Somehow, whenever I hang in fandom, I always end up getting a reputation as an enjoyer of romantic cannibalism. This is extremely funny to me, because this is by far my least favorite kind of cannibalism. So hey, let's talk some more about fictional cannibalism!
Cannibalism for survival
It is stupidly easy to say "there are some things I would never do under any circumstances." It is also, very often, a complete lie. "I would never break the law" "I would never kill someone" "I would never do drugs" oh but if you were hungry enough? Desperate enough? Suffering enough? Everyone says they have no threshold. But they do. They do.
So, the question: would you eat a man to survive if you were hungry enough?
Don't answer yet. I want you to think. I want you to imagine, really imagine, what that implies. There is a body in front of you and it belonged to a person. They had a family and children and parents and hopes and dreams. They had plans for this summer. Their friends have been trying to call them for months.
Can you eat them? Can you reduce your kin to food, to meat, to something to consume?
Cannibalism for survival is a very effective way to showcase how desparate a character is, because it is in many cultures considered a huge taboo and the absolute worst thing you can do to another human. It's an act you will have to carry with you until the day you die.
Cannibalism as deshumanisation
See above: to eat someone is to reduce them to food. To reduce your kin to something less than human means that in turn you make yourself into something less than human. That's why so many myths across the world feature people turning into monsters or animals as a result of eating human meat (king Lycaon comes to mind.) Cannibalism is an excellent way to show that a character is no longer human- either because they don't care anymore about what they're eating, or because they physically cannot understand what they're eating anymore from being reduced to something akin to a beast. And that fucks.
Cannibalism as romance
And NOW we get to romantic cannibalism, which is actually a subset of a larger ensemble I like, being "completely unhinged depictions of love." Love is, generally speaking, understood as something universally good. (I mean, just try explaining to an alloromantic person that you're not interested in dating, you're gonna get a really heated reply on how EVERYONE wants love it's NATURAL to want love love is GOOD and UNIVERSAL ect ect.) So having something normally considered "good" being paired with something normally considered "bad" makes for some really interesting dynamics. Cannibalism as love. Murder as love. Taxidermy as love. Torture as love. The idea that something commonly associated with universal goodness could be twisted into something so monstrous (or that something commonly associated with evil could be masquerading as goodness) makes a lot of people profoundly uncomfortable. Which is the point.
There are, of course, plenty of other sorts of fictional cannibalisms, but they don't appeal to me in the slightest, so I will leave you guys to your Hannibal shenanigans and move on.
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