Mushroom Man

He's a real fun guy.

"Mushroom Man, Mushroom Man, playing hide and seek
Mushroom Man, Mushroom Man, shrouded in mystique"

— Lemon Demon, "Ivanushka"

A type of fictional creature resembling a humanoid mushroom.

Typical traits of this creature include:

1. A mushroom-like cap at the top (usually either as the creature's head, or as a growth on top of the head. May or may not be removable).
2. Some sort of face. Noses are not required, but most variants will at least have eyes and a mouth.
3. The ability to walk, usually on two small feet. An alternative is to have it hopping around on its stalk.

These critters can be good or evil, and may or may not be sentient. Might work for the Big Bad as Plant Mooks. If they are competent fighters, expect them to use poison or spore-based attacks. They may or may not also live in Mushroom Houses. Do not confuse them with Plant People.

May or may not overlap with Mushroom Samba.

If you're looking for the video game that shares a similar name to this trope and is based on this premise, see Mushroom Men.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Delicious in Dungeon, one of the first monsters Team Touden encounters is a walking mushroom. After killing it, they use it to make a hotpot along with a giant scorpion.
• Doraemon: Nobita and the Green Giant Legend have Jii, the elder of the underground plant tribe, who is a giant mushroom-humanoid whose face is obscured under his shroom cap (save for his eyes and Gag Nose).
• In Dragon Ball Z, during the Other World Tournament in which Goku competes with other fighters in the afterlife, there's an announcer-person-thing with a mushroom cap as the upper part of his head.
• Played with by Yamawaro from Hell Girl. While he normally has the appearance of a boy, he's actually a fungus youkai who originally looked like a sometimes-humanoid mass of glowing mushrooms with a human face. Even with his human-like appearance, he contains the mycelia of a magical fungus that a doctor-turned-alchemist cultivated in his body in hopes of creating an elixir of life.
• In Interspecies Reviewers, myconids are a race of living mushrooms, the number of myconid sub-species being equal to the number of actual mushroom sub-types, with the physical attributes of each sub-species also being roughly the same (including some sub-species having bodies that are potentially lethal to most other species).
• In Jewelpet Twinkle☆, the Jewelland has an entire population of anthropomorphic mushrooms, much to the horror of Sara who is scared of the little gills on the undersides of mushrooms' caps.
• Monster Musume has Kino the matango, a Cute Monster Girl version.
• The little shiitake ayakashi from Natsume's Book of Friends who befriended and went fishing with the powerful spirit Lord Shuon while he was traveling incognito and originally had no idea of just how mighty and important his new fishing buddy was.
• Kinoko Nasu of Type Moon fame depicts himself as a talking mushroom whenever he makes cameo appearance in a manga. That is because "Kinoko" means "mushroom" in Japanese.
• In Overlord (2012), a barkeep in Nazarick is one of these.
• In The Seven Deadly Sins, there are a variety of sentient mushroom-like creatures. One of which is capable of shrinking people with spores if frightened.
• In Slayers the Motion Picture a hypnotist makes a minor character see mushroom guys dancing with help of some extras costumed as these.

Asian Animation

• GG Bond: In Season 13 episode 11, the gang discovers a mushroom they were grilling is sentient and spare it. The mushroom, Momo, turns out to be the only survivor of the mushroom people on Planet Dobudo, where the inhabitants lost their ability to produce spores. In the episode following that one, the pigs fight against a giant mushroom monster with a Faceless Eye and large mushroom hands.
• Kodama: One of the Kodamas, Maca, is an anthropomorphic mushroom with a humanoid shape.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The Thallids are a race of sentient, almost sapient fungus creatures. Dominaria's thallids were originally developed by the elves as a food source, but unexpectedly developed sapience, wound up spreading faster than the elves could kill them and eventually overran their creators. They also occur on other planes, where they seem to be naturally occurring beings. There are also the Sporoloths, towering fungus creatures similar to giant Thallids that came from Dominaria's far future during the Time Spiral crisis.
  • Saprolings are tiny creatures too small and weak to appear as actual cards — they usually only get tokens — that are strongly associated with Thallids in gameplay and generally represent scraps of animated plant matter. They most commonly appear as little walking mushrooms or bits of ambulatory mold, although saprolings based on actual plants and plant parts have also show up.
• "Mystical Medleys: A Vintage Cartoon Tarot": The "Nine of Cups" features an anthropomorphic mushroom, complete with the red, white-spotted toadstool for a hat (or hair?).
• The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has cards specifically named Mushroom Man #1 and #2. Sylvan Stoolhouette is based on a fly agaric mushroom, as evidenced by the red cap with white spots.

