How many chomps does it take to get to the center of a planet? The world may never know...note
"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 and Planetary Parasite. 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.
Subtrope 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:
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Anime and Manga
- Cat Soup: The Magician (who may or may not be God) was trying to eat the Earth.
- Dragon Ball:
- A variation is the tree in Dragon Ball Z: The Tree of Might, which sucks all of the energy out of a planet, which can then be consumed by eating the fruit it produces.
- The Big Gete Star in Dragon Ball Z: The Return of Cooler.
- Moro from the Galatic Patrol arc of the Dragon Ball Super manga drains entire planets of their energy, which he then consumes.
- The Getter Emperor from Getter Robo, before it upgraded to a galaxy eater. He's even called 'Planet Eater' Moro inuniverse.
- In Junji Ito's 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.
- The monstrous plant Kaiba from the anime series 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 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.
- The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's The Movie Second's version of the Darkness of the Book of Darkness, NachtWal, which doesn't just destroy the planet its on but consumes it, piece by piece, growing larger the more it consumes, eventually swallowing the planet whole.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- In Digimon Frontier, the Digital World is converted by the villains into data code region by region (explaining the mising "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.
Asian Animation
- In Planet of 7 Colors, the Dark Planet survives by moving around and consuming other planets.
Comic Books
- One of the two Trope Makers is Galactus, from the Marvel Universe.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 the second Fantastic Four (2005) movie, 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. He's a necessary part of the cosmic balance, which is why he can't be killed off permanently.
"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!"
- Then Marvel introduced Galacta, Galactus' estranged daughter. She 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.
- Spoofed as Balactus in Minoriteam.
- 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.
- The main universe Galactus, despite being pretty omnicidal, is vital to the survival of the universe. 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.
- There's also Hunger, who was sort of like Galactus, except it fed on ''universes''.
- DC has a largely-forgotten parody called Mr. Nebula, who doesn't eat planets, just re-decorates them by wiping out all life. He is placated by being given Las Vegas, which is about what he's going for.
- An issue of The Simpsons comic had Homer as a parody of Galactus who was hungry for planets. Marge was 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.
- Marvel also has Ego the Living Planet, who is himself eaten by cosmically powered zombified superheroes in Marvel Zombies.
- One Deadpool storyline featured Id, the selfish moon of Ego, which wasn't a planet eater, but rather a planet snorter. It would crash into populated planets and then snort up the remains to get high.
- In the Marvel cosmic miniseries event Annihilation, the extradimensional invaders fielded a gigantic, organic, living spaceborne weapon called the "Harvester of Sorrows" which destroyed entire worlds and consumed the remains. What was left of the organic life was separated out so the crew could enjoy it.
- The Avengers once confronted the Infinites - beings from beyond the universe who wanted to rearrange the galaxies to 'improve the energy flow of the Multiverse'. To this end, they demolished planets and re-shaped them into the means to move galaxies. The actual demolishing was done by human-sized drones which destroyed everything in sight and used the raw materials to replicate themselves until there was nothing left except the molten core and trillions of drones. The Infinites were pretty appalled when they discovered 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.
- Legion of Super-Heroes:
- The Sun-Eater, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The first appearance of something called a Sun-eater in The Death of Lightning Lad was very different from later interpretations, being a giant green-furred humanoid that new legionnaire of the month "Marvel Lad" really Mon-el having fun took 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.
- In Supergirl story arc 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. - The World Devastators from the Star Wars Legends: 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 Original Insect from Michael Moorcock's Multiverse.
- 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.
- One early issue of Rat-Man 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.
- And then there's the Limbo Cell from DC's 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.
- 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.
- Dr. Blink: Superhero Shrink has Ginormous, an Expy of Galactus. Dr. Blink diagnoses him as an obvious victim of an eating disorder.
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 Works
- 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
- 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.
- In The Return of Hanuman, a monster formed from a volcano named "Armageddon" is supposed to eat the contents of Earth entirely if Hanuman didn't stop him.
Films — Live-Action
- 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.
- Depending on the incarnation, Godzilla Arch-Enemy 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 the Anime Ghidorah, who is a literal planet eater. See the anime folder.
- 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.
- 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 live action continuity. 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
- World-Eater reveals black holes to be winged, intergalactic creatures which eat planets, stars and even light.
- The new Borg Cube from Peter David's Star Trek Expanded Universe novel Before Dishonor. It eats Pluto. (Just before it becomes moot, it was revealed that it had been re-planetized by the time of its destruction.)
