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Planet Eater (trope)

"Stan Lee thinks big. He came up with Galactus, a massive purple guy who eats entire planets. That's menacing! To get any more epic in scope, you'd have to have Andromedax, The Galaxy Who Shoots Other Galaxies With A Big, Galaxy-Sized Bazooka. Even better, Galactus isn't some sort of hand-chafing nefarious schemer. He's just very large, very hungry, and loves the great taste of ecospheres."

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a nom (all apologies to T. S. Eliot).

A character that not only destroys but eats planets for nourishment. They may suck the life-force from the biosphere, feed off its gravitic potential or magnetic field, or just start taking big bites out of the crust and mantle.

Planet Looters and Alien Locusts taken to the Nth degree. May overlap with Grey Goo. Taking this trope to the Nth degree, is Spacetime Eater. Compare Omnicidal Maniac, Planetary Parasite, and Starkilling. This is an X-1 class threat in Apocalypse How. When a character eats planet-sized portions (or eats so much they're the size of a planet) that's Big Eater.

Sub-Trope of Planet Destroyer (because a being who eats planets for breakfast would also have the necessary strength to destroy it) and Fantastic Diet Requirement.

This would have been called "World Hunger", but that's a real life problem with real life consequences. We guess.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 
  • Cat Soup: The Magician (who may or may not be God) was trying to eat the Earth.
  • In Digimon Frontier, the Digital World is converted by the villains into data code region by region (explaining the missing "chunks" whenever a map of the Digital World is displayed), and then fed to Lucemon at its core until he is finally free. And Lucemon isn't planning on stopping there; for the brief moment he reached the human world, everything starts getting converted into data, meaning Lucemon plans to devour them as well. Fortunately the heroes drag him back to the Digital World to finish him off. Only when Lucemon is defeated did the Digital World return to its normal state.
  • Dragon Ball Super: Moro from the Galatic Patrol arc drains entire planets of their energy, which he then consumes.
  • The Chronophage in EDENS ZERO is a combination of this and Spacetime Eater that specifically eats the time of planets, which "kills" them by rewinding them to an earlier state ranging from decades to millennia, creating a pocket Alternate Timeline that overwrites the present and anyone unfortunate enough to stay behind.
  • Yamigedo of Future Card Buddyfight is first seen eating a planet as the Omni Lords start sealing it away. When it is unsealed on Earth, its much smaller sizes means it eats things like buildings and other targets of opportunity instead. It also acts as a Buddy monster for the second season's Big Bad.
  • The Getter Emperor from Getter Robo, before it upgraded to a galaxy eater. He's even called 'Planet Eater' Moro in-universe.
  • Kaiba: The monstrous plant Kaiba consumes planets in addition to the memories of their inhabitants. At least two characters think this is a good thing, viewing it as a form of Assimilation Plot.
  • The Original Life Fiber from Kill la Kill. It technically doesn't eat the planet itself, merely draining energy from the living things instead, and once it's consumed its fill of the planet's energy, it spreads its children to other planets, destroying its host world in the process.
  • The High Gods of the Kurohime universe get their power from draining the Life Energy of a planet and taking the dead planet as their bodies. Humans Are Bastards by their design because they need parasites to weaken the planet first.
  • In Psyren, the membrane that surrounds the planet is actually a being which reincarnates by eating planets.
  • Remina: The titular Remina, being an Eldritch Abomination, eats the planets of the Solar System on its path. Bonus points for being a planet itself.
  • Tamagotchi Friends: In Tamagotchi! Episode 30a, after growing well beyond Tamagotchi Planet's size, Mamametchi, in her fit of anger, consumes the planet itself.
  • The Demon King Neo from Toriko is implied to have first implanted the Earth with Gourmet Cells millions of years ago in order to prepare its flavor, and is now returning to eat it.

    Asian Animation 
  • In Planet of 7 Colors, the Dark Planet survives by moving around and consuming other planets.

