I'm a Humanitarian: Difference between revisions

In [[Speculative Fiction]], cannibalism is generally extended to include all sapient or humanoid creatures, even if they aren't technically human. Any species that includes humans (or other humanoids) [[To Serve Man|in its diet]] is usually portrayed as [[Exclusively Evil|villainous]]. Likewise, humans treating other sapient species as food are rarely treated sympathetically (unless [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?]] is in effect).

 

 

{{examples}}

* ''[[Mazinger Z]]'': The Chip Kamoy [[Alternate Continuity|in one of the manga versions]] (the version penned by [[Gosaku Ota]], to be exact). They were a species of giant, fish-like, maneater humanoids from another dimension that raised herds of humans like cattle. However [[Green Aesop|they had depleted their homeworld's natural resources]] and were running out of food, so they crossed over to our dimension to find more preys. It can be interesting mentioning one of them declared "humans taste better when they are skinned".

* In obscure manga ''Because I'm The Goddess'', one of the protagonist Aoi's sisters loves this trope. She ate several of her own personal maids - and her pet parrot - because she ''loved'' them so much. She's also in love with Aoi, and [[Love Makes You Evil|guess what that means...]]

** It also has the normal air of cannibalism as both Evangelions and Angels are made form the same source- Adam.

*** Except that {{spoiler|Unit-01 isn't: She is specifically mentioned as being the ''only'' Evangelion created from Lilith instead of Adam}}.

** In a early side-story, Buggy the Clown had to deal with a [[Wacky Wayside Tribe]] that was going to eat his crew.

** Here's a non-human [[Subverted Trope|subversion]] from ''[[One Piece]]''. Hatchan, an octopus fishman who was a henchman in the early Arlong saga, resurfaced as a purveyor of takoyaki at Sabaody Archipelago. Keep in mind, takoyaki is made with ''octopus''. He is aware of this, and says he makes his takoyaki with other tentacled creatures like squid.

* Possibly the case with the Russian Sushi restaurant in ''[[Durarara!!]]'', although it's likely/hopefully just an urban legend. Simon is [[Suspiciously Specific Denial|oddly insistent]] that the sushi is made of fish, not people, but in a later episode threatens some thugs that if they don't stop beating someone, they will provide ingredients for the sushi.

* Chapter 406 of ''[[Bleach]]'' reveals that {{spoiler|Aizen}} intends to do this to {{spoiler|Ichigo.}}

* In ''[[Uzumaki]]'', all those lovely mushrooms were really {{spoiler|the placenta from the babies born}}. To add to the horror, {{spoiler|the placentas grew back every night, ready for lunch the next day}}.

** [[It Gets Worse|It doesn't stop there.]] The mothers {{spoiler|drink the blood of other patients and personnel every night}}, first using piercing tools like braces and drills, then {{spoiler|[[Body Horror|mutated mosquito-like proboscises]]}}. And near the end, lots of people seem to think that {{spoiler|those affected by [[Baleful Polymorph|the snail curse]]}} look mighty tasty...

 

* In ''[[Tales from the Crypt]]'', a Shrimp Grill owner and his wife resort to murder to protect their failing business from foreclosure. The body? They cook it as steaks and quickly become the city's most popular Steak House.

* In a famous ''Venom'' miniseries from [[Marvel Comics]], the symbiote develops a sort of vitamin deficiency, and starts compelling Eddie Brock to help it [[Brain Food|eat human brains]]. When Eddie is too repulsed to continue, the symbiote leaves him temporarily.

* A witch and her evil husband in a story by [[Wilhelm Busch]]. (Though she turns the boy into a pig before; does that count?)

* An issue of the revamped ''CREEPY'' comics had a story about a homosexual couple, one of which was a cannibal, and the other who wanted to be his victim.

 

* "[[Little Red Riding Hood]]" used to have more gruesome elements to it. In certain once-common tellings, the Big Bad Wolf didn't just eat Red Riding Hood's grandmother—he fed her the leftovers.

