Our Ogres Are Hungrier

Ogres are like onions. There's more than one kind of onion.^{L-R, top-to-bottom}Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Berserk, Ella Enchanted, Shrek the Third.

"After all, ogres appreciate succulent meat as much as the next ten-foot tall killing machine."

— Warhammer Fantasy Battle: Ogre Kingdoms

Ogres? Man, I've got a Description Of Our Ogres Are Hungrier Here! It's got a +9 against ogres!

Ogres are a staple of fantasy and fairy tales, and so appear in many forms. Most have the following traits in common:

• Child Eater (in fairy tales; otherwise they eat anyone that comes their way).
• Big Eater — ogres are usually provided with immense appetites, and can put away quite a lot when they sit down to eat. They aren't usually picky eaters, either, and while they usually prefer meat they are often depicted as capable of and willing to eat anything they can fit into their mouths.
• Much bigger than a human and tend to associate size with leadership.
• Brutal and prone to Hulk Speak.
• Typically not too smart.

Ogres in folklore were portrayed as child-eating monsters who sometimes had magical or otherwise supernatural powers (the ogre from "Puss-in-Boots" is a classic example). Unlike modern depictions of ogres as lumbering primitives, fairytale ogres often lived in castles, wore fine clothing and owned wondrous magical items... while still being unrepentantly evil monsters who ate children like popcorn.

In fantasy works, ogres tend to occupy a mid-level spot on the Sorting Algorithm of Evil of evil humanoid foes, generally appearing after orcs but before giants.

See also Our Orcs Are Different (their names share the same linguistic root — they are believed to stem from Orcus, a Roman god of the underworld), Our Giants Are Bigger, All Trolls Are Different, and Smash Mook.

Not to be confused with trolls. Even though they can often be indistinguishable in fairy tales (when English/French tales reached Scandinavia, "ogre" would usually be translated as "troll"), Nordic-style trolls are generally a type of fae rather than a generic evil monster. Sometimes shares international space with oni.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The Ogres of Berserk are bizarre mashups of human and sperm whale: extremely tall and lanky humans with a massive head with eyes on the front.
• In Delicious in Dungeon, only female ogres have been seen so far, although males have been drawn in supplementary sketches. They're very tall and muscular Horned Humanoids with large canines that are based on Oni rather than Western ogres (their only populations are in the "Eastern" regions of the planet), and possess Super-Toughness and strength. It's mentioned in supplementary media that they're a Dying Race for reasons unclear (theories include being too large to travel on horses or requiring too much food to survive famines), and are now very rare even in their homelands. They can also interbreed to produce fertile offspring with tallmen (although this never comes up in the story).
• Digimon has Ogremon! He's a Noble Demon, it turns out. There's also his Palette Swap versions, Fugamon (brown) and Hyogamon (blue, ice-themed.)
• Hellsing: Referenced in the chapter titled, "Ogre Battle".
• The Zentraedi from the Macross series have the characteristic Super-Strength and large size in comparison to humans.
• Monster Musume has Tionisha, a rather unorthodox example compared to ogres from other media: while she's certainly got the Super-Strength part down, and has a colossal appetite one may expect from her species, she's a Cute Monster Girl and Gentle Giant with the most feminine personality of her MON teammates, showing a love of cute little animals and a passion for fashion and pop music. Doesn't inhibit her from stopping bad guys, though.
• In Sword Art Online, Ogres featured in the Underworld resemble Wolf Men rather than traditional ogres.
• Lucifer from The Wonderful World of Puss 'n Boots does retain the Super-Strength and giant size of most ogres, but his true power lies within his magical capabilities. While he does shapeshift as told in the Fairy Tale, he also gains the ability to teleport, make money and feasts appear out of thin air, and can even make castles out of diamonds. That said, do not take his "King of Power" title lightly.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering: Ogres are a staple creature type for Red (the color of emotion, chaos and acting without too much thinking) and Black (the color of pragmatism, amorality and the willingness to do some pretty nasty stuff to benefit oneself) Mana, a combination that tends to result in violent, chaotic hedonists with little regard for the lives of others. Those that have special abilities tend to be able to harm their controller or other friendly creatures. They're typically hulking, muscular brutes fond of fighting and anywhere between barbarians and animals, depending on the ogre in question and their world of origin, but exceptions exist.
  • The ogres of Kamigawa, also called the o-bakemono, are as violent and cruel as other ogres but far more intelligent and cunning, and often worship the plane's demonic oni.
  • In Mirrodin, ogres are barely sapient brutes often used by goblins as beasts of burden, and physically resemble barely humanoid hulks with faces dominated by gnashing bear-trap maws full of big sharp teeth. When Mirrodin became New Phyrexia, they were mostly transformed into servants of the red Phyrexians, serving as guardians and stokers for their ever-burning furnaces.
  • In the city-plane of Ravnica, ogres are often used as muscle by the various Red-aligned guilds, although the constant stench they exude forces many out of the guild system and onto the fringes of society. At least one ogre, the chieftain Ruric Thar of the Gruul Clans, has two heads.
  • The now-exitnct Onakke ogres of Shandalar were far more intelligent than most and are known to have been skilled artificers and sorcerers, and were the creators of the Chain Veil.
  • The ogres of Tarkir are enormous, incredibly strong, aggressive and dim-witted brutes resembling giant, shaggy apes with huge horns. They're mostly kept by the Mardu Horde as war beasts and living siege engines that need to be kept chained up until they're unleashed on the enemy. Others live independently in the cold mountains of the Temur clans, and often come in conflict with them. After the timeline's alteration, they mostly live in the mountains of the Atarka dragons: their strength and ferocity make them very effective at gathering food for the ever-hungry dragons, but their size means that they're among the first to be hunted when the dragons go hungry.
  • The Commander Legends set introudces Obeka, Brute Chronologist, a female ogre mage. While she's much more presentable and presumably smarter than your average ogre, she apparently warps the fabric of time by punching it very hard!

