Follow TV Tropes

Following

Abstract Eater

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/abstracteater.jpg
Mmm, that's good red.

Many characters have Bizarre Taste in Food, but they still eat things recognizable as food. Many characters are Extreme Omnivore, but at least they eat physical objects. In fiction, almost anything can be food, an Abstract Eater eats things which aren't so much things but concepts.

Individuals with these tastes will feed on anything from lost possibilities to sanity, love, or even coolness. Though they may also enjoy the material as a side dish, all of these foodies get some kind of benefit from the abstract dish of their choice.

The process of eating something abstract could be portrayed in any number of ways, as it's up to the creators of the work to describe what it looks like to see something intangible be devoured.

This can often be Horror Hunger, as it often leads to the Eater of the Abstract feeding of the actions or traits of folks like us, leading to humans in behaviour farms and/or a deficiency of the tasty concept in the world or its previous host. A common aspect of Eldritch Abominations, naturally.

There are several subtropes based on the type of abstract food:

In turn, this is a subtrope of Fantastic Diet Requirement.

When prayer is eaten, this overlaps with Gods Need Prayer Badly. If the food is something intangible like "magic" or "life force" it overlaps with Phlebotinum Muncher. See also Dream Stealer, who may or may not eat the dreams.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 
  • Devils in Chainsaw Man are Anthropomorphic Personifications of specific fears. If the Chainsaw Devil eats one, they'll be rendered defunct by erasing the concept they embody from history.
  • Demons in Delicious in Dungeon are an omnipotent species that eat "desires". Not only is this consistent with the manga's core philosophy of "to live is to eat", but it effectively creates an entire species of devils willing to make deals. However, once a demon eats someone's desire for something, they no longer desire that thing... ever.
  • Dragon Slayers in Fairy Tail each have their own signature element, which they use to attack. They can also replenish their energy by eating that same element. Elements, of course, don't usually count as abstract concepts... except the specific case of darkness, which is really only absence of light. However, they can feed on magic with that elemental type (Sting, the White Dragon Slayer, can eat "White Magic" and anything that's colored white).
  • In Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro, the plot is kicked off when the demon Neuro comes to Earth to feed off the complexity generated by riddles, puzzles, and mysteries. To do so, he starts solving murders and feeding off the culprits. One of the later story arcs has Sicks offer him a mansion full of fabricated crimes for his consumption, and Neuro is appalled by the artificial riddles.
  • Youkai in Ushio and Tora have many different diets, usually people, organs or souls, but the recent Youkai Ikkaku (a fish-like monster who dwells in motorcycles and possesses people) gets its nourishment from speed itself, forcing the user to go faster and faster with no regards for safety.

    Film — Animated 
  • Symbolically, this is why Mr. Snake in The Bad Guys (2022) loves Gueni pigs as his Trademark Favorite Food as he explains to Mr. Wolf.
    Wolf: I dunno. They're a little, uh, a little cute for my taste.
    Snake: That's what makes them so delicious! You're not just eating food, you're eating pure goodness! It's not about the pig, it's about what it symbolizes on a deeper level!

