The Struggle Is Real: An Underrated Part of Vore?

[Vigilante_2470]

One thing I've found when perusing work and letting the rabbithole take me where it will, is that I REALLY enjoy vore the most when there's not merely an appropriate scale or demeanor, but like in all good stories... when our hero(?) must overcome and struggle.

Now, this goes without saying for prey, provided it's unwilling... but I'm actually surprised how seldom it's applied to predators. Oh sure, the process might not be short, but usually the pred has almost no issue whatsoever dragging their guest down with confidence, even ease. It comes off as inevitable.

Personally, I love it most when there's a struggle on BOTH sides. The prey, fighting, wriggling for their life, and the pred, perhaps desperate from starvation, stubbornly determined or even blindly vengeful as they fight not only to keep the prey from escaping... but to keep them in the first place. Maybe they don't usually swallow prey whole and alive, or have never done such a thing but are single-mindedly inspired to try by hate or circumstance. They risk choking to death, their throat pains, tears well, but they work and swallow, maybe even using fingers to stuff them down until at last they can breathe again. Maybe they even need to pause after an attempt and steel themselves as they work out how to do it.

But ultimately they succeed, dragging them down to the depths, heady with oxygen and adrenaline as they marvel and celebrate at their accomplishment, or the satisfaction of having so defeated the subject of their punishment or revenge. They didn't even know they could pull it off, yet the reality sits heavy in their stomach, the prey tucked under their skin to stay. Elation unknown, satisfaction beyond reckoning, and all THEY can do from within is rock around and whine.

I'll list a few notable examples, but sadly there's rarely any tag associated this. I think from the picture I just painted you can tell it really works on me. How about you?

https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php? ... 8d8c81acde
https://aryion.com/g4/view/395152

[Randomdude5]

I agree with you, it would be nice if there was more vore that had this in it. One of my more specific vore kinks is the first time male pred lacking confidence eating his first girl. Edit I like both willing and unwilling prey with the pred struggling to eat them. They have different tone/mood tho. Here is my favorite pred struggle with willing vore https://aryion.com/g4/view/479079 it is a part 1 and hasnt been finished yet

[stearwing]

I'm running a 1200kg carnivorous reptile with bioelectric cells all along his tail. The idea of physical struggle is about as unfamiliar as the idea of eating people for psychological reasons like "revenge" or "punishment".
With that in mind, in a world of firearms and smartphone cameras every hunt must be planned to blindside the prey and avoid or quickly eliminate witnesses. Planning is mental, and so in the context of my pred the struggle is mental. Upside: work harder, not smarter and you get competence porn instead of barely-won victories that are mostly due to luck. Downside: not as many deathrolls.

[Ghrelin]

I love scenes where the pred has a hard time swallowing the prey or keeping them down--or better yet, both. And even if/when they manage it, I like when it's uncomfortable for them. This works especially well for same size, where the size and weight of the prey in their stomach would be enough to continue giving them trouble even after they finally managed to get them in there. Even just having the preds doubt themselves is a welcome change from the usual smug confidence, tbh. We do have a "struggling pred" tag, along with a few other relevant tags, but you just don't see them pop up very often, which is a shame.

[DevourerOfLolis]

This is something I 100% agree with. In fact, it's the lack of this that motivated me to start writing my own stories in the first place. I love the concept of a pred needing to work for his prey! Maybe even have him fail his first few times trying to eat someone until finally he manages to bag his first prey. I would love to read a story like that and plan to write it myself in the future.

[Skeiron]

I agree with this as well. I find that when the outcome of the scene is presented to be (relatively) uncertain, it adds a lot to the tension and the eventual enjoyment at the conclusion of the scene. Some of my favourite setups include an overconfident pred who bites off more than they can chew (figuratively speaking, in the sense of Soft Vore at least ) and has to work to get the prey down. These types of scenes, and the other scenes mentioned in the thread, are seemingly quite a rare find.