- And the Black Mass from the Star Trek: New Frontier books, which eats planets and then has their suns for dessert.
- This was the focus of one The Stainless Steel Rat novel.
- It's not alive, but the gigantic Green Sun from The House on the Borderland consumes every planet in the solar system, and the sun as well.
- The Roar from The Silver Sequence is a member of a species that eats planets, or at least all the life on them.
- The Forerunners in The History of the Galaxy series 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.
- In IT by Stephen King, 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.
- In Keith Laumer's Retief story, "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 organisms in the book Moonseed by Stephen Baxter. They 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.
- The Doctor Who novel 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.
- The Choose Your Own Adventure spinoff Space Hawks had multiple examples. One book has the Cephids, a literal Horde of Alien Locusts who envelop and devour whole planets. Then there's Nemesis, a vaguely-developed ultimate evil who appears in the book actually called "The Planet Eater".
- Martin Gardner's "Thang": The titular creature 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.
- 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.
Live-Action TV
- The Cetus from Andromeda
- The eponymous menace of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Doomsday Machine" breaks up planets and devours the chunks as fuel.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation has the Great Crystalline Entity from "Datalore" and "Silicon Avatar", a giant space snowflake that wipes out the landscape and lifeforms of worlds.
- Doctor Who:
- The creature from "The Claws of Axos" drained 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 Exactly What It Says on the Tin in "Battlefield". So the Brigadier shoots it.
- And the Racnoss from "The Runaway Bride" (implied, at the very least):
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.
- The titular Cool Ship from Lexx loves (and needs) to do this. The Lexx even took a few bites out of Earth.
- In season two, Mantrid went 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.
- 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.
- Stargate SG-1 has the Replicators who, after getting access to a time-dilation device, were 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.
- From Dengeki Sentai Changeman Star King Bazoo turned out to be this: he's in 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, growing stronger with each meal.
- One Sesame Street skit had Cookie Monster eat the Moon.
- Kamen Rider Build has Evolt, the Big Bad. He 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 in the process lost most of his power and was forced 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.
- The Ultra Series has a number of them, 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
- In Norse Mythology, Fenrir's sons Hati and Skoll shall respectively eat the Moon and Sun when Ragnarok comes.
- A common image in many Alchemical texts is that of a bright green lion eating the Sun.
- In Aztec Mythology, the first earth, Jaguar Sun, was ended by Tezcatlipoca turning into the Jaguar God Tepeyollotl and devouring it.
- The ultimate goal of the serpentine chaos embodiment Apophis (Also spelled Apep) of Egyptian Mythology was to swallow the sun, kept from doing so only by Ra's constant battle with him every night.
Pinballs
Poetry
- Shel Silverstein's "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.
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.
- Draedens, multi-tentacled monsters from the Immortals
- The Eldrazi in Magic: The Gathering. 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.
- 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.
- In the Yu-Gi-Oh! game, 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
- 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, who combined the mimetic/assimilation abilities of the creature from The Thing (1982) 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 mistakingly 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.
- 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.
- Chaos Rings: The Qualia seeks to destroy spacetime itself.
- In Chaos Rings III, The Entity 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.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: 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."
- Parasitis, from Abadox, digested the titular planet and assumed its shape. Parasitis obviously takes the maxim "you are what you eat" too seriously.
- Pyron from the Capcom game 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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 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.
- 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 Planet 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
- Star Wars:
- The Star Forge in Knights of the Old Republic is a variant of this - it feeds off a star and the Dark Side to create vast swathes of technology for the Sith army. Whether it would eventually destroy the star it's using for energy and raw material is unknown (the star it's found orbiting seemed undamaged, and the math at least suggests that it's unlikely).
- Darth Nihilus in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is (or was) a person who consumes the life-force of planets through the Force, leaving them barren rocks in space. It turns out this is pretty much all he does, since his hunger is all-consuming and all that motivates him.
- The Sith Emperor in Star Wars: The Old Republic is essentially a stronger version of Darth Nihilus who was said to be capable of doing this to multiple planets at once at his peak.
- 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".
- USG Ishimura in Dead Space 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.
- 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.
- The Toronto of Albion is another example of 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The final boss from Supercharged Robot Vulkaiser, Gogoh the Space Devil, literally swallows Earth whole. The last level is set in its stomach.
