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Vore in a civilized (and sustainable) society.
12 years ago
It is easy to imagine a setting in which vore takes place out of the public view. Any adventure game has room for monsters ranging from hungry dragons to sneaky shapechangers or seemingly harmless creatures (and people) who sneak into inn rooms - or just walk in - with the intent of eating the occupant. Savage the tiger moves in a modern city setting, but quite a few criminals, the occasional supervillain and even a certain wererat hero have disappeared down his throat. High tech Mwee beartaurs surround themselves with "pets" who like to be eaten - but in the privacy of their starships. These are all secretive creatures.
Putting vore in public view and in a civilized society and making it sustainable is tougher. While hanging out with Cougar at Anthrocon, the subject came up and we spent several hours hashing this out. I had the following thoughts, some of which are already in effect in my art and stories.
(Interestingly enough, as I type this Karno has a comic running about a society in which everyone who dies gets fed to the preds.)
These concepts can apply to a world with only one pred and one prey species, or to a world like we see in many vore settings, where many anthro (or nonanthro) species coexist.
First, there can't be very many predators, or they must not eat people very often. If just 5% of the population is predatory and they eat only one person a month, the population would collapse to nothing in little more than a year. Soon enough the prey would be gone and cannibalism would wipe out the preds. (This assumes that the preds only eat people. We'll get to settings in which vore is rare a bit further on.)
There are ways around this. Maybe the prey breed often and mature very fast. There is a symbiotic relationship in Star Control 3 between wolflike predators (The Harika) and mouse sized intelligent prey (The Yorn). They evolved to sapience together and the Harika require proteins that exist only in the Yorn whereas the Yorn need the Harika to prevent them from overpopulating. It is a peaceful relationship in which nearly all the prey climb willingly into the mouths of the preds. It works because the prey massively outnumber the preds and find a benefit in the relationship.
Another possibility is a world in which prey are reformed by magic or supertech. The question arises as to why this level of effort is expended to allow predation, but we can posit a culture in which many vore fans get together for fun. The Mwee take this approach. A communication node in each prey pet's brain transmits updates to their memories to the ship's medical computers, so that when they inevitably disappear into some beartaur orifice their new body will pop out of the cloning tube with a full set of memories. Needless to say, the Mwee found a way around the replicative fading problem (a clone of a clone of a clone eventually suffering the "bad photocopy" effect) a long time ago.
If we applied the Mwee example to some sort of "vore resort" planet, there could be an awful lot of vore on a large scale with little lasting consequence. This also allows for the sort of friendly, everyone-eats-everyone art we tend to see...if vore is consensual and not too unpleasant.
Now, if prey always reform but the vore is nonconsensual and/or unpleasant in some way we get a Stank-like world where people avoid being eaten even though they may know it is only a temporary inconvenience. By extension this could lead to horrible situations such as Stank or Cougar himself encounters, where just about everything he runs into eats him whether he likes the idea or not (and he usually doesn't). This sort of setting might happen if the supertech or immensely powerful magic is there, but not under the control of the characters. Perhaps some god or insane computer thinks a world like this is amusing and keeps things going for a laugh - and that power is probably responsible for people being being able to eat each other in the first place.
The Yum-Chat swamp, among other vore settings, works this way. Something in the swamp traps prey there and attracts predators as well. Most, but not all, of those eaten reform whether they like it or not. No one knows why it happens, just that the area is a feeding trough for hungry preds and a hell for those unfortunate enough to repeatedly end up on the menu.
In a natural setting, without sapience or reformation, the number of predators will vary as the prey population does. Populations of lynx tend to rise and fall with the variation in snowshoe hare populations, for example. More rabbits mean more lynx who then eat more rabbits and eventually the lack of rabbits means less lynx. Nature manages itself over the long term barring a super-effective predator (usually an invasive species) or some new sort of prey the local predators just can't keep up with (again, usually an invasive species). Overspecialized predators can die out as their favored prey vanishes. Black-footed ferrets are all but extinct since man has eliminated their prey, the prairie dog, to name one of many examples.
An excess of -prey- can be as huge a problem in nature as an excess of preds. The absence of large predators in North America due to human action has led to deer being a major cause of highway accidents. Plagues of mice in Australia and locust swarms are other examples of too many prey, not enough preds - though the latter is no one's fault but the locust and its breeding cycle.
The "lots of prey, few preds" model has a problem when the prey attain sapience. If there are a hundred zebra-analogs for every lion-analog and the zebras can reason out the consequences of having lions around (the lions will eat some of us, maybe ME), some zebra is going to get the idea to wipe out the lions. This is what happened on Earth when a sorta-preyish species (man) couldn't help but notice that they kept ending up inside smilodons, cave bears and other preds. As fast as humans could manage it we were all but out of preds, and anything that might eat something Man wanted to eat soon followed. (It didn't help that this "prey" species was pretty predatory too, and intelligence plus pointy sticks was all it took.)
So what keeps a weak but populous prey species from ganging up on the preds? Maybe the preds are virtually invincible. It could be a huge tech or magic advantage on the part of the preds or a simple matter of scale. A group of mice isn't going to be able to stop wolves from eating them, though they could make the wolves' lives miserable with traps and by attacking the wolf cubs...miserable enough that two rival societies would likely form (mice hordes and large packs of wolves that guard each other, so some wolves can sleep without worrying about the mice) and war would follow once technology reached a certain point. Mouse Guard, the RPG, represents this war pretty well - tiny mice against much larger predators, with heavy casualties on both sides. Redwall does not, since the preds and prey are roughly the same size and the author is unswervingly on the side of the prey species.