Comic Books

• The Black Moon Chronicles' ogres are gigantic fur-covered humanoids who raid isolated villages. One such raid resulting in the birth of Ghorghor Bey, a half-ogre warlord.
• In Garulfo, the ogre is an enormous giant with No Indoor Voice... Unless he's around his collection of fine crystals. Woe to you if you break one.
• In Top 10 we see an ogre being a solitary creature with a taste for brutality, murder and decorating its cave with body parts. It's too big and too ugly to fit in the panel, ridiculously strong and so hard to kill even its ashes will try to fight you.

Fairy Tales

• In one Arabian Nights story, a prince (whose vizier is actually using an Uriah Gambit on him) encounters an "ogress" who appears at first as a beautiful woman, but then shapeshifts into a monster who tries to feed the prince to her children. The magical powers and ability to deceive seem incongruous for an ogre, but very much in keeping with a ghul, so ogress might just be a mistranslation.
• In an Italian fairy tale from the '90, titled Gorgo the Ogre, there are three types of Ogres: Red Ogres are large and brutish, and must kill a monster to achieve adulthood and turn red but are otherwise good natured. Golden Ogres are beautiful, virtuous and only kill if they have no other choice to defend themselves. Finally, Black Ogres are Always Chaotic Evil monsters that come in all shapes and size.
• A notable exception to the typical use of the trope is in the famous "Jack and the Beanstalk" story, where the giant's wife, who is usually portrayed as nice enough to try to get Jack to leave without harming him, is often described as an ogress.
• Another notable aversion appears in The Daughter of Buk Ettemsuch, where the ogre Buk Ettemsuch adopts the protagonist and treats her as his own daughter. He has several opportunities to eat her, but allows her to live instead.
• In "Puss in Boots", the ogre is a shape-shifting brute, who owns a large amount of land. In order to get his poor master some land to trick a king into thinking he is royal, the eponymous cat tricks him to turn into a mouse so he can eat him.
• In "Sleeping Beauty", the prince's mother is an evil ogress who tries to eat her own grandchildren.
• In Madame d'Aulnoy's The Bee and the Orange Tree, the main character, Aimée, is a shipwrecked princess who is raised by ogres. These ogres not only eat humans, but each other as well. When Aimée steals crowns from the young ogres, the older ogres see them and eat them. The father ogre Ravagio plays this trope completely straight. The mother ogress Tourmentine does too, but is actually quite intelligent due to having fairy blood.
• In many folk tales from Italy, the antagonist male Ogre is sometimes called "Nanni Orco" (John Ogre), and is a character which is either the classical child-eating monster or an overall nice guy who actually helps the hero (not without teaching him a lesson for his foolishness). Variations include the "Uomo Selvatico" (Savage Man) and in at least one istance "L'Orco con le Penne" (Feathered Ogre), a non-descript Ogre monster whose feathers are the MacGuffin the hero has to retrieve. Ogresses aren't unheard of too.

Films — Animated

• The Flight of Dragons: As the heros are resting at the last inn before entering Ommadon's realm, the evil wizard sends an ogre to attack them. The ogre is a giant who stands taller than a dragon with three eyes and tusks. He's noted as being significantly stronger than a dragon as well as being immune to a dragon's fire. Peter and Smrgol fight him and eventually win, but the strain of the battle winds up costing Smrgol his life.
• Shrek:
  • The eponymous hero is a green, seven-foot-tall humanoid with trumpet-shaped ears. He has a reputation for man-eating, but is actually well educated and merely wants to be left alone, though he does get a kick out of scaring people now and then.
  • Without the spell making her look like a regular human, Fiona looks just like an ogre. The second movie implies this was because her mother is human but her father is a frog in human form, leaving her relation to the ogre species unclear.
  • The fourth movie reveals that Shrek is actually a runt; other male ogres are even bigger. However, though soldiers fighting a rebellion, they're still not particularly brutish. Despite their fearsome reputation, no ogres have ever been known to eat humans, even if their actual diet is pretty disgusting.

Films — Live-Action

• In Ella Enchanted ogres are blue-skinned brutes slightly larger than humans, and with a habit of wearing low-riders that show their plumbers' butts. They eat people, but apparently lived in peace under the prior king's rule, before they were blamed for his death by the king's brother.
• Ogres make an appearance in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and are shown as long-armed monsters half-way in size between the orcs and trolls, and serve as frontline soldiers among Azog's forces. They also appear to be intelligent to a certain extent, as shown in the extended edition where they coordinate in teams to destroy several dwarf war chariots.
• OGRE unsurprisingly features one as its villain, which terrorizes a cursed time-locked village in rural Pennsylvania.
• The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth is a somewhat out-there take on this trope. He's not a giant, but he is a hideous Child Eater, and a return to the original folk lore of the ogre, rather than the fantasy story hulking oafs we've come to expect.
• Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger: The troglodyte that the heroes encounter in Hyperborea is a midway point between a fantasy ogre and the Frazetta Man - being an 8 foot tall, hairy, horn-sporting, beast-faced caveman who is nevertheless described by Melanthius as a primitive ancestor to humans. Despite his intimidating appearance, the troglodyte turns out to be a Gentle Giant who can communicate with the baboonified Kassim and he becomes an ally to the group with only a little convincing. It even helps the heroes fight the Zenobia-possessed saber-toothed tiger at the end of the film, though it dies trying despite putting up a valiant fight.
• In Time Bandits, the protagonists are found by an ogre and his wife on the ogre's ship. The ogre is outwitted and left at sea after the protagonists commandeer the ship (don't feel too sorry for them - they were planning to eat the protagonists after all).

