One-Track-Minded Hunger

A character has One-Track-Minded Hunger when they will do (almost) anything to get something to eat to such a degree that it almost seems like their Character Alignment. No matter what, they'll go for food, and they won't ever let up. Nothing can convince them not to eat everything they can reach... except maybe another One-Track-Minded Hunger character standing in their way. That said, It's NOT a good idea to stand between them and their food.

They might not care much about Good or Evil, and laws are at best a suggestion. They may be good or evil-aligned, but only by accident or because it will earn them more food. It can sometimes start as basically this, then develop into a more personal goal for the character to get their meal out of pride which may or may not lead into Motive Decay depending on how much of the character's gluttony was caused by hunger or psychological reasons to begin with.

These characters are (most of the time) Big Eaters that might also be an Extreme Omnivore to boot. They tend to suffer Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! level susceptibility to Delicious Daydreams; sometimes even Meat-O-Vision. When they do get their mitts on a meal, don't be surprised if they proceed to scarf it up like a wild animal. Heavily prone to falling for a Delicious Distraction. You want them to be on your side? Give them food. You need them to do any sort of task or favor for you with a 99.9999% success rate? Simply bribe them with food.

Sub-Trope of Obsessed with Food, which is someone who isn't necessarily always seeking to eat food but otherwise has a fixation on the subject. Compare Bratty Food Demand. See also fairly common overlapping tropes Horror Hunger and Hungry Menace. Contrast Forgets to Eat.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: When Kurumi gets hungry (which is almost always), she will become aggressive and can't help but think about the food she wants.
• Dragon Ball Z: Majin Buu, in his "fat" form, is quite malicious but really only cares about candy. The number of people he killed without eating them can be counted on one hand.
• Gluttony the Homunculus in Fullmetal Alchemist is technically a bad guy, but he's really more of a mentally-deranged kid with Extreme Omnivore tendencies.
• One Piece:
  • Luffy only thinks about one thing outside fights and that is food.
  • Later arcs introduce Big Mom, a member of Yonko, who has a vague disorder where she gets cravings for a specific food and rampages until said craving is satisfied. Unfortunately, she's an incredibly powerful giant of a woman capable of ''stealing souls'' who becomes incapable of discerning even family in these rages and might devour anyone in her way. It's been said that she's even devoured more than one of her own children when in the grips of her hunger. The only reason she even has her Devil Fruit power is because she ate the previous holder during a particularly bad hunger frenzy as a child.
• Toriko's Neo lives and breathes the trope. Its only goal in existence is to revive through Acacia's Full Course (the Full Course of the World) and devour the world. Since the manga is about food, it essentially speaks for itself.

Comic Books

• Galactus in many of his incarnations. He even says he's Above Good and Evil!
• Venom's Ultimate counterpart was created to be a protoplasmic cure for cancer, but in its incomplete, weaponized state it is ravenously hungry for flesh and drives its hosts to devour anything and anyone around it.
• Played with horrifyingly in the first arc of Hellblazer when John Constantine has to stop Memnoth, a Hunger demon which is loose in New York. Said demon kills his victims by cursing them with an insatiable hunger for a non-food item, usually something valuable that the person covets, such as jewels, rare comics, etc. In one case, he makes a bodybuilder eats his own ARM in an attempt to sate his hunger. If the victim doesn't suffocate from trying to swallow solid items, they die when their bodies consume themselves from Memnoth's possession.

Fan Works

• Eldritchrune: As part of her Adaptational Abomination status, Canon Susie's mild case of Extreme Omnivore is upgraded to an insatiable Horror Hunger for her Eldritch counterpart. This Susie is cursed with an infinite stomach that can never be filled, and thus tends to devour anything she comes across, especially living creatures. She only teams up with Kris (after digesting them once already) when they strike a deal of gaining her assistance for the prospect of setting her loose on Earth, where she can feast to her heart's content.