** The Newgrounds flash animation Red Riding Hood features this. And a [[Downer Ending|bad ending]], too.

** There's one variation that's arguably even worse, where Sleeping Beauty, realizing she's got two [[Child by Rape|children by rape]], '''eats them'''.

* In "The Juniper Tree", a stepmother kills her stepson by chopping off his head with a chest lid. She then hides the body by cutting it up and using it to make a stew. And her husband spends the meal saying how tasty the meat is!

* According to many Russian fairy tales, the [[Baba Yaga]] is a cannibal.

 

* Madara does this in the [[In Name Only]] ''[[Naruto]]'' fanfic, ''[[Naruto Veangance Revelaitons]]''. [[Bad Boss|He eats one of his workers in his rice fields]] for bad work, and threatens to do the same to Ronan and Sakura before they escape. He later does this to {{spoiler|Mandy and three of the [[catgirl]]s}}.

* While the characters aren't human, anyone who knows about ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic]]'' knows about ''[[Cupcakes]]''.

* "The Savage" from [[The Teraverse]], who is a blend of Vandal Savage from the [[DC Universe]] and Clarence Aloysius Gaffney from [[w:The Gnarly Man|"The Gnarly Man"]] by [[L. Sprague de Camp]], is an immortal Neanderthal hunter and cannibal.

 

* Hannibal Lecter of ''[[Silence of the Lambs]]'' fame.

** ''Especially'' Hannibal Lecter of ''Hannibal'' and ''[[Hannibal Rising]]'' fame. {{spoiler|oh where, oh where, has my little sister gone....}}

** [[Wham! Line|"IT'S PEOPLE...."]]

* In ''[[Dog Soldiers]]'' a group of British soldiers on a training exercise find an abandoned cabin, inside one of the soldiers finds a stew cooking on the stove. After eating a bowl he comments that he doesn't know what it is but it ''"Tastes like pork."'' Later they discover that the missing residents are anthropophagous werewolves. Whether the werewolves themselves are cannibals is debatable (half-cannibal?).

** And in the third, ''[[Doomsday]]'', the guy who played one of the flesh-eating monsters in ''[[The Descent (film)|The Descent]]'' now gets to go the full hog - he prances about onstage singing a song by the ''Fine Young Cannibals'', then tosses little plastic plates to his followers, cooks a guy, and starts handing out pieces of charred corpse.

*** In addition to the Crawlers and the cannibalistic savage, that actor was also one of the previously mentioned werewolves. Neil Marshall obviously loves both this trope ''and'' this actor.

* The French black comedy ''[[Delicatessen]]'' deals with cannibalism in a post-apocalyptic 1950's France.

* [[Tim Burton]]'s adaptation of the classic [[Stephen Sondheim]] musical ''[[Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (film)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street]]'' - which was itself an adaptation of the old magazine serial ''The String of Pearls'', which was written by either J.M. Rymer or Thomas Prest - with Johnny Depp as the eponymous barber. Todd and Mrs. Lovett aren't cannibals themselves, as far as we know, but Mrs. Lovett does sell meat pies made from Sweeney's victims to her customers.

** This is in direct contrast to the book, where an accusation of Orc cannibalism is seen as a horrible slur. (Though this may not apply to Uruk-hai eating Morgul orcs.)

* ''Dying Breed'' involves a bunch of young people stumbling upon a remote community in Tasmania where humans are on the menu, to emulate the behaviour of the convict who founded the place. The kicker is that the Tasmanian state government is trying to use the film to attract tourists.

* Averted in ''[[Snow White: A Tale of Terror]]'', though not for lack of trying. Claudia has (what she thinks) is Lilli's heart cut up to eat in a stew.

 

* Interestingly, [[The Bible]] [[Loophole Abuse|nowhere condemns cannibalism as a sin]], though it does [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2028:53-57&version=NIV describe it as a punishment] Israelites would suffer if they made God angry enough at them. As [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%206:24-31&version=NIV later events demonstrated], this was no idle threat.