Literature

• Ogres are mentioned in The Elenium but never play a major role. They're described as somewhat resembling trolls (who are much more important), but are even bigger (and apparently hairier), and there is much Fantastic Racism between the two groups. They also have curved ram-like horns so hard they can withstand a direct blow from a battleaxe, and thus are used to make helmets.
• Stan, in Fancy Apartments, is a seven-and-a-half-foot tall orge who can't seem to hold down a job, and has an unusual fondness for dark poetry.
• A tribe of ogres attack the house in A Fantasy Attraction. Luckily, Aleksandra, a dragon was on hand to deal with them.
• Ogres are commonly encountered as enemies in Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, though they are rarely outstanding from the common bunch of enemies.
• Ogres and ogre/human hybrids are fairly common in the Garrett, P.I. series, appearing repeatedly as Mooks for the villains, and taking a major role in Bitter Gold Hearts.
• In Tamora Pierce's The Immortals, ogres are a sort of Immortal, a mythical creature that will live forever unless killed by accident or malice. Hundreds of years before the start of the quartet all Immortals were sealed into the Divine Realms - the quartet is named after them because mages have found ways to summon Immortals back into the Mortal Realms. These include ogres, which are extremely tall, ugly to human eyes, and often seem menacing.
  • Offscreen the Tortallans sometimes fight them, but in Wolf-Speaker Daine says that sometimes they can be talked to, and speculates that they'd be less nasty if not attacked on sight. With that in mind she contacts some ogres which were enslaved and forced to mine opals. The ogres' spokeswoman Iakoju says humans lied to them and said they'd be given farms if they came to the Mortal Realms, and that she's been sent to find their kin-clans to fight the lying humans, but she readily understands that she can ally with some humans to fight against their mutual enemy. Some ogres fight even when they're not forced to; when this is pointed out Iakoju shrugs and says this is true, but not all ogres are the same. Are humans?
• Ogres in The Iron Teeth are herd animals and are actually herbivores, not man-eaters. That won't save you if you startle one, though.
• In La Saga du Prêtre Jean features Ogres, especially in the third book: there's a cell which hosts a single Ogre who tries to cuddle you to death and Ogres working in the Mines of King Solomon as overseers. You can befriend one of them in the cantina and he can reveal useful information to you if you get on his good side.
• Lyttle Lytton Contest: From the 2020 entries, implied as an ogre and an orc from the name:
  Oogor Orkson let out a curdling hell scream and plunged his rigid warpick deep into elven flesh; this was not an Age for soft long-ears, but hard green men.
• Downplayed in Moonshine from Jasmine Gower, ogres are a bit hungrier but only because they're so much larger than humans. Instead their defining trait in this novel is that they're the technologist race and were the ones to invent the radio.
• The koloss in Mistborn. They are blue skinned and actually start out rather small, around five feet but grow continuously until they reach a height of around twelve feet wherupon most of them die of heart failure. Their skin, however, which starts out saggy, does not grow with them and develops small rips as they grow. They have two emotional states, placid indifference and berserk rage. They were originally humans, transformed by the Lord Ruler by means of hemalurgy.
• In the Mithgar series, "Ogru" is another name for Trolls. They're gigantic Rucks (Goblins) with stony skin, dim wits and sadistic temperaments.
• Phantastes: As said in the third chapter, the spirit of the Ash tree "is an ogre".
• Though the titular creature in Clive Barker's Rawhead Rex is never specifically called an "ogre" in story, he very obviously is meant to be of a race that inspired the legends of ogres.
• Second Apocalypse: One of the weapon races of the Consult are Bashrags. They are hulking, hideous creatures that have the appearance of three humanoid bodies fused into one.
• Master vampires in Nancy A. Collins's Sonja Blue series often employ ogres, both as dumb muscle and as walking garbage disposals, consuming drained corpses when the master doesn't want to add to his/her brood. In reference to their Western Fairy Tale origins, they have a tendency to be child molesters.
• In the Spellsinger novel The Time of the Transference, Tomjon and his friends are captured by an ogre tribe. As well as grotesque humanoids with fangs and sparse hair, they also include outsized monstrous Funny Animals, such as a four and a half foot chipmunk with five stripes and twisted incisors. Tomjon convinces the ogres not to eat them, but instead he becomes engaged to the chieftain's daughter, who's an ogre bear.
• The Spiderwick Chronicles has an ogre named Mulgarath as its Big Bad, with ogres receiving further detail in The Field Guide. Unlike most fantasy ogres, Spiderwick ogres are extremely intelligent (on top of being crazy strong as is typical) and possess great magical abilities, particularly Voluntary Shapeshifting. They generally use their abilities to bully other creatures into serving them or giving tribute, but are often undone by their arrogance. Ogres in the series are also depicted as having horns that grow more impressive and elaborate as they age (Mulgarath was so ancient his horns looked more the twisting branches of a tree).
• In "They Bite" by Anthony Boucher, legends about ogres are said to have started due to people devolving into savagery as a result of turning to cannibalism. The story has Villain Protagonist Hugh Tallant victimized by the monstrous descendants of the cannibalistic Carker family. The creatures are described as small, withered and pygmy-like, but with sharp teeth and powerful jaws.
• The Wheel of Time's Ogier definitely qualify for the much greater than human size and huge appetites; however, the ones remaining on the main continent, if not the ones in Seanchan, are quite peaceful and intelligent. They're a Proud Scholar Race with a knack for stoneworking and forestry.
• In Xanth, magic makes ogres strong, and also makes them rhyme. They were originally portrayed as stupid brutes, but this was later shown to vary with the individual (and several fake it for cultural reasons).