Comic Books

• There is a Green Lantern called Amanita, who is basically a mushroom man. He's named after a genus of mushrooms that includes fly agaric, death's cap and destroying angel.
• Morrigan Lugus from Supergod is a very nightmarish example. A three-faced giant formed from the bodies of three astronauts and a mass of alien mushrooms. The mushrooms are the driving intelligence of the entity acting as a fungal supercomputer. Everything that happens in the series, culminating in the deaths of every living thing on Earth, was planned by Morrigan Lugus (its appearance is basically what kicked off the disastrous superhuman arms race). All so that its spores would have plenty of raw dead material.

Film — Animated

• BoBoiBoy Movie 2: The Cendawa tribe from Planet Rimbara, whose name comes from the Malay word for mushroom, "Cendawan"^note (The C in Malay is often pronounced as "ch", so it's "chen-dah-wan"). They all have a mushroom cap atop each of their heads, while the young ones have a stalk with a smaller cap on top. They also have stumpy limbs, tribal markings and grass skirts, and each of their names follow the prefix "Cenda". TAPOPS brings them to Earth after the final battle to help heal the damaged land.
• The dancing mushrooms from Fantasia.

Film — Live-Action

• Gaia (2021): The creatures in the forest are humanoid, but with definite "mushroom cap" heads, though more closely resembling large, thin, "sharp" edged ones than rounded or conical caps. They used to be humans, who were converted to this form by the Festering Fungus.
• The titular monsters in the film Matango, especially with the fully-mutated Matango, who are essentially human-sized muscular mushrooms with legs and arms capable of ripping non-infected humans apart.
• The Lub-Lubs in Mom and Dad Save the World have eyes and what appear to be cute little smiling mouths on the top of their caps. It turns out the "mouth" is actually a blowhole - the real mouth is under the cap, and full of nasty sharp fangs.
• That annoying little turn-you-into-a-bear sprite in the Russo-Finnish Morozko (a.k.a. Jack Frost as seen on MST3K).
• Galwyn, a former wizard and now a singing mushroom in the 1986 movie Troll.

Literature

• Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris books prominently feature gray caps, also known as Mushroom Dwellers, that live underneath the titular city. They seem to be long-necked humanoid fungus creatures, but they have developed Organic Technology to such heights that it seems like magic, and live in symbiosis with their fungus, allowing it to grow inside their bodies for various positive effects — most notably that almost all their wounds regenerate almost instantly, flesh replaced by mushroom tissue. They also wear wide-brimmed gray caps, but their function is unknown.
• The Cthulhu Mythos has the Mi-Go, the Fungi from Yuggoth, a species of fungus-based aliens from the depths of that have established an outpost on Pluto. In their case, they're less Mushroom Men and more Mushroom Bat-Lobster-Things.
• The third Spellsinger novel, The Day of the Dissonance, offers a variant. Jon-Tom and his companions evade some pursuing bad guys by going into the Muddletup Moors. It takes a day or two for them to find out why smart people don't go into the Muddletup Moors: the Moors are inhabited by giant fungi. Giant, intelligent, telepathic, suicidally depressed fungi. ^note Hey, if you were a five-foot-tall intelligent mushroom that had nothing to do but stare at the same gray, misty landscape all day, you'd probably get a little depressed too.
• The mushroom people from The Wonderful Flight To The Mushroom Planet and its sequels.
• In Endless Quest 6: Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, the mushroom men. It's not clear whether they are myconids or a separate race, but some are apparently creatures that have been transformed into mushrooms while others have always been that way.
• The Big Bad of the Animorphs parody, Vegemorphs: The Fungus Among Us is a Mushroom Man called Fun Gus.

Live-Action TV

• Primeval: The Festering Fungus in Season 3 turns its human victims into these: the head bares a vague resemblance to an oyster mushroom, there's a pair of large eyes (which look nothing like human eyes) and a sort of mouth, and a bipedal walking and running gait. Oh, and they're completely feral.
• An Ultraman Taro Monster of the Week, Mushra, has the ability to turn human citizens into mushroom people by contaminating the water supply with its spores, even affecting the ZAT members. It isn't permanent, thankfully, once Taro destroys Mushra its victims goes back to normal.

Mythology and Folklore

• In Greek mythology after Deucalion's flood, while most of humanity was restored by Deucalion and his wife, there was at least one race of people who formed from mushrooms that sprung up after the flood waters receded.

