Soul Eating

Soul food is the best!

"You know, souls are a bit like taffy. Sweet enough to eat, yet pliable enough to mold into any shape I can imagine."

— Hades, Kid Icarus: Uprising

This is about a character, or creature, who eats souls. How exactly they devour souls vary from story to story, but the case is almost always the same: the soul becomes a replenishment for someone/something else.

The effect eating souls have, aside from satiating hunger, may be either restoring your health, youth, Life Energy and/or Mana, increasing one's lifespan, gaining their power or knowledge in life, etc.

Many beings that eat souls do it for a living, due to it being the thing that keeps them alive (especially for soul-eating monsters and other creatures), or because they want to live forever or keep their youth, or because they're getting stronger and healthier with every soul they devour. Some rarer cases, however, may occur only once or twice, especially for "mundane" beings who normally don't eat souls.

What happens to the souls they eat, you say? Well, just as how food gets broken down into nutrients for our body, it's assumed that souls tend to get "broken down" into their components that nourish the eater, so the souls effectively cease to be aware or exist. Sometimes, however, the souls that they eat may remain intact in the eater's person, and might even be able to be taken out of the eater. Either way, eaten souls can't go to any afterlife (at least until they're freed, somehow).

If someone has a Soul Power and/or necromancy ability, they may be able to do this.

Sub-Trope of Liquid Assets, Abstract Eater and Your Soul Is Mine!. Often overlaps with Vampiric Draining, Cannibalism Superpower, Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious, and/or Horror Hunger. Compare Soul-Powered Engine for engines that "eat" souls to work, and Soul-Cutting Blade, weapons that harm souls.