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • The evil Daleks use a race of large, unintelligent humanoid brutes called Ogrons as warrior-slaves. The Ogrons are featured in the stories "Day of the Daleks", "Frontier in Space", and very briefly in "Carnival of Monsters".
  • Aliens called Ogri, which resemble large rocks and feed on blood, appear in "The Stones of Blood". The Doctor suggests that Gog, Magog, and Ogre could derive from this.
  • Although his species' name is Androgum, Shockeye from "The Two Doctors" is essentially a big meat-hungry ogre, albeit one with a trained chef's vocabulary.
• Ogres have been a threat to the Enchanted Forest more than once in Once Upon a Time; they're extremely tall, brutish and not very smart, with poor eyesight and a keen sense of hearing to make up for it. They're not, technically, Always Chaotic Evil, as Belle finds out when she attempts a spell to detect evil intent on one, but they're hard to reason with and too easily provoked into fighting.
• Special Unit 2 features Jack the Ripper as an ogre who was compelled to devour humans. He tried to limit himself to hookers and prostitutes and developed a serum to control his instincts, but was losing control when SU2 tracked down and killed him.
• The Wheel of Time (2021): Rand mistakenly calls Loial an ogre, which hints that Ogier inspired our concept of ogres. But Ogier invert or avert nearly every ogre-related trope.