    Comic Books 
  • The World Devastators from the Dark Empire series are a variation on the Planet Eater concept: nigh-invulnerable machines that tear planets apart with powerful tractor beams, thus mining raw materials to build huge automated fleets of starfighters and, potentially, more World Devastators. While it would take a very long time for a fleet of World Devastators to completely consume a planet, they don't have to eat the whole thing to depopulate it.
  • The DCU:
    • In All-Star Comics #13, Starman fights a microbism, a creature larger than the Earth that is eating Jupiter. In the original All-Star Comics, the microbism seems to be a simple if powerful wild animal, but All-Star Squadron retcons it as a malevolent entity trying to wipe out life on what is now an Alternate Universe Jupiter, where it is the only planet with life as we know it instead of Earth. In both versions, it's way too powerful for Starman, but the Jupiter's residents are more than willing to help even the odds.
    • The Limbo Cell from the Elseworld Another Nail; far from being a cheerful sort of dance-prison, this insanely huge being (roughly the size of Earth's orbit around the Sun at the narrowest point of its serpentine form) was slowly but surely eating all of existence, starting with the more basic forms of energy, moving up to cosmic power, magic and the like and eventually proceeding to matter and ultimately spacetime itself. Adding insult to injury, far from being a villainous predator, the only sensation this practically mindless cosmic amoeba felt was the vaguest inkling of satisfaction at sating its hunger.
    • In Bizarrogirl, a race of planet-eating, space-faring, giant life-forms called "Ash'ka'phageous" make their appearance. One of them — called "godship" by the denizens of Bizarro World because it's easier to pronounce — tries to devour Bizarro's planet.
      Bizarro: Bugs came from godship and started eating. They ate Bizarros, buildings, even part of Bizarro World itself. Once they am full, they fly back into godship and more would come out.
      Supergirl: Huh. Omniphagus supplicants to produce fuel. Interesting
      Bizarro: Huh?
      Supergirl: Those things go out and eat something, then they return to the ship and are processed.
    • Legion of Super-Heroes:
      • The Sun-Eater. The first appearance of something called a Sun-eater in The Death of Lightning Lad is very different from later interpretations, being a giant green-furred humanoid that new legionnaire of the month "Marvel Lad" (really Mon-el having fun) takes out in one page as part of his initiation test. The Sun-Eater gained its much more formidable cloud form later in The Death of Ferro Lad.
      • Legion Lost introduced the Omniphagos, which, as the name implies, ate everything, and had to be kept imprisoned or it would eat the entire universe.
    • Power Girl (2009) has the Ix Negaspike, a monster that took a galaxy full of "super warriors" simply to force into a prison "beneath" the known multiverse. Vartox releases it on Earth to prove his brilliance can overcome what Powergirl's strength cannot, only for it to immediately smash the teleportation device he planned to send it back with.
    • The ultimate villain of Shadowpact, the Sun King, is a solar deity from another dimension who feeds on entire universes.
  • Dr. Blink: Superhero Shrink has Ginormous, an Expy of Galactus. Dr. Blink diagnoses him as an obvious victim of an eating disorder.
  • Marvel Universe:
    • One of the two Trope Makers is Galactus.note  He is a "planetary energy"-type Planet Eater. His appearance has varied significantly. In the main universe, he's a non-abstract universal function that resembles a giant of the same species as any viewer but a hundred times bigger, while in Ultimate Marvel, he's a Hive Mind swarm of robots that both needs to eat planets and hates organic life, and in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, he's a formless mass, although if you look really closely, you can make out Galactus's helmet within the swirling clouds at its core. The main universe Galactus, despite being pretty omnicidal, is a necessary part of the cosmic balance, which is why he can't be killed off permanently. He's a living seal keeping an Eldritch Abomination locked up, and without him, it'd destroy the universe very, very quickly. Most of the energy from his meals go towards the seal rather than his own body, which is why he's always so hungry.
      "Of all the creatures in the vastness of the Universe, there is none like me. I was present at the birth of the Universe, and I shall be there at its end. Though I ravage worlds to live, I bear no malice toward any living thing. I simply do what I must to survive. And why must Galactus survive? For, no matter how many worlds I devour... How many civilizations I destroy... It is my destiny to one day give back to the Universe — infinitely more than I have ever taken from it. So speaks Galactus!"
    • Galacta: Daughter of Galactus has the same cravings her dad has, and is capable of devouring planets, but she keeps this urge in check by working as a superhero, feeding on malevolent forces of energy (which would be destructive if left unchecked). In between those feedings, she spends a lot of time trying to control her insatiable hunger by eating bacteria, mostly because anything more filling and she might go on a feeding frenzy that would destroy the world. However, she's pregnant, and her baby has the same cravings even now, while still in her womb.
    • Revealed as the secret of the Celestials in the Elseworld Earth X; they reproduce this way, by parasitizing planets with their young. Galactus is their enemy. Every time the Celestials succeed in this, it destroys the universe — which doesn't bother the Celestials, since they can survive it, and this is the only way that they can make more of themselves. Galactus was revealed to have originally been a survivor of a previous universe that the Celestials destroyed, and dedicated his life to stopping them from ever succeeding again.
    • Marvel also has Ego the Living Planet, who is himself eaten by cosmically powered zombified superheroes in Marvel Zombies.
    • Issues #33-35 of Deadpool volume 2 feature Id, the selfish moon of Ego, which isn't a planet eater, but rather a planet snorter. It crashes into populated planets and then snorts up the remains to get high.
    • In the cosmic miniseries event Annihilation, the extradimensional invaders field a gigantic, organic, living spaceborne weapon called the "Harvester of Sorrows" which destroys entire worlds and consumes the remains. What's left of the organic life is separated out so the crew can enjoy it.
    • The Avengers once confront the Infinites — beings from beyond the universe who want to rearrange the galaxies to 'improve the energy flow of the Multiverse'. To this end, they demolish planets and re-shape them into the means to move galaxies. The actual demolishing is done by human-sized drones which destroy everything in sight and use the raw materials to replicate themselves until there's nothing left except the molten core and trillions of drones. The Infinites are pretty appalled when they discover that planets — which to them are about the size of grains of sand — have tiny beings living on them which can't survive that sort of thing.
    • Dark Phoenix in X-Men proved even more dangerous than Galactus considering she got sustenance from stars, causing them to go nova, which destroyed one populated planet. The Shi'ar and their allies realize that while Galactus is bad enough, having a menace that destroys whole solar systems is something they have to move against at any cost. And eating stars is only the beginning; Dark Phoenix had the potential to destroy the entire universe, and in some alternate continuities it did.
  • The Original Insect from Michael Moorcock's Multiverse.
  • One early issue of Rat-Man (1989) features Cosmicus, a parody of Galactus right down to the heralds. Gets devoured by Earth, or, rather, the Eldritch Abomination living under the surface. Cosmicus is later revealed to be one of the villains created by Mr. Mouse for a superhero to fight and sell more comic books with their fight.
  • An issue of The Simpsons has Homer as a parody of Galactus who' hungry for planets. Marge is a Nova Expy who wants him to eat a planet covered in healthy plants, and Bart (who takes on the role of the Silver Surfer) recommends Uranus. Homer ends up ordering planets from a pizza delivery-style service.
  • Space Dumplins has literal Space Whales that eat planets. The story begins with them having already eaten the main character's school. A scientist character even explains much later on that the whales do indeed eat entire planets.
  • IDW Publishing ended its long-running Transformers series with The Transformers: Unicron, a Grand Finale driven by the arrival of Unicron. Unlike other incarnations of the Chaos-Bringer (see his entry in Western Animation), this version of Unicron didn't have any cosmic roots, instead being an automated Doomsday Device and Mechanical Abomination built to wipe out the Cybertronian species as revenge for the ancient Cybertronian empire doing the same to its builders millions of years ago. Shrugging off every attempt to destroy or control it, Unicron consumes thirteen planets over the course of the series (including Cybertron itself), growing larger and stronger with each, and is only stopped at Earth when Optimus Prime performs a Heroic Sacrifice to merge with its mind and convince its creator to make peace, causing Unicron to consume itself and implode into a black hole.