Podcasts

• Capmon from Binary Break is a Digimon resembling a little pink and white mushroom girl.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Myconids are a race of mushroom people who have been in every edition since the first. They're considered among the more peaceful races of the Underdark and are able to release a variety of spores from their bodies, including telepathic spores that let them communicate with others, and animating spores that revive corpses as fungal servants.
  • Campestris look like tiny redcap mushrooms with a face in their stems, and are barely mobile, mostly harmless and silly monsters prone to singing songs off-key while botching the lyrics. If threatened, they can headbutt foes for minuscule damage, or release clouds of spores that cause opponents to stagger about in a daze, unable to act.
• Pathfinder:
  • Myceloids are similar to D&D's myconids, if quite a bit more sinister.
  • Leshys — small plant people magically created to serve as tenders of nature and aides to Druids, fey and Treants — include fungal leshys among their many variants.
    • Fungus leshys are the most monstrous-looking leshys, with many asymmetrically-arranged eyes and gaping toothy maws, and typically haunt swamplands, compost pits and areas thick with fungal growth. They're no more evil than other leshys, however, and they watch over compost and decay, helping decompose dead and dying plant matter and recycle it back into the ecosystem. They also vary quite a bit among each other, as most leshys do, and may resemble any given type of mushroom from fly agarics to morels.
    • Lichen leshys are humanoids with bodies made up of amorphous fungus-alga symbiotes. Like common lichens, they inhabit barren, rocky landscapes that they slowly break down into habitable soil with their acidic secretions.
  • Nunos are a type of gremlin resembling tiny old men with pallid skin, a large mushroom cap for a head, shelf fungi sprouting from random parts of their bodies and no eyes.
• Turnip 28: Fungus-infected humans and fungoid monsters are a very common sight in this setting. Almost as common as those mutated into root vegetables.