As this can be a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Black Butler:
  • The terms of Ciel's bargain with Sebastian is that once Ciel has achieved his life's goals, Sebastian gets to eat his soul. In the meantime, Sebastian acts as his utterly loyal butler.
  • In season two of the anime, Alois' brother Luca made a contract with a demon to kill all the villagers who mistreated them and his soul was eaten leaving an empty shell of a body. Alois eventually learns that it was Hannah who ate him and makes a contract with her so they can be together again. After she collects the two of them are heard talking inside her.
• Bleach:
  • Hollows feed on human souls, and a Gillian-class Menos Hollow is created when hundreds of Hollows descend into an inter-cannibalistic frenzy and eat each other.
  • The intelligent minority of Gillian — as opposed to the mindless, bestial majority — are also forced to devour other Hollows (Menos or otherwise), either partially or entirely, in order to avoid regressing back to a bestial state, as well as to gradually ascend the Menos evolution ladder (Gillian to Adjuchas, and then to Vasto Lorde). If a Menos gets only partially eaten, their evolution essentially gets locked in place: they can no longer regress to an earlier form or become mindless, but but they can also never ascend to a higher level no matter how many more souls they eat.
  • Then we have Aaroniero Arruruerie, the Noveno Espada (#9), who goes even further by combining the trope with Cannibalism Superpower, and by the time he debuted he had eaten 30,665 Hollows (including one that had assimilated a dead Soul Reaper's body via a somewhat different method). Aaroniero is the only Gillian among the Espada, so the other nine members (who are all either Adjuchas or Vasto Lordes) would have eaten substantially more Hollow souls than that.
  • If a Hollow is killed by a Soul Reaper, its own soul gets purified and sent to Soul Society, where they're put back into the reincarnation cycle. It's never specified just what happens to the souls that were eaten by a purified Hollow. But given that it's never even suggested that Ichigo could be reunited with his mother's soul after his father purified the Hollow who ate her, and as a former Soul Reaper Captain his father would know more than most about how this works, the implication is that such souls are destroyed forever.
  • In the anime, the Bount are a group of vampiric humans who gain agelessness and extra spiritual power by consuming the souls of dead humans. They become a much bigger problem when they start producing mosquito-like constructs that can extract and distill soul energy from the living for their consumption.
• Dragon Ball Z: Cell is an Artificial Human/"Android", an artificial biomechanical lifeform created by combining the genetic code of the strongest warriors in the galaxy, including several Saiyans (Goku, Vegeta) whatever species Freeza is (Freeza himself, plus his father King Cold) and a Namekian (Piccolo). In addition, he was also designed with the ability to increase his power and metamorphose into stronger forms by not only liquifying and consuming the bodies of living creatures, but also through the absorption of the Ki/life force/souls of sapient beings along with their bodies (with the last step to complete his final metamorphosis into his ultimate "Perfect" form being the absorption of the two infinite energy engines built into the earlier "Androids" #17 and #18). There is a scene in which Cell powers up and the ghostly faces of the people he had consumed appear around him floating within his Ki aura. In addition to being an artificially designed amalgamation of the strongest fighters in the galaxy who is powered by two infinite energy sources, Cell is also basically a living vampire.