An entrenched and powerful aristocracy of predators that protects the rights of "nobles" to eat lesser folks can also work, but it won't work forever. Unless the rulers are enormously powerful (dragons, maybe), there will at some point be an uprising. The prey must greatly outnumber the preds (or once again breed and mature fast), so numbers will be on the side of the rebels when the revolution comes.
One workable vore-society model that I like is one in which the preds and prey interact but the preds are allowed to eat the prey (and other preds) only under certain circumstances.
Taking as an example another of my settings: Blackfur's Legacy, or the Empire of the Clans. The premise is that roughly 10,000 years ago the smilodons (sabretoothed cats), which in this setting are intelligent, conquered early Mankind and even interbred with them thanks to the magic of furry genetics. (Anything can knock up anything! Yay!) As a result there are feral (but intelligent) smilodons, smilodontaurs and anthro-smilodons intermingled with a larger population of human slaves, servants, vassals and more-or-less freemen.
Now, the smilodons (all sorts) very much like to eat humans (and each other), but strict laws keep this under control. Normally they eat what vegetable matter they can digest, plus livestock. Getting to eat a human or fellow smilodon is a treasured privilege and can happen one of two ways.
First, the Clan leadership is intentionally poor at preventing slave revolts and minor wars. They make sure such are of a manageable size and use them to keep their military in practice. This also gives the soldiers opportunities to gorge on tasty, tasty humans (and sometimes other cats) and is a powerful impetus to join the military.
Second, anyone whatsoever who commits a capital crime ends up being raffled off, and the lucky winner promptly eats them. These raffles are occasionally opened to humans, which can lead to roast human or cat, but much more often it is some sort of smilodon that ends up eating the human or smilodon criminal. These raffles are enormously popular but they don't provide nearly as much human or smilodon prey as some aggressive big cats would like. The #1 sort of criminal cat that ends up being raffled off is thus smilodons who snuck around eating humans or whatnot without authorization. The average human criminal sentenced to be eaten is a rebel against the establishment.
Other examples are my Greyston/Monstertown, where capital criminals are sold at a "meat market" and often eaten, the arena in that same city, where "Two furs enter, one fur leaves" really does happen sometimes, and my "Run" story series, in which Death Row inmates try to avoid hungry predators to earn a parole.
Now, eventually we must confront the core concept of many furry stories, that of a town chock-full of furries, some of which are of predatory species. In these stories they presumably eat some sort of livestock, but we will of course inject vore into this setting due to our disturbing obsession.
To preserve this seemingly friendly setting, the preds only eat people illegally or as a means of execution. The street can be full of lambs, rabbits, wolves and lions and the lambs and rabbits are as safe as one can reasonable expect. There are going to be some wolves or lions or foxes or whatnot that glance covetously at their tasty neighbors and arrange for them to disappear, but a fair number of these predators will be caught and discover the intricacies of another predator's digestive system themselves.
Meanwhile, some of those mice, rabbits and whatnot are going to harbor an understandable distrust for that lion family next door. Some of them will attack and kill their neighbors and they too may be caught and sentenced to exactly the fate they worried about. There will be what amount to serial killers on each side and all of them will reason out what seem to them the best way to get away with it. There will be preds who badly want to eat preds and prey who want to murder other prey for whatever reason. There will be murderers and sociopaths on both sides. And there will be rapists who eat their victims to cover up their deeds, and lovers who bed their prey as a convenient way to get their lunch away from those annoying witnesses.
Now, once again this sort of sneaky predation or serial killing can't happen often or else society collapses. Even if there is reformation, if the memory of being eaten is retained, society would break down as everyone worried they would be next on the menu.
Vore being rare, but known, means nearly everyone you meet on the street will be perfectly harmless...but not all humans are harmless and neither will be all of those weasels, foxes, lambs and lions. Just as that handsome man at the next table giving you the eye may not be the tiniest bit trustworthy, that snake anthro batting her eyelashes at you may be sizing you up as the next bulge to distend her midsection. And she thinks she has a way to get away with it, too.
Hopefully the society this happens in is one of those high-magic or supertech ones, because otherwise, if she gets her way, her hapless lover just became another entry in the missing persons list. And if she gets caught at it, she'll end up as a bulge instead - with her victim perhaps contributing to the bulge in the predator who gets to eat -her-.
In the end, creating a society in which vore goes on comes down to determining how many predators there are and why the presumably far more numerous prey don't grab torches and pitchforks and come after them. There are a number of ways to do it, and though it is not impossible, it takes some thought to set such a society up.
Putting vore in public view and in a civilized society and making it sustainable is tougher. While hanging out with Cougar at Anthrocon, the subject came up and we spent several hours hashing this out. I had the following thoughts, some of which are already in effect in my art and stories.
(Interestingly enough, as I type this Karno has a comic running about a society in which everyone who dies gets fed to the preds.)
These concepts can apply to a world with only one pred and one prey species, or to a world like we see in many vore settings, where many anthro (or nonanthro) species coexist.
First, there can't be very many predators, or they must not eat people very often. If just 5% of the population is predatory and they eat only one person a month, the population would collapse to nothing in little more than a year. Soon enough the prey would be gone and cannibalism would wipe out the preds. (This assumes that the preds only eat people. We'll get to settings in which vore is rare a bit further on.)