However, like the OP mentions, I think that the main reason for the apparent scarcity has to do with the relevant tags being underused. For example as of right now, searching the gallery for "struggling pred" tag yields 20 results, whereas "struggling prey" yields 27 pages of results, and the generic "struggling" tag has many more than that. Certainly many of these works will feature a struggling pred as well, but are just not tagged as such.

There is also the issue of having multiple tags describe the same sort of things things, making the artist / taggers unsure which to use and fragmenting the tag search results. For example: fighting prey, fighting back, overconfident pred, difficulty, difficulty swallowing, hard to swallow, struggling to swallow, resistance, struggling prey inside, and so on. Some of these tags have just one associated work, and some works have several of these tags, but searching just one of these is guaranteed to miss some results. One solution is to tag every work with every similar tag, but this leads to a large numbers of tags on works (other examples of ambiguous tags are Macro/Micro & Size Difference, or Unwilling & Non-consensual, etc).

One possible solution is to have advanced tag filters that matches some quantity of a list of tags. For example, a tag search may look like [At least one of: struggling pred, difficulty swallowing, prey fighting back] and yield all relevant results this way. But this would require some development time to implement. For now the best solution, other than going out and making art yourself that features this , is to just tag where you find it and make it easier for others to look for it. When a tag gains more widespread use, it may also incentivise artists to tag the works themselves as well.

[Tassie]

I think most of my work falls into that 'overcoming' sort of thing, inevitably with the predator winning, but I'm only a writer, sorry.
Even then, sometimes, I feel like I bite into more than I can swallow with my writing.


What would be a good thing to call this sort of thing so we can try to get the word out of what to call it?

[ScrambleandClick]

Now, this goes without saying for prey, provided it's unwilling... but I'm actually surprised how seldom it's applied to predators. Oh sure, the process might not be short, but usually the pred has almost no issue whatsoever dragging their guest down with confidence, even ease. It comes off as inevitable.

Personally, I love it most when there's a struggle on BOTH sides. The prey, fighting, wriggling for their life, and the pred, perhaps desperate from starvation, stubbornly determined or even blindly vengeful as they fight not only to keep the prey from escaping... but to keep them in the first place. Maybe they don't usually swallow prey whole and alive, or have never done such a thing but are single-mindedly inspired to try by hate or circumstance. They risk choking to death, their throat pains, tears well, but they work and swallow, maybe even using fingers to stuff them down until at last they can breathe again. Maybe they even need to pause after an attempt and steel themselves as they work out how to do it.

That's something I like a lot too, even when running highly competent predators. Which in this case means predators DO have military experience and the anatomical gear to make predation more tactically viable. What I usually do when roleplaying these sorts of scenarios is...

1. Figure out what anatomy structures the predator has to achieve the feat
2. Figure out what anatomy weaknesses the predators has
3. Figure out what non-anatomy skills the predator has to make up for their anatomical downsides
4. Repeat the same steps, except for the prey

Now taking your above scenario idea into account, I can envision something like this happening? Correct me if I'm wrong. (Will use DnD spells to sketch out a scenario example)

• Predator is so angry at a certain person for wronging them
• Predator wants to erase said person like the way said person erased things valuable to them
• Predator suddenly has idea of wanting to eat this person
• Predator takes some off days from their normal job to practice Enlarge/Reduce on some test food items
• Predator tries to swallow a food item to make sure they can do it safely, but realizes how difficult it is to swallow a piece of cake (or insert whatever soft food that should be easy to swallow)
• Predator keeps doing it anyway to try to stretch out their digestive tract as much as possible for the big course
• Predator is now finally prepped for the hunt
• Predator and prey fight! Whatever the hunt fight looks like depends on the characters
• Predator manages to cram prey in the middle of the fight shrunken down, trying as hard as they can to not let go of the spell because if they do, it means the pred's deader than dead
• And swallowing the prey is still painful because it's just a tad larger than any of their practice items
• At the end of the day, they exhausted all of their magic, but... They won? They won. They finally took their vengeance!