    Comic Strips 
  • In a May 1987 strip of Garfield, Garfield has a dream while on a diet where he eats everything in sight and swallows the entire planet Earth before spotting other planets around him which he decides to also consume for dessert.

    Fan Fiction 
  • The main antagonist of Sonic Holograph: Episode Shadow -Stardust Song- is literally called the "Planet-Eater", and it very much lives up to that name. It is the form that the Ancient Ones took after Sana scattered them throughout the universe to save them from the Time Eater's own ravenous rampage, which caused their survival instincts to kick into overdrive, eventually causing them to merge together into a planet-sized Almighty Idiot that only knows to consume worlds and their power.

    Films — Animation 
  • Dragon Ball:
  • Godzilla: The Planet Eater has King Ghidorah, Godzilla's famous arch-nemesis and the eponymous planet eater in the title. Ghidorah in this continuity is a massive, immortal, indestructible energy being from another dimension that uses gravitational powers to eat planets. Ghidorah devoured many planets over the expanse of time he's been around, and almost succeeds at eating Earth.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The MOVIE 2nd A's' version of the Book of Darkness, NachtWal, doesn't just destroy the planet it's on but consumes it, piece by piece, growing larger the more it consumes and eventually swallowing the planet whole.
  • In The Return of Hanuman, a monster formed from a volcano named "Armageddon" is supposed to eat the contents of Earth entirely if Hanuman doesn't stop him.
  • Transformers: Unicron is one of Trope Makersnote , starting with The Transformers: The Movie, where his first appearance doubles as his first meal and the animated film's opening scene. He goes on to devour two of Cybertron's moons containing the hidden Autobot bases as well. (Well, one and a half, technically, since they desperately blow up the second one while he's still eating it to try and stop him. It doesn't even scratch him.) He is a "eats the whole planet outright"-style Planet Eater. Apocalypse Wow! Notably, however, he declines to eat Cybertron itself once Galvatron tries to betray him, instead choosing to assume his robot mode and tear apart the planet with his bare hands just to prove a point.note  Depending on continuity, he's also more evil than Galactus: as a dark god in a crunchy robot shell, Unicron doesn't actually need to eat anything. He just considers the mere existence of the universe to be a personal affront against him, and some continuities make it clear that he personally devoured all of reality and creation at least once. Then the Big Bang happened while he was sleeping and he woke up annoyed he'd have to do it all over again. It's even more disturbing because Unicron is a mechanical planet himself. Incidentally, he is most definitely not to be confused with Galactus (although Marvel may have had a hand in The Transformers: The Movie, and was publishing the Transformers comic at the time).
  • Wishology: The Darkness eats planets, but it's just defending itself because the denizens of the planets it's passing by freak out and attack it for looking menacing. When it's all sorted out, it spits out everything/everyone it and its Eliminators ate.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Godzilla: Depending on the incarnation, King Ghidorah's planet-scouring antics over the millennia are responsible for everything from the extinction of the dinosaurs to Mars's inability to support life anymore. Taken to a new level by Godzilla: The Planet Eater's Ghidorah, who is a literal planet eater. See the Films — Animation folder.
  • Independence Day: Resurgence reveals the alien Planet Looters have this capacity, with an extra-large ship that drills up to a planet's core, a process that effectively kills the magnetic field/biosphere/etc., and then the ship absorbs the planetary energy to fuel the whole fleet. The opening sequence shows a charred husk that are the remains of this process, and the attempt to this on Earth is thankfully cut short.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • The Assimilation Plot of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2's true villain involves him planting a piece of himself (looking like an alien seed or flower bulb) in each planet he wishes to conquer. When he's at full power, those seeds grow to immense size looking and acting like an Advancing Wall of Doom until they completely consume the planets they're on.
    • In The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the cosmic being Galactus is cursed with an endless appetite for planets, which are grinded and turned into lava by his gigantic ship and fed into him via cables in his back. His herald, Shalla-Bal/the Silver Surfer, chooses the planets that will be marked for death and consumed by him.
  • Men in Black 3 has a rogue alien race known as the Boglodites, parasitic aliens that consume all planets in their path. Thanks to the last surviving Arcainan, named Griffin, he gave the Arc Net defense system to Agent Kay on July 16, 1969, and Kay installed it on the Apollo 11 in Cape Canaveral Florida. The Arc Net activated outside of Earth's atmosphere, protecting the Earth from the Boglodite invasion, leading to the race's extinction. However, Kay made a mistake of arresting the last Boglodite, Boris the Animal, instead of killing him, therefor he was able to escape from prison, time travel to the past, kill Agent Kay and fulfill the Boglodite invasion. But Kay's partner, Agent Jay, prevents the invasion by going back in time, help Kay install the Arc Net, and convince Kay to kill Boris, making the Boglodites extinct again, only this time, with Boris on that list.
  • Transformers: Rise of the Beasts brings Unicron to the (rebooted) Transformers Film Series. Instead of being a Perpetual-Motion Monster like his other incarnations, here he needs to consume planets to fuel himself, and due to the vastness of space and his own size he's constantly on the edge of starvation. To find suitable planets, he sends his Terrorcons, a horde of robotic monsters led by a trio of Cybertronian hunters empowered/enslaved by his own dark energies. In particular, he's after the movie's MacGuffin, the Transwarp Key, because it will let him teleport anywhere, anywhen, and make all space and time his feeding ground.