There are ways around this. Maybe the prey breed often and mature very fast. There is a symbiotic relationship in Star Control 3 between wolflike predators (The Harika) and mouse sized intelligent prey (The Yorn). They evolved to sapience together and the Harika require proteins that exist only in the Yorn whereas the Yorn need the Harika to prevent them from overpopulating. It is a peaceful relationship in which nearly all the prey climb willingly into the mouths of the preds. It works because the prey massively outnumber the preds and find a benefit in the relationship.
Another possibility is a world in which prey are reformed by magic or supertech. The question arises as to why this level of effort is expended to allow predation, but we can posit a culture in which many vore fans get together for fun. The Mwee take this approach. A communication node in each prey pet's brain transmits updates to their memories to the ship's medical computers, so that when they inevitably disappear into some beartaur orifice their new body will pop out of the cloning tube with a full set of memories. Needless to say, the Mwee found a way around the replicative fading problem (a clone of a clone of a clone eventually suffering the "bad photocopy" effect) a long time ago.
If we applied the Mwee example to some sort of "vore resort" planet, there could be an awful lot of vore on a large scale with little lasting consequence. This also allows for the sort of friendly, everyone-eats-everyone art we tend to see...if vore is consensual and not too unpleasant.
Now, if prey always reform but the vore is nonconsensual and/or unpleasant in some way we get a Stank-like world where people avoid being eaten even though they may know it is only a temporary inconvenience. By extension this could lead to horrible situations such as Stank or Cougar himself encounters, where just about everything he runs into eats him whether he likes the idea or not (and he usually doesn't). This sort of setting might happen if the supertech or immensely powerful magic is there, but not under the control of the characters. Perhaps some god or insane computer thinks a world like this is amusing and keeps things going for a laugh - and that power is probably responsible for people being being able to eat each other in the first place.
The Yum-Chat swamp, among other vore settings, works this way. Something in the swamp traps prey there and attracts predators as well. Most, but not all, of those eaten reform whether they like it or not. No one knows why it happens, just that the area is a feeding trough for hungry preds and a hell for those unfortunate enough to repeatedly end up on the menu.
In a natural setting, without sapience or reformation, the number of predators will vary as the prey population does. Populations of lynx tend to rise and fall with the variation in snowshoe hare populations, for example. More rabbits mean more lynx who then eat more rabbits and eventually the lack of rabbits means less lynx. Nature manages itself over the long term barring a super-effective predator (usually an invasive species) or some new sort of prey the local predators just can't keep up with (again, usually an invasive species). Overspecialized predators can die out as their favored prey vanishes. Black-footed ferrets are all but extinct since man has eliminated their prey, the prairie dog, to name one of many examples.
An excess of -prey- can be as huge a problem in nature as an excess of preds. The absence of large predators in North America due to human action has led to deer being a major cause of highway accidents. Plagues of mice in Australia and locust swarms are other examples of too many prey, not enough preds - though the latter is no one's fault but the locust and its breeding cycle.
The "lots of prey, few preds" model has a problem when the prey attain sapience. If there are a hundred zebra-analogs for every lion-analog and the zebras can reason out the consequences of having lions around (the lions will eat some of us, maybe ME), some zebra is going to get the idea to wipe out the lions. This is what happened on Earth when a sorta-preyish species (man) couldn't help but notice that they kept ending up inside smilodons, cave bears and other preds. As fast as humans could manage it we were all but out of preds, and anything that might eat something Man wanted to eat soon followed. (It didn't help that this "prey" species was pretty predatory too, and intelligence plus pointy sticks was all it took.)
So what keeps a weak but populous prey species from ganging up on the preds? Maybe the preds are virtually invincible. It could be a huge tech or magic advantage on the part of the preds or a simple matter of scale. A group of mice isn't going to be able to stop wolves from eating them, though they could make the wolves' lives miserable with traps and by attacking the wolf cubs...miserable enough that two rival societies would likely form (mice hordes and large packs of wolves that guard each other, so some wolves can sleep without worrying about the mice) and war would follow once technology reached a certain point. Mouse Guard, the RPG, represents this war pretty well - tiny mice against much larger predators, with heavy casualties on both sides. Redwall does not, since the preds and prey are roughly the same size and the author is unswervingly on the side of the prey species.
An entrenched and powerful aristocracy of predators that protects the rights of "nobles" to eat lesser folks can also work, but it won't work forever. Unless the rulers are enormously powerful (dragons, maybe), there will at some point be an uprising. The prey must greatly outnumber the preds (or once again breed and mature fast), so numbers will be on the side of the rebels when the revolution comes.
One workable vore-society model that I like is one in which the preds and prey interact but the preds are allowed to eat the prey (and other preds) only under certain circumstances.
Taking as an example another of my settings: Blackfur's Legacy, or the Empire of the Clans. The premise is that roughly 10,000 years ago the smilodons (sabretoothed cats), which in this setting are intelligent, conquered early Mankind and even interbred with them thanks to the magic of furry genetics. (Anything can knock up anything! Yay!) As a result there are feral (but intelligent) smilodons, smilodontaurs and anthro-smilodons intermingled with a larger population of human slaves, servants, vassals and more-or-less freemen.
Now, the smilodons (all sorts) very much like to eat humans (and each other), but strict laws keep this under control. Normally they eat what vegetable matter they can digest, plus livestock. Getting to eat a human or fellow smilodon is a treasured privilege and can happen one of two ways.