Films — Animation

• Though the pack of blue and orange Pterosaurs in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs were all hungry to eat Crash and Eddie, there was one pterosaur that really wanted to have his stomach filled. That same pterosaur would eventually go right up to the possums while they were still firing explosive berries, being so fixed on eating them , he was not aware of the consequences that would be coming onto him.
• Kaa from The Jungle Book (1967) seems to suffer from this. He's rather affable and, unlike Shere Khan, not a wrathful active villain (one episode of Jungle Cubs even shown him to be an outright Friend to All Living Things the rare time he is full) but he is constantly setting his hypnotic eyes on a new morsel, making him a danger to the protagonists.
• The Greedy from Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure. He is a gigantic Blob Monster made out of taffy, who spends all his time eating himself yet never feels satisfied. He believes a "sweetheart" will satiate him. When Raggedy Ann tells him about her candy heart, The Greedy goes absolutely berserk trying to obtain it.

Films — Live-Action

• The alien slugs in Slither can turn people into this. Making them seek out the closest source of meat they can find, regardless of what or who it is.
• Pizza the Hutt from the movie Spaceballs is always eating. And when locked in his car, he eats himself to death.

Literature

• In Animorphs, the Taxxons have an endless hunger that drives them to eat their own wounded (as well as anything else they can get their mouths on). Many Taxxons willingly became Controllers because being part of the Yeerks' forces meant they would have the power to hunt and eat more prey. Their hunger is so powerful that not even the Yeerks can stop it. The Yeerk that would become Visser Three refused to become a Taxxon Controller because he didn't want to live with that hunger. In the final arc, the Animorphs persuade some Taxxons to switch sides by offering to transform them into animals with smaller appetites, like pythons.
• There's a brief bit in one of the Discworld novels which shows the POV of a shark, whose entire mentality comes down to "=", i.e. "sense it = eat it". (It's brief, because the "it" it senses is Rincewind's feet, and the Luggage follows a similar equation with regards to anything that threatens its master...)
• The Hungry Tiger from the Land of Oz books. He is always hungry, no matter how much he eats, and longs to eat a "fat baby," though he never would because his conscience will not allow him to do so.
• Ungoliant from The Silmarillion is a spider-like Eldritch Abomination who is all about hunger and eating stuff. She teamed up with Morgoth because she was hungry and he offered her to suck the Two Trees dry. Later he betrayed her because she was still hungry and wanted to eat the Silmarils. Morgoth had to call his devil goon squad to stop her from eating these artifacts along with him, since she was already overpowering him. Although she disappeared afterwards from history alltogether, it is said that she isn't around anymore because she eventually ate herself to death.

Podcasts

• In Hello, from the Magic Tavern, Chunt's father is a Hunger Ghost, which happens to you you die hungry. He is cursed the Walk the Earth, perpetually seeking food, and has an infinite and insatiable hunger.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Supplement REF5 Lords of Darkness. One opponent the PCs can encounter is Rugen Phimister, a ghoul who is always hungry and always eating.
  • Dark Sun setting. The Fael are undead creatures who never quenched their need for material consumption in life. In death, they're condemned to be always hungry and always searching out food to eat. Worse yet, the more they eat the hungrier they get, so no matter how much they eat they're never satisfied.
  • Famine Spirit is the 3.5th edition adaptation of the Fael — a corporeal undead that doesn't have the ability to stop eating.
  • The Fiendwurm is a giant earthworm that has a rift to the Abyss in its stomach and in constant pain. Eating reduces the pain so it seeks to eat as much as it can.
• In Nomine: Haagenti is the Demon Prince of Gluttony. He spends all his time either eating or getting more food, and anyone around him is at risk of becoming his next meal.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Tyranids are smart enough to do things like sacrifice their own or employ psychological warfare to demoralize prey, so it can be easy to forget that, at base, their only real endgame is to eat everything.