    Literature 
  • The eponymous darkangel in The Darkangel Trilogy must feed on the souls of human maidens in order to complete his transformation into a vampyre — leaving them mindless, emotionless "wraiths" who slowly wither away physically as well.
  • In Effigy Nights by Yoon Ha Lee, magic is used to bring legendary heroes to life to fight a Galactic Conqueror. Unfortunately the magic devours all the stories in the civilization to create more and more warriors, cutting them out of books and eventually people.
  • From the Eighth Doctor Adventures, the Fendahl Predator devours concepts — as a group of beings who believed You Cannot Kill An Idea discover to their cost.
  • Ghost Girl (2021): Mr. Scratch is a negative entity attachment, or NEA, that feeds on peoples' wishes, hopes and dreams, devouring their very souls until they're nothing but worn-out husks.
  • And let's not forget about the Babelfish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That little creature feeds on the thought processes around its host and excretes a neuronal matrix into the host's brain. Incidentally, this enables the host to instantly understand any form of communication whatsoever. It is said that the poor Babelfish has wreaked more havoc on sentient life in the universe than all armies that ever marched combined, due to obliterating all boundaries to understanding one another.
  • The Name of the Game (Elrod): Demons feed off of certain emotions and sins associated with them from the Realside. Succubi and Incubi feed off of Lust and physical pleasure (making them more agreeable compared to others), while demons would harass and possess humans to feed off of the anger and sadness this causes.
  • In The Nekropolis Archives, Waldemar is an ancient vampire who subsists on memories rather than blood. He runs the Great Library of the Nekropolis, selling information in exchange for eating one day's worth of memory from the person seeking it.
  • Pact: a demon encountered partway through the story consumes "existence"... or at least, that's what the characters assume. Anything devoured by the demon appears to be Ret-Gone, everybody forgets that the person or thing ever existed to begin with, and even all records of that thing's existence vanish as well. Upon being compelled to speak its name, it even "eats" the name it just spoke, preventing the characters from learning it beyond the first syllable, "Ur-". It later turns out that things devoured by the demon do not technically cease existing; what it does is erase metaphysical connections between things. When all those connections are severed, the thing falls into the "Abyss", a purgatory or limbo dimension where everything that doesn't quite fit in reality goes.
  • The Saga Of Billy: Vetherr the Betrayer earned his nickname when he devoured the fertility of one of his lovers and the reason of the other (or his mothers', depending on the interpretation of the myth).
  • Star Trek: Diane Duane's novels have the Iruhe, who eat the minds of sentient beings, leaving only breathing but mindless bodies. They appear briefly in The Romulan Way, where they devour the minds of two ships' worth of Romulans (who have just left Vulcan and were in the process of looking for a new homeworld, and were lured in by the Iruhe's illusions of a water-rich, habitable planet); the rest of the fleet barely escape. The Iruhe are also the villains of her TNG book Intellivore, where they have gained the ability to move their planet about to prey on planets rather than just starships.
  • Thursday Next: Grammasites are parasites that live in books and feed on parts of speech. Examples include adjectivores, which eat adverbs; nounfish, which eat nouns; and verbisoids, which eat verbs. In one scene, Thursday observes an adjectivore feeding on the side of a ship within a book and realizes that she can no longer describe what that area looks like outside of general nouns, since its descriptive adjectives have all been stripped away.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer season five Big Bad Glory managed her hell-god composition by eating human sanity, leaving her victims gibbering wrecks.
  • Channel Zero has the creatures inhabiting the No-End House. Duplicates of the loved ones of those who enter the House, they feed by conjuring up manifestations of the guests' memories, and then eat them, which in the process erases those memories. This process eventually renders the victim an Empty Shell, which isn't good news for the duplicates either, as they can only feed on the memories of the person they were created from; without them, they devolve into zombie-like creatures.
  • Doctor Who has a few examples;
    • The Weeping Angels send people back in time so they can feed on the lives they never lived. To resurrect an entire cave system of dying angels, one crashes a starship into it that happens to harbour one of Series Five's cracks in time; the Angels have a feast on all the lives the crack had stolen from existence, until the crack starts swallowing them.
    • In "Amy's Choice", the psychic pollen that places the Doctor, Amy and Rory in a shared dream state fed off the darkness in its victim's minds, creating the image of the Dream Lord as a manifestation of the Doctor's own self-hatred.
      Amy: But why didn't it feed on us, too?
      The Doctor: The darkness in you pair, it would have starved to death in an instant. I choose my friends with great care. Otherwise I'm stuck here with my own company and you know how that works now.
    • The minotaur from "The God Complex" eats faith and lives in a maze designed to show its inhabitants fears that will cause them to call onto their faiths, "cooking" them.
    • The planet-sized creature known as the Old God from "The Rings of Akhaten" fed on stories. The people living in his system used items of sentimental value as currency so they could be given as offerings to it and taught their Queen of Years all the stories of their culture so that if it ever awoke he could feast on her rather than their entire system. They even believe that the Old God made the first life in the universe, possibly to create tasty stories for it to feast on.
    • The Trickster (from spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures) and his minions, the Trickster's Brigade, feed on the chaos created when an established timeline is altered in some way.
    • The Teller in "Time Heist" eats guilt, and will turn your brain to soup to get to the buried stuff.
    • "Flatline" features bizarre creatures which eat dimensions; shrinking items or turning them into images for sustenance.
    • The goblins in "The Church On Ruby Road" eat both coincidence and babies, seeking out improbable coincidences surrounding an infant and arranging a series of unlikely accidents as a preamble to the physical consumption.
  • In The Good Place, Time is a cocaine-esque drug, envy is a hot sauce, and there is a deodorant that smells like ones opinions on the Transformers movies
  • Sleepy Hollow introduced a "sin eater" in Season 1. It was the ruse by which Ichabod Crane's evil son began insinuating his way into Crane's life to take revenge, but he was actually capable of sin eating.
  • The Wraith in Stargate Atlantis consume human life forces via organs in the palms of their hands.

