Midnight" has a woman who's been turned by mad scientists into a cerebrospinal fluid sucking vampire.
* ''Series/{{Sliders}}'': Among the Kromaggs human eyes are a delicacy. The series' first recurring BigBad, Colonel Rickman, suffered from a degenerative nerve disease that required him to regularly steal brain fluid and inject it into himself to survive. His victims were left in comas.
* ''Series/{{Smallville}}'': In "Static", the alien Aldar tears people apart and eats their bones, leaving the rest to rot.

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** Eugene Victor Tooms fed on human livers.
** The "fat-sucking vampire" from "2Shy" that fed on overweight women. There's a business model right there.
** A monster from "Leonard Betts" that replenished itself by eating ''tumors''.

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