    Literature 
  • Choose Your Own Adventure: The spinoff Space Hawks has multiple examples. One book has the Cephids, a literal Horde of Alien Locusts who envelop and devour whole planets.
  • The History of the Galaxy: The Forerunners feed on all forms of matter from space dust to planets. They are not particularly large but are able to breed (through mitosis) at tremendous rate after eating. The Forerunner Crisis occurred 3 million years ago, when a swarm of these low-intelligence creatures was moving through systems attracted by starlight and leaving only stars with no planets in their wake. They were finally stopped by a species-wide Heroic Sacrifice of a Precursor race. One of the novels reveals that the Forerunners are, in fact, creations of an Energy Being, designed as its vessels. They were created with prototype DNA molecules. Some of them died on various planets, resulting in Panspermia. They weren't designed to go crazy, though.
  • The House on the Borderland: It's not alive, but the gigantic Green Sun consumes every planet in the solar system, and the sun as well.
  • It: The titular monster claims that it is "the eater of worlds". We're only shown it eating children, but considering what almost happened in the end... It is female, and she lays eggs. Hundreds of them. We're lucky for Ben and his cowboy boots.
  • Mercy Thompson: The River Devil is a snake-like demon that plans to consume earth. The more it consumes, the bigger it gets, and it eventually plans on growing so large it can consume the world.
  • The organisms in Moonseed by Stephen Baxter are a type of (probably) naturally-occurring Grey Goo that normally feeds on protoplanetary disks and eventually builds a huge "hive" to move on to the next young system, but if they're stuck in one system for whatever reason they're quite capable of eating a fully formed planet.
  • New Series Adventures: Sick Building features a Voracious Craw, a giant worm-like creature which devours everything it can on the planets it comes across, leaving behind only bare rock.
  • Retief: In "The Garbage Invasion", the Basurans want to take over the paradise planet of Delicia so they can eat it, the way they did their home planet.
  • The Silver Sequence: The Roar is a member of a species that eats planets, or at least all the life on them.
  • Star Trek:
    • The Black Mass from the Star Trek: New Frontier books, which eats planets and then has their suns for dessert.
    • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Vendetta, the last survivor of an alien race assimilated by the Borg finds and activates a fully-powered final-design Planet Killer (the one from the Original Series episode "Doomsday Machine" is revealed to have been a prototype) that also holds many of the minds/souls of the race that built the Planet Killers to fight the Borg. They take it on a rampage of revenge against the Borg, destroying many Cubes while also devouring several worlds for fuel, including a planet in the Tholian home system.
    • The new Borg Cube from the Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch novel Before Dishonor eats Pluto (just before it becomes moot, it was revealed that it had been re-planetized by the time of its destruction).
  • The titular creature in "Thang" by Martin Gardner is large enough to grasp Earth between two fingers. It clears off all water and ice before chewing the planet, core and all. It, in turn, is also eaten by a planet-eater eater.
  • Where the Sidewalk Ends: "Hungry Mungry" is about a boy whose ravenous appetite works up to and beyond this level.
    And when he'd eaten every state, each puppy, boy and girl
    He wiped his mouth upon his sleeve and went to eat the world.
  • World-Eater reveals black holes to be winged, intergalactic creatures which eat planets, stars and even light.
  • The power-granting Entities of Worm don't literally eat planets. Instead, after completing their evolution phase, they consume all available forms of nutrition in the parallel versions of the world before destroying it to launch their spawn into space.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Dengeki Sentai Changeman, Star King Bazoo turns out to be this: he's actually a living being the size of a planet known as the Gozma Star. Riding in the coattails of the Halley Comet, he travels through the universe, devouring all planets he encounters and growing stronger with each meal.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The creature from "The Claws of Axos" drains life-energy from whole planetary ecosystems to sustain itself.
    • The Great Vampires from "State of Decay" supposedly devoured planets as well.
    • The Destroyer, the Lord of Darkness and Eater of Worlds, threatens to do so in "Battlefield". So the Brigadier shoots it.
    • Implied, at the very least, with the Racnoss from "The Runaway Bride":
      Doctor: The Racnoss are carnivores — omnivores. They devour whole planets.
    • The stingrays from "Planet of the Dead" devour a planet's whole ecosystem, leaving it a desert. Then the swarm flies around the planet faster and faster until their combined mass and velocity open a black hole through which they travel to their next home/meal.
    • The Moment, one of the "ultimate weapon[s] of mass destruction" and final work of the ancient inhabitants of Gallifrey, is specifically mentioned as "the galaxy eater" and is how The Doctor originally ended the Time War. Until he changed his mind, thanks mostly to Clara for knocking him out of his pity party, with some help from Ten and Eleven.
  • Kamen Rider Build: Evolt travels from planet to planet, consuming them with black holes and using the energy gained to make himself even more powerful. He's personally responsible for Mars being a lifeless ruin, but was mortally wounded by the Queen of Mars during the process and lost most of his power, forcing him to hide out on Earth while he tried to regain it. His Evil Plan during the later quarter of the series is to unlock warp travel so that he can do so even faster.
  • Lexx:
    • The titular Cool Ship loves (and needs) to do this. The Lexx even took a few bites out of Earth. In a twist, the Lexx actually receives less nourishment from doing exactly this, as it needs protein from organic material for sustenance. This is why the Lexx only eats Holland instead of the moon; it's just that 'accidents' happen, and the rocky ("not very tasty") remains of an exploded planet are all it has to make do with.
    • In the second season, Mantrid goes one better by eating the entire universe. Technically, dismantling it and converting it into his drones, but they are arguably a part of his body.
  • One Sesame Street skit has Cookie Monster eat the Moon.
  • Stargate SG-1: After getting access to a time-dilation device, the Replicators are able to entirely cover a planet with replicator blocks. Granted, the planet is still there, but it's less of a planet now than a planet-sized mass of replicator blocks.
  • Star Trek:
  • The Ultra Series has a number of these, with a tendency to show up as the Final Boss of a New Generation Series:
    • Return of Ultraman: One episode involves the invasion of Vacummon, a planet-eating space cloud the size of galaxies. Ultraman Jack eventually defeats Vacummon by destroying its gut from the inside, forcing it to spit out every single planet it has devoured.
    • Ultraman Orb: Maga-Orochi is said to have devoured many planets before being imprisoned on Earth. It begins to consume Earth once it's revived in its adult form Magata-no-Orochi.
    • Ultraman R/B: Reugosite is a planet-devouring entity who tried to consume Earth 1,300 years ago, but was driven back by Ultraman Rosso and Blu; it returned in the present day to continue its attempt to devour Earth. It was also part of a species of "space white-blood cells" that consumed any planet deemed a threat, before Ultraman Tregear corrupted it into indiscriminately devouring any planet in its way.
    • Ultraman Taiga: Woola is a living heap of space trash with a black hole within its body, which drives it to consume any planet it comes across in a futile attempt to sate its endless hunger. It's said to first eat the crust of a planet and everything on it, before burrowing into the core of the planet to consume it, destroying the planet in the process.