    Myths & Folklore 
  • The baku in Japanese folklore eat dreams.
  • The Sin-eater in some folk religious traditions consumes a ritual meal that absorbs the sins of the recently departed into his own soul.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine: The Primordial arc gives you the ability to digest and metabolize anything you can figure out how to put in your mouth.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Several monsters eat the psionic energy of psionic creatures, such as Brain Moles, Cerebral Parasites and Intellect Devourers.
    • The undead known as a Shadow drains the strength of other creatures.
    • Beholders have to consume food to survive, but to power their prodigious magical abilities, they have to absorb magic — their brains have "dweomerlobes" that allow them to store and amplify magical energy from things a Beholder looks at. This isn't quite as drastic as a Mana Drain effect, and a Beholder would have to study even a basic spell scroll for an extended period to render it inert, but it does mean that a Beholder is compelled to seek out magical effects and hoard magic items to study. Which helps explain why a giant floating head would collect a bunch of enchanted boots and gloves that would only be of use to adventurers who might happen to defeat it and expect level-appropriate loot.
    • Forgotten Realms: Dendar the Night Serpent is an Eldritch Abomination who feeds on the nightmares of mortals and deities alike. Among the duties of the Chultan god Ubtao is guarding the Realms against Dendar's emergence from beneath the Peaks of Flame. If Dendar defeats Ubtao, legend has it her next meal will be the universe itself.
    • Planescape has the scile, motes of light from the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance, which eat the colors of visiting creatures, quickly rendering them completely invisible. Which might sound good, save for the fact that the affected creature can't see themself or what they're doing, leading to a penalty on any dice rolls involving physical action. There's also a scile variant known as "the Ravagers of Color," who eat specific colors from victims, which somehow causes mental changes as well — those who lose their yellow also lose their hope and fall into depression, those who lose the color green also lose their secrets, i.e. their ability to lie or withhold information from others, and so on.
  • Magic: The Gathering has Chronatog, a relative of the artifact-devouring atog that eats time.
  • Planebreaker: Tereculon, the Fate Eater, can eat (break) prophecies, curses and other dooms affecting specific individuals.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: The Word-Eater of Clan Malkavian is well-known for this sort of thing: having transcended his need for blood, he's instead taken to devouring words and the ideas associated with them; more frighteningly, the words and ideas he consumes cease to exist and cease to ever have existed — hence the reason why nobody can remember the Word-Eater's true name or any of his victims. Even the Clanbooks aren't safe from his appetites, the original Malkavian clanbook depicting him in the act of eating the words right off the page, and looking decidedly interested in the reader...
  • Warhammer 40,000: Enslavers, a type of Warp entities, feed on the mental energies of psykers.