Theater

• In the play of Metamorphoses, Ceres curses Erysichthon with an insatiable hunger. He eats everything he can. Sells his possessions and then tries to sell his own mother for food, and then eventually eats himself.

Video Games

• The demon Gorgoth in Arcanum is cursed with insatiable hunger, and was banished to the Void when he chowed down on a halfling village and no one could think of anything better to do with him. Recruiting him into your party and keeping him loyal requires you to keep him fed with a steady supply of lizard carcasses.
• In Commander Keen, the Dopefish — the second dumbest creature in the universe — has a thought process that goes, "Swim swim hungry. Swim swim hungry."
• Far Cry 6 has Chorizo the daschund, who is normally sweet, amiable, and friendly—until he gets hungry. His favorite dish is "Jambalaya in the Style of Chorizo," which is made with crocodile meat. How does such a tiny dog have a taste for such a large predator's flesh? Because he once befriended a crocodile hatched from the egg, treated it like a brother, and grew up with it happily—until Chorizo got hungry and had nothing else nearby to eat...
• Quina of Final Fantasy IX is always on the lookout for new food to try and will eat, or express interest in eating, anything, including at one point, a rock.
• The Heartless in Kingdom Hearts act all out of instinct, and their instinct is to get hearts to eat. Nothing more.
• Kirby is seen as a hero, and yet more than once he saved the world by accident, looking for a cake or something similar.
• League of Legends:
  • Kog'maw, a champion, attacks only using his gastric acid. It's stated he spits acid on stuff because he can't swallow them whole (yet), meaning anyone he spits on is a potential breakfast. And because it's a baby, he doesn't even understand good and evil.
  • Same with Cho'Gath, except that Cho actually is Chaotic Evil, too. It is an Eldritch Abomination in constant hunger, devouring anything coming too close to its claws. And its main objective is to bring its species to join the feast.
• The Maw's entire purpose is to eat everything, to the level of a Cosmic Horror.
• The Spirit Eater Curse from Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer is built around this trope. The Spirit Eater is a horrific demi-godlike entity that turns the host into an insatiable devourer of spirits, fey, and the dark energy of the undead. The curse becomes so strong that it eventually consumes the soul of the host; destroying the very essence of their existence and leaving only an empty corpse behind. The eater has consumed countless spirits for generations, and the Player Character can use it For the Evulz. It devours all life in the Forgotten Realms and a couple other planes. The gods band together to fight it and it literally eats half of them before they bring it down. (It's even implied that the Betrayer didn't truly die from the wrath of a dozen gods.) An ironic thing about it is that Myrkul, the god who created the curse can be eaten by it. D&D gods are virtually unkillable, they just partially fade away. The spirit eater completely destroyed them.
• Annabelle in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel starts out as a young woman on a journey who takes up fishing as a way of stretching her travel budget. By the second game, she has shifted her priorities so that the point of the journey is to catch and eat every variety of fish in the Empire (to the point where the only time she isn't seen near a fishing hole is after she was dragged to shelter after she tried fishing in a blizzard), which continues for the rest of the series. She ends up marrying the younger brother of the owner of Erebonia's top producer of fishing gear, and her idea of a honeymoon is a cross-continental fishing trip.
• Pokémon:
  • Munchlax, which forgets about the food it has stashed in its fur in its sheer desperation to eat. It's said to eat whatever looks like it might be edible (keyword: might) without a thought. It also has no time for chewing. Its evolution Snorlax of course applies as well, as eating is the only thing that motivates it to do anything besides sleep. It's said to have no interest in anything other than eating.
  • Morpeko has a lightning-fast metabolism, so it gets hungry again very quickly after eating. When it's hungry, or in "Hangry Mode", its temperament becomes highly aggressive and will resort to dastardly acts to satiate itself.
  • Guzzlord, known as UB-05 Glutton, is a far more extreme example. Guzzlord's eternal hunger is to the point where it stops at nothing to consume everything — buildings, mountains, even the very land and sea. Most horrifyingly, no one has ever found their droppings, so they are essentially black holes.
• The Gobblers from Wizard101 definitely apply. They are Extreme Omnivores that continue to eat buildings even after they are fed a potion that is suppose to both magically and chemically trigger the gag reflex.
• The Eaters from Chimera Beast are a Horde of Alien Locusts that have no other motive than to eat all lifeforms in sight, assimilating their abilities. In one ending, they leave the planet after destroying the planet's ecosystem, continuing on to destroy other planets until they eventually reach Earth.
• The Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas presents us with Dog, one half of the divided personalities within a schizophrenic Nightkin. Dead Money's overall story carries a theme of greed, and Dog represents this via pathological, uncontrollable hunger. If he can't maintain a steady diet to keep his appetite under control, eventually he can no longer resist it and will simply feast upon anything edible-looking within reach, no matter how he has to crush and mangle it to fit - Ghost People, explosive collars, humans...
• Boreas from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 thinks about little other than food. Almost every node of his affinity chart requires either feeding him or donating food to his personal stash. When said stash is stolen, he stops at absolutely nothing to get it back.
• In What Remains of Edith Finch, Molly becomes this after she is sent to bed without dinner. First, she eats everything she can find in her room: old gerbil food, a tube of toothpaste, and some holly berries. What happens after this depends on your interpretation of her diary: she either becomes various animals hunting for their prey, ending with a sea monster eating her real self, or she dies of food poisoning while hallucinating of becoming the aforementioned creatures.
• The titular slimes of Slime Rancher basically live for food, especially the Pink Slimes that will eat basically anything. The rest are a little pickier, only being willing to eat out of their category of food (fruit, veggies, or meat) and each have a Trademark Favorite Food, though all of them will attempt to take a bite out of you if they turn feral and will also try to eat plorts from other slimes. Whether they're hungry or grumpy or feral, food will always make them feel better. Then of course there's The Tarr who eat other slimes and whose favorite food is ranchers, and "BOb" a pile of Pink Slimes in a trench coat who have figured out how to use Ranch Exchange... and use it to ask for chickens.