First, the Clan leadership is intentionally poor at preventing slave revolts and minor wars. They make sure such are of a manageable size and use them to keep their military in practice. This also gives the soldiers opportunities to gorge on tasty, tasty humans (and sometimes other cats) and is a powerful impetus to join the military.
Second, anyone whatsoever who commits a capital crime ends up being raffled off, and the lucky winner promptly eats them. These raffles are occasionally opened to humans, which can lead to roast human or cat, but much more often it is some sort of smilodon that ends up eating the human or smilodon criminal. These raffles are enormously popular but they don't provide nearly as much human or smilodon prey as some aggressive big cats would like. The #1 sort of criminal cat that ends up being raffled off is thus smilodons who snuck around eating humans or whatnot without authorization. The average human criminal sentenced to be eaten is a rebel against the establishment.
Other examples are my Greyston/Monstertown, where capital criminals are sold at a "meat market" and often eaten, the arena in that same city, where "Two furs enter, one fur leaves" really does happen sometimes, and my "Run" story series, in which Death Row inmates try to avoid hungry predators to earn a parole.
Now, eventually we must confront the core concept of many furry stories, that of a town chock-full of furries, some of which are of predatory species. In these stories they presumably eat some sort of livestock, but we will of course inject vore into this setting due to our disturbing obsession.
To preserve this seemingly friendly setting, the preds only eat people illegally or as a means of execution. The street can be full of lambs, rabbits, wolves and lions and the lambs and rabbits are as safe as one can reasonable expect. There are going to be some wolves or lions or foxes or whatnot that glance covetously at their tasty neighbors and arrange for them to disappear, but a fair number of these predators will be caught and discover the intricacies of another predator's digestive system themselves.
Meanwhile, some of those mice, rabbits and whatnot are going to harbor an understandable distrust for that lion family next door. Some of them will attack and kill their neighbors and they too may be caught and sentenced to exactly the fate they worried about. There will be what amount to serial killers on each side and all of them will reason out what seem to them the best way to get away with it. There will be preds who badly want to eat preds and prey who want to murder other prey for whatever reason. There will be murderers and sociopaths on both sides. And there will be rapists who eat their victims to cover up their deeds, and lovers who bed their prey as a convenient way to get their lunch away from those annoying witnesses.
Now, once again this sort of sneaky predation or serial killing can't happen often or else society collapses. Even if there is reformation, if the memory of being eaten is retained, society would break down as everyone worried they would be next on the menu.
Vore being rare, but known, means nearly everyone you meet on the street will be perfectly harmless...but not all humans are harmless and neither will be all of those weasels, foxes, lambs and lions. Just as that handsome man at the next table giving you the eye may not be the tiniest bit trustworthy, that snake anthro batting her eyelashes at you may be sizing you up as the next bulge to distend her midsection. And she thinks she has a way to get away with it, too.
Hopefully the society this happens in is one of those high-magic or supertech ones, because otherwise, if she gets her way, her hapless lover just became another entry in the missing persons list. And if she gets caught at it, she'll end up as a bulge instead - with her victim perhaps contributing to the bulge in the predator who gets to eat -her-.
In the end, creating a society in which vore goes on comes down to determining how many predators there are and why the presumably far more numerous prey don't grab torches and pitchforks and come after them. There are a number of ways to do it, and though it is not impossible, it takes some thought to set such a society up.
If predation and reproduction were firmly linked, the population collapse argument is reversed. The prey have to allow predators to live among them or they die out. Any single individual might fear being eaten, or might welcome it, but either way they can't rely on their fellow creatures to protect them. In such a world, sexual attraction would have developed much like the sweet taste of fruit - a lure for predators.
Which, odd as it may sound, wouldn't even be a new idea. Even the Disney Channel used this once; in American Dragon Jake Long, griffon babies need to spend a week or so inside their mother's digestive tract after hatching.
My own take has been the "rare, but known" scenario. Where, as Strega described, the prey outnumber the predators substantially and are presumed to be in charge, but the predators are so much more adept than the prey that the winner of every major conflict between tribes or countries has been the one that struck the sweetest deals with the most carnivore tribes.
I figure that, in a scenario with no non-sentient prey whatsoever, they would have, as Strega described, predominantly lived by eating criminals, prisoners of war, or the deceased, at least until modern developments started producing suitable replacement supplements.
As for the frequency of vore, well, I figure it would be as prevalent in a furry culture as furries are in our culture. It would be known of, sure, but only 1% of the population would have any interest in vore, and the vast majority of vores would only be interested in it from a fantasy spectator perspective.
So while I suspect there would be tension between the neighborhood of rabbits and the family of lions that just moved in across the street, I suspect that tension would be more rooted in their historical differences than their carnivorous nature.
More comparable to how white people respond to minorities, if you will. There'd probably be at least one loud-mouthed bigot-bunny screaming at the lions to go back to Africa, while the rest of them would try to stifle their prejudices or tiptoe around the issue. And if Fluffy Cottontail started going steady with Sungura Kipenzi, then you'd start hearing people (on both sides) start their sentences with "Not that there's anything wrong with that, but-" and such.
Even with tech advancements thrown into the mix, I honestly wouldn't expect it to become commonplace unless their surroundings absolutely demanded it. Even if a sentient pred had complete ownership of a sentient prey and could legally do whatever the heck they wanted with them, I wouldn't expect vore to come up at all except in jest or roleplay.