Tabletop Games

• Age Of Ambition: Ogre is the collective name for five related races. They can be as heroic or villainous as anyone else, and are largely accepted in most nations, but they have a reputation for being unruly in large numbers. They are Goblins, High Orcs, Hobgoblins, Orcs, Trolls, and True Ogres. The main thing they have in common is how their memories work: Having a shorter lifespan than the other races on Trystell, Ogres have a strong short term memory that allows them to quickly master almost any skill. But the trade-off is that they have difficulty passing that skill into their long-term memory.
• In Changeling: The Lost Ogres are those abductees who were warped into tough, violent monsters, often with a penchant for human flesh, by their time in Arcadia. Their stereotypical view of humans is "You're beautiful. On the other hand, you taste like chicken." Overlaps with All Trolls Are Different, as some trolls are water-themed ogres.
• In the older Changeling: The Dreaming, "ogre" was often used to refer to Unseelie Trolls early on, but Ogres proper are a separate race of fae associated exclusively with a faction of the Unseelie Court. They're typically extremely strong and resilient, but dumber than lobotomized rocks.
• Chronopia: Ogres are surprisingly intelligent, backed up by their incredible strength, and they are well armed and armored in faux-Eastern armor. For more detail, the Ogres have become the ruling class of the Black Blood empire (an analogue to a Middle-East kingdom), with Nazir Kinslayer the ruler and Grand Vizier Bukhir Bloodborn while the rest of the Ogres make up most of the nobility and special forces. Ogres rule now because of their cunning, great strength and unity. Trolls are a lot stronger but they're normally pacifists and lack the numbers - so they end up working for the Ogres as shock troopers and Praetorian Guard. The Orcs are the main worker and soldier race, but they're so divided that they're no longer much of a threat to the ruling Ogres. Finally the Goblins are just too physically weak despite having the largest population.
• Ubiquitous in Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Ogres have simple minds, ugly tempers, and voracious appetites. They are at least 9 feet tall, and depending on the edition, their body parts were a rainbow of disgusting colors (in 3E, they were mostly orange-yellow; in 4E, pink-gray). They wear skins and furs and keep captured prisoners as slaves (and/or snacks). They're not very bright and are often the first Really Heavy Hitter enemy PCs come across. In terms of origin, they were directly inspired by Tolkien's trolls, but under a different name (the proper D&D troll is more of a lift from Three Hearts and Three Lions). Ogres (as well as trolls) traditionally worship the evil god Vaprak.
  • Ogre magi are similar to ogres, except that they are much cleverer (more intelligent than most humans), have magical powers, unnaturally-colored skin (red and blue being the most common), horns, and Japanese-style attire. The monster is clearly inspired by the oni of Japanese folklore. Fourth edition even abandoned the pretense and renamed them "oni."
  • In Forgotten Realms, the origin story of the ogres is that they are the cursed progeny of the giant goddess Othea, who was raped by Vaprak.
  • Ogres in Al-Qadim are actually peaceful and productive members of society. The Caliph's bodyguard is actually made up entirely of ogres. However, savage ogre tribes are very common in the wild southern islands.
  • In 5th edition, the Hill Giant often fulfills the roles that the standard ogre does. The Hill Giant is the smallest of the giant varieties and lack the elemental traits of the other standard giants. Similar to ogres, they are reknowned for the primitiveness (they can barely make a club and fur loincloth), their awful hygiene and their voracious appetite. In fact, their Ordning or calling in life is to be hungry and eating.
  • Ogres are a very common race in Dragonlance and are even more inclined toward evil than goblins. They're an offshoot of the beautiful, human-shaped irda race, whose civilization descended into depravity ages ago and most of whom were cursed by the gods. The ogre race actually includes not just common ogres and irda, but also ogre magi, hags, and giants. After the Summer of Chaos, some savage ogres underwent magic rituals to transform themselves into the massive, beautiful, and wholly evil titans. Dragonlance's ogres are a particularly noteworthy example because they're not the simple monsters most settings make them. Sure, they may be (rightly) considered savage and barbaric now — but they know full well that their ancestors once ruled the world and most fully desire to return to that birthright, making them genuinely dangerous villains deeply enmeshed in the setting's mythology.
  • Merrows are an aquatic offshoot of ogres. They breathe underwater, have scaly blue skin, and use spears instead of clubs, but are otherwise similar to normal ogres. (Note that in real-world Irish folklore, merrows were actually a kind of (generally good-natured) merfolk.)
• Games Workshop examples:
  • Warhammer:
    • Ogres live in the Mountains of Mourn, a range of monster-infested Himalaya analogues in the far east of the world, where they have a society influenced by the Mongols, and wield a strange form of Gut Magic, which depends on what the caster ate. They literally worship the concept of hunger (to the point where being disemboweled is to ogres what Crippling Castration is to humans) and practice rampant cannibalism, eating both other sapient races and their own kind; a Klingon Promotion generally entails the usurper devouring its predecessor. They are also the setting's most neutral faction — ogres care very little about the finer points of politics, history or the struggle against Chaos, and will fight for and against anyone if it suits them to do so. Consequently, while ogres can and often do rampage against civilization alongside Chaos and orc armies or on their own account, it's also fairly common for human and even dwarf nations to hire ogres as mercenaries or guards.
    • The Ogre special character Greasus Tribestealer Drakecrush Gatecrasher Hoardmaster Goldtooth the Shockingly Obese is a Genius Bruiser by the standards of ogres, having figured out that demanding tribute from surrounding kingdoms and demanding tolls from merchants on the Silk Road allows him to make money and get into fights at the same time.
    • Ogre Maneaters are wanderers who have served as mercenaries in various armies, keeping souvenirs and trophies. Now available in Pirate, Ninja (yes), and Brawn Hilda flavors.
    • While ogres are generally fairly resistant to Chaos, they can be lured to its cause with promises of eternal battle, food and plunder. The influence of Chaos eventually overwhelms even their natural resistance, and Chaos armies are often accompanied by Chaos Ogres sporting mutations such as additional heads or limbs. Mutant ogres receive very little stigma from their unmutated brethren and have few issues with reintegrating into their tribes — if anything, the others are mostly just jealous of the fact that a third arm or second head makes fighting and eating a lot more efficient.
    • In early material, ogres were described as the descendants of mutant humans mostly found in Norsca and the Chaos Wastes, and as being too few to really form a faction of their own — consequently, they appeared purely as special units for Chaos, orc and Dogs of War armies. Later editions retconned much of this, making ogres a wholly distinct species from humans and a lot more numerous and thriving, and moving them from the distant north to the distant east.
    • There are also Yhetees, mutant white-furred ogres that inhabit the highest slopes and peaks of high mountains.