    Mythology and Religion 

    Tabletop Games 
  • The indie RPG Belly of the Beast takes place in the digestive tract of one after it scrapes off the surface of a Medieval European Fantasy.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Draedens, multi-tentacled monsters from the Immortals boxed set, aren't able to literally devour planets whole, but they're entirely capable of munching a world down to bedrock.
    • Gammaroids, great turtle monsters from Spelljammer, tend to cause tectonic activity during hatching and then go away, but a big infestation can gradually (over centuries) destroy planets, as happened in Moragspace sphere featured in SJS1: Goblins' Return module.
    • Several of the Elder Evils consume planets. Atropus the World Born Dead is a undead moonlet said to be a leftover from the birth of the universe that crashes into populated planets and consumes all of their life energy. Shothotugg the Eater of Worlds is a mass of poison that also drains worlds of life and every time it does so the laws of the universe are changed a little more. Dendar the Night Serpent is a massive snake that feeds on nightmares and is destined to one day destroy the Forgotten Realms by consuming its sun. Ragnorra the Mother of Monsters does not actually eat planets but envelopes them and leaves all life on them mutated beyond recognition.
    • While likely intended to be a joke monster (it was published in Dragon Magazine issue 96 on 1 April 1985), the Quazar Dragon fits as it's best described as a planet-devouring space lizard capable of Faster-Than-Light Travel that even gods feared, measuring over 74,000 miles long with a bottomless hunger for magic-rich worlds. Its bite alone is measured in 'planets per bite' in damage, and it is impervious to damage due to having 16 miles thick iridium plating and officially infinite hitpoints, on top of being completely immune to magical effects. It is virtually impossible to fight it and the only way to save a world from its hunger is to destroy all magical items on it as it's attracted to powerful sources of magic — and even then there's only a 5% chance of it going away instead of continuing to snack on the planet.
  • Magic: The Gathering: The Eldrazi are titanic cthonic entities from the Blind Eternities between the planes that ate whole universes before a trio of Planeswalkers locked them away on Zendikar. The lock...didn't hold.
  • The Strange: Planetovores are entities native to the Strange united less by any kind of shared nature or origin and more by their immense power and interest in finding and subsuming planets, which they parasitize and kill in order to turn them into personal control nodes for the Strange itself — described ones include an evil god, rampant AIs, and a particularly nasty strain of Alien Kudzu. In theory, finding any specific physical location from the Strange is impossible, but any civilization that reaches a certain level of advancement will eventually discover and interact with the Strange, producing a "ping" that tells planetovores where it is. Almost every single alien civilization to ever exist has been eaten by planetovores. Earth escaped this fate through, essentially, sheer dumb luck; the chance collision of a piece of alien technology in the Hadean has made it connected to the Strange in a way few, if any, other prime worlds ever were, which means that an immense swarm of recursions surrounds it and shields it from the predators that lurk outside. Even so, some planetovores exist in its vicinity, such as the trapped entity that forms the land of Ardeyn or the kray broodmother that lives in the Kray Nebula; some of these have tried to eat Earth in the past and would dearly like to get a second shot at it.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The Tyranids are known as "The Great Devourer" for good reason. When a Hive Fleet descends upon a world, first the Hive Mind sends vanguard organisms to infiltrate the planet and disrupt its defenders, while seeding the atmosphere with spores that mutate the native flora to create a Hungry Jungle. As the Tyranids swarm the world and eradicate the last of its defenders, swarms of Rippers consume every last bit of biomass, including other Tyranids, then jump into acidic digestion pools linked to capillary towers that the orbiting hive ships use to siphon up nutrients. Eventually even the oceans and atmosphere are sucked up and the Hive Fleet moves on, leaving behind a barren rock — and frequently, due to the Tyranids' method of interstellar travel, a star that goes nova. The optimistic take on the Tyranids is that they're attacking the Milky Way galaxy after scouring one or more others of life. Pessimistically, they're Invading Refugees fleeing something even worse.
    • The World Eaters Traitor Legion invoke this trope with their name in heraldry, but don't really fit, they're more Berserkers than planet-eaters.
    • The C'tan used to eat stars. This was a fairly slow process so for the most part no-one even noticed they were there. When eventually contacted by the Necrontyr and given physical bodies, they were no longer able to do so and are instead forced to consume the life energy of living beings. This is the reason the enslaved Necrons have been asleep for millions of years — the C'tan ate basically everyone in the galaxy, resorted to cannibalism, and the few survivors were eventually forced to hibernate since there was no food left. People just aren't as filling as stars. They are much tastier though.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: There's a high-Level Synchro Monster called Star Eater; if its name is any indication, it takes this Trope up one notch further. (Given how powerful it is, it's possible; it could override the effect of Number 9: Dyson Sphere.)