    Video Games 
  • Destiny:
    • The Hive (and the symbiotic worms that give them power) feed on death and grow stronger with every kill they make, in accordance with their guiding philosophy, the sword logic: if you kill something, you prove that you‘re more powerful than that thing. However, the more they kill, the bigger their worm’s appetite gets too, forcing them to ever-greater feats of violence — if they fail to sate their worm, the worm eats them instead. The gods of the Hive, the oldest and mightiest of the species, were forced to build an elaborate metaphysical tithe system drawing from every single other Hive to gather all the death their worms demanded, as even with their vast power they were unable to do enough killing on their own to satisfy them.
    • The Ahamkara are shapeshifting dragons capable of granting wishes. They do this by eating the difference between "reality as it is" and "reality as you want it to be", bringing the two together, though they somehow manage to be Jackass Genies at the same time. It's not clear if they eat (or are even capable of eating) anything else.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
    • The Daedric Prince Vaermina has been eating the dreams of the inhabitants of the town of Dawnstar, leaving nightmares in it's place. The quest Walking Nightmare involves helping a Mara priest named Erandur to seal Vaermina's shrine and stop her from eating more dreams. If you side with Vaermina, betraying and killing Erandur, she will give you a staff that also charges its power from "eating" dreams.
    • According to legend, Alduin once devoured the lifespan of the entire Nord population down to age six.
  • God of War Ragnarök: It is quite telling that despite the fact that Garm is unkillable and can tear up dimensional holes in the fabric of reality with his claws, threatening to destroy the Nine Realms and quite literally leave them in tatters, the thing that makes him The Dreaded is his appetite: According to Mimir, there used to be a word for that feeling you get when you're so hungry that you stop feeling hungry. Garm ate it. There also used to be five seasons, with the fifth one taking place between Winter and Spring. Garm ate it. Including its nature and its name. Now, only some of the oldest, wisest beings alive are aware of the fact that the word and the season ever even existed, but they cannot really talk about them in depth due to the linguistic issues that arose when the word and season were devoured.
  • The tutorial of Heroes of the Storm has fun with this idea.
    Diablo: How tastes your fear, mortal!
    Raynor: I wouldn't know, I'm not sure you can actually taste fear.
  • The Phantom mobs in Minecraft are undead flying manta rays that are "attracted to insomnia". They appear in the skies at night when a player hasn't slept for 3 days and swoop down to attack that player.
  • Pokémon:
    • Drowzee is a Pokémon that is famous for eating dreams, like the mythological baku it is based on. It's hardly the only Pokémon to do so, as other Psychic and Ghost-types are also capable of learning the move "Dream Eater", which does damage to a target and heals the user, but only if the target is asleep.
    • Other Pokémon are said to consume emotions.
    • Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon establishes Necrozma as a being that eats light, whether that of an entire world (like the Ultra Megalopolis) or of another being like Solgaleo or Lunala (represented by its Fusion Dance-cross-Grand Theft Me with those Pokémon). This is because Necrozma is the remains of the "Blinding One", a deity that was composed of light and willingly shared it with other worlds, and Necrozma is attempting to consume enough light to regain its original form. Even when in this form, dubbed "Ultra Necrozma", Necrozma still absorbs the surrounding area's light as part of its Z-Move, Light That Burns the Sky.
  • In Prey (2017), January speculates that the Typhon have evolved to feed on consciousness and that they can quite literally "eat minds". Subsequent events in the game more-or-less confirm this to be the case while positing it as a rather horrifying answer to the Fermi Paradox: Any civilisation that gains self-awareness gets preyed upon by the Typhon.
  • Keine Kamishirasawa from Touhou Project is a were-hakutaku, whose ability is to eat history in human form, and create history in hakutaku form. It is unexplained how she eats history, but the effect seems to conceal the thing whose history is being eaten, without actually removing its existence.
  • Peeesh in UK Sight Reading Tournament eats spent energy of people, instead of food.