Video Games

• Battleborn: Miko is a sapient ninja mushroom being who's the Last of Its Kind.
• In Brain Dead 13, Lance will encounter these mushroom people in the garden maze in one death scene, and without warning, one of them will jump up so high, it will explode and spray him with its spores that can cause little mushrooms to sprout all over his body. This video explains it all.
• Brave Hero Yuusha: Mycon-kids and their variations, who are ambulatory mushrooms, and the inhabitants of Myconia.
• Breath of Fire II: One of the fusions turns Spar (an androgynous plant man) into a cute mushroom girl.
• Catmaze have sentient, walking mushroom folks as recurring enemies in the forest stages, from shrooms reaching the waist of your Cute Witch protagonist to towering Giant Mook shrooms.
• Chrono Cross: Funguy was originally a normal human, but became a humanoid fungus after eating an enchanted mushroom.
• Dark Souls has a group of enemies simply named mushroom people. Humorously, they're actually very potent Killer Rabbits, capable of dishing out a ridiculous Megaton Punch that can kill most players in one shot, like so.
• Darkest Dungeon has a body horror variant of this as an enemy group, humans who have been infected by the corrupt spores in the Weald.
• Dragon's Crown, being one big love letter to Dungeons & Dragons (among other things), also features myconids. And you can cook them at your campfire between levels.
• Dragon Quest: The series has a few monsters that look like mushrooms with short arms, feet, and a face with a long tongue on their fat stalks. They first appeared in the third game.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Several video games using the license contain myconids, including Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights.
• Dwarf Fortress has the plump helmet men (plump helmet is a fungus, one of the dwarven crops).
• Enter the Gungeon has Fungun and Spogre that lean on the less humanoid side of the trope due to having no visible upper appendages. Inhabiting the mines and oubliettes of the Gungeon, they wander around occasionally releasing a cloud of spore bullets, some of which can home in on the player. They also have innnate resistance to poison.
• Everquest and Everquest II, taking much influence from Dungeons & Dragons for their monsters, uses the "myconid" term for their mushroomfolk.
• Fallen London has Blemmigans, carnivorous ambulatory fungi spawned from a giant mushroom growing in the sea.
• Grow: Song of The Evertree: Mycela are anthropomorphic mushrooms who can appear on fungi worlds. There's also a hidden group of them in Alaria's Mountainside Ward.
• Hollow Knight has a number of anthropomorphic mushrooms inhabiting the Fungal Wastes, including the Shrumal family of enemies and the talkative but elusive Mr. Mushroom.
• In Katamari Damacy, one of the Prince's Second-Cousins, Kinoko, looks like a mushroom with arms and legs (no face). She even has a Bilingual Bonus name, given that "kinoko" is the Japanese word for "mushroom" that just happens to end in the -ko syllable so common to girls' names.
• Kingdom Hearts features animate mushrooms as Heartless types; White Mushrooms are harmless and can even help you if you give them the item or spell they're asking for, while Black Fungus are a vicious enemy.
• Kirby: One recurring enemy is Cappy, a Bedsheet Ghost-like creature that tosses its mushroom-shaped hat up in the air in an attempt to hurt Kirby.
• The Last of Us: Advanced infected forms are increasingly overwhelmed by the parasitic fungus which transformed them, starting with fungal growths around their heads and ending with their craniums and eyes becoming completely covered by spore-producing masses.
• Lone Fungus is an indie platormer where you are one of the last surviving mushroom-human seeking your own kind in a monster-loaded underground cavern.
• Lost Smile and Strange Circus has Mr. Mush, a giant mushroom man of the 'mushroom cap' variety, who is also accompanied by two smaller mushroom people, one blue and one pink, who are just normal mushrooms with tiny legs.
• MapleStory has quite a few nasty mushroom monsters.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man X: Split Mushroom from Mega Man X4, the only Maverick boss based on fungi, as the majority of the other Mavericks bosses are based on animals, alongside four bosses based on plants.
  • Mega Man Battle Network: The Mushy viruses. They're among the more dangerous viruses you can run into, being very quick and possessing a difficult to avoid spore attack that messes up your controls if it connects, making it even harder to dodge or fight back.
• Monster Sanctuary has Fungi, a mushroom with a face and stubby arms. It can evolve into Fumagus, which has legs and more human-like proportions. According to its Monster Compendium description, the first Fumagi came to be when druids transferred their souls into Fungis.
• Mother:
  • The fourth sanctuary guardian in EarthBound (1994) is a humanoid mushroom called "Shrooom!" (exclamation mark included).
  • A mini-boss in Mother 3 is a mushroom with arms and legs called "Zombieshroom".
• Odin Sphere: Appears in Ringford as a miniboss in Leifthrasir. It shifts between three forms. One is a tiny little mushroom with slight anthropomorphic behaviors which is fairly weak. The second is a hulking fungal giant that grows a sprawling field of poisonous mushrooms. The last is a dangerously agile and very attractive mushroom girl.
• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin (2001): Exposure to the Puffstool's spores causes Pikmin's leaves, buds, or flowers to be replaced by mushroom caps, marking their transformation into Mushroom Pikmin under the Puffstool's control.
  • Pikmin Bloom: Park Decor Pikmin get different mushroom caps as hats, making them look like this.
• Pokémon: Several Pokémon are based on mushrooms, and of them, Breloom and especially Shiinotic are the ones humanoid enough to qualify for this trope. Shiinotic in particular resembles a traditional myconid. Foongus and Amoongus are downplayed examples in that they look like mostly ordinary mushrooms except that they have arms, and Shroomish, who evolves into Breloom, has little stumpy legs.
• In Ragnarok Online, there are various monsters, the spore and red spore monsters, which resemble mushrooms with faces and their caps pop open to reveal a huge mouth full of teeth. players can also get a hat that resembles a mushroom cap and look like one themselves.
• Resident Evil introduces the Molded in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. However, these mushroom people are... different. To be more specific, they're devoid of any sight, are far too stupid to open doors, and are... bizarre. Characters like the Baker family and Ethan as revealed in Resident Evil Village are also technically mushroom folk, but nothing in their appearances betrays that they're anything other than the humans they originated as when their abilities aren't on display.
• Shin Megami Tensei: The Slavic dark god Chernobog is usually portrayed as a skull-faced, sword-wielding figure with a mushroom cap head, and numerous mushroom rising out from beneath his black cloak. As a god of destruction and darkness, the mushrooms represent decay and poison.
• Skylanders: Shroomboom is a walking one-eyed mushroom. His mushroom cap has straps on the sides, resembling an army helmet. In his backstory, he saved his people from becoming pizza toppings for the Big Bad.
• Smashroom: The Player Character is a human who was turned into an anthropomorphic mushroom by the curse placed upon the forest.
• Smushi Come Home is set in a world of anthropomorphic mushroom-people, including the titular character, a redcap toadstool with a face running around a forest.
• The third stage of Splatter Master, the Requiem Forest, have animated mushroom men as enemies, and concludes with a boss battle against a giant, five-headed mushroom man (whose individual heads all can release poisonous fungal spores).
• Starbound: You may occasionally run into Agarans. They initially seem harmless, but are secretly agressive and spread very quickly through the universe, as seen in the codex "The Agaran Menace". They're also known for keeping Florans hostage.
• SteamWorld Quest: Tiny (regular mushroom-sized) mushroom people are early encounters, but a giant one serves as a King Mook and Warm-Up Boss.
• Stellaris features fungoid alien races, and individual fungoid aliens are described as sentient colonies of fungi. Among the Fungoid portraits, most, even those with a humanoid structure, are bizarre, but one fits, being essentially a fly agaric with eyes and tendril-arms◊.
• Super Mario Bros. has Toads, who resemble small humanoids with mushroom caps, though just how closely related they are to actual mushrooms Depends on the Writer. There's also the generally unfriendly Goombas, who more closely resemble mushrooms with Big Ol' Eyebrows, Cute Little Fangs, and stubby legs, and the significantly more unfriendly Shroobs from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, who are mushroom-shaped aliens somewhat analogous to Toads.
• Tap Tap Infinity: Varamond the Vicious sports a blue cap with green spots and horn-like protrusions.
• In Terraria, if you create an above-ground "mushroom" biome with mushroom grass seeds, it will occasionally spawn mushroom zombies, and if you build a house in the biome, then activate hardmode, the house will eventually become occupied by the Truffle, a mushroom-man NPC that sells items needed for making late-game Ranger class gear. Other NPCs love making puns about him if they live nearby.
• Torchlight II has an entire series of these as enemies, ranging from tiny shrooms that swarm your characters, to enormous hulks of fungal matter that spew clouds of toxic spores and can take half your health off in one punch.
• 12 Tails Online has the Fungon, Funga, and Fungko. The latter two are especially dangerous due to their status effects.
• The World of Mana series has the recurring Mushboom species (also known as Myconids in the Japanese versions), who are often encountered as early-game enemies. Friendly Mushboom do exist, however, such as in the village of Matango in Secret of Mana.
• World of Warcraft has the denizens of Sporeggar, introduced in the Burning Crusade expansion. The race are called Sporelings, they evolved from the same Draenor fungus that the giant mushrooms in Zangarmarsh did.