    • Rat Ogres are hulking rat-like monsters the size of ogres used as shock troops by the Skaven. There's some debate about where they're from — it's certain that they're creations of the monster-breeders of Clan Moulder, but besides that there's debate about whether they were once regular Ogres who were twisted by dark magic or whether they were bred and mutated from Skaven stock. True Ogres, at least, don't see any kinship.
    • Dragon Ogres are Chaos-aligned monsters resembling monstrous centaurs, with the body of a horned Ogre atop that of a wingless dragon-like beast. They are one of the oldest races in the setting, and perhaps the most dangerous Chaos minions. They are apparently incredible long lived, and continue growing for their entire lives. They often spends long periods of their lives slumbering. They aren't related to actual Ogres, as Dragon Ogres predate the arrival of the Old Ones while true Ogres were the last of the Old Ones' creations, and the two races have no fondness for one another. When they first met they instantly became enemies, and have fought many vicious wars over the ages, which culminated in the Dragon Ogres being driven out of the Mountains of Mourn where the Ogres live.
  • In the Warhammer spinoff Blood Bowl, Ogres are "big guys", strong (have five strength which is generally as high as generic units go, and can throw teammates), stupid (have a chance of forgetting what they are doing) and surprisingly fast and agile for their size (5 movement and 2 agility, higher than the average Big Guy who usually have an agility of only 1 and are often even slower). They're also the only Big Guy-class player to get their own team.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Ogryns are a big, stupid Human Subspecies that live in stone-aged tribal societies. They look like Warhammer Fantasy's Ogres, but are rather friendly by 40K standards: They're basically large, mischievous children who like clubbing things and having cleverer people tell them what to club. They are also capable of acting civilized (even if most don't), particularly after being upgraded to merely stupid with neural implants. They are also drafted into the Imperial Guard to act as shock troopers, as their combination of enormous size and strength and totally unshakable loyalty makes for excellent front line troops.
    • During the Eye of Terror Campaign, the Lost and the Damned possessed a unit called "Big Mutants". No official depictions of a "Big Mutant" exist, but the book offered conversion tips, mostly around using Warhammer Fantasy Ogres or Imperial Guard Ogryns. Like their non-chaos counterpart, Big Mutants tend to have sub-par intelligence and has a lower initiative to represent that. Their "Boss" upgrade only gives the Boss a higher profile, as he is still too stupid to use any weapons, he's just bigger.
    • The Eldar term for humans, "Mon'keigh", is apparently derived from the Eldar name for a legendary race of hulking, cannibalistic monsters who once invaded and subjugated the Eldar. This race no longer exists. Guess why.
• GURPS, being a generic rule-set, can handle a wide variety of ogre types. For example:
  • The ogres of Banestorm are technically among the Elder Folk of the world of Yrth, but are by far the least advanced race; even the orcs are cultured and intelligent compared to them. Their only saving grace is that they're stronger and tougher than pretty much every other species (except the big, rare races like giants and dragons).
  • GURPS Thaumatology: Alchemical Baroque has ogres which are former immaterial spirits who have, on an incomprehensible whim, "burned out" their spirit powers in the process of taking the physical form of a big, hideous material being, reducing their minds to a parody of intelligence in the process.
• Iron Kingdoms: Ogrun are more like Blizzard-style orcs, being a shamanist Proud Warrior Race Guy PC race. Being a people who hold loyalty and service as the highest ideal, their sworn lord's alignment probably shapes much of their own behaviour.
• Nobilis: Ogres were created by Lord Entropy from rocks, dead trees, corpses, and the sensation of being ripped apart by predators and treated as meat. They're very strong, have acute senses of smell, and like eating people. Intellect-wise, though, they don't appear to be different from anyone else. One, Ogre-Sensei, is a main character in the sort-of spinoff Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.
  "I have a story," he said. "I will trade it for my life."
  "Don't like stories."
  "It's got lots of crunching bones and tasty flesh in it."
  "So do you."
• Palladium Fantasy (and by extension Rifts) has Ogres as a playable race, one of the main civilizations in the game. As expected, they are larger and stronger than humans, but they are of human intelligence and not considered monstrous. They are also the only race in the game capable of interbreeding with humans, though the product of such unions is always considered an Ogre.
• Pathfinder does quite a lot with ogres, most varieties of which can be counted upon to be some combination of primitive, violent and stupidly cruel.
  • Standard ogres are essentially based on the Hillbilly Horrors genre, being idiotic, deformed, hulking brutes, disgustingly obese, covered in mats of filthy hair and known for their penchants for sadism, cannibalism, rape, incest, necrophilia and general depravity — to them, there are few things as amusing as the sounds and faces made by captives crudely tortured to death or murdered in hyper-violent "games", which never fail to send them into fits of braying, drooling laughter. There's also the ogre-kin template, for the horribly distorted and depraved halfbreed spawn of ogres and their victims.
  • Buggane are essentially a cross between an ogre and a hideously anthropomorphic naked mole rat, with the magical ability to "ghost" through earth and metal.
  • Karkinoi are essentially ogre-sized crab-men with much the same mentality as common ogres. They share the role of aquatic ogre-kin with merrow, who are essentially the same as regular ogres, but scaly and capable of breathing water.
  • Then there's the matter of the Ogre Mage enemy, which in Pathfinder is handled more or less the same as in 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons; the "Ogre Mage" is actually an entirely different kind of creature, an evil shapechanging spirit called an oni. In fact, the common "Ogre Mage" is actually an oni that has chosen to "take the flesh" (take a physical form stylized upon) of an ogre. There is actually a wide variety of oni, all based on different races. Specifically, there are "giant" oni; the Ogre Mage (ogres, naturally), the Atamahuta (ettins), the Yai of Fire, Ice, Water, Wind, and Earth (based upon the Fire, Frost, Storm, Cloud, and Stone Giants), and the Void Yai (a giant oni of indeterminate, vaguely "giantish" form). Then there are four human-sized oni; the Ja Noi (hobgoblins), the Kuwa (humans), the Nogitsune (fox), and the Yamabushi (tengu). There's also the Spirit Oni, an oni that has yet to take flesh for itself, and rumored oni based on other goblinoids or giants, such as bugbears, trolls, cyclopses, etc.
• RuneQuest: Ogres are Chaos-tainted humans who look like attractive human beings, but have a genetic predisposition to anthropophagy. They deliberately spread disinformation to the effect that all ogres are hideously deformed and unsanitary.
• Shadowrun: Ogres are regional variant of ork mostly found in Germany, and like all orks descend from humans who spontaneously transformed when magic returned into the world. They're large (about as tall as humans, but substantially broader and fatter), ugly, strong, slow and dumb, though not as large, ugly, strong, slow or dumb as trolls, with heavy jaws and reduced body and cranial hair, and can (and will) eat almost anything.
• The Splinter: Flammeogres have four legs and are constantly on fire.
• In the Hungarian tabletop RPG/book series World of Chaos (like Tolkien except all the elves and dwarves are missing, with the half-orc Skandar Graun acting as the main protagonist), Ogres are a major race and are given even more mutations (extra horns, heads, limbs etc.) to pick from.