** It didn't need to condemn it specifically. Humans are omnivores, and thus not Kosher.

* Steven Erikson's ''[[Malazan Book of the Fallen]]'' has the Pannion Domin, a ghastly empire of cannibals. Their peasant horde, the Tenescowri, are part of the army and double as a food supply for the officers. In fact, {{spoiler|humans are the ''only'' source of food the Pannions eat, so the Domin is completely dead in its core lands and only alive on the border, where there are other peoples to conquer and eat}}.

* The Greek historian [[The Histories|Herodotus]] writes about cannibalism a number of times. Perhaps most notably is the story a disgraced Persian officer being fed his son at a feast as punishment. Herodotus didn't think too well of Persian people, apparently.

* The children's book ''Baa!'' is the Soylent Green story <small>[[Recycled in Space|WITH SHEEP!]]</small>. No, seriously. Finding out that your lamb chop is made of sheep isn't quite so much of a big reveal, though.

* The "popular restaurant with a secret" version predates TV: attend for instance the tale of ''The String of Pearls'', about a barber who murdered his customers and sold the bodies to the pie shop next door, a classic pennydreadful of Victorian days. And yes, his name was [[Sweeney Todd]].

** [[Through Darkest America]] is an [[After the End]] novel with some similar themes to ''The Barn''. In much of North America, animals other than humans are extinct. To allow meat production to a society mostly at about an 1800 technology level, they have "stock": They LOOK like humans, and are believed to be able to interbreed with humans (although there's a strong religious taboo against it), but they cannot speak so they must not have souls, so eating them isn't wrong. Then the hero finds out what happened to his little sister when she got to move to the government's claimed reconstructed area...

* [[Robert Heinlein]] used cannibalism in ''[[Farnham's Freehold]]'' as a way of showing just how screwed up the [[dystopia]]n future his characters found themselves in [[After the End]] was.

*** Also subverted because Valentine Michael Smith is a Humanitarian in ''both'' senses; the ethical sense and the eating sense.

* In ''The Bad Place'' by [[Dean Koontz]] the bad guy drinks the blood of his victims. His sisters dug up their dead mother and ate some of it and shared the rest with their mob of cats - so their mother 'would always be with them'.

* The only official rule of ''[[The Hunger Games]]'' is "wait a minute before entering the arena". [[Even Evil Has Standards|An implied one is "don't eat your adversaries"]], as shown by [http://thehungergames.wikia.com/wiki/Titus the story of] [[Meaningful Name|Titus]].

* {{spoiler|The big secret of the Boneys}} in the ''[[Xeelee Sequence]]'' sidestory "Raft".

 

* General psychopath Young Young McGurn in ''[[Rab C. Nesbitt]]'', who apparently eats anyone who crosses him, as well as his own Rottweiler.

* ''[[Double the Fist]]'' included a scene where the Local Council is invading the Fist Team's new HQ (the Council in question seems to be made up of zombies). Mephisto finds some Community Welfare Officers ripping through their washing, and attacks. We come back a few scenes later to find him chewing on their faces.

* The ''[[Torchwood]]'' episode "Countrycide" is ''[[The Hills Have Eyes]]'' <small>[[Setting Update|WITH FAT WELSHMEN!]]</small>.

** Made even creepier near the end when the team, and the viewer, realize that, unlike normal ''Torchwood'' episodes, there is {{spoiler|nothing science-fictiony going on at all. They're just perfectly normal humans. ...for a given value of "perfectly normal", in any case.}}

{{spoiler|'''Floyd Feylinn Ferell:''' So is Tracy Lambert.}} }}

** The earlier episode "Blood Hungry" had another cannibal villain, one who took and ate body parts with special significance in different religions.

* A literal [[Cannibal Clan]] abduct Virgil and Gabrielle in an episode of ''[[Xena: Warrior Princess]]''.