Visual Novels

• Marco & the Galaxy Dragon: The Energy Planet is home to a race of mushroom-like creatures. Arco and Ruri slaughter droves of them to make an energy drink from their remains.
• Last Chance in Xollywood: Maz Zay Paz and his sister Uz Zay Paz (and by extension all members of their race, the Zoberonians) are apparently this, though it's not referenced much outside of their portraits.

Web Animation

• Shroomy from SMG4.
• All versions of Bitshrum in adaptations of TOME, which makes sense, as he's directly inspired by the Super Mario Bros. franchise.

Webcomics

• Masha Kinoko from Touhou Nekokayou is a Moe Anthropomorphism version.

Web Original

• Roll To Dodge: Savral features a race of mushroom people known as shrumen. While they don't have a nation of their own, they tend to be common in western Harkad and Nivani. Shrumen soldiers tend to wield axes more than any other weapon.
• The Rumi creature family in UniCreatures.

Western Animation

• Ben 10: The "Camp Fear" episode features an army of Plant Mooks who look like this.
• Western Animation/Capelito: A claymation show about the titular character, an anthropomorphic mushroom with the ability to change his cap into any kind of hat by squeezing his magic nose.
• In the Futurama episode "The Thief Of Baghead", Bender breaks into the home of actor Langdon Cobb and meets his Angry Guard Dog Pookie, a dog-like fungus. Pookie and Cobb are actually a quantum lichen, two creatures linked as one by a quantum link.
• Jeremy from Harvey Beaks, although his toadstool cap is removable.
• In Inside Job (2021), Magic Myc comes from a race of intelligent hallucinogenic mushrooms with Psychic Powers who live inside the Hollow Earth. A downplayed example, however, as the "man" part is pretty tenuous: Myc isn't especially anthropomorphic and looks more like a jellyfish than a human being.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season 4's Obi-Wan undercover arc gives us the Bounty Hunter Derrown, a member of the Parwan species. In addition to the cap-like growth on his head, he's got tentacle-like limbs, three eyes, can produce electricity and can float in the air. He can also take an electrolytic serum that would kill most creatures (doesn't apply to all Parwans, as it really depends on the blood-type).

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