Web Video

• Cream Heroes has this with Lulu. He's willing to even paddle around in water if it means getting hold of a snack. Kitten Dodo can be just as bad, if not worse. He's also risked getting his paws wet in the name of food, and even fished the spoon Claire had mixed and served his food with out of the sink so he could lick it.

Western Animation

• Captain Planet and the Planeteers does this in an episode where a kid somehow got cloned. The clones are all ravenously hungry and the more they eat, the more they multiply. There are many repeated "we are hungry" cries while the Planeteers work to undo it. It was possibly an overpopulation lesson.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Whatever obstacles stand between the Tasmanian Devil and a snack won't stand there for long. Many episodes open with a description of him which includes a long list of animals he eats, ending with "especially rabbits", or on one occasion, wild duck.
  • Sylvester may also qualify. Most of his villainous antics abide to setting on eating Tweety or some other small animal. Also at times he can be a bit of a bully and a schemer towards other cats and dogs. Outside those moments, he is either forced into a chase by a human owner or acts as a non-provocative protagonist.
  • As would Wile E. Coyote — frankly, any animal protagonist in an animated cartoon would probably qualify, barring the times where they interact only with non-prey characters and more aspects of their personality are shown.
• Case in point, Zig the Hyena from Zig & Sharko. His one and only obsession is trying to eat Marina the siren, and it doesn't matter how much pain Sharko is going to inflict him for his attempts — Zig is not going to give up.
• The Eruptodon from Dragons: Riders of Berk is a Titan-wing Boulder-class dragon that must constantly feed, its primary diet being volcanic lava. If it goes without feeding for very long, it becomes insatiable until it dies of starvation.
• A defining characteristic of the protagonists of 2 Stupid Dogs is their obsession with food.

Real Life

• Any carnivorous animal that hasn't been fed for a few days/weeks.
• Prader-Willi syndrome patients.

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