* In an episode of ''[[CSI]]'', Sara Sidle and Greg Sanders are trying to remove a corpse that has rotted to the point of liquification from the trunk of a car.'

* In [[Cruel Twist Ending|the last minute]] of the ''[[House (TV series)|House]]'' episode {{spoiler|"Fall From Grace"}}, it turns out that the patient that the team has successfully treated from his illness has suddenly fled, and his hospital room is swamped with law enforcement officers. The guy was actually a cannibalistic serial killer, and they've unwittingly helped him remain at large.

* ''[[Masters of Horror]]'', "Cigarette Burns": When the [[Artifact of Death]] film-within-a-film ''La Fin Absolue du Monde'' is presented in a private theater at the end, Annie, Kirby's dead girlfriend, emerges out of the theater screen. Her father comforts her, but she's "hungry", and takes a bite out of his neck. {{spoiler|It's a hallucination.}}

 

* Reoccurring theme of rapper [[Brotha Lynch Hung]]

{{quote|''Guess what daddy's bringing home for supper?

''Timothy, Timothy, God why don't I know? }}

** When Dave Barry held a survey for what his readers considered the worst songs ever made, this was one of the top finishers, despite being nowhere near as big a hit as the others. Barry noted that it made up for a lack of success with its extremely memorable subject matter.

{{quote|''Going around saying "don't eat people", that's the way to make people hate you!

''We always have eaten people, always will eat people -- You Can't Change Human Nature. }}

''Wait a minute, it looks like Stu}}

 

* [[Older Than Feudalism]]: [[Classical Mythology]] has several examples:

** Tantalus tricked the goddess Demeter (who at the time was dejected over the kidnapping of her daughter, Persephone) into eating the shoulder of his dead, roasted son. While dear little Pelops was brought back to life, his shoulder replaced by an ivory one by Demeter, he then went on to spawn the cursed House of Atreides. Tantalus was punished in such a way as to give us the word "tantalizing."

* Kumiho, the [[Exclusively Evil]] Korean counterpart of the [[Kitsune]], were infamous for this, and sometimes they'd trick the humans they encountered into [[I Ate What?|eating]] [[Squick|one of their own]] too. There's at least one story where a Kumiho claims she'll [[Pinocchio Syndrome|become human herself]] if she eats enough human livers, though this doesn't seem to be the motivation for most of them.

 

* Played for laughs in ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]''{{'}}s typically darkly humorous way. A common source of food rations for the Imperial Guard and many Imperial citizens on some drearier worlds is "Soylens Viridians", which is [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]]. Also present in the universe is the infamous Corpse Starch, and the even more heavily processed Block (also used as a clandestine delivery method for a variety of suppressive narcotics). It's unclear exactly how close to cannibalism these rations actually are, though; among the fandom, theories range from "Soylens Viridians is people," to "Soylens Viridians is recycled human protein," to "Soylens Viridians is a soy product cultivated on recycled human protein."

** Of course, this is parodied in ''[[Ciaphas Cain]]'' by relating Soylens Viridians to promethium (gasoline).

* The [[Robot War|Denver Zonemind]] in ''[[GURPS Reign of Steel]]'' sometimes renders its dead human slaves into a "high protein soup" to feed the others. (In the slaves' defense, though, the robots don't tell them where it comes from!)

* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' has too many "really omnivore" sentient creatures to list, but even there are some outstanding examples.

** Co-narrator of some ''[[Planescape]]'' accessories Xanxost the slaad intersperses his planar chant with offhanded mentions of eating sentient beings: mephits (he digresses to mention this favourite food at any opportunity), humans, fiends... and [[Crosses the Line Twice|turns it into comedy gold]].

{{quote|'''Xanxaost:''' They are hateful. Vicious. Bad-tasting.}}

* Humans and metahumans in ''[[Shadowrun]]'' infected with the Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus turn into Vampires, Ghouls, and other things (depending on what they started out as), all of which require either blood, raw meat or internal organs of other humans/metahumans to survive.