• In Hellsing, vampires consume the souls of those they kill by draining blood, human or vampire, and keep them on call as "familiars" that can be summoned or expended to power their strongest abilities. Alucard is nearly impossible to kill because he's eaten millions of souls. Towards the end, he summons them all as an army. When he eats Schrodinger, however, Schrodinger bizarre quantum-something powers cause him to disappear for decades. Because he had to kill all of his other consumed souls, leaving just him and Schrodinger. But that makes him even more unkillable than before, since he gained Schrodinger's power of being both dead and alive at all times.
• Inuyasha:
  • The Tsukumo Toad imprisons pretty women inside gigantic eggs in order to eat their souls if he's hungry or wounded in combat. It's never stated if the eaten souls are gone forever or if killing the Toad releases them.
  • Kikyo also has to eat souls to stay "alive" after she Came Back Wrong. She has to keep eating a steady supply of souls, but whether this is because she "digests" and permanently destroys the souls or because they move on to the afterlife once she uses up their energy is never explained. But since Kikyo develops into a sympathetic Anti-Hero with once she realizes that it was the Big Bad and not Inuyasha who caused her death, fans presume it's the latter.
• Naruto: One Dangerous Forbidden Technique summons the Shinigami with the user's body as its conduit, which then rips the enemy's soul and then devours them. As the payment for this technique, the user's soul will also be consumed by it and get locked in a fight with the souls its user ripped.
• Big Mom of One Piece ate the Soul-Soul Fruit, which lets her physically interact with people's souls. The first time she demonstrates this power is during a hunger filled rampage where she steals a portion of one of her son's soul, shaving 40 years off his life, nearly killing him.
• Soul Eater: Humans with the weapon bloodline (essentially a gene which allows them to become an Equippable Ally) can eat the souls of other humans to grow stronger (the good guys only consume the souls of corrupted humans, villains tend to be less picky), so long as they also consume at least one witch's soul. Those that indiscriminately eat other humans slowly become Kishin.
• Ushio and Tora: Both Ayakashi and Mikonjiki are sea-dwelling monsters that imprison people in barriers, devour them and feed on their souls, slowly enjoying them like candies for the rest of eternity. However, once they're both killed their barrier is dispelled and all the souls they gathered are free to complete the journey to the other side. The latter's name even translates as "Soul Devourer". Most of the other youkai are content with eating flesh.
• YuYu Hakusho: Goki — Kurama and Hiei's collaborator in the "Artifacts of Darkness" arc — feeds on souls, preferably of children, and stole the Orb of Baast to make it easier to extract them from people.

Comic Books

• Aquila: Aquila serves Ammit the Devourer, an Eldritch Abomination which feeds on human souls tainted by wickedness.
• Black Moon Chronicles: Souls from all the mortal races are devoured by the demons from hell, as well as succubi. The main bad guy also dies this way when Lucifer shows his displeasure with his failure, despite being Lucifer's son.
• X-Men: The aptly-named Soul-Drinker, an Eldritch Abomination, has this as its shtick, though it is only able to consume one soul per summon. For its adaptation into the '90s animated series it was somehow made more menacing and Lighter and Softer, as it could in that continuity consume multiple souls, but it also took time to digest them and if it was destroyed quickly enough, the souls it consumed would be restored (as happened when Wolverine and Gambit ultimately dispatched it).
• Young Justice: Secret is an interesting variation. She has an "emptiness" inside her that pulls her to draw the souls of the dead into herself. However, for the most part, it's actually a benevolent process, helping the soul move on to the afterlife, save for a few Asshole Victims who are trapped in eternal suffering within her. However, after her Face–Heel Turn, she begins consuming living people, and it seems that they're not simply sent onward but trapped inside her.

