#i dunno maybe i just need to go through the valenwood quests and look for more to get confirmation on these things

[bam-monsterhospital]

fantasy & cannibalism

the decision to make wood elves in the elderscrolls (for the most part) cannibals who forgo consuming vegetation is an interesting one, but it begs the question:

how are the bosmer (wood elves) surviving?

the worst fact about cannibalism that everyone except biologists forget is that you will starve to death if you consume nothing but other people.

yes. STARVE.

why? because there's not enough nutritional value in human flesh. We're at the top of the food chain and the nutrients we need to fuel the engine of our bodies and keep it operating have to 1) pass through other creature's metabolisms and what they took from it in the chain of eating, and 2) if what little was left over has been already processed and used by the human body, there's not going to be much to gain from it. Forgive my extremely short and simplistic way of saying the higher up on the food chain a creature is, the less bang for your buck you'll get out of it in general: aka why mass meat production doesn't focus on farming apex predators, but instead creatures that consume low on the food chain, like grazing herbivores.

That's real life. You cannot live off of the flesh of other people, you will die of hunger(if the prions and diseases and other stuff don't get you first). Now, apply that to fantasy.

Moving on to elder scrolls

Bosmer are weird... they practice ritual cannibalism and the whole thing seems more spiritual (hence 'ritual') to tie them back to the essence of the plants that shelter them, rather than an essential part of their diet... maybe. It's a blurry mess. The 'green pact', the practice that forbids them from harming plant-matter means their diets are carnivorous. So...

Does this mean bosmer are obligate carnivores, ie: is their biology adapted so that they rely only on meat to give them sustenance (and thus can't derive it from plantlife or non-animals)?

if it doesn't mean their biology is 100% carnivorous and they are instead omnivores like humans, where are they getting their fibre, vitamin c, other stuff needed from plant-eating? Do they import it from outside valenwood where the green pact doesn't apply? That's extremely shaky ground to keep an entire civilization alive...

if the bosmer are obligate carnivores, and the practice of cannibalism came from pragmatism to not waste a resource they depend on to survive (meat), which seems to be what the lore implies, how are bosmer getting nutritional value from eating other people (aka, animals at the top of the food chain)? Not to mention if reliance on this meat is a common thing (again which the lore implies), how do their bodies deal with prion transmission? Do their bodies resist disease- OHMYGOD. THEY DO RESIST DISEASE, it's in morrowind, oblivion, and eso as one of their species stats.

'the green pact' isn't practiced by all bosmer but what does that mean when it comes to diet other than 'haha not all of us eat our enemies'. Are these bosmer also carnivorous?

i mean the boring answer is probably 'tee hee, they're omnivores, just like humans, duh', which opens up all the issues™ with the decision to make them so meat and cannibal oriented.

I don't know. there's so much to do here and everything's so vague and wishy washy.

Mostly I'm just frustrated with creators not knowing the one single most interesting and horrifying fact about cannibalism: it doesn't help anything.