Prey creature is protected by, cared for and fed by predator, eventually eaten by predator.
Youung prey is incubated in predator before going on to be protected by, cared for and fed by etc
Though I'll say this, given how easily the seemingly powerless can be devoured into today's society, I'm not so sure that the pitchforks would be coming out any time soon. There's something to be said about "hell with you, least I'm safe," and any predators in the upper echelons of power would be experts at manipulating just that mindset. As they are in RL.
Of course, there are plenty of ways for that to go wrong as well, which I think is part of the fun. Nothing lasts forever, but all sorts of things pop up again, if given enough time.
1: i do like the use of life serving criminals or death sentenced to be used as fodder given the situation they will most likely be bound
2: volunteers for such a program are given these access collar/cuffs which connect into a personal system or something so that "willing" prey can offer themselves up to prey
sidenote: Willingness to be eaten does not refer to full on situational willingness, ie a prey could want to be eaten but is a person of a dominant personality so resists the pred
3: the situation of having vore be similar to a restaurant with serving schedules, specials, and maybe even the odd meals to order in which the reformation of sentient prey such as people and anthros is kept in house, but feral non sentient prey would simply be like having a stock of easily bred animals that can be gotten thru various mean would just simply be bred and fed off to "small time preds" as in they do vore but only on a level in which sentience is not a factor like mice or rabbits or even as far as predators eating other predator species or going into the lines of cannibalism of which would it be cannibalism if say a wolf anthro eats a non sentient feral wolf
4:this is an idea of my own, but in such worlds where magic and seemingly impossible tech exists reformation could be as simple as having life /medical insurance in which prey eaten simply pop up at a nearby hospital thru various means akin to respawn points in games but centralized in a commonplace facility, in this scenario not everybody could have this sort of coverage the poor, destitute, or homeless for example as having an insurance plan that covers full corporeal recovery/regeneration with little to no side effects would probably be fairly expensive but this extends to those who are and are not magically gifted in THIS sort of way say a pred eats someone who has a family but not the money for the fancy reformation coverage if the pred had magical capability of reformation it would be at the predators discretion/volition to reform their prey but if the pred has no such talents well the prey is pretty much shit out of luck unless theres a market or something available to the public that offers temporary access to these sorts of powers like an amulet or potion or what have you
Being eaten (and reformed) could be used as a punishment. If you don't earn a one way trip through someone's guts you might still get such a trip but with reformation, remembering the unpleasantness of being eaten and suffocating/being digested. There would also be the willing victims, but a mixture of both willing and unwilling could add variety to the menu.
I don't have enough settings with reformation for that to easily work, but I might be able to think of something. 83
1) A society of intelligent beings that are all predatory. They stick to the active volcanic regions to avoid the rest of the world that has massive predatory types of a primitive nature, all over the place. They use a slave trade system with aliens for their regular meat need. The aliens find other planetary creatures and deliver them to a slave camp for auctions, where the locals trade with mined goods. As long as the mined ores and such don't run out, the traders will always have a universe full of prey to gather.
2) A civilized VS uncivilized relationship. All civilized predators and prey species get the unconditional protection of a local government to either sustain their health from danger...or, at the very least, a responsive trial and jail or death penalty for those that break the laws. Whereas, uncivilized creatures (ones that choose to live in the wild and won't register to any townships or cities) are free game for any predators from the civilized side of the world. Any civilized member has equal rights to purchase processed meats and such over having to hunt, live.
3) The mountain spiders. This is a race of spiders that essentially have a cohabitation with a kind of living crystal. The crystals reproduce quickly and the far fewer populous of spiders could freely feed off of them. Low and behold, a side effect of these crystals is to ooze a kind of liquid that acts as a formula for youth. A group of foxes figure this out and begin introducing themselves as thieves to a spring that this ooze gathers in. By quite literally giving themselves enemas with the very crystals that the spiders eat, they have made a rather complex environment occur. The spiders recognize the foxes as having something to do with the food source. Properly yielding foxes get to reach the spring in exchange for appearing to be egg layers to the crystals. If caught by a spider and they don't taste right, the fox becomes an exotic source of meat that is full of their crystal food source. In short, the alien influence of this fox tribe will all eventually bite the bullet of tasting wrong.
4) Another alien influence of predatory slimes will find a short term solution in capturing all surrounding lifeforms and slowly feeding off of them. Once the food source has run quite thin and whatever remains can escape them, the slimes fall off to near extinction...until the main characters in the story stumble into their trap and literally migrate some to a new grazing ground that was otherwise out of reach. The slimes were alien drop offs, after being altered for science experimentation and the scientist types only cared enough to get rid of them as easily as could be.
In the Bartimeaus books, of which I've only ever seen the first, the ruling upper class is a small group of, not simply noblemen, but magicians. Demon summoners. They train their whole lives to capturing and binding these treacherous, extremely powerful creatures, but beyond that training they are exactly equal to the common man. And yet, this training allows them to rule with impunity. The common folk can only hope to keep their heads down, lest they find themselves spontaneously exploding from a demon's stray spell. What few who even can go against this are, quite frankly, remarkable, almost unique people, and yet even they are so rare that they must keep themselves hidden, lest they be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
And yet, the common folk are constantly kept woefully ignorant of that one fact. The ruling class' power comes solely from the demons they bind. Oh, sure, eventually a civilization would realize this, and there'd be a great uprising in which the magicians would only be capable of parlor tricks, but after a single generation of magicians out of power, someone would come across a book filled with the many, many rituals, then it'd be a few with this knowledge and these demons, and then there'd be a ruling class yet again.