Fan Works

• Anything for Family: Joker kills the Masked Shadow by stealing his Bad Energy and eating his soul, which reduces him to nothing but dust. The epilogue mentions that it gave him indigestion.
• Spellbound (Lilafly): Cat Sidhe can consume the souls of the dead, which permanently increases their magical power — but in the case of half-fae, having more magic makes them less human. A human who was violently killed by the fae asks Félix to do this to her as a Deader than Dead Mercy Kill, and he reluctantly complies.
• The Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic "Unconquerable Souls" has Darla summon a soul-eater to try and take Angel's soul to restore Angelus, with the 'aid' of a couple of witches. It devours a range of souls, including the soul of Catherine Madison (while she was using her daughter's body, which allows Amy's soul to return to her original form), but when Buffy sacrifices herself to save Angel, the purity of that act essentially 'overloads' the soul-eater and kills it due to the power of a soul fueled by love. The rest of the White Hats eventually deduce that the soul-eater essentially uses the souls like batteries rather than literally eating them, which allows them to find a ritual that draws the souls out of its corpse so that they can either pass on or return to their original bodies.

Film — Live Action

• The reason the evil mummy in Bubba Ho Tep is hanging around a nursing home is to feed off the souls of its residents.
• In The Dead Center, the demon takes its victims' lives through their mouths, and gains a little more strength each time.
• In A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Freddy is now harvesting the souls of his victims to power himself. Just to freak out Alice, he presents a pizza with screaming human faces on it, one of which he promptly devours in front of her.

Literature

• According to the elves in The Arts of Dark and Light, the Witchkings were in the habit of this, and this may have been how their magic could surpass even that of the elven magisters of their times. We never actually see them doing this when they appear in the short stories, though, so it's possible that this was merely elven propaganda.
• In Matthew Costello's novelization of Child's Play 3, Chucky's god, the voodoo loa Damballah, is revealed to be this in a flashback scene. Chucky specifically refers to it as "the soul catcher" and "the eater of spirits".
• Chronicles of Ancient Darkness has the villain team of the Soul Eaters, dark shamans who call forth demons. Most of them don't actually do much soul eating, though Tenris and Eostra try to eat Torak's soul to gain his spirit walking powers.^note It's also worth noting that in this series, everyone (including animals and natural features like rivers) has 3 souls – a name-soul, a clan-soul, and a world-soul. It's possible to remain alive if only one soul is lost, though it's not a pleasant existence.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): Anthony is disgusted and horrified to read the description of the Edax Animae Termite, which consume the souls of those they defeat to power their own growth, and contemplates asking the Legion to help exterminate them.
• In "The Coming of the White Worm" by Clark Ashton Smith, the White Worm Rlim Shaikorth travels from world to world on a magical iceberg, searching for powerful wizards to devour body and soul. His victims are subsumed entirely by his mind while he's awake, and are lost in infinite darkness while he sleeps.
• The Devourers: The titular werebeasts consume their human victims' flesh and spirit in one, which grants them Ghost Memories and fuels their agelessness. They can eat animal flesh, but it doesn't provide the same benefits.
• In Dragaera, Morganti weapons will devour and utterly destroy the soul of anyone killed with it, and Vlad was able to sense that one he was being attacked with was definitely alive and hungry. The Great Weapons have Morganti weapons as the base, so, in addition to whatever other powers they have, they can all destroy the souls of their victims. (They can also not destroy them, or even temporarily store and then return them.) Morganti weapons were originally created by an ancient race that wanted to make war too horrible to consider. It worked... for them.
• Dreamblood Duology: "Gathering" a soul with Dream Weaving involves ushering it into the afterlife-Dream Land of Ina-Karekh, then collecting the dreamblood that maintains the soul's link to the body. "Reaping" a soul involves cracking the soul open and Mind Raping it into oblivion with nightmares, wringing out the dreamblood until there's nothing left to sustain the soul's existence.
• In Harry Potter, the Dementors generally feed on human emotions. Their deadliest attack, the Dementor's Kiss, literally sucks out the soul of a person's body, turning the victim into a body that lives but can't feel any emotions or think any thoughts. This is treated as a Fate Worse than Death. The exact fate of the sucked-out souls is unknown; that it is destroyed (digested?) by the Dementor is the most popular theory, but others think it is trapped within the Dementor forever, or that it becomes a Dementor.
• Into the Heartless Wood: King Elynion devoured the Gwydden's soul centuries prior, earning him the moniker of the Soul Eater among the creatures of the wood.
• It: Implied with Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It claims to be "the Eater of Children", but doesn't seem to eat them physically. It does, however, trap their souls in "the deadlights", suggested to be a Fate Worse than Death. It may also be able to summon up those It's eaten, to taunt or communicate with prospective prey, unless that's just It creating illusions.
• The Laundry Files: As exceptionally dense stores of information, souls make great food for extradimensional entities that range from worm-sized demons up to Eldritch Abominations. Bob Howard gains the ability to consume souls from a botched Summoning Ritual and later inherits the full power of an Eldritch Abomination known as the Eater of Souls.
• Mulia, the soul-eating demon from Asi Hart's The Man In The Corner Room, can create material goods and flesh-automatons in exchange for souls. His powers aren't used wisely.
• The One Who Eats Monsters: Ryn eats the hearts of wicked beings, relegating their souls to the fires of her gehenna, a small pocket dimension inside her that produces heat comparable to a star. The ashes of the souls then float out of her mouth.
• Patternist: Doro absorbs the minds of the people he Body Surfs into; he likens the experience to a "hunger" that he needs to satisfy every few weeks or months. Millennia spent sustaining himself in this manner have left him completely apathetic to the cost in human lives.
• In Sanctuary, the ghost eater devours three ghosts and parts of others in order to gain corporeality.
• In The Screwtape Letters, demons eat the souls of other demons as well as of humans.
• The Tuunbaq from The Terror. It is implied that it will eventually die from devouring the souls of corrupted men.
• Downplayed in Warbreaker: everybody is born with a single Breath, which is the currency of the magical art of Awakening. The Returned Came Back Strong from death but must consume one Breath every week. The country of Idris abhors the Returned as soul-stealing abominations, but the fact is that the Breath is distinct from the spirit and people are only mildly inconvenienced by losing it.

