- In Irish folklore, there’s a thing called féar gortach (“hungry grass”) which is…well, grass. It’s planted by fairies and cursed by a fairy of famine. If you step on it, you’re cursed with insatiable hunger for the rest of your life.
- Medieval bestiaries sometimes noted a creature called a hydros, a snake whose bite caused the victim to swell up. Ox poop is the only cure.
- In Japanese folklore, tanuki (a kind of wild dog) would become magical shapeshifters if they lived for centuries, as with some other animals. Tanuki tsuki refers to being possessed by a tanuki, which causes intense hunger and overeating. The victim gets fat and eventually dies from malnutrition, while the tanuki gets all the nutrition. Other yokai can possess people to a similar effect, like the osaki.
- The Umi Nyobo is a yokai that, in one story, displays an extreme appetite, eating a shitton of fish (and a human baby) in one sitting before contemplating eating a man. They’re basically fish people.
- Many religions practiced animal and even human sacrifice, and in some cases (i.e. the Aztecs), this was framed as providing food for the gods. More sacrifices would provide more food, in theory. There’s even a scene in the Bible where the cult of the Semitic god Baal insists that he eats all the food they offer him, although it’s later revealed that the priests were eating it all.
- There’s a shitton of monsters in folklore that eat people and/or animals, or have other noteworthy diets. You could rethink one of these myths to incorporate wg. We remember Oedipus mostly for…y’know…but his run-in with the Sphinx is also pretty famous. She was a monster who demanded travelers solve a riddle to enter Thebes. If they answered wrong, she ate them. (You could reframe this as demanding food.) Oedipus was the first person to get the right answer, and she killed herself in frustration, although one can imagine her being too fat to fly away by that point were there enough travelers to exploit.
- Lots of animals in polar biomes build up fat reserves for warmth. You could just set something in a cold environment and say the native populace evolved to cope with obesity for temperature regulation.
- Bees make honey from their puke, but honeypot ants take it to the next level: an entire caste of ants fills their abdomen with an energy-rich syrup which other ants can use as food.
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