    Video Games 
  • Abadox: Parasitis digested the titular planet and assumed its shape. Parasitis obviously takes the maxim "you are what you eat" too seriously.
  • The Toronto of Albion is a man-made Planet Eater. It's basically a giant metal colossus that settles on the planet and digs up the surface, while slowly expanding. Eventually it could reduce the entire planet into raw materials.
  • The biggest threat to your civilization in Before We Leave is giant Space Whales occasionally drifting by and swallowing chunks of planets you've settled, removing tiles from the map and damaging nearby structures. Smaller ones can be placated with offerings of food delivered via Space Elevator, while larger ones need to be repelled with Aegis shields.
  • Ouroboros, The Man Behind the Man and Final Boss of Bravely Default. Phase one of his evil plan is to physically link every Alternate Universe. Then he can eat them all at once, giving him enough energy to invade the Celestial Realm. One of his attacks, the aptly-named Armageddon, consumes just one of these universes (visually represented as a single planet) as fuel to attack the party and fully heal himself.
  • Chaos Rings:
    • The Qualia seeks to destroy spacetime itself.
    • The Entity in Chaos Rings III is a massive beast that drains entire worlds of their lifeforce. It is a predator and planets are its prey. Even worse, it's not a unique creature — its true reason for visiting Marble Blue was to lay its egg.
  • In Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, Lavos is gradually eating the planet's energy from the inside, having first attached itself in 65,000,000 B.C. What makes it particularly nasty is that Lavos is heavily implied to alter evolution on the planets it lands on, so that local sentients become more intelligent and advanced. Why? That makes the meal more filling. Cross expounds on this to make matters more complex: Lavos enhances the DNA of the planet's native life, creating sentience, then incorporates that DNA into its offspring, killing the planet so that its evolved young can move on to other worlds, continuing the life-cycle. This is a very literal take on the Panspermia theory of life propagation, with Lavos as the sperm that penetrates and fertilizes the egg, Earth. This kind of sucks for the Earthlings in the long run, but after all, you can't hatch an egg without breaking it.
  • Pyron from Darkstalkers is similar to this in most regards, although he usually prefers wiping all life off the face of the planet and letting a new race come into power before starting it over again.
  • Dead Space:
    • USG Ishimura from Dead Space 1 is a humongous scraper capable of gutting a whole planet and collecting its mineral resources. So basically, it's a human-made planet eater/coal miner. Repeat that to yourself and realize the awesome.
    • Dead Space 3 has the Brethren Moons, Necromorphs the size of moons that reproduce by consuming all biomass on a given planet's surface.
  • The Leviathan from Destiny 2 is a monolithic starship that overshadows the dwarf planet of Nessus, and is actively consuming it — to mix with "royal nectar" and be formed into wine for the Cabal Emperor's refined palate.
  • The Elder Scrolls: The draconic Beast of the Apocalypse Alduin has the title of "World-Eater". It is his divinely mandated duty to "eat the world" at the end of every "kalpa" (cycle of time) so that it can be remade anew. In The Seven Fights of the Aldudagga, he is described as a titanic monster with divine power even beyond that of the Daedric Princes. He is also described as exhaling entire farms out of his nose and dwarfing even the Throat of the World itself. So it's a bit disappointing when you finally face him and he's just a slightly-bigger-than-normal dragon with not many special powers who just wants to Take Over the World.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • The title of the final chapter of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. The actual event taking place during it is less about eating planets and more about crashing meteors and the moon into them, though.
    • Final Fantasy VII's Jenova combines the mimetic/assimilation abilities of the Thing with the retirement plans of Lavos. Much of Jenova's history is kept vague: it was discovered in a glacier near the ruins of the ancient Cetra civilization. It was frozen in the shape of a naked woman, except with missing limbs and numerous alien appendages jutting out from its shoulders and torso. According to lore a "calamity from the sky" came to the planet, imitated human form and nearly wiped us out until a few remaining Cetra buried it in ice. It would have remained dormant but for an excavation team in the present day, who were looking for remnants of the Cetra and assumed that Jenova was a mummy. Eventually, Shinra's scientists took possession of the body and began experimenting on injecting Jenova's undying cells into potential soldiers, which mistakenly allowed Jenova to work its will from inside them. Its ultimate goal is to destroy the planet, then use the hollow shell as a vehicle for preying on other worlds. Jenova's motives and nature can actually be summed up pretty easily: It's an infectious agent, not really a life form, that lands on a host planet and subverts it in order to reproduce and spread. In the real world we've got something that behaves in almost the exact same manner: a virus.