The best part about this sort of thing is that it's something that we may actually see happen, if not in our own lifetimes, the next couple generations; the ability to digitally backup our own brains. Think Ghost in the Shell.
Whether an absolutely perfect copy of you is actually "you" is a philosophical debate.
Though I admit I actually also enjoy puzzling things out like this.
It may all be an allegory for being gay/transsexual. There's no text, you kinda have to imply everything.
Rather than be a fetish shop though, it's a restaurant, where people are on the menu! Staff are protected by advanced hyper tech, so the waiters will reform (most of the time, assuming it doesn't fail of course) but the menu items will not. Hungry predators walk into the restaurant, intending to leave with a large, round squirming belly of live meat. Of course, such an establishment is extremely expensive, so it's a special treat to be served live prey. The prey range from the willing, to the suicidal, to societal malcontents approved by the state for "culling" and even to street kidnaps in the case of less than legal vore establishments. Devouring your waiter or waitress incurs extra charges, of course, and if you destroy their attire during the process you have to pay for that.
Of course, sometimes a special couple will come in for a special romantic evening, a dinner date in which only one of the two is left at the table, and the other is picking their teeth. For an enormous fee, such couples can arrange a one-time use of the establishment's reforming equipment. If not, the survivor of the dinner date will simply have to keep his/her romantic memories of their significant other padding their waistline.
Of course, the legal establishments have all the safety gear, and the illegal ones don't. Illegal ones would be busted similar to drug rings, and their staff may even be hostages themselves, waiters and waitresses victims of human(sapient?) smuggling and so forth who hope that their slaves' debt is paid off before they find themselves a fashion accessory on some predator's handsome gut (which isn't likely) ... Even the legal establishments would have potential and temptation to resort to less than legal methods to keep their stable of food plentiful and vibrant.
This expands the world of Sapient trafficking to not only include so-called coyotes who smuggle people across boarders (picture idea. A literal coyote smuggling boarder hoppers across in his stomach? And then just doesn't let them out. Bonus points if it's a natural and overpopulated prey species, like hares.), but 'livestock' breeding operations, with captives being held in bonds and kept pregnant to birth more food for the restaurants. Legality questionable, of course.
As for the clone replicant fading (mentioned in your Mwee section) the solution is simple. Don't clone the clone, clone only from the original material. Take samples from the foodpet when they're new, and keep those samples on record. Rather than clone from their immediately previous body, clone from this original source. No fade. This brings up the problem of maintaining the sample's purity, especially since, if kept living, it would age. Methods of preservation, such as stasis, could be used, or alternately (and this is my method) the genetic record can be kept in a pure data format, and the initial genetic material required to make a clone is carefully assembled according to advanced genetic sequencers to match the data on file. Obviously, that's some seriously advanced hardware. I use nanotech as part of my excuse.
These ideas fall into the possibilities of government controls as mentioned above, both public and secretive (legal versus illegal) as well as that of the powerful aristocracy due to the prohibitive costs, but even those not fabulously wealthy might still be able to indulge now and then. Especially if an establishment runs special deals, or the lesser folk go to illegal ones.
Maybe frequent patronage cards? Like some places have a card, buy ten burgers, your 11th is free? Except its more along the lines of "Volunteer for our menu five times, earn a free meal" .. Dive into someone's tummy five times, you get to snack! The wait staff would automatically be included in this, to account for instances when a starving glutton decides to snatch up his waitress and stuff her down his gullet spontaneously.
I am 99% sure Strega has both a picture and a story about a literal coyote doing that. He had some kind of weird extra-dimensional stomach and could choose to store people there rather than sending them into his normal stomach.
I already did a story about a "coyote" who smuggled people across the border. He was, of course, a were-coyote with a skill called "gluttony" from Werewolf. 83
There are probably feral livestock too, but I haven't elaborated on their role in the preds' diets.
*Both races anthro of similar size; no magic or reforming. Soft vore is not an option, so a single prey could last for multiple meals.
Heavy emphasis on magic used in reformation, severe consequences for use of it, and an entire prey species forced into nutritional servitude because of general fantasy racism against them.
Eventually though, as intellect further increased, the predators eventually figure out they can settle in one place, and as long as they don't have any competing neighboors too nearby they can go out to hunt when they need to and likely find prey sooner or later. The competition with other predators who settle too nearby brings about the use of crude weapons, which soon are used for hunting as well, and the prey species eventually take up weaponmaking too as they are intelligent enough to copy what they see. Once the prey start using weapons too, predators are forced to group larger than they used to prefer for less risk of injuries when hunting the now armed prey. This arming also allows the prey to start to settle in statonary places sometimes as well, with some species being far more suited as guards than others.
The predators learn pretty quickly that attacking a guarded village of prey is dangerous to suicidal...but the prey have to range out on their own in smaller groups to eat sooner or later, and that's when they get them.
