Big Eater/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character that eats enough to feed a whole football team.

  • Straight: For one meal, Bob eats plates of food that is put in front of him.
  • Exaggerated: Bob eats the amount of food the average person gets in a month.... and that's just his first meal.
  • Justified:
    • Bob needs to eat a lot of food to fulfill his Required Secondary Powers.
    • Alternatively, Bob is obese.
    • Bob is lonely, and eats a lot to fill the void in his life.
    • Bob is an athlete who needs all the calories he can eat.
    • Bob has a case of the munchies.
    • Bob is a magic-user or has Psychic Powers, which require him to take in extra calories.
    • Bob is an adolescent in the middle of a growth spurt.
  • Inverted: Bob is an anorexic.
  • Subverted: Bob is shown eating pounds and pounds of food. When asked why he ate so much, it was because he was starving for many days.
  • Double Subverted: ... Until Bob is shown eating that amount afterwards.
  • Parodied: A bad guy tries to use ironic torture, feeding Bob a literal mountain of food. The scene changes and returns five minutes later to show Bob, happily wiping crumbs off, next to the space where the mountain used to be.
  • Deconstructed:
    • Bob's eating causes a localized food shortage, and therefore famine. His eating also has serious health repercussions later down the road.
    • Bob becomes obese due to his heavy eating, and has all the health problems that come with it.
    • One of Bob's friend's meals is poisoned. Bob doesn't stop at his own meal, and eats his friend's poisoned meal, inadvertently saving him.
    • Bob's overeating turns out to be a (nearly) Fatal Flaw.
    • After consuming an inhumanly large amount of food, Bob vomits or his stomach bursts open.
    • Bob is a world-famous eating contest champion, and practices every day by consuming large amounts of food to expand his stomach, and drinking loads of water and exercising a lot to burn all the extra calories away.
  • Reconstructed:
    • Bob does his best to resist eating too much.
    • Alternatively, Bob finds a food known for being extremely filling, and eats mostly this.
    • Bob has an incredibly fast metabolism, and can eat quite a bit without gaining weight.
  • Zig Zagged: Bob eats heavily one meal, then eats very little the next. Then he eats all the food in a restaurant. Then he doesn't eat at all.
  • Averted: Bob eats the amount of an average man his age.
  • Enforced: The show has a Product Placement deal with a fast food chain.
  • Lampshaded: "Wow Bob, haven't you noticed that you're eating a bit too much?"
  • Invoked: "Hmm, if we disguise the vegetables as pizza and junk food, Bob will actually eat something healthy!"
  • Exploited: Bob's enemy poisons the supply of Bob's Trademark Favorite Food, confident in the knowledge that he will be the one to eat it.
  • Defied:
    • Bob is given the choice to either eat a plate of food, or a whole table of food. He choses the plate.
    • "Of course I won't eat that much food! What do I look like?!"
  • Discussed: "Have you noticed that Bob eats more than a normal person would per day?"
  • Conversed: ???
  • Played For Drama: Bob is bulimic.

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