Money Fetish



""I wanna have sex with you on a bed of money!""

- Raye, Sailor Moon Abridged

Some people just really love money. Not wealth for the luxuries or the power. They love money itself, to the point they have a Money Fetish.

Okay, not to the point they actually get turned on by it (usually). They just like feeling it, bathing in it, diving around in it like a porpoise, and burrowing through it like a gopher. It could be coins, jewelry, paper money or all three. Either way, these characters treat money itself as a luxury to enjoy. They might break into a Money Song.

Often occurs as part of an If I Were a Rich Man fantasy sequence.

Compare Conspicuous Consumption.

Anime and Manga

 * Merrill of Rune Soldier Louie
 * Nabiki Tendo in Ranma½ just loves money, so damn much. She's never actually shown in the usual sexual situations, but an anime filler episode does have her envision a great tidal wave of golden coins, which is used to force a telepath out of her head. So much does she adore money that she actually caused the "wedding disaster" at the end of the manga because she believed that the other members of Ranma's Unwanted Harem would A: bring money as a present for the "happy couple", B: she could take that money for herself, and C: they wouldn't cause such destruction in their outrage that it would cost more then was brought in to fix the place. She was wrong on all accounts.
 * Don't forget that she never brings her own money, since she always manages to swindle someone else into paying the bill, and keeps a jar full of 1-Yen coins. Or that she made the telepathic child back off by apparently embarrassing him with sexual imagery right after the sea of money.
 * Nami (pictured above) from One Piece, largely due to a tragic Freudian Excuse. She never had much money for what she wanted while growing up, and after Arlong's pirates invaded and killed her foster mother, she was forced to work to collect money to free her village. After Arlong's defeat and her village's liberation, she is just as determined to collect money, particularly since she can now use any money she collects for herself.
 * Also pretty much all of the evil pirates as well, as well as unable to understand how anything besides money could be considered treasure.
 * Early on in Fushigi Yuugi, this is one of Tamahome's defining character traits. Although it's traced to his Backstory regarding a poor family, it's a running gag that even the smallest coin is like catnip to him.
 * And even after, he's still obsessed.
 * The swim team of Medaka Box are "money-zombies". Their ultimate fantasy is a swimming pool filled with cash.
 * Baron Danglars from Gankutsuou. His last scene in the series was of him wallowing naked in a pile of goldbricks, suckling on one of them.
 * Hoteye of Fairy Tail had this. After he has a magic-induced Heel Face Turn, it turns out that he was originally a Love Freak who was trying to raise money to find his missing brother, but lost sight of his goal.
 * One of the sisters in Puni Puni Poemi had this.
 * Kakuzu from Naruto as well.
 * Seto from Needless had this obsession as well.
 * Chouji Suitengu from Speed Grapher is obsessed with acquiring money and actually rolls his cigarettes with it.
 * In Heat Guy J, Monica is talking about her recent commodity investments with Daisuke (never mind that she's only 10!), and her eyes get all sparkly, and she has Love Bubbles in the background. She also later uses J to help her gamble. Her money fetish is understandable, given that she lives in a trailer, caring for her alcoholic mother.

Comic Books

 * Scrooge McDuck swimming in his money bin.
 * He claims Glittering Goldie was his Distaff Counterpart in regards to this.
 * On several occasions he's actually seen in a bathtub full of money (as is his Evil Counterpart, Flintheart Glomgold).
 * Scrooge can also tell immediately if even a single coin is missing while swimming through it.
 * Richie Rich's Aunt Noovo is constantly seen as this, though she mostly does this for show as she is a very charitable person.
 * Heavily implied with Larfleeze of the Orange Lantern Corps. His home is a ruined palace filled with rotting treasures. Every time he kills and his ring consumes another being and adds them to his corps, a new power ring is created and it goes to Larfleeze. In one panel in his first appearance, Larfleeze is seen emerging from a pile of orange power rings like Scrooge McDuck.

Film
""C'est l'or, il est l'or, l'or de se réveiller... Monseignor, il est huitor...""
 * Trina in the silent film Greed literally rolls around in her lottery winnings.
 * In the film Danger Diabolik, after Diabolik has a successful robbery, he has fun with his girl on a bed covered in money.
 * When this film was featured on the final episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Mike and the bots joked that the first take of the scene involved gold bars, which injured both actors.
 * Crow also criticized the size of the haul. His reasoning: "If he had stolen just a little less, I could see her ass right now!"
 * Rogue Trader take this trope and turns it up to eleven by having the bed is covered in bearer bonds. These instruments have now been phased out, but at the time the movie was set, bearer bonds were paper certificates that were typically worth something like one hundred thousands dollars. And Nick Leeson's bed was covered with them.
 * "This is GOLD, Mr. Bond. all my life I've been in love with its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness..." Seconded by Shirley Bassey.
 * Parodied in Austin Powers in Goldmember: "I love gold. The look of it, the smell of it, the taste of it, the texture. I love gold so much that I even lost my genitalia in an unfortunate smelting accident."
 * Salluste in La Folie des Grandeurs: his manservant wakes him up every morning by dropping handfuls of gold coins in a basin--and he can tell just by the sound whether one is missing.