    Webcomics 
  • Grrl Power: Vehemence is "an innate user of vehemic energy... sometimes called vistric energy." The layman's version:he gains power from violence. He makes his debut by sticking around an all out super brawl between a super hero team and a team-up of villains. Only when it's over does he enter the fray himself, now strong enough to go toe-to-toe with one of the most powerful super beings in the world and only making himself stronger for it.
    • Dabbler is a succubus and the team's resident Jill of all Trades. She feeds on tantric (sexual) energy.
  • In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, the resident Succubi and Incubi passively feed on the emotions of surrounding creatures. They are able to eat souls, though probably most of them don't, since that would get them in trouble rather quickly. Also, the various clans each have one emotion they especially like, which include Pride, Pain, Anger, Lust and Joy. Because of their abilities, they are vulnerable to mental manipulation. For instance, you can remember being tickled "at" them, and they will react as if it were actually happening. They also don't need to sleep or eat when receiving enough emotional energy. However, they do enjoy coffee, ice cream and other 'treats' just like every other living creature, and they can sleep if they want to, although they do not dream. Emotional consumption apparently replaces the effects of REM sleep.
  • Emily in Questionable Content is a barista in a coffee shop and Genius Ditz who somehow manages to respond to a customer's request for a medium Lorentz factor.
  • The Feyn from City of Somnus can only last a couple of days without a steady supply of human creativity. This is why they ste... rescue children.

    Web Original 
  • Homestar Runner has the King of Town, who's capable of eating holidays according to the cartoon "Happy Hallow-Day".
    Strong Sad: Cough it up, King of Town! We know you ate Halloween Night!
    King of Town: You amateurs, you don't know what you're talking about. I'm on a diet! It's strictly Arbor Day and Earth Day for me this year.
  • Morby from Less is Morgue is an Eldritch Abomination that feeds on nostalgia until he becomes powerful enough to start absorbing physical matter.
    Morby: There is no next episode, Evelyn Hooper. Morby is the first and final episode, and every episode in between. I am the vulture who feasts on time. I am the shadow of the turned page. Your innocence is my ambrosia, your lust for simplicity my bread.
  • In the creepy internet story "The Name Eater", eating someone's name turns them into a barely-existent ghost, and everything they've accomplished in their past or future is Ret-Gone. If he should only mostly eat the name, then the surviving husk retains enough sentience to become The Name Eater's servant.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time has a few examples; a character who eats drawings from within the paper they reside, and Marceline, a vampire who eats not blood, but the colour red, leaving whatever she drinks it from a pale white (she can eat blood instead, but prefers not to). The Heirophant turns back on his offer of an alliance when Marceline says he'll have to switch his diet from blood to red, because old school vampires don't care about the lives of other beings and not because he can't drink red, indicating other vampires can drain red coloration as opposed to blood.
  • DuckTales (2017): In "House of the Lucky Gander!", Gladstone Gander ends up in the thrall of Liu Hai, a spirit who feeds on good luck. When Liu Hai is tricked into trying to feed off Donald Duck, Hai is left weak and emaciated and is forced to flee the ducks' dimension.
  • In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Swarm of the Century", the parasprites at first eat all the food in Ponyville. When Twilight Sparkle casts a spell on them to make them stop eating all the food, they instead start to consume everything conventionally inedible. This trope appears when they eat the words out of books, sucking them in like spaghetti.
  • Discussed in The Owl House — While trying to figure out what mortals eat, the Collector suggests rocks, fire, and gravity.
  • In the Italian animated series Tommy And Oscar, Oscar is a pink alien who eats music — not, it should be noted, music as a concept or sound waves, or anything like that, but actual musical notes, which are physical if ephemeral objects in the series. His typical breakfast consists of turning on the radio, grabbing the notes as they float past and popping them in his mouth.

Top

Gourmet Records

How well does it match the trope?

4.57 (7 votes)

Example of:

Main / AbstractEater

Media sources:

Report