** The Germany sourcebook contains a shadowtalk-post about a cannibal-cuisine restaurant in the lawless enclave of Berlin, although another shadowtalker's post immediately afterwards claims it's a load of hooey.

* The aptly (if unimaginatively) named Cannibal from the ''Dark [[Champions]]'' sourcebook ''Murderer's Row''.

 

* In ''[[Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (theatre)|Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street]]'', the murder victims are baked in meat pies, which become very popular among the unsuspecting populace.

* Even [[Shakespeare]] [[Zeroth Law of Trope Examples|uses this one]]. In ''[[Titus Andronicus (theatre)|Titus Andronicus]]'', Titus' daughter Lavinia is raped by Chiron and Demetrius, with their mother's help. To get revenge, Titus kills the two brothers, bakes them into a pie, and feeds them to their unwitting mother. This is based on the Thyestes and Philomela myths mentioned above.

** Though, amusingly, some of the characters who aren't bothered by it are among the protagonists, and only one recurring character doesn't get used to it fairly quickly.

* ''[[First Encounter Assault Recon]]'s'' [[The Dragon|Dragon]], Paxton Fettel, eats the flesh of his victims. It is indicated [[All There in the Manual]] that he gains memories and information directly from their corpses.

* In the background lore of ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'' series, the [[Our Elves Are Better|Wood Elves]] are cannibals, eating both their own dead and the bodies of those they've killed in battle. They try to avoid war unless they've had a suitable fasting period beforehand.

* In ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', the Forsaken (Undead) race can eat the corpses of humanoids to restore their health.

* ''[[Kinnikuman: Muscle Fight]]'': As a reference to the ''[[Kinnikuman]]'' anime, Anime Ramenman has a level-3 Super that he can only do to Brockenman. He breaks Brockenman in half, turns Brockenman into noodles, and proceeds to eat him.

* ''[[Tharsis]]'' is the story of a doomed Mars mission, which has an explosion in their pantry during the tutorial. A few rounds in you get the option to eat bits of your deceased colleagues to survive (but lose points and gain stress). Eat enough human meals, and you unlock a cannibal character!

 

* ''[[Karate Bears]]'' often eat people: [http://www.karatebears.com/2011/09/dealing-with-rejection.html "Dealing With Rejection"], [http://www.karatebears.com/2011/09/pack-lunch.html "Pack a Lunch"]

* ''[[String Theory (webcomic)|String Theory]]'' has Prof. Phineas Armastus, Schtein's fellow inmate and a cannibalistic serial killer.

* Butch of ''[[Chopping Block]]'' regularly eats the people he kills, and a ''lot'' of disgusting jokes have been made about various aspects of this (for instance, his fear that it makes him gay if he enjoys the taste of testicles.)

 

* [[Played for Laughs]] at the end of ''[[The Strangerhood]]'', with {{spoiler|Tovar}}. With his place back home filled by {{spoiler|his [[Evil Twin]]}}, that makes "quantum crap", so it's said that they'll liquefy his DNA and drink it. It's okay because "genetic cannibalism is totally in, in the future."

* Comes up a couple of times in ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]''.

{{quote|'''Fry:''' Wow, they have every kind of meat in here except human.

'''Neptunian butcher:''' What, you want human?}}

* In an episode of ''Mutant League'', Razor Kid is threatened by the other starving players after a plane crash leaves them stranded in the mountains. With the help of his agent, he negotiates it down to his tail, which will grow back.

* An episode of ''[[Eek! The Cat]]'' had Anabelle made the queen of some bizarre-looking savages on an island out in the middle of nowhere. Problem was that, "In order for the queen to become a goddess, she must be cooked and then eaten by the king."

'''Lenny:''' And there's bananas in that tree right over there.

'''Homer:''' Eh, they look a little green... }}

* The ''[[Sealab 2021]]'' episode "Frozen Dinner" finds the crew answering a distress call from two men trapped on an ice station, one of whom has decided to resort to cannibalism and proves remarkably dedicated to following that course of action no matter what happens. He even asks the crew for vegetables... so he can make a proper stew out of his companion.