Live-Action TV

• In Farscape, the apparently magical recurring villain Maldis claims to eat souls, although this might just be mystification of something like Life Energy.
• Lovecraft Country: Ji-Ah devours men's souls after having sex with them through inserting her tails into all of their orifices. Due to this, she also absorbs their memories. She must devour one hundred to become human again.
• Supernatural:
  • The Crocotta is a Monster of the Week which feeds on human souls. They're fairly low on the monster totem pole all the same, living in filth and only being able to lure in victims by being a Voice Changeling.
  • The much more powerful Famine also eats human souls, though demons will do in a pinch. Which isn't that surprising, since demons in this setting are essentially corrupted human souls rather similar to ghosts.
  • In season 11, it is revealed that the Darkness/Amara is eating human souls and growing with the power that they provide. Unusually for the trope, that entity claims that its victims continue to exist within it, in some kind of alternate afterlife.
• As in the novel it is based on, the Tuunbaq from The Terror devours the souls of the lost explorers it preys on.

Mythology & Religion

• In Egyptian Mythology, the deceased would face the Judgment of Osiris before they could enter the afterlife, who weighed their hearts to see if they had lived wicked lives. If the heart was too heavy, he would feed it to the demon Ammit. Also, the God of Evil Apophis would stalk passengers on their way to the land of the dead so he could eat their souls.
• Succubi and Incubi eat souls. Traditionally, they took in the soul via stealing the breath from other humans. In modern times their method of soul-taking have varied considerably.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Barghests grow by feeding on the bodies and souls of their victims. They still reach the afterlife, but the damage can leave them unable to come Back from the Dead by even the greatest resurrection magic.
  • Devourers consume the essence of living beings, creating a spectral effigy of the victim trapped in their exposed ribcage, which is depleted by the use of their spell-like abilities. Destroying the Devourer before the essence is depleted allowed the victim to be resurrected.
  • Demiliches, such as Acererak from the classic module Tomb of Horrors, can suck out your soul and slowly digest it to increase the power of their spells.
  • In the Bastion of Broken Souls adventure module, the evil dragon Ashardalon has traveled to the Positive Energy Plane, the source of all life, and learned to subsist on a diet of the energy that forms souls in newborns. A rash of soulless children alerts the player characters to Ashardalon's depredations.
  • Forgotten Realms: The favored prey of Kezef the Chaos Hound is the souls of pious mortals; he has no taste for the souls of atheists and the faithless, and finds the "unripened" souls of the still living to be repulsive. The souls he devours are destroyed forever, and cannot be restored even by Divine Intervention.
  • Spectral deaths in the Mystara setting are otherworldly predators that resemble black mist from which taloned hands emerge to strike their victims. They can be summoned by high-level villainous clerics to hunt down enemies, but it's risky: if bested by their initial target, they return to attack their summoner instead.
  • Black Razor, a sentient sword from the classic module White Plume Mountain, devours the souls of any humanoid slain by it, granting its wielder some temporary buffs each time it does so. However, if it goes too long without being used it will attempt to eat the soul of its wielder.
  • Souleaters from the 3rd Edition Magic of Incarnum supplement automatically consume the souls of any creature that dies nearby, granting the fiend hit points and a bonus on attack rolls and saving throws for every soul devoured. Anyone slain by a souleater can't be raised until the fiend is destroyed, and even then it takes high-level magic like true resurrection, miracle or wish to do the job.
• Godforsaken: Soul eaters maintain their existence by absorbing the spirits or minds of living victims, burning the soul away in the process. If a dread skull isn't destroyed within twenty-four hours of eating a soul, the victim's essence is fully consumed.
• Pathfinder:
  • Daemons are Omnicidal Maniacs who devour every mortal soul they can, angering the devils and demons who prefer to use them in trade and as raw materials. People crazy enough to try Monster Organ Trafficking can refine daemon spinal fluid into a potent drug that contains the memories of the souls they've digested.
  • Vavakia demons arise from the souls of mortals who already engaged in this practice — or more generally in extracting or enslaving souls — in life. In their new forms, they can breathe out green flames that burn away the souls of their victims, and which the vavakia can inhale to heal itself.
  • Ammuts consume the souls of those they devour, but are notoriously picky eaters. They consider the souls of common people to be bland and uninteresting, and rarely bother eating them unless extremely hungry. They usually prefer those of experienced heroes, which they consider much more complex and flavorful, but especially delight in consuming the souls of powerful evil creatures.
  • Powerful magic, or the natural abilities of some fiends such as cacodaemons, can trap a mortal's soul in a gem. Outsiders and wicked mortals use these for currency, but evil outsiders can eat them to gain Fast Healing for a short period. The soul is sent to Abaddon afterwards, but can be raised normally.
• A Touch of Evil: The Spectral Horseman's wound track increases every time it kills a Town Elder.
• Mournguls, from Warhammer and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, are monstrous, inhuman spirits driven by a ravenous hunger to devour not only the flesh of the living but their very souls as well. The souls of their victims nourish the Mourngul, healing its wounds and sustaining its unholy existence.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Dark Eldar, who drink the souls of their victims, whom they torture for death for amusement. The main reason they devour souls is in order to maintain their youth, thus preventing them from dying and feeding Slaanesh with their souls, or because Slaanesh is continually draining their souls while alive and they use their victims' souls to replenish or as a substitute for their own souls, Depending on the Writer.
  • Souls comprise the diets of daemons and Chaos gods, either mortals or weaker daemons. Notably, Slaanesh devoured all but three of the Eldar gods shortly after awakening.
  • The C'tan devoured the souls of the Necrontyr, the original race of the Necrons.
  • The Doom of Malan'tai is a Tyranid capable of devouring souls.
• The World of Darkness:
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem, Diablerie is the act of consuming another vampire's blood and their very soul. It is reviled among many vampires (to the point that it is expressly forbidden in the Traditions in Requiem), but some vampires (such as the Sabbat from Masquerade) do it to gain the power to challenge their elder rivals. Worse, the act is incredibly addictive.
  • In Werewolf: The Forsaken, entities from the Spirit World consume other spirits to become more powerful. They often acquire traits of the consumed spirit as well, unless it was another spirit of the same type or one that would be "in its nature" to eat, an example being a fox spirit eating a rabbit spirit. A very rare few learn to supplement their diet with human souls.
  • Mage: The Awakening: Tremere liches in take Immortality Immorality to the extreme by requiring a steady diet of souls, which they claim through Death magic or the advanced powers of their Legacy. If they can't consume souls, their minds fall apart and they eventually end up Deader than Dead.