 * The film version of The Spirit has Sand Saref, who wants all of the money in the world for her self (and has wanted it since her origin story!), even to the point of going after the Golden Fleece.
 * Oceans Eleven: Saul sees the casino vault full of tens of millions in cash: "That's the sexiest thing I've ever seen."
 * Disneyfied version: in Blank Check just after buying a house, Preston dumps his backpack of money onto his bed, and rolls around in it while fully clothed.
 * Slumdog Millionaire is about two brothers who are driven by different obsessions: Jamal with love, and Salim with money. In the end,
 * Diana Murphy, played by Demi Moore, in Indecent Proposal.
 * Perico, Bumbling Sidekick to El Santo in Santo En El Tesoro De Dracula, doesn't seem to be wealthy or greedy, but is otherwise pretty inexplicable.

Folk Lore

 * A racial trait of Dragons, at least in the Western tradition. Even good-aligned dragons enjoy the tactile sensation of lounging on a pile of coinage.

Literature

 * This is the title character's major flaw in the classic book Silas Marner.
 * As mentioned, Discworld's Dwarfs don't love gold. They just say that to get it into bed. Make of that what you will.
 * Dwarfs in Warhammer aren't quite as bad, but even Gotrek will forestall his epic quest to get himself killed to go on a treasure hunt. Especially if he can do both by going after treasure someplace dangerous.
 * Ella's father, Sir Peter, in Ella Enchanted.
 * Smaug from The Hobbit. He rolled around in his treasure hoard for so long that he had precious metals and jewels embedded in his skin, making him Nigh Invulnerable.
 * In John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich, the title character and his wife have sex on a pile of Krugerrands. Rabbit even jokingly sticks one into her vagina like a slot machine. Yes, it's gross and played for laughs.
 * Lotus Cloud from Bridge of Birds, although she's a lot more picky than the standard money fetishist. Giving her pearls and jade will cause her to tremble with greed and profess her undying love to you, but giving her anything else like gold or diamonds will only bore her..

Live Action TV
"Tonight on 'The Money Programme', we're going to look at money. Lots of it. On film, and in the studio. Some of it in nice piles, others in lovely clanky bits of loose change, some of it neatly counted into fat little hundreds, delicate fivers stuffed into bulging wallets, nice crisp clean cheques, pert pieces of copper coinage thrust deep into trouser pockets, romantic foreign money rolling against the thigh with rough familiarity, beautiful wayward curlicued banknotes, filigree copperplating cheek by jowl with tumbling hexagonal milled edges, rubbing gently against the terse leather of beautifully balanced bank books!"
 * In Monty Python's Flying Circus, the host of "The Money Programme" gets a bit carried away:

"Angel: Hide some in the office and watch her. It's uncanny."
 * see it at; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sor9GzivGbk
 * Lampshaded in the Malcolm in The Middle episode "Malcolm Babysits" where Malcolm, having money for the first time in his life, rubs it on his face and then asks to camera "Is this as creepy as I think it is?"
 * Parker of Leverage, to the point of unnerving her crewmates. When confronted with a shipping crate full of bills, she can't even speak.
 * Of course she didn't speak! She was too busy hugging the pallet full of 100-dollar bills.
 * Oh like you wouldn't
 * She still has a money fetish despite the fact that the team's business has made her filthy rich.
 * Cordelia actually does get turned on once when a billionaire starts talking finance; also, she can apparently smell it.

"Sam: How do you sleep at night?
 * Anya seems to have a thing for cash herself.
 * Anya, whilst playing The Game of Life, asked if she could sell her children for more money.
 * Supernatural gives us this:

Bela: On silk sheets, rolling naked in money."


 * On Las Vegas, after Danny sells his car, one suggestion of what he should do with the money was to cash the check out in singles and roll nude in the pile of cash. Danny claims that he has already tried that with the check itself, much to the consternation of the person holding it.
 * In The Bill episode Big Eagle Day, two known criminals are discovered with a pile of money and two women. During the investigation one of the women admits that they did indeed to the bed of banknotes thing. Ultimately it is revealed that
 * In The L Word, Helena and her lover Catherine win a ton of money playing poker and have sex while gloating over it.
 * The Star Trek franchise of course has the Ferengi, whose society is based so much around the acquisition of wealth, that they actually have a holy scripture about it, the "Rules of Acquisition".