The predator societies gradually advance over time and after repeated cases of famine they come to understand how their relationship with their prey balances out and they realize that if they don't limit their numbers then all the food will keep running out in an area followed by warring with surrounding cities and raiding in their territories. The only cities that survive are the ones that begin enforcing strict childbearing limits with fatal penalties for intentionally violating them. The cities that did not adopt this method are not able to compete when they attempt to raid or attack one of these cities as the attackers are malnourished and less able to spend time training for combat or being on guard or fortifying their walls when they have to forage and hunt so much more due to an unchecked population. Thy also have more problems with diseases as well due to so many more people in close proximity combined with malnourishment issues and cases of smaller predator species being eaten by larger ones.
During this time many of the prey species populations are actually starting to recover, though in areas where there is unchecked hunting some of their cities become so depopulated they are forced to abandon them and return to a nomadic lifestyle or face total elimination by hungry predators. Their cities never develop nearly as much as those of predators as for the most part they are not attacked inside the cities, and they have no interest in competing with or attacking other cities of their fellows. There's far less luxury for learning or creating new things when you never know if your next day out foraging could end in a hungry predator's stomach - just one stomach if you're lucky.
Things don't change much for a long time after that, aside from a gradual decrease in populations of predators that breed freely and starve themselves out of existence. As civilized predator society gradually absorbs or attacks their wilder cousins for space learning and inventing new things becomes more and more common as the threat of being raided subsides away and trading between cities becomes common. Predators are able to actually do things that don't involve hunting, and indeed some don't even need to hunt their own food as they offer a service or good that is needed enough somewhere that they can sustain themselves through providing it.
With the subsiding of the free ranging, wilder hordes of predators the prey species are in turn able to advance, if more slowly due to an often much shorter lifespan. There was still a constant threat, but it always was away from the villages, and more predictable. With enough time there was writing and philosophic ponderings in both societies. With this came the eventual curiosity of one side for the other, and the eventual scientific studies into the society of the prey populations by predators who hungered for knowledge, and eventually later similar studies with many promises of safety and courtesy by learned minds of the prey species as well.
Further on there are cases of inter-trading and much more frequent pursuit of learning by interested kinds in an environment free of the fear of becoming someone's meal. If you could become a successful businessman or work your way into scholarly circles you were safe from being some predator's food as long as you didn't do anything stupid in one of their cities like wander around alone at night. It was the lowest class prey that had to go out to gather food for themselves or others that ended up in the bellies of the predators.
This gradual intermingling led to the earliest laws eventually being enacted that offered prey some protections upon entering one of the cities. There were already all sorts of laws related to predator society, and now many of those protections could be granted to prey, and if they had the right leverage or assets, those protections could extend outside of the city walls, too.
Much further into the future. as prey populations kept growing unchecked due to the population limits enforced on predators not keeping up with the rapidly breeding prey, the first laws actually mandating the culling of prey came about after some cities of prey began starving. It was every predator's responsibility to help keep their populations from growing any higher, and there were periods where increased breeding was even allowed for predators to further curtail the prey populations that had spread to fill great areas of land all over the continent even as the predator cities hardly grew at all in comparison.
A join effort was eventually made with cooperation by the leaders of prey cities in which every person was to be identified and marked in a place of residence so that there were records for everyone, predator and prey alike. Those that resisted were wiped out by well armed and trained armies from predator cities. Instead of the ever present fear of being hunted in the wilds while foraging, all prey now had a distinct time limit on their lives. The faster they bred, the sooner the limit would be reached, with the oldest of the prey being culled as food, with exceptions being made due to pregnancy or being a person of importance, such as a business owner, government official, or engaged in scholarly pursuits. The prey themselves were very eager to ensure the rule was enforced when someone else would be chosen at random of any age if the one whose time was up fled or hid away. It became a responsibility and point of honor to go to one's death with pride.
This mandate would continue all the way into modernized society, where there was not even a distinction between cities of predator and prey any more, and where there was virtually no fear of walking alone among predators, because everyone was guaranteed prey to eat, and the prey complied because it was the only way to control their numbers as well as erase the daily fear from their lives. Eventually, in a much debated vote, the mandate would be extended to cover every species, predator and prey alike, because it could not be argued that there was any reason other predators should actually be exempt from feeding the populations as well. It could not be argued that it would allow for a larger population of younger, more productive predators if this were to happen, and there was a very real risk of rioting by the massively larger prey populations if it did not pass. The only way it was able to happen , however, was with the stipulation that the madate would not affect any predators unless they were born after a certain future date.
And that is my concept of how vore would happen in a modern and civilized society. When someoe's time is up they are consumed by another predator, and everyone will end up in another's belly sooner or later.
Eventually you'd expect some species/tribe to gain some local power and keep it, but I think there would be such an overlapping demand on land and resources by various species that for it to be stable for any period of time, it would -have- to be interspecies, and either it would make some provision for carnivorous species, or it would become a target of carnivorous species and solve the problem either way.
Something else to consider is that our feelings on death/murder are not the same as they were 500 years ago, and presumably different than they would be if cannibalism hadn't been a taboo/eating sapients was normalized. People might -expect- some violence in society. They may expect that old age is a terrible way to die, and that once they'd had had a chance to breed it was only a matter of time before they ended up in somebody's belly.
What it really rises out of anyhow is this mixture of human and animal in furry. To be honest I see just as many problems with a furry society as I see with a vore society, and I think one naturally evolves out of the other if we are really mixing the human and animal elements and not just giving them an animal appearance; we're mixing human and animal society as well, and the natural society is the food chain. Human society even mirrors that, I think it's not too difficult to see the economic system as being a nonfatal foodchain. Not hard to imagine it developing into a time where, say, people mix themselves with animals, only to find that the artificial bodies themselves have a raw material value that can be bought and consumed for the right price.
