If like me you created a seven foot tall, blue skinned Alien with no mouth, it's kinda important to know how and what she eats, never mind the Android who runs as part of a mercenary team. Then there are the usual Goblins, Mummies, Vamps, Werewolves and four armed Nabrack.
Characters are not shown eating that often, but when they do it is handy to know how and what it is that they eat.
How you figure this out, can be as simple as remembering that Mork from the TV show Mork and Mindy used to drink through his fingers, or like the kid in the movie called Ms Perigrine's home of peculiar children had one child that had a mouth on the back of her head.
Androids for many years have been shown to either not need any food at all, or to ingest either liquid or mush that contained all the nutrients that they needed to operate.
Vampires traditionally drink blood, unless they imbibe energy or life force then it's not teeth they use but fingers.
Werewolves like their food bloody, and barely cooked.
Mummies I'm not sure of, but if I was writing them, they would eat Scorpions, Scarabs and flies.
The Goblins in my second novel eat meat, the rarer the better, but have evolved enough to also eat vegetables and drink a brew much the same as coffee.
The NaBrack are a mixed race of live beings and mechanical ones who look exactly like their masters. They are cannibals (well the living ones), the mechanical ones prefer to eat the energy that their pods provide much like the Borg.
Once again, you may never use all the information you write down, but at least you will know enough to be able to write about it as if it's fact. When you can do that, you have added one more thing to your character that makes them well rounded and developed.
TWW
I love it when a writer fleshes out the characters with detail like this.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger, much of my reading was SF and I can see where deciding how a character got nourishment would be important to the author, even if nourishment consuming never happened in the written work.(And then there are works such as Klara and the Sun where how Klara received nourishment was a main feature of that character). I suspect any character I created would love chocolate.
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