New Media

 * This guy

Tabletop Games

 * Dungeons and Dragons borrows from Western mythologies. Dragons of all alignments absolutely love to sleep on pile of gold coins and other valuables (carapace and all, it's not painful for them). Even the goodest and nicest of dragons aren't immune to avarice. Rumours has it that they also frolick in hoards like hogs do in mud, when no one is watching.

Theater
"O thou son of Sol,
 * Harpagon from Molière's L Avare.
 * Ben Jonson's Volpone opens with the title character apostrophizing a pile of money:

But brighter than thy father, let me kiss,

With adoration, thee, and every relick

Of sacred treasure, in this blessed room..."

Video Games

 * Wario, natch.
 * Hoggmeiser in Disgaea.
 * World of Warcraft has the goblins, which have been described as "the Ferengi of Azeroth." It's commonly said that they will sell their own mother if the price is right.

Webcomics

 * Haley Starshine obsessively shines every gold piece she owns, and once swam through a dragon's treasure pile - and losing her share of said treasure pile inflicted such mental trauma that she spoke in cryptograms for a time. She has jokingly(?) explained that she's a half-dragon. She has also considered a more physical version of this trope.
 * Thief from Eight Bit Theater.
 * Kharisma, from Something Positive.
 * In Exiern Tiffany once got an orgasm just from seeing a vault full of gold.

Web Original

 * One piece of Gaia Online art has the moneygrubbing Nicolae posing naked in a wooden tub full of money. It can be found on his character profile and as a buyable background for your Aquarium (Cash only).
 * The executive played by Chris Hardwick in this video can be heard saying "I fucked a pile of money" near the beginning of the clip.
 * In the French webfiction Les Aventures de Morgoth, the titular mage with an Unfortunate Name has an Elf girlfriend who likes filling her bed with gold before sleep. It's actually foreshadowing that.

Western Animation
"Jay Sherman: [contemptuous] How do you sleep at night?
 * Mr. Krabs from Spongebob SquarePants. Heck, in the prehistoric episode, his cry was a constant "Money, money, money,..."
 * Understatement of the year. The crab has regular money baths and showers, he cries in pain if a dollar is put in a blender, he sticks his claw in a sink and loses his arm to retrieve a dime, and he has, at least once, had a romantic dinner with a pile of bills. And he dreams about catching a giant Moby Dick-esque dollar bill.
 * Not to mention this little bit of Getting Crap Past the Radar.
 * In an episode of King of the Hill, Khan made a lot of money--all in quarters--via ownership of a DIY carwash, and he and Minh dumped it on their bed and rolled around in it.
 * Also shows up in one of Homer's fantasies in an episode of The Simpsons (the one where Homer loses the family's money investing in motion capture technology).
 * In another episode, upon hearing of a scheme to become "moderately wealthy", Homer imagines himself rolling around on a small pile of money, shouting, "I'm sort of rich! I can rent anything I want!"
 * And, from "A Star is Burns",:

Rainer Wolfcastle: On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies."

"Lickboot: We've got to have... moneyyyyy!"
 * Futurama, "Into The Wild Green Yonder", Professor Farnsworth dances naked in a swirling vat of cash.
 * Money was the motivation for everything Cousin Mel did in Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.
 * Aunt Figg and Lickboot in Tom and Jerry: The Movie. They even have a whole musical number about how much they love money.

""So fucking expensive that it makes me horny.""
 * Daffy Duck himself definitely fits this trope.
 * Cartman has this reaction after winning a bet with Kyle, having the cash converted into ever-smaller denominations so he can enjoy its increased mass (loudly, in front of Kyle). This includes wallowing in a kiddie-pool full of quarters.
 * Skwisgaar from Metalocalypse seems to literally have this trait:


 * Sylvester the Cat rolls around in a pile of money after inheriting a fortune in the Looney Tunes short Heir Conditioning.
 * Ruel, and his entire race of Enutrof from Wakfu. Though his race's name backwards is Fortune.
 * The Looney Tunes Show: After becoming rich in "Peel of Fortune", Daffy is shown rolling around in a pile of cash on his bed.

Real Life

 * Real Life example (well, if you believe what some not-so-friendly biographer says): the original Caligula, in addition to being a generally greedy bastard, eventually started doing things like walking on piles of coins and even wallowing in them just for that special feeling of gold.
 * So this is where Mel Brooks got the idea for the 'Treasure Bath!' bit from ''History of the World Part I'.
 * A milder example would be scripophilia, which is not, in fact, a sexual perversion: it's the technical term for collecting old paper money and financial certificates. Nineteenth century railroad bonds and such were often very elaborate pieces of engraving and quite aesthetically pleasing to people who like that sort of thing.