Theatre

• English editions of the opera Hansel and Gretel (1893) often translate "Knusperhexe" as "gobbling ogress." It fits the rhythm but isn't quite appropriate for a character otherwise consistently described as a Wicked Witch.

Video Games

• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura has playable half-ogres, and one subplot involves finding a half-ogre birthing factory, which then turns out to be unsolvable (due to a conspiracy).
• Plague Eater Lords of Darkest Dungeon 2 invoke this. They are huge, fat, toothy fellows who ravenously eat anything they can get their paws on.
• Dragon Age ogres are a type of darkspawn created from qunari. They have horns and look like wingless demons but are otherwise typical examples of The Ogre.
• Enemy ogres in Dungeon Crawl are Glass Cannons who can't take damage quite as well as they can deal it due to lack of armor, and playable ogres are much the same. Of note, however, is that ogres make surprisingly good mages; an ogre mage is a fearsome foe, and a legitimate character build in the Magic Knight vein (In past versions, ogres and ogre mages were two different species, who were later merged, giving all ogres basic aptitude in magic).
• In Dwarf Fortress, ogres are huge, powerful brutes that live in certain evil plains. They're highly aggressive, very powerful and tough, and will path to any building laying outside, wreck them, then proceed to find their way to the inside of the fortress. If you see a pack of ogres at the very beginning, you're better off restarting the game. Goblins sometimes bring them in sieges. Blind Cave Ogres found in caverns are eyeless (not that it holds them back in any way), outright feral in their aggression, toothier and even bigger, and can show up anywhere in the subterranean wilderness once you've breached far enough.
• The Elder Scrolls series has Ogres who are nearly twice the size of the average playable races, while being Dumb Muscle Giant Smash Mooks. Considered a race of "Goblin-ken," meaning they are related to Goblins, Ogres typically have grayish-blue skin, pronounced teeth, and Pointed Ears, though Ogres in colder climates are known to have shaggy white hair covering their bodies as well. They live in primitive hunter-gatherer societies, most often inhabiting natural caves in remote areas. Like Goblins and Orcs, Ogres are known to revere Malacath, the Daedric Prince of the Spurned and Ostracized. Ogres can be found throughout most of mainland Tamriel, where they are feared as man-eaters and are known to raid settlements and attack travelers in remote wilderness areas.
• In EverQuest, ogres are large, muscular, stupid humanoids who not speak too good. The stupidity came about as a result of being cursed by the Gods of good. In EverQuest II, the Gods had all left, and one of the effects was that the ogre's curse was lifted, turning them into a race of Genius Bruisers.
• Fallout: The Super Mutants seem to fill this role in the post-apocalyptic setting of Fallout 3 and 4, where they're big, hulking, brutish and fairly stupid, and very aggressive and warlike. Super mutants from the other games are more akin to "Blizzard" orcs than ogres. The art book for Fallout 3 puts even more emphasis on the "ogre" aspect, as they are shown to make their own cobbled-together armor and guns and forge melee weapons such as axes, swords, maces, and flails/ball-and-chains.
• Final Fantasy Ogres are a staple monster that appears in most of the games.
• In God of War (PS4), ogres are a type of enemy related to trolls who Kratos and Atreus run into on several points in their journey. In terms of appearance, they look like hairless massive gorillas with spiked skin. They have their own language, like trolls, but they're violent and fierce. Kratos can use them against other enemies by shoving his fingers into their eyes and subjecting them to a head-punching, then when he's done with them, he dispatches them by cutting through their jaw muscles with an axe in two goes.
• Heroes of Might and Magic: Ogres have appeared in many of the games.
  • HoMM1's ogres are mid-tier (4 of 6) big, fairly slow moving club-wielders aligned with the barbarians, with a lot of hitpoints for their level.
  • HoMM2's ogres are mid-tier (4 of 6) big, fairly slow moving horned axe-wielders with a lot of hitpoints for their level. They upgrade into tougher and faster "ogre lords", and are aligned with the barbarians.
  • HoMM3's ogres are also mid-tier (4 of 7) big, strong humanoids that use clubs. They upgrade to ogre mages, who wear vaguely oriental armor and exchange their clubs for totem staffs. Again, they're aligned with the barbarians.
  • HoMM4 units don't upgrade. The Ogre Magi appear as the Tier 3 monsters for the Might faction, as an alternative to the Cyclops. Interestingly, they bear some resemblence to elderly Native American shamans.
  • Might and Magic VIII indicates that the Ogres of Might & Magic are not stupid child-eaters — while the intelligence of Zog's ogre army is not indicated beyond the Ogre Mage Zog himself (he's fairly clever) and being able to follow relatively complex instructions, Ravage Roaming features a peaceful village of ogres. They neither appear stupid, nor are indicated as being unusual for ogres.
• Guild Wars: There are two definitions of Ogres:
  • In the first game, Ogre acts as a classification for large humanoids that do not qualify as a giants; this covered Jottuns, Ettins, and Yetis.
  • In the second game, a race identified as Ogres have invaded the Blazeridge Mountains. Their culture revolves around beasts and all members of their society tame beasts for use in battle. Their behavior varies by clan, with many being hostile to all other races and some being quite friendly.
  • The Jotun are actually a subversion of this, at least in their backstory. The jotun were an advanced magical civilization predating humanity and the human gods, but eventually their pride overcame them and they descended into constant civil wars that turned the once-great people into savage ogres. They are still the only ogres or giants to use magic in the Guild Wars universe.
• King's Bounty: Ogres are the mightiest units for the Orc race and they're the cheapest of the Level 5 units (Levels are tiers of how powerful a creature is, with 1 the lowest and 5 the mightiest - so ogres are in the same power-class as a dragon).
• The Legend of Zelda: The Hinoxes are massive, powerful, one-eyed creatures that appear to spend most of their time either sleeping or eating.
• Neo ATLAS 1469: The "human eater" trope is played with in this game from Artdink, in a region near India approx. (maps are randomly shaped in this world) your merchant company encounters "red-mouthed ogres". This leads to a quest where a village is believed to be kidnapped by evil ogres but in actuality the ogres are friendly, kind and not cannibalistic. They took in the villagers to give them a nice vacation and feed them strawberries. It was ripe strawberries that made the ogres's mouths red and it's these ogres that introduce strawberries to the world.
• Averted in the Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre games; instead of the usual big brutish humanoids, "ogre" seems to just be another word for "demon."
• Okiku, Star Apprentice: Ogres battle Okiku with the help of orcs, and ogres are green, with possibly glowing yellow eyes, about twice as large as orcs, and are primitive due to wearing only a loincloth and and spiked pauldrons, while wielding Primitive Clubs.
• Pillars of Eternity: Ogres are huge and carnivorous, but much more intelligent and reasonable than the usual depiction. The problem of an ogre stealing a farmer's pigs can be resolved by convincing the ogre he should go somewhere else before people get really angry, he can be hired to defend your stronghold, and ogres live alongside other races in Twin Elms.
• Pokémon:
  • Grimmsnarl from Pokémon Sword and Shield is a big, hairy Pokémon that resembles an ogre, although it also has features that make it resemble a troll as well.
  • Ogerpon from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is based on oni, but frequently referred to as an "ogre" in the English localization.
• Puzzle Quest has the hungriest ogre of all, Drong. He has a series of side quests, all revolving around getting him different things to eat. Things such as poisonous spiders, another ogre, diamonds and LAVA and the body of a slain god.
• Quake: Ogres aren't as big as their classical fantasy family, but it doesn't make them any less brutal — you can see it from the spatters of blood on them. They just so happen to use chainsaws and grenade launchers to do their thing. Their skill with weapons is off-balanced by their penchant to attack blindly and causing monster infights.
• RuneScape ogres are large dim-witted humanoids. They have a fairly human, yellowish skin colour and prominent bellies. They speak in a primitive manner. Some are aggressive, but most are not, and are in fact capable of holding a city with merchants. They also have something like a dozen varieties - actually green-skinned jungle ogres (Jogres), blue-skinned amphibious marine ogres (Mogres) and so on, even having zombie and skeletal varieties, aptly named. The now nearly extinct species known as Ourg, even larger than actual giants and more intelligent, might be a relative. Ogres also form a gender-separated society, with the ogresses living further south in an Australia-themed land.
• In Sands of Salzaar from Han Squirrel Studio, their version of ogres are called Grunts on account of them not conversing in anything other than grunts. Described as a large green-skinned humanoid with some animalistic traits (they look like upright gorillas in clothes), the Grunts are voraciously hungry and often attacking slaughterhouses for the meat inside. And on-screen they're about a head taller than your human units and dressed in crude furs while wracking foes with a club, though their captains wear metal armor and have horned helmets. However in one quest called Disgruntled, you learn that a rare few Grunts can speak and have human-level intelligence. You also learn they came through a mysterious door from another dimension.
• Tales of Maj'Eyal: Ogres were created as soldiers and laborers for the Allure Wars-era Conclave (and, for the healer in charge of the program, as a personal means of getting revenge on the Nargol Empire by creating something that would haunt Halfling nightmares) by way of giving conventional humans an extensive array of magical and nature-powered enhancements, alongside some light mental alterations. It's made clear that they're actually pretty smart (physical dependence on the runes covering their skin has made them Maj'Eyal's finest runesmiths, for example), but they're awful at communication, uninterested in high culture, and prefer to seek out reliable solutions to their problems, like "hit it until it stops moving." It's implied in a few ways that they could be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands - their runes are so ingrained into their physiology as to make them a blank slate for a functional equivalent to genetic engineering, and one alternate timeline shows Healer Astelrid could've organized them into a world-conquering New Conclave, but their gratitude to the Shaloren (who have been a very good influence) and utter lack of personal ambition have made them one of Eyal's nicest (if grumpiest) factions. (They fit the mold in most other ways - huge, ugly, used to eat Halflings alive mid-combat, and so on.)
• Touhou Project: The Oni are somewhere between this and Orcs, with a heavy dose of Blood Knight. They would challenge everyone that will accept their challenge, usually of drinking and fighting (or drunken-fighting, natch). Too bad modern people refuse to acknowledge the existence of the supernaturals, so they retreated underground since they don't have anything fun to do with humans anymore.
• Warcraft: Ogres are large, dim-witted humanoids that either attack with a club or their fists. In the first game, they were a random neutral threat, but the second one promoted them to underlings of The Horde. Oddly, World of Warcraft seldom shows any Horde-affiliated ogres and there is no playable Ogre race, while enemy ogres are very common. WC2 also presented the ogre-magi (inspired by Dungeons & Dragons Ogre Magi, which in turn are based on Japanese oni), which were even turned blue-skinned in the second sequel. Notably, the two-headed variants are freaks of nature magically created by an orc warlock to boost their intelligence.
  • In a small subversion there is a quest where you run into a two-headed ogre who's quite intelligent, and heckles you for thinking all Ogres speak in a You No Take Candle fashion.
  • There's also a whole faction of rather intelligent ogres in The Burning Crusade expansion.
  • In Warlords of Draenor, the ogres seem to be heavily based on the ancient Roman Empire, complete with coliseums, arenas, and gladiators and slaves. They also appear to be much more intelligent and cultured than their descendants on Azeroth will become.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: "Ogroid" is a classification for a wide variety of primitive, brutish humanoids, varying from the diminutive Nekkers to great Rock Trolls, mighty Cyclopses and even an enormous Ice Giant.