- Tuska, a nearly mindless beast goddess, from the MMORPG RuneScape, came to the planet of Gielinor in an attempt to devour it after Guthix's assassination and death. But 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.
- In The Elder Scrolls series, Alduin is the draconic Beast of the Apocalypse and 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- In Marco and the Galaxy Dragon, Nudos are gigantic Space Whales that can swallow an entire planet in one gulp. Marco and Arco have to stop one from devouring the Earth at one point.
- 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.
- 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.
Web Comics
- 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.
- Parodied in Casey and Andy 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.
- One in the Star Trek parody arc of Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger.
- 8-Bit Theater gives us the Cakelogical Singularity! Too bad it didn't actually work out, but even just the idea is awesome.
- 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 one strip of Lil Formers, Unicron and Galactus debate over whether they, as planet eaters, should eat Pluto.
- Jupiter from Nebula is a downplayed one- he eats moons.
- More threateningly, Sun is shaping to actually be one.
- 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.
Web Original
- 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.
- In 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
- Dial M for Monkey brought us the Galactus parody Barbequor, who tried to turn the entire solar system into a shishkabob.
- Coop battles one of these in Megas XLR, after it has the gall to disrupt his wrestling show. He destroys it by feeding it a missile packed with soda and Pop Rocks. And that's by accident. His first attempt — a Macross Missile Massacre — is incredibly effective at devastating an area the size of New York City, on a creature the size of Earth. So then he tries smashing it...
- The Beast Planet from Shadow Raiders gets along by eating planets. Oddly, it's also an Implacable Man... err, planet, as it
survives severalis completely unfazed by ALL attempts at destruction, even eating two of the heroes' planets. The Beast also produces a near-endless supply of drones who tend to kill off anyone escaping from the Beast's feeding. Even in the end, they were unable to completely stop it; they had to sacrifice yet another planet to use its teleport world engine to send the Beast planet far away. However, the series ended up closing on Planet Reptizar's doomsday... - Spoofed as Omnipotus in The Tick.
Omnipotus: Okay, I won't eat Earth now, but may I take a bite out of the moon as I go?
Tick: Sure. Go ahead. - In the '90s Spider-Man animated series, Doctor Strange villain Dormammu could devour entire dimensions.
- Hungorto, in Duck Dodgers is Galactus, right down to having a cosmic-powered Herald. He is defeated when the combined forces of Earth and Mars throw all their food at him.
- The Fairly OddParents!:
- Seemingly played straight but ultimately averted with The Darkness in the three-part special. It eats planets, but it's just defending itself because the denizens of the planets he'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 termi-errr, eliminators ate.
- In one episode, Timmy turns his parents into superheroes. When he inevitably experiences the downsides of having superhero parents, he finds that magic immunity is one of the powers they have, so instead of just having Cosmo and Wanda change them back, he has to become GALACTIMUS! EATER OF ALL PLANETS! and blackmail them into willingly giving up their powers
- A Garfield and Friends Musical Episode ended with Garfield becoming this - in a possible reference to this strip.
- This theme was revisited in the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "One of Our Planets Is Missing" where a gaseous antimatter entity the size of a small nebula which arrived from outside the galaxy and began digesting planets. In a twist on the theme, the entity proved to be sentient, though not particularly bright, and once the ship's crew managed to establish communication and explain that its next intended meal was inhabited by living things, the entity decided that eating inhabited worlds was murder and set out for uninhabited regions.
- The reboot of Max Steel has this in Makino who combines it with The Assimilator as the reason for his actions. One of the battle cries of his troops sums it up:
Absorb and expand!
- Cosma from OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes. Being a self proclaimed foodie as a size changing Lizard Folk woman means feasting on entire planets when the mood strikes her, which becomes an issue in one episode.
- Unicron from Transformers is the other Trope Maker,note starting with The Transformers: The Movie (1986), where his first appearance doubles as his first meal and the animated film's opening scene. He is a "eats the whole planet outright"-style Planet Eater. Apocalypse Wow! 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
life inthe universe to be a personal affront against him. 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). - SilverHawks had an episode actually called "The Planet Eater".
- Gourmand aliens in Ben 10 take the meaning behind their name literally, as Extreme Omnivores. In Omniverse their last-ditch resort in order to repel a hostile Alien Invasion is to eat their entire planet. And Ben (as his Gourmand form Upchuck) even decides to join in...
- One episode also featured a giant tick-like alien known as The Great One by its worships that travelled between planets to suck all of the life out of them and then cause them to explode.
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.
