What is vore ?  An attempt at a definition.

Vore (or "voraphilia") is a very strange "fetish", or more exactly an ensemble of fetishes and kinks, the composition of this ensemble varying largely from one voraphile (or "vorarephile", or "vore") to another.

There is however a basic definition and common ground which most (if not all) vores will agree with:
Voraphilia is a fetish in which people fantasize about devouring a living being alive, or being devoured alive. The one devouring is called the predator (often abbreviated into "pred") and may be a living being (sapient or not) or even an object (performing vore via mechanical or magical means), while the one being devoured is called the prey (the prey is almost always a living being, generally sentient, most often sapient), and voraphiles may be either strict preds, strict preys, or "switch" between prey and pred.

From there, we can already split the vore acts into two main categories:

• Soft vore: involving the prey being "swallowed" whole, in the widest acceptation of the "swallowed" term and which includes enveloping (blob vore, for example) or using other orifices than the mouth (such as in unbirthing, anal-vore and cock-vore).
• Hard vore: the more obvious way of devouring something big: by reducing the prey into pieces or pulp (biting, chewing, rip'n tear, dismemberment, crushing, etc...).

One important thing in the vore definition I propose, is that the prey must stay alive and conscious while it is devoured (or at least for the longest possible time). Make it a dead prey being devoured, and vore becomes mere cannibalism, which is another and different kind of "fetish", in my humble opinion... Though, there is a thin border that some vores would easily cross there. For example, some vore scenes will involve cooking; in my opinion, they are still vore scenes when the prey stays alive throughout the cooking process and is still conscious while devoured, as opposed to cannibalism where the prey is killed before or while cooked...

As for what are the preds and preys, you may find any combination of the following:

• Humans (either normally sized, or giants, or tiny-folks).
• Animals (here again, either standard or with unnatural sizes).
• Furries (anthropomorphic animals, taurs, etc...).
• Mythical beasts (dragons, gryphons, centaurs, unicorns, etc...).

• Plants (of the carnivorous kind, obviously...).
• Monsters (aliens, blobs, etc...).
• Objects (robots, machines, or even as weird as a couch: yes, couch-vore exists too...).

What are the various fetishes/kinks that are involved in vore ?

Here again, it is only a proposal, and some of the voraphiles will probably find more fetishes/kinks to add to this list (given in no particular order):

• Sacrifice (loss of the prey's life to sustain the predator).
• Annihilation fetishes (such as the one involved in digestion where the prey becomes mere nutrients for the pred).
• "Objectification" fetish (denial of the status of sentient being of the prey which is considered just food).
• Fusion fetish (becoming one with another).
• Fascination for death (either giving or receiving it).
• Dominance and submission (the power of the predator over the prey is usually a big kink for voraphiles).
• Sado-Masochism (for hard vore).
• Return to the womb (holding of the prey in the stomach, or even into the womb for unbirthing scenes).
• Reverse-birth (the swallowing act and the digestion may be experienced as such, and unbirthing-vore is of course related to that fetish).
• Carnal delights (lust for flesh and blood).
• Food fetishes (over-eating, stuffing, inflation).
• Oral fetishes (including tongue, saliva, suckling, throat, etc...).
• Other body parts fetishes (while eating, many preds love lingering on feet, rumps, crotch, breasts, fingers, etc).
• Scat (some vores like scenes describing the whole digestion down to the end result, and anal-vore is directly related to scat as well).
• Many other fetishes involved in the preliminaries to the actual vore act, such as: hunt, capture, bonding, licking, nibbling, vanilla sex or rape, etc...

Is vore a sexual fetish ?

That's a tough question... Most voraphiles (rough estimation: 80%) will reply by "yes, of course !", while the others will reply by "Hell, no !"...

Fact is that this "fetish" (reminder of the definition of fetish: "excessive or irrational devotion to some activity") is often deeply rooted in early childhood (most vores will admit always having had this fascination, even though they didn't know it was called "voraphilia").

But vore is also deeply rooted in any living being (the relation between predators and preys defines most of the behaviours of any living being, and the fact that humans got very few predators nowadays (but for themselves !) doesn't prevent their instinct to come into play when they witness or think about a predation act).

Add to this the fact that vore is everywhere: Do you remember about all those stories, tales (Perrault's for example) and fables (e.g. La Fontaine's), all of them full of monsters, dragons, ogres and wild animals devouring people, and that were told to you when you were a little child ?... Think about how many fantasy/sci-fi/horror movies include vore scenes... Or how much you are fascinated when watching wild life documentaries where big lions or tigers devour helpless and innocent little gazelles...

My interpretation is therefore that, basically, voraphilia is not a sexual fetish, but that, in most cases, it becomes one at puberty, because of all the other sexual fetishes it may stimulate or induce... Yet, for 20% of the vores or so (and I'm one of them), vore is not and will never be something they will sexually fantasize about... It's all about life and death, our relation to them, and about our place in the food chain...

Henri.

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