For vore fans: what's the appeal?

[Olo]

@miss-lillipants As threatened promised, on the occasion of Vore Day here’s my navel-gazing post on the joys of mouthplay and vore.

[Leucan]

Many aforementioned aspects play into my enjoyment of vore as well – intimacy and domination, primarily. What’s more imposing and degrading and downright terrifying than getting eaten? As for being the one doing the eating, how can you be any more possessive? I love it through and through.

[subasubaski]

It’s a form of very assertive or committed intimacy. As someone who doesn’t enjoy gentle content at all, there’s really no other way for a particularly “cruel” scenario to end without the tiny being just a bloodstain or a hopeless prisoner. Vore (especially soft vore with a description of the prey’s “bad end”) for me is an effective way of providing narrative closure to shrinking scenarios without making the whole thing seem pointless–you can always say that the prey’s death amounted to something, even if you never apply that sort of logic outside of size content where a strict dominance hierarchy is essential to the appeal.

It’s a dominance/submission thing for me, as noted above, but it also has to do with the realism of the world. The impossible nature of the size fantasy requires that we posit alternate forms of relations between people who might otherwise be equals in the eyes of society. This doesn’t mean that everyone should always be a dildo. It means that there have to be other reasons for prey characters to exist, beyond just sexual gratification, for me to enjoy it. It’s not really about realism, more about my ability to be immersed in the world of the story on terms that I’m willing to accept.

In shrinking scenarios with, say, a shrink ray, this is easy; someone acquires power over someone else by shrinking them. What happens next depends entirely on the personality of that character (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, for example) and the world around them. The tiny’s experience doesn’t need to be justified with a place in an already-existing ecosystem or world order.

In a world already inhabited by tiny people, though, it just seems inevitable that they will be on the food chain somewhere. Even if it’s just part of the superstructure or the background of the action of the story, the idea of a world where tiny people are never in danger of being eaten just makes my brain turn off. Although it is one of the most interesting parts of the fantasy for me, I don’t personally identify as either predator or prey, and I don’t insert myself into my stories at all, and usually not even into my fantasies. I’m more a fan of F/f vore, of MF/f (but only if I’m the M) than of anything involving tiny men.

[Olo]

@subasubaski Very thoughtful and heartfelt! I think size fantasy is richest when it explores relationships, and that really only works when we know something about the world in which they develop.

[Giant Keith]

Cannibalism is more like a werewolf or vampire shrinking you to be a quick or tiny savored meal, a spider liquifies the insect’s insides before draining it dry which is another way nature has predator and prey, it’s for survival but a human tribe on a hunt of a mammoth is survival and a spiritual ritual of power and thanks for the animal’s sacrifice. Consuming someone or a piece of them in old ancient days was thought of consuming their power soul or essence, a powerful process of the control of death and life energies. As a fetish vore is that thrill of ending someone’s life to feed their own. Fantasy blood lust has been around a long time. Tiny people just makes them more helpless and accessible for the power thrill. Me my fetish is more sexual and relationship based but I’ve learn to enjoy vore and other fetishes.

[i am insane]

@subasubaski
You know, I’ve noticed some Gulliver travels styled fic, but ones where all of them live in the same world and not separated by magic or whatever, and it always irked me that all three shared a tech level, just… in different locations. And somehow this works. Noth even mentioning wildlife and foliage?

“Realistically”, there’s no way the various size classes could live in harmony needed for such development to happen. People are assholes; the biggest, whether the Brob or some higher one, would inevitably dominate the others, treat them as lessers, and the Lilis, or any smaller ones, would inevitably be the prey of frogs, bugs and the like, unable to establish any advanced civilization due to accidentally being trampled by their betters, or pass down information and technology beyond basic, word of mouth communication due to the fragility of their works (we got to where we are through passing on information throughout generations, via writing and technology; centuries or millennia of investment were needed to get to where we are now. Imagine, then if for all intents and purposes malevolent meteors could just… reset a city in an instant? Where giant monsters could devour everything? Cities that could be not just part of a society, but the society itself? There’s no way that they could reach a technology level anywhere near modern civilization. That’d be the world inch tall people would live in). I mean, fuck, even the ecology: either everything is sized to the giant’s size, and so why aren’t they the normal size, or the giants exist, for all intents and purposes, above the food chain, have little need to invent technology because there’s no real threat to them, and probably don’t even eat like normal living creatures since there’s no way to support themselves ‘naturally’ (what do they eat?! Whales?!) like normal mammals.

…I know I got somewhat off topic but this is something I’ve been thinking about for awhile now.

[Olo]

@i-am-insane World-building is hard, but it’s worth it.

[subasubaski]

@i-am-insane there’s one book that I always think of when I read that sort of story. Flux, by Stephen Baxter, is about very small people in the far future, living inside of a neutron star and the kinds of problems they’d have to deal with in an environment on that scale. It’s ostensibly “hard” science fiction, and the author is pretty well-known for the outlandish but supposedly plausible concepts that he brings into his stories. He’s also one of the grimmest hard SF writers I’ve read. His worlds are just very, very bleak. BUT he wrote a story that deals with the actual physics of a society of microscopic people, so props for that.