Posted by Loomfox 2 months ago Report

Honestly though its interesting as to how much I love your feral fox art, its actually really interesting to see a natural fox behavior be taken as a form of cruel pleasure

Posted by foxyoreos 2 months ago Report

Oh, I don't think the Forest is a good example of natural predation at all! :3

I don't just mean in terms of preds like Mal having sex with prey, or in terms of preds like Sam, but in every part of it - real predation is messier - not just because it's hard vore, but because the lines between predators and prey are much blurrier, the risks that animals take on are much different, and the mental states of the animals involved are not really comparable.

I say this as a vegan who thinks that animals like foxes meet the definition of sentience, so no shade against foxes (am foxo myself) - but wild foxes are not.. well.. intelligent. X3

A natural fox can't be cruel, because it doesn't have the capacity for moral judgement. It's not smart enough to be kind or cruel.

I think a lot of vore stories and a lot of conversations about the natural side of predation set up environments where animals are heavily anthropomorphized and then try to retrofit vore onto those scenarios. The Forest isn't meant to be a commentary on whether predation is moral or not in the natural world, it's saying in a world where animals were intelligent and could understand each other and were smart enough to have real moral discussions - in that scenario, all of this would be unbelievably cruel.

There's a longer deep-dive I could maybe write about that, in that when the Forest tries to critique vore, I'm sometimes thinking about real-world systems of oppression between humans that get excused because "they're just a part of life." And the Forest's perspective is that those kinds of arguments are complete bullshit.

But because of that it's not really trying to imitate nature. There are a lot of details I simplify to help with creating a tone - and some of them are obvious like the fact that my foxes can get enough nutrients without killing if they want to. But some of them are less obvious, like the fact that most of my fatal preds don't starve to death or get injured going after prey or regularly kill each other or that all of my prey wouldn't also eat any dead body that they find without hesitation.. I don't know. I think that mainstream media has a very romanticized idea of what a natural food chain looks like that is not very realistic, and I think a lot of even touted "realistic" stories like Animals of Farthing Woods go with this very simplified version of predation (which is fine) but then mix that with anthropromorphism in a way that doesn't necessarily examine any of the implications in more than a very shallow way - and then get lauded as more realistic because of that lack of examination?

So there's a little bit of an interrogation of that idea in the Forest, or at least in my motivation for writing it. This fox is cruel because they're not just a dumb animal, and neither are the mice that they're killing - the mice dying here are no different than the mice playing hide and seek and joking around with Sam. <3

It's late for me, so I am very rambly fox though. >w< Apawlogies for a long aside.

These things are very difficult for me to put into words, which is part of why I like drawing the Forest so much - I think, yes, it's often very silly porn, but it's still communicating an idea better than I'm able to communicate it with words.

Again, apawlogies for the long response, whenever I try to dig into things like this I'm just reminded of how bad I am at talking about it X3