Gluttonous Pig

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Pigs are more omnivorous than most domestic animals, and like most meat livestock have been bred to put on weight quickly. That's why in fiction pigs are often portrayed as gluttonous beasts whose favorite thing in life is eating—eating a lot, eating all the time, eating anything that moves and that doesn't. This may result in the pig character becoming obese, but not necessarily; quite often they're just a bit pudgy.

If a pig is anthropomorphic, expect them to eat a lot of junk food, in a poignant commentary on the low quality of mass-produced food, or on modern consumer society, or something like that. In a crossover with Messy Pig, such anthropomorphic swine usually have Jabba Table Manners, burping, snorting and farting all the time.

Sometimes, in a twist on this trope's original meaning, a pig character (usually also anthropomorphic) is portrayed as greedy, craving money and riches instead of swill.

Subtrope to Big Eater and, in some cases, Extreme Omnivore. Supertrope to Fed to Pigs, where the pigs' gluttonous nature is used as a means to dispose of bodies. For another common porcine Animal Stereotype, see Messy Pig. For a trope related to boars, see Full Boar Action.


Examples, oink oink


Anime and Manga

  • Chihiro's parents in Spirited Away turn into pigs after gorging themselves on the spirits' food.

Film

  • Legend. The pig-like goblin Pox wants to use the unicorn's magical horn to "turn everything into garbage, a great towering mountain of slop" for him to eat.

Literature

  • Journey to the West. Zhu Bajie is a half man/half pig who, among other things, is quite gluttonous.
  • In George Orwell's Animal Farm the first thing the pigs do when they seize power is keep the milk and apples for themselves. They are also prone to alcoholism and Squealer becomes enormously fat by the end of the book.

Video Games

  • Pey'j, Jade's pig uncle from Beyond Good and Evil, eats flies by snorting them through his nose.
  • The Rashberry species in Viva Pinata. In order to romance them, they need to eat items that have gone rotten. If they eat a hunk of cheesecake, they transform into warthogs.
  • The villains of Mother 3 are based around pigs. They burp and eat junk food a lot.
  • Hoggmeiser from Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. He's greedy to the point where the periods in his speech have been replaced with $ marks, he uses his own followers as shields, and at one point compares the main character to a fish bone stuck in his throat. He never shows up in more than one chapter in the game, despite forcing his way onto your team for the rest of the game.
  • Horkos of Shin Megami Tensei fame is a demon pig/dragon hybrid wearing a crown and cape and wielding a staff. Oh, and he loves to eat.
  • Hogs of War is about armies of pigs fighting a bloody war for a continent full of swill.
  • The pigs in Angry Birds, particularly in the spin-off holiday comics. The 2011 Christmas comic has the pig king thinking that the meaning of Christmas is for him to eat all day long. In the games, if they'd just give up on eating the eggs and run for it, they'd save themselves a world of hurt.
  • The piggies in Glitch require being fed periodically. They will have word balloons pop over their head with knife and fork to indicate they're hungry. And if they are not fed, they will not let you nibble them no matter how much you pet them. And while they can and do eat fruit dropped from trees, they will also eat food dropped by Glitches.

Web Comics

  • Squigley from Sinfest. One of his main flaws is eating a lot of junk food.

Western Animation

  • An early Porky Pig cartoon has him being punished in an Ironic Hell for stealing a pie by being force fed.
  • In the U.S. Acres shorts on Garfield and Friends, Orson defies this trope, but his brothers play it straight by stealing food whenever they can.
  • Hoggish Greedly from Captain Planet and the Planeteers is a very piggish human rather than an anthro pig, but otherwise fits the trope with both greed, gluttony and table manners.
  • A pig-woman in the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Popcorn Pandemonium" pulled the And a Diet Coke routine after ordering a large amount of snacks for herself at the movie theater.