Video Games

• Arx Fatalis: The evil god Akbaa mentions he will "drink" the souls of everyone in the underground city of Arx.
• BlazBlue: Ragna's Drive ability "Soul Eater" eats the souls of people. In-game, this is translated into Life Drain attacks. There's also the Eldritch Abomination of the verse, the Black Beast, who devoured mass amounts of souls in its rampage. Ragna's source of his ability is the Azure Grimoire, an artifact made out of Black Beast's corpse.
• Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon: Many of the bosses have devoured the other heroes both body and soul. When freed, Zangetsu has the option to kill them and consume their soul to gain their "Soul Power" rather than save them.
• Implied in Breath of Fire II as one of several methods being secretly used by the Church of St. Eva to power up the demon god, Deathevan. Apparently, the souls of St. Eva's believers are sent to Deathevan's domain whenever they die, where he presumably devours them to feed his own growth. This religion constantly and aggressively tries to gain more and more followers, so it's likely that thousands of unwitting souls may have ultimately met this horrific fate.
• Vulgrim from Darksiders consumes souls collected by War as currency.
• This is essentially what the Entity does in Dead by Daylight. After a survivor is sacrificed to it, the Entity drains out their fear and then dumps them back into the next match. Each time they come back, they are slightly more numb (both physically and mentally) and it is inferred that the Entity is slowly eating away at their soul with every feast.
• Divinity: Original Sin II:
  • Trained Sourcerers like the Player Characters can consume Soul Jars and the spirits of the dead for Source points, which inflicts Cessation of Existence and is portrayed as an utterly monstrous act. (which the Pantheon is fully complicit in constantly doing). However, the ability only acts as Mana Drain on a living target, leaving their soul untouched.
  • The Abusive Precursors Eternals created the present-day races solely to feed on their spirits. One surviving Eternal doesn't even acknowledge the player character as a person, only calling them a "Source vat." The Seven Gods are ascended Eternals, and have free run of the afterlife...
• Shadow Fiend from Dota 2 take souls to power his attack through Necromastery and release an unholy surge of energy through Requiem of Souls.
  "So, you're curious where I come from? There's one easy way to find out for yourself."
• DragonFable has Roirr consume the souls of his host bodies. This bites him back big time when they are all expelled from him, leaving him a charred skeleton.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Beings with the soul of a dragon can consume the souls of other dragons to both boost their own power as well as to permanently destroy the other soul, the only means to destroy the otherwise immortal dragons. Apart from the dragons themselves, history has known of rare mortals known as "Dragonborn", who are born with the immortal Aedric souls of dragons. Those who are Dragonborn owe their gift to Akatosh, the draconic God of Time and chief deity of the Nine Divines Pantheon. Akatosh created the Dragonborn to serve as natural predators to the dragons, who view these "Dovahkiin" as Humanoid Abominations. In Skyrim, the Player Character is the so called "Last Dragonborn", sent to oppose the return of Alduin, the World Eater. The Dragonborn DLC adds Miraak, the "First Dragonborn", who will steal the souls of any dragons the Last Dragonborn kills until he is dealt with. Alduin himself also qualifies, as he uses a portal to get into Sovngarde and devour the souls of dead warriors to regain his strength.
  • The Dunmer mage Malyn Varen consumes the souls of victims sacrificed to Azura's Star during the "Black Star" quest.
• Evolve Idle has the Soul Eater trait, where the standard food resource replaced with souls (and production buildings like farms replaced with soul wells). Wendigos, as well as Imps and Balorgs all share this trait.
• Get far enough into the lore of Fallen London, and you find out that this is all humanity was made for. When you die, your soul goes to the local Judgement to be ground up and eaten. The Devils were created to serve the Judgements by making souls more appetizing, and although most rebelled, they sacrifice the souls to create their own version of paradise instead. On top of this, it's implied the "Bell" in Low Barnet was created by the London Admirality to feed souls to the Dawn Machine.
• Final Fantasy XIV: The raid boss Kokytos is a monster which can trap the souls of the dead in a lanternlike object and ingest them to gain their powers and personalities, regurgitating them whenever it wants to use a different set of abilities. It's running amok within The Lifestream, and the players need to kill it before its gluttonous devouring of souls damages the cycle of rebirth.
• The Soul-Eating Monster from Kid Icarus: Uprising is a serpentine monster who lives off the unfortunate souls of the Underworld. He's not alone, either, as the game's Big Bad occasionally compares souls to food items like taffy and outright states they taste good with everything "like bacon". The Chaos Kin indulges in a particularly sadistic version in that it takes over the minds of those it possesses while slowly consuming their souls for nourishment, which Palutena is only able to resist for three years thanks to Heroic Willpower and still almost gets her soul completely eaten when it decides to just forcibly tear it out of her chest.
