Basic Trope: A Robot or Cyborg who eats.
- Straight: Alice the robot eats just like the humans.
- Exaggerated: Alice needs to eat even more than the humans.
- Downplayed:
- Alice can eat, but she doesn't need to.
- Alice can only eat certain foods.
- Justified:
- Alice is a cyborg and still has a human digestive system.
- Alice eats fruit and vegetables, which get converted to bio-fuel inside her body to make her systems work.
- The food Alice consumes leads to chemical reactions that produce electrical energy to make her systems work.
- Inverted:
- Alice is a machine who makes food from her energy.
- Alice gets her energy from whatever her output is.
- Alice is a cyborg who can plug in a power cord to have one of her subsystems synthesize blood sugars and organic nutrients.
- Subverted:
- Alice tries to eat, but finds she cannot.
- Alice #5 is an Audio-Animatronic placed at a dinner scene, it only looks like she's eating.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob rewires her so that she can eat.
- However, Charlie, another robot, can eat.
- Parodied: The robots eat, but the humans don't.
- Zig-Zagged: Some robots can eat, some can't, and some can only eat certain foods.
- Averted:
- There are no robots or cyborgs.
- Robots and cyborgs can't eat.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: "How are you eating that?! You're a robot!"
- Invoked: Bob designs Alice to be able to eat.
- Exploited: Alice can pass as human.
- Defied: Bob designs Alice not to be able to eat.
- Discussed: "Could a robot eat?"
- Conversed:
- "How are those cartoon robots eating?!"
- "Isn't it convenient that I can share your fuel?" "It'd be more convenient if you didn't eat all my popcorn shrimp!"
- Implied: Alice is seen being served food, then later it's gone.
- Deconstructed: Food doesn't make a very good source of energy compared to fuels and lacks the logistical eases of electrical power.
- Reconstructed: However so long as Alice doesn't get too much water within her digestive system she can extract energy more efficiently than a biological system as she may run hotter due to not having to worry about proteins denaturing.
- Played for Laughs: Alice needs to eat to sustain herself, but has the dinnertime manners of a Bratty Half-Pint with a bad case of Kids Hate Vegetables.
- Played for Drama: Alice relies on food as a power source, and stops eating.
- Played for Horror: Alice decides that, since people are made of meat, they are therefore edible and starts hunting humans.
Back to Eating Machine.