But anyhow, mainly I think most of the discussion around the topic is too anthropocentric. I never liked it when there's a mixture of people and animals physically, but not psychologically or culturally. I'd rather think of it in terms of "If nature were a society, how would it function." And I think there are a lot of answers to that question that get thrown out over politically correct fears about human rights and equality that completely ignore thousands of years of animalistic brutality exhibited by the human race. Our civilized society is really just an illusion maintained for the sake of those few at the top who benefit from the masses.
One idea I have had, is that you have basically two races based on caste system where one caste consists of small worker units with short life spans and low intelligence (another problem with the discussion, why do we always assume that the prey would be smart or have any impulse for rebellion, rather than being totally domesticated), with a high sex drive that keeps them distracting and keeps the population high and turning over at a quick rate, and a low number group of large predators who serve as a warrior caste and feed on the multitudinous and dim workers, who have had their fear mechanisms removed through domestication/breeding (maybe they are even made voraphiles). So there's a protection element to justify the predators. Food supply needs to be factored in as well -- just as in nature, the prey are capable of eating basic foods, like a basic grass/grain crop, that the predators can't eat directly, so they rely on the prey to convert the food source into energy (protein) that they would need to maintain their defensive bodies.
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/11025310/
I've never really bought this idea in whatever form it crops up. It raises the sort of 'end-of-self' questions you also get from teleportation (ie; getting atomised and reformed elsewhere still 'killed' you). The clone with the memories of its genetic predecessor is an exact duplicate, but just that - a duplicate. The original prey is still dead. I first came across this idea as a side-plot in Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga. In that universe, humans rarely died at all thanks to a 'rejuvenation' kind of science. However, if a human was killed, he would be 're-lifed' in a new, young body with all the memories that had been uploaded from a chip in his brain. A problem arose when one character got re-lifed whilst his original self was actually still alive.
Also, the cloning idea does give rise to a kind of 'Peter Pan' problem. If the clone keeps coming out set at a certain age, say as a young adult, the duplicates never get older. This may create the oddity of having young adult clones of someone that originally died many decades ago.
Just some thoughts, do ask or poke if I don't make sense. I enjoyed reading your essay on this subject.
You can get functional immortality from cloning, or from transporters. It's not a big problem in most settings because cultures with that level of technology probably have some sort of immortality already. 83
I'd say to go with a mix.
Have the Mwee setting with reformation to where the prey can have thier memory of the event wiped if it was unwilling.
Also include death row inmates being raffeled off to those preds who'd rather not see thier meal up and running the next day same goes for the military deal.
Include that any prey killed in an accident or from old age can be sold to the meat markets. Like an organ donor type thing where the prey can choose in life whether they want to be eligable for it when they die.
All I can think about are the adds you'd find on Craige's list, hahaha. "Single male wolf looking for a tasty bunny, will pay said bunny $100 per meal" or "Full figured mare looking to be swallowed and sexed, male dragons prefered". X3
Another "fun" idea I've had is a world where non-sentient animals are the prey, but magic or science can be used to imprint full intelligence onto them. Some people could do this to animals just for kicks, others could do it to make the hunt more interesting. If the process is temporary, you don't even have to worry about them getting lose and organizing.
In a non-reformation setting;
Preds and Prey would start off living together, prey holding the lower classes of perhaps a feudal system with the predators at the top. This would go on for as long as Prey didn't revolt but they eventually would.
When this happens, not all preds would be killed but would be run out of towns and cities.
Preds would then form gangs or clans of roaming raiders. -Their numbers can't get too big and they wouldn't deplete a town entirely because they are always on the move.
Essentially you have a setting where there are hundreds of towns or small cities with fortifications, linked by roads over-which armoured convoys travel. You then get raiders appearing suddenly, attacking by surprise and capturing prey they need/want.
The predators would probably be physically larger/stronger so you get something akin to viking raids.
In a reformation setting it would likely depend on the setting.
It would be limited and legal only in places where that magic applies, presumably the same for if technology was used.
If reformation were "natural" -in that, if eaten you reform, if killed another way you do not and if being reformed "restores to factory settings" as it were and heals illnesses, cancers, injuries automatically while preserving the being themselves, the setting could evolve into one where doctors routinely devour their patients if they are mortally wounded or ill without infectiousness.
This could be taken further; predatory species could perhaps be immune to most prey illnesses and would then become doctors, carers, guards etc out of necessity.
There would be enough sick creatures to sustain predators and enough preds that they could take a few days off and still have enough to cure prey (or even other preds)
there is an interesting setting my friend cooked up you might want to look at too http://profile.aryion.com/profile/R.....olt_University it has a very thought out system for a society based around vore
Frankly two of the ways you mentioned do stand out to me, reformation as in the control of the character, and reformation but out of the control of them: Frankly I am rather fascinated by how that one detail, who is in control of the reforming, can make such a big difference. I understand how it could also, that single difference can mean the change from only a few, maybe only one or two close friends, being predators to you, as opposed to having to run and hide from anything remotely half a step above you in the food chain.
However, the reformation being out of control of the characters, does not immediately eliminate all chances of some willing vore occurring, or of a certain pred and a certain prey creature meeting up to engage in the act on numerous occasions. Frankly I think that in a non-controlled reformation scenario there exists a huge possibility for diversity.