• Legacy of Kain: Raziel is a vampire whose blood-hunger is replaced by soul-hunger. He's a servant of the Elder God who feeds on the souls Raziel devours and on most souls of those deceased.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel:
  • Throughout the series, the Nosferatu devours people both body and soul.
  • The Devil Laomedeia Scylla is implied to devour souls of women with regrets. It uses its skeletal servants to accomplish this.
• Mega Man ZX: Cyber-elves, like in the previous series, are Energy Beings infused with the consciousness and data of an AI; a soul with an energy medium, essentially. In this series, it's also possible to turn living beings into Cyber-elves, as the line of humans and robots in the setting have become blurred. The Slither Inc. is revealed to be responsible for turning mass amounts of people into elves without the populace knowing, so that they'll become food for Model W.
• Mortal Kombat has Shang Tsung, who is cursed to devour the souls of his enemies in order to maintain his youth (and much more importantly, his life). His sorcery is also fueled by the souls of those he devours, making it doubly important that he devours more in order to maintain his power.
• In the Neverwinter Nights expansion pack Hordes of the Underdark, Mephistopheles devours souls in his home plane Cania to fuel his power to raise an army of undead in the Forgotten Realms.
• In the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion pack Mask of the Betrayer, your character is inflicted with a curse called the Spirit-eater, which requires them to periodically nourish themselves by devouring spirits. Initially it only works on elementals, fey and incorporeal undead, but you can learn how to direct the hunger at souls and corporeal undead.
• In Overwatch, one of the lines Reaper may say when he spawns is "I will feast on their souls". In-game, he can absorb 50 health from each Soul Globe he collects from a downed enemy. Flavor text also mentions that the bodies of his victims are pale, empty husks drained of life, their cells showing signs of intense degradation.
• Androxus from Paladins was cursed with an insatiable hunger for souls after slaying a sinister goddess. He roams the Realm to feed his hunger, condemned to live with the curse for all time.
• Paper Mario: Tubba Blubba is the Big Bad of chapter 3, "The "Invincible" Tubba Blubba", and is mainly known for eating boos.
• Persona 4: A collectible SP-restoring item is called the Chewing Soul, which restores 100 SP to a party member when eaten.
• Pillars of Eternity: In one ending, you force an entire community to partake in this trope. This is considered a 'good'-ish ending. Context: Your former master in your previous incarnation harvested the souls of thousands to prevent their reincarnations from revealing the Awful Truth. After you kill him, you now have a giant tank of souls. You could restore them to the natural order or use them for your own benefit... or, you can crush them into cosmic essence and feed the essence to the miserable people of Drywood, strengthening their souls with sheer determination and saving their country from total collapse.
• Shesha from Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse devours the souls of people in order to fuel the Cosmic Egg — of which is actually Shesha's body — to create a new universe.
• The Akujiki from the Shinobi (2002) drinks souls. The Big Bad actually uses this to his advantage; having you slay a huge demonic war machine powered by thousands of souls...and then intercepting the souls and absorbing them himself.
• Soul Series: The cursed sword Soul Edge and its host Nightmare become more powerful by devouring the souls of its victims.
• Sunless Skies: In this alternate timeline of Fallen London, the Judgement of the Blue Kingdom is triumphant and claims all mortal souls. Everyone in the afterlife eventually passes through Death's Door, only to be eaten. In one ending, the captain defeats the Judgement once and for all by poisoning one of their meals with a Sorrow-Spider meme. The Judgement involuntarily reality-warps a Hive Mind of ravenous giant spiders into existence, which then eats their soul instead. For bonus schadenfreude, the spiders use the Judgement's soul to give birth to clusters of eggs, which immediately hatch and go straight for more of the Judgement's flesh and essence.
• Titan Quest: Referenced by the name of the rare club, "Soul Feast", which does Life Drain and Mana Drain.
• A Total War Saga: TROY: Cerberus devours the souls of his victims alongside their flesh, growing in power as he does so.
• Toukiden has demons that devour people's souls. Kikka even mentions that the souls are still conscious and aware in the demon and that they are screaming. She also mentions their souls long to be reunited with their loved ones, those emotions helping the demons to come over into this reality to invade.
• In Undertale, Mettaton's cake recipe includes a human soul as the "most important ingredient," though MTT-brand Always-Convenient Human-Soul-Flavored-Substitute can be substituted for vegan purposes. It's not clear whether or not souls can actually be eaten, as the recipe is basically treated as an excuse for a killer robot to try to kill you.
• One of Tichondrius the dreadlord's lines in Warcraft III is "I must feast on souls!"
• Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land: The Dark God intends to do this to everyone in Duhan. You can even see the souls of his victims inside his mouth during the final battle.