    • In Final Fantasy IX, Terra is a parasitic other planet gradually dining on the souls of Gaia, a planet it has been slowly trying to devour for a very long time.
  • Guhnash from Fossil Fighters, a gigantic space-fish-Pac-Man creature, presumably of the physical-devouring variety of planet eaters. Around 600 million years ago, it ate the dinaurians' home planet. Thanks to their subsequent attempts to 'correct' the evolutionary path of Earth, it starts making its way there.
  • One of the entries in the Gradius series, Life Force/Salamander, has one of these as the storyline: you have allowed yourself to be swallowed by Zelos, a creature so large it eats entire solar systems, so that you can fly through his body and take down his organs one by one with your heavily armed spaceship.
  • Marvel Snap: Galactus is a playable card and his ability to consume planets is represented by outright destroying two of the three locations that players can put their cards on, removing all cards on them and rendering those locations permanently unusable.
  • Some Space Monsters from the first and second Master of Orion games will eat planets if you don't stop them, leaving behind only "a barren, radioactive husk".
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: Phaaze, by itself, is a living planet. However, in a loose reenactment of an Alien's modus operandi on a planetary scale, it sends out its offspring in meteorite form to corrupt and devour other planets as a means of reproducing.
  • RuneScape: Tuska, a nearly mindless beast goddess, came to the planet of Gielinor in an attempt to devour it after Guthix's assassination and death. However, Gielinor was defended by four different rival factions (three controlled by gods Armadyl, Saradomin, and Zamorak; and one godless faction under Vorago's worship). She was ultimately stopped by Vorago, an embodiment of the Genius Loci of Gielinor.
  • Salamander (1986): The entire game Life Force takes place inside one of these. Half the levels are organic-themed, while the other half are apparently the surface of the actual planets that were consumed.
  • Sonic Frontiers: The franchise's Greater-Scope Villain, THE END, is described as a consumer of worlds. This is the entire reason it was made a Sealed Evil in a Can in the first place by the Ancients, who lost their own world to it and barely managed to stop its attempt to do this to Sonic's world, and what it intends to resume being once freed, starting with the very planet it was denied last time.
  • Star Control:
    • In Star Control 2, one of the Umgah's pranks is to convince the Spathi of the existence of a "Grand Master Planet Eater".
    • In Star Control Origins, the Ancient One is a moon-sized lifeform that devours planets... well, sort of. As one Menkmack puts it: "Technically, it only eats the atmosphere... but, technically, we need that to breathe."
  • Star Wars Legends:
  • In Stellaris, Devouring Swarms composed of Lithoids are known as Terravores and can slowly consume planets, gaining minerals and alloys, but making them gradually smaller and less hospitable. If left unchecked they can ultimately break the planet into pieces, rendering it permanently useless.
  • The final boss from Supercharged Robot Vulkaiser, Gogoh the Space Devil, literally swallows Earth whole. The last level is set in its stomach.
  • The Old Gods from WarCraft are planetary parasites that merge themselves to a planet and slowly corrupt it. Whether this would eventually destroy the planet is unknown, as the Old Gods on Azeroth were sealed away by the Titans (they could not be killed, having already corrupted the planet to such a degree that removing them would've required the destruction of Azeroth). The canon lore anthology Chronicles solidifies their story as well as the Titans. Titans began life as planets which eventually hatch into new Titans, making them basically Planetary Parasites themselves. The Old Gods were created by the Void Lords and hurled randomly into space hoping at least one set of them would impact on a Titan Embryo, allowing them to corrupt a Titan into their ultimate warrior of destruction (full grown Titans were too strong with The Light to be corrupted). Meaning they don't consume the planet in a traditional sense, but just consume it with corruption for when it hatches on its own.note 
  • In Wild ARMs 2, the Encroaching Parallel Universe, Kuiper Belt, is gradually devouring not only the planet Filgaia, but Filgaia's entire universe, in what is termed the "Stain Paradigm".
  • In World of Horror, Ath-Yolazsth the Towering Eye is an unfathomably vast Old God who drifts through the cosmos looking for inhabited planets to consume. The player's objective in a run featuring this god is to prevent it from noticing the Earth, because once it gets our planet in its sights, there is absolutely nothing humanity can do to stop Ath-Yolazsth from slowly making its way to the solar system and eating the Earth like a grape.
  • In Xenogears, the removal of the Limiters from the planet's population causes most of them to suddenly transform en masse into Wels, and it is revealed that all humanity on the planet was allowed to grow and thrive so that they could be consumed as raw materials for Deus.
  • In Xenosaga Episode II, the activation of Proto Ω on Miltia causes it to instantly devour the planet from the inside out for raw materials, and then literally hatches out of the planet like an egg, throwing off pieces of its crust like egg shells.

