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Emotion Eater / The DCU

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  • Black Lightning: Year One: The 100 are an ancient order of landowners who resorted to any means necessary to render themselves immortal. This left them with two side-effects: that they need to tie themselves to a plot of land to draw strength from it, and that they need to feed on emotions, preferably negative ones. This usually results in them becoming slumlords of one stripe or another.
  • Green Lantern: A variant in the Emotion Entities. As long as there is at least one being in the universe that can feel the emotions they embody, they will always exist, although they do not feed on the emotions they embody. They are in fact the avatars of the combined power of each emotion (rage, greed, fear, will, hope, compassion, love) felt by every being in the universe.
    • The Entity of Rage, the Butcher, does play this straight. It chooses hosts full of grief and rage (it is first seen merging with a man who was being taunted by his daughter's killer while the killer was being strapped in the electric chair) and empowers them to vent their fury on their targets while feeding on their anger. The Butcher then leaves after its hosts' rage is spent to find new hosts.
    • Blackest Night: The Black Lanterns feed on the emotions of sentient beings to power up their battery. They come back in the body of people with emotional connections to those that still live (heroes, villains, emotional spectrum welders, lovers, friends...) and incite emotions in many ways, usually but not always by giving them Breaking Speeches while fighting. They feed on Rage, Greed, Fear, Willpower, Hope, Compassion and Love, which means its just as dangerous to feel hopeful as it is to feel afraid. Their vision is full of black and shades of grey, and the only things with color are sentient beings full of emotions, which makes it possible to run from them if one contains his own emotions. When their targets are full of emotion, they rip out their hearts and feed on them, powering up their black power battery.
    • Green Lanterns: Singularity Jain is an unusual example of this. She's a motophagus, meaning that she feeds on misery. While she's capable of eating nearly anything, including raw energy, due to the fact that she's essentially a walking black hole, she states that it "tastes of ashes" and prefers to feed on the suffering of sentient beings. What sets her apart from most examples of this trope is that she feeds on this emotion by literally swallowing said beings whole, trapping them in the most traumatic moment of their lives in the singularity within her.
  • Justice League of America: A one-off alien villain both feeds off emotions and can channel the excess to others. Fear of death is a narcotic to his species, and he destroyed entire planets for the high, but he kept a little in reserve as an Emotion Bomb. (Scarecrow's failures notwithstanding, it really is possible to scare Batman into surrendering. Wonder Woman, not so much.)
  • Justice Society of America: Psycho Pirate uses his golden Medusa Mask to control and feed off the emotions of the people who see it. Addicted to his powers, they eventually backfire when he pisses off Black Adam and gets the mask rammed through his head.
  • New Gods: Depending on the Writer, the Gods are powered by and sustained by the emotions relating to what they represent. Darkseid, for instance, relies on despotism and the fear that accompanies it.
  • Teen Titans: Raven does feed on negative emotions, like sadness, but has a hard time not absorbing any heightened emotion, such as excitement or joy. All she does is leave people feeling neutral, though.
  • Starman: The villain Bliss is a demon who finds the despair of "special" people (carnival freaks) exquisite. However, when Jack confronts him, his meal is tainted with hope, weakening him to the point Jack and Mikaal can outright destroy him by combining energy blasts.
  • Supergirl:
    • Supergirl Vol. 5:
      • The Japanese assassins Gakidou and Sakki, the Hate Furnace not only have Intangibility, but can feed on negative emotions like lust and anger to boost their strengths to astronomical levels. Supergirl defeated them by simultaneously beating them up and overloading them.
      • Powerboy revealed he can channel others' emotions to fuel his abilities, but the excess emotions caused him to go psycho on Supergirl.
        Powerboy: (to a restrained Supergirl) I feel. Feel everyone else's hate, love, pain, fear... and it becomes this..."(forms ball of black energy) Of course, you saw what happens when it goes the other way. But I hope you understand... I did it for you.
    • Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade: Supergirl's communicator turns out to be an emotion-collecting machine which absorbs emotions and feelings with the purpose of amplifying Mr. Mxyzptlk's power.
  • Superman: In A Mind-Switch in Time, Euphor has the power to feed on negative emotions. Unfortunately, absorbing too much negativity and unhappiness drives him gradually mad.
  • Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Pluto and his subjects feed on the living by separating them out into specters of their colored emotional spectrum and then draining said specters.
  • Wonder Woman Vol. 2: The Erinyes drain their victims of their blood and use it to trigger emotionally charged memories and feed on their victim's blood and despair.
  • Wonder Woman: Warbringer: Phobos and Deimos feed on fear and find it sweet, but rather than drain a target of their fear they generate more. Eris on the other hand feeds the same way on the kind of distrust and petty grudges that lead to arguments and fights.

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