Visual Novels

• Fate Series:
  • Servants can do this to replenish their Mana, though the more wholesome ones are understandably quite averse to it. In one case, the Servant — a Chaotic Evil Anti-Villain — expressed a preference for evil souls, because their foulness makes them that much tastier, and souls of similar alignment are easier to digest.
  • It's not commented on often, but other kinds of magical creatures are able to do this since a soul is a pretty nifty source of Mana and can even be used to extend one's lifespan, and even mages can get in on this. However, it's often looked down upon in modern magical society since, moral issues aside, plenty of things can go wrong in the process and if successful, prolonged usage will cause Death of Personality even in the best case. In Fate/Apocrypha, it turns out Darnic Prestone Yggdmillenia has devoured souls in order to prolong his life to achieve his dreams, but the ritual is dangerous enough to potentially kill him each time he does it and by the start of the story he's reached the point he will undergo Death of Personality if he does it one more time.
• Devouring souls forms the very basis of the magic system of Dies Irae and it's related series. It serves as fuel both for their extended lives as well as their combat abilities and characters frequently needs to "refuel" to keep things up. How many souls someone can hold can also determine someone how well someone stacks up against another individual in combat, with greater capacity generally meaning greater power, though soul quality can also be a factor.

Web Animation

• DEATH BATTLE!:
  • In "Ghost Rider vs. Lobo", it's noted that Ghost Rider is capable of eating souls after he lets Zarathos take over. He uses this in the fight to finish off Lobo, who might be Barred from the Afterlife but whose soul is still vulnerable to being destroyed.
  • In "Venom vs. Crona", Ragnarok not only pulls Venom's soul out but Eddie Brock's soul as well and consumes both of them.
• Dreamscape: Keedran, in her monster form, can suck out souls like a black vapor.
• Glitchtale: In Season 2, it's revealed that Betty, seemingly a human with an unusual soul, can absorb souls to power her Fear magics. It's actually a construct of one of the original seven wizards, Amber, who had turned to evil in her desperation and pride and created it to be her final act of spite towards human-and-monsterkind.

Webcomics

• In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures Cubi are notorious for eating souls; though they can subside on mere emotions, souls extend their lifespans and increase their magic. Other creatures can do it as well, a dragon was harvesting souls from the dead of a city until Dan's grandmother killed him and accidentally glassed the region.
• Played with in Digger: the Living Shadow baby demon Shadowchild can consume shadows, with the side effect that any living thing whose shadow it eats is left an Empty Shell. While it can eat things like fish this way, it also mentions "shadows on the heart" that guilty people have, and once tells Digger not to worry because she doesn't have any. Nobody's quite sure what that means for the metaphysics of its diet but the threat is definitely there.
• Dominic Deegan: The majority of damned souls in Hell are destined to be demon food, they're explicitly not destroyed in the process, only a demon lord can destroy a soul, but anyone can eat them. It's even possible for some of the damned to become demons through cannibalism.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Devils, being made from the parasitic hot black flame, usually gain power by leeching slight amounts of soul energy from someone through making a Deal with the Devil; for as long as the contract persists, the devil takes miniscule amounts of the contractor's soul to sustain itself. Older and stronger devils have discovered they can gain soul energy much more directly by cutting out the middleman (or devouring them, to be exact). Cio used to be one such devil before she was killed and demoted — in fact, she helped develop the proceedure of soul eating — and really regrets it.
• In Our Little Adventure, Angelo Souballo has a collection of trapped souls in gemstones, and sometimes eats one as a snack. The habit might have something to do with him having a Damaged Soul and a case of Demonic Possession.
• Project Future, a fan comic for Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, features the creation of 'artificial souls' for creatures to consume, avoiding many of the ethical, moral, legal, health and sanity problems associated with consuming natural souls.
• Unsounded: Efheby venom turns the soul to mush, allowing the efheby to sort through it, see the victim's deepest secrets, and eventually devour it. They can envenom someone and mess with their memories without eating it, allowing them to mostly recover.

Web Original

• Serina: In the religious beliefs of the woolly trunkos, those killed by predators have their souls completely devoured, barring them from their afterlife. As a result, it obligates them to kill their predators on sight so that as much of the family can survive death as possible.

Western Animation

• In The Cuphead Show!, the Devil generally tries to collect souls and put them in his vault. However, as is revealed in "Release the Demons", he has contemplated (and maybe has done so in the past) eating people's souls if they make him mad enough. In particular, he wanted to eat Cuphead's soul because he hates the little guy for causing him so much grief.
• In Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, the guys watch a horror movie about a "cannibal ghost" who "scares you to death and eats your ghost".
• In The Owl House, Emperor Belos consumes some sort of magical substance from palismen he cracks open to extend his lifespan. "Hollow Mind" reveals that this consumes their souls as well, which then stalk his mindscape as a horrid amalgamated monster.

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