    Visual Novels 

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • 8-Bit Theater gives us the Cakelogical Singularity! Too bad it didn't actually work out, but even just the idea is awesome.
  • Played with in Akuma's Comics: Sprite Eaters are the Sprite Comic versions of planet eaters, who normally devour dead sprite comics. The one that attacked the comic was more ambitious than its kind and began eating sprite worlds earlier for their power.
  • Casey and Andy:
    • Parodied with the Planet Devourer, which can eat planets... eventually. (It's about the size of a canary, with a similar rate of digestion.) It does eat Mars at one point... except it's Only a Model.
    • At one point, Casey puts together a computer simulation between planet eaters and -destroyers, which in addition to the Planet Devourer includes Galactus, a Vorlon planet killer, Unicron, and the Death Star.
  • In one strip of Lil Formers, Unicron and Galactus debate over whether they, as planet eaters, should eat Pluto.
  • Nebula: Jupiter is a downplayed example — he eats moons. More threateningly, Sun is shaping to actually be one.
  • The Non-Adventures of Wonderella has Ginormous, who travels the universe eating things that deserve to be eaten. She occasionally talks him out of eating the Earth.
  • In Schlock Mercenary, while no planets get eaten, quite a few planet-sized dark matter Pa'anuri get eaten by Umbral Schlock.
    Pa'anuri: It is not a monster. "Monster" is not enough of a word.
    Schlock: The word you want is "mundivore." It means world-eater. Or maybe unverse-eater. I won't know which until I'm done eating.

    Websites 
  • Terren: The goddesses Pura Velpormia and Hellmasin Miastrius swallow heavens and hells, respectively, whole. Unless they decide to wear them as jewelry instead. The creator also draws some macros that grow big enough to eat planets in a more conventional sense, but one of them was still nothing more than a snack for Velpormia.
  • SCP Foundation: There is an SCP capable of this, but most scientists aren't even aware of it. It's SCP-2317, and only O5 personnel are fully aware of it. Why? There is no way to stop 2317 once it awakens, with the "containment procedures" being just an Empty Promise to keep from a widespread panic.

    Western Animation 

    Real Life 
  • Black holes, if they get close enough. These are cores of dead stars that have high enough gravitational pull to absorb even light. And they cause spaghettification of everything (including planets) that gets close enough.
  • Near the end of some stars' life cycles, they will expand and envelop nearby bodies, including planets. This is the likely end of Mercury and Venus, considering the type of star we orbit. Earth is an open question; some astronomers suggest that the sun won't quite reach earth's orbit of the time (somewhat farther out than now, as the sun's loss of mass as it transitions to a red giant will cause Earth to drift away from it).
  • Here on Earth, it's become memetic to create an "Earth Sandwich": Finding someone on the exact opposite side of the globe and putting a piece of bread on the ground at the same time, then taking a picture to share on social media. Yummy.
  • On June 2022, a picture from one of NASA's satellites was revealed after the planet’s infamous gases temporarily parted and the chemical make-up of the planet’s core indicates that Jupiter likely swallowed up lots of small planets (called planetesimals) and space rocks to boost its own growth. Which is somewhat horrifying.
  • Earth may be guilty too, in the giant impact scenario. According to this model. Theia, a Mars-sized planet, crashed into Earth early in its history, with the massive amount of ejecta from the impact eventually coalescing into the Moon. As for Theia itself? Its remnants are still inside Earth: the so called "large low-shear-velocity provinces", enormous structures in the inner mantle which have different seismic properties than their surroundings due to different composition, would be Theia's own mantle that sunk deep towards the Earth's core, basically forming half-digested blobs. Yikes.

 
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Unicron

Unicron is introduced as a massive robot planet who devours smaller worlds.

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