tell me what you eat, and i will tell you what you are

[ivy_chan]

I'm idly thinking about food in fiction and how it's used to flesh out characters. (No pun intended.) How authors deliberately pick food choices to reflect a character personality or to give insights to a culture in general. I think this is partially because Hunger Games, (which I have completed and love,) is just full of food observations. It

Comments

Zuko

[ivy_chan]

Oh man, this kid. He's a fun one. You have to think about his favorite food a bit because he spends his time man-angsting in a nightie and it takes away from the realization that he even eats.

If you're familiar with Chinese mooncakes, I can see him liking a Fire Nation solar-version of them, suncakes, as a treat for solar festivals. But he doesn't have that much of a sweet tooth in my head, so that seems like it was a childhood favorite food.

Zuko likes fish in my head. Also, he's very carnivorous due to being from the Fire Nation, the place of meat-eating-meat. But then I'd add some transcontinental elements in there, since the boy has traveled a lot. Overall, he'd like spicy dishes, the kind of food that makes regular people long for death or a convenient fire hydrant. So, something along the lines of Thai food.

He doesn't seem like the foodie his uncle is, and I'd expect his tastes to be a lot plainer, as well as him not quite differentiating between foods of a certain quality. There's good noodles, good chicken-pig, good soup. They're all good. Why bother having a preference there? Still, he's not a picky eater out of necessity, although I'd imagine he was once one when he was younger, and sometimes it shows through when he raids people and steals food from the captain. (I'm sorry, LIBERATES food.)

Wow, this commentary was scattered. o.o *needs sleep*