Webcomics

• Beaches and Basilisks: An ogre teaches Monty that many of his people are intelligent and peaceful, contrary to popular stereotypes.
• Homestuck: Ogres are the second type of underling — enemies spawned by the in-universe video game the main characters become drawn into — to be shown. They're huge, hulking humanoids with immense tusks, and while big and strong they only provide serious danger to inexperienced players — more aggressive ones are shown taking them down with ease.
• The Order of the Stick: Ogres show up several times, usually as incredibly dim-witted cavemen stereotypes complete with animal-skin clothing and clubs. There's also a pair of green-skinned brutes whom nobody is sure whether they are ogres or trolls.
• Tales of the Questor filler art describes ogres as particularly sadistic monsters. Ghouls are created when an ogre forces humans to eat meat it has eaten from, and presumably the ghouls turn into ogres when they eat an ogre's carcass.
• Unsounded: The Ogres are all long dead, their bodies make up the continent, but Uaid was made using one of their bodies and it is theorized that him putting anything he's curious about, or which he sees as a problem in his mouth is an echo of the memories from his bodies previous life. Since he's been hollowed out throwing people and animals down his gullet just puts them in a protected room.

Western Animation

• In Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, there is an army of villainous ogres residing in Castle Drekmore and led by Duke Igthorn, who attempt to conquer King Gregor and Dunwyn Castle. They are almost all hulking morons, with the exception of Igthorn's majordomo Toadwart (who is as tall as a human child and of average intelligence) and Toadwart's cousin Tadpole (who is a genius—and shorter still).
• In Disenchantment, the ogres are recurring characters. They have a primitive little kingdom called Ogreland and an ongoing war with gnomes, with the pair killing each other whenever they meet. (And they're about equally matched, surprisingly.) Their queen, Grogda, turns out to be nicer than the others. She's also Elfo's mom, making him half-ogre and the heir to the throne.
• Family Guy had that episode where a salesman tries to sell beachfront property terrorized by an ogre. "Beautiful beachfront property! No city noise! No flesh-eating ogres! No pollution!"
• In The Smurfs animated series, an ogre named Bigmouth occasionally befriended the title characters while making life for the evil wizard Gargamel difficult. Subsequently introduced ogre characters, love interest Bignose, romantic rival Bigteeth, and baby Bigfeet, suggests having disproportionately large body parts on their already hulking bodies they're named after is their hat.

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