* Reversal: In one episode, ''[[Count Duckula]]'' is sent into future, where he is captured by intelligent vegetables. He tries to defend himself by (truthfully) saying: "I am a vegetarian, a vegetable lover"; the vegetables aren't too amused.

* While in the ''literal'' sense this trope doesn't apply in ''[[Beast Wars]]'' (though Tarantulas probably would have eaten any hominid he managed to catch), the technical sense gets more than its look in. Tarantulas relishes eating living creatures, and is quite willing to add Cybertronians to the menu- a fact made [[Nightmare Fuel|terrifyingly clear]] in the third episode. In fact, in the first season, it was this literal appetite for carnage and bloody gluttony that was his defining trait, to the extent that his official season 1 profile talks mainly about his appetite and defines him as a "twisted gourmand", as opposed to the [[Mad Scientist]] and Machievallian plotter of seasons 2 and 3. Rampage, we are reminded regularly, (mainly by the [[Psycho for Hire]] himself), tortured, butchered and ''ate'' the entire population of no less then two Maximal colonies before ending up in the ''[[Beast Wars]]''. In one of the first season episodes, Dinobot eats a psuedo-clone of himself (a biologically grown raptor with a cybernetic brain).

* Pictured above is the cannibalistic [[Eats Babies|baby killer]] from the season 2 premeire of "Metalocalypse"

** Another villain tried to feed kids to a [[The Bully|bullysaurus]] as well.

* Lockdown from ''[[Transformers Animated]]'' is a robotic version of this. While he doesn;t eat other robots he does strip them for parts to upgrade himself.

* An episode of ''[[The Brak Show]]'' had the family go to meet their new neighbors for dinner. Brak meets the overgrown baby of the family, who eventually reveals that he and his parents are planning to eat Brak and his parents (and now he feels guilty about it, because Brak is so fun). Nobody gets eaten, but apparently the family had trouble fitting in (and looking at them, it's clear why), and..well...

* The owner and staff of the motel (an [[Inn of No Return]]) in the ''[[Taz-Mania]]'' episode "A Midsummer Night's Scream", who plan to eat Bushwacker Bob and Taz.

* An episode of ''[[Courage the Cowardly Dog]]'' featured an [[Pig Man|antropomorphic pig couple]] who were set up as this. It's {{spoiler|eventually revealed}} that they only make food {{spoiler|scupltures}} and courage just misunderstood {{spoiler|the situation}}.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

** You see, [[In Soviet Russia, Trope Mocks You|In your country, you eat fish. . .]]

* Enriqueta Marti, [[Wicked Witch|Witch]], kidnapper, child killer, and cannibal.

** Notice that the victim was indeed eaten, then killed. Apparently the two men ate the chopped off body part together. The story was immortalised in the [[Rammstein]] song "Mein Teil", a portrayal which strays into [[A Glass of Chianti]] territory.

*** There was an episode of ''[[The IT Crowd]]'' that used this plot. In "Moss and the German", Moss answers an ad for what he thinks is a private cooking class, not realizing that the eccentric German man who placed the ad was trying to find someone whom he could eat.

* [[Serial Killer]] Ted Bundy once took a bite out of one of his many female victims [[For the Evulz|just because he was curious about what it would be like]].

* One of the early indicators that the rebels in the Syrian Civil War weren't fine, upstanding members of [[La Résistance]] was when news reports came out that they were engaging in [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23190533 cannibalism]. That article was then [https://web.archive.org/web/20141110232635/http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/09/07/322571/bbc-justifies-arming-cannibal-militants/ blasted] by other media outlets for trying to demonize the Syrian military by painting a romanticized and sympathetic picture of what were, by most accounts, murderous terrorists.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Evil Is Visceral]]

[[Category:Horror Tropes]]

[[Category:Older Than Dirt]]