Recently, I made a list of my Top "Pet Human" Moments, during which, at various intervals, I promised to return to certain topics, and to possibly explain how something like that came to be combined with vore.

This is that other part.

There are two things you really need to know about me before we get to the list. The first is that I have an older brother. And the second is that my older brother, for as long as I have been alive, has believed the following:

#1: In this world, you are either a winner or a loser.
#2: Your position is assigned to you at birth.
#3: Your position is NEVER allowed to change.
#4: In the instance that a designated winner loses, or a designated loser wins, the entire contest is nullified in its entirety and forbidden to speak of ever again.
#5: EVERYTHING is a contest.
#6: HE was the designated winner of the family, and I, his little brother, was the designated loser.

I could write a whole fucking book about how this defined our teen years, and even our adulthood all the way up to present day -- all the shit he did in the name of "beating" me, or all the horrendous things he did because I "beat" him. But the important thing for this list is how, during his "overactive imagination" years, all he wanted to do was imagine that he was the lead -- the designated winner -- of whatever was on TV last, declare that I -- the designated loser -- was the villain, and beat the shit out of me.

"LET'S PLAY WRESTLING!"
"No, I don't wanna' play wrestling!"
"I'M OLDER! WE'RE PLAYING WRESTLING! I'M HULK HOGAN!" *WHAM!*

If you're wondering, he lost all interest in wrestling right after the first time he saw Hulk Hogan lose. And lost interest in beating me up (but not in turning everything into a fucking competition) after I worked out how I could throw him over my shoulder.

But long before either of those happened, I learned to really empathize with the "designated losers" of the arts -- the characters who, in movies, TV and video games, were always being beaten up as well.

Many of which, you'll notice, were vorish in nature. So it's through empathy, I have no doubt, that my vore fixation began.

So anyway, that and the previous list -- those are things that combined and ultimately led to a pelipper swallowing three human children (and five nonhuman children) and saying that he was their new dad.

For clarification, I filtered out any villainous character with which the audience was intended to sympathize. So no Great Wolf Sif, Ice King, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sniper Wolf, Nox, BlackWarGreymon, Fazbear animatronics, and God only knows how many Final Fantasy villains.

I also filtered out villains who eventually turn good, or have the option of being turned good and/or spared. So no Nightmare Moon, Prince Zuko, Mr. Freeze, Asriel Dreemurr, Dr. Octopus, Snowflake the tiger, etc.

#10: Wile E. Coyote

Once again, starting with a very obvious inclusion. And the reason why he's #10 should be fairly obvious too: He does it all to himself. The Road Runner rarely ever does anything directly to him -- it's just a result of his own horrendous luck.

That said, there's another reason he's only #10: Because it appears we are very much not alone in our sympathy. More recent Loony Tunes' properties have given him a break, and an upcoming movie even promises to focus on him filing a lawsuit against the company whose products always failed him. But even when they do go easier on him, they still don't show mercy to him. That's why he wasn't exempted.

#9: Gazimon (Season 1)

In the first season of Digimon, everything was clear-cut good vs. evil, with the virus digimon all being designated villains. But very rarely did they ever let us see any of the virus digimon below the champion level. The most notable exception was Demidevimon, who I did consider, but was ultimately complicit in the evil mechanisms right up until the very end. The gazimon, on the other hand, seemingly existed for no purpose except to suffer. It didn't surprise me at all that, during the first of many complete canon reboots, the gazimon were among the first virus types to be shown having switched sides. Hence why only the Season 1 gazimon were specified, and why they're only #9 on the list.

#8: Lizardon / Pakkun Lizard / Biting Lizard

There are a lot of "cute monster minding their business" I could have picked for this, but the Pakkun Lizard in Secret of Mana is an easy #1. You encounter (and have to fight) them right after they've hatched, the in-game sprites make them look like they're smiling cutely, their one means of attack technically doesn't do damage to you until after damage has been done to them as well (even if it is a straight-up act of vore), and they're mandatory boss fights so you can't even just run passed them.

#7: The Cheetah

Boy does DC / Warner Bros. like to do this character dirty, and not just by always designating her a villain. She's supposed to be Wonder Woman's arch nemesis, and yet, once the rest of the Justice League starts to show up, she immediately becomes a throwaway villain. Even when it looks like they're about to give her a break, such as in the episode from which I got the screenshot, they still had her stick with the real villains just long enough to get killed off.

Even in Injustice, where her nemesis Wonder Woman has become one of the villains, they couldn't let her even enter that "gray area" that so many other heroes and villains wound up in towards the end.

#6: Tom

Yup. Of course he would be on here. And we all know the reasons why: Jerry is often a sadistic asshole, and Tom is usually the middle man -- a cat under orders from humans to catch the mouse or else.

How is he not #1? Well, he has been shown to have a sadistic streak of his own, and the more recent revivals are obviously aware of this and have taken care to create more scenarios in which Tom is the one who sets all of the misery into motion. That, and everyone ahead of him has it either just as rough, or worse.

#5: Shere Khan

"Tera? Who the fuck is that?"

That is Shere Khan, the way he appeared in Mowgli's 4D Jungle Adventure, an abysmal animated short that is still near and dear to my heart for being the one and only version where Shere Khan A) talks, and B) is given a smidgen of respect towards the end.

There was a meme going around for a little bit about how villains become heroes that compared Venom and Magneto, the former of which, it said, was a villain who became a hero because he was popular, while Magneto was a villain who became a hero because, year after year, it just got harder and harder to argue that he was wrong.

Shere Khan is another clear case of the latter. Straight from the beginning, his villainy was a consequence, not of malice or sadism, but of a belief that man was a dangerous evil that would one day kill everyone if left unchecked.

And yet, despite it getting harder and harder with every passing year to argue that he is wrong, even the two adaptations that came out in the 2010s felt the need to kill him off.

What the fuck, Disney?! You felt the need to sanitize the image of Maleficent, the mistress of Hell, but Shere Khan still needed to die?

#4: Sylvester

I put Sylvester above Shere Khan, and used that particular screenshot, to illustrate just how terrible this cat's lot in life is. In that animated short, there was no Tweety, no Speedy Gonzales -- the premises was that the stork accidentally delivered a mouse to Sylvester and his mate, with whom Sylvester eventually bonded and had to spend the rest of it defending him from other cats.

And yet, even at the end of this one -- one of the few opportunities Sylvester was given to play the protagonist -- he still got shafted in the end. Even when he wants to do good, fate still conspires to have him end up getting the villain's treatment.

#3: Team Rocket

Boy, I got very close to excluding this group on the sympathy clause. And it's not just because I wanted to use that screenshot that I didn't. It's because 99.9% of the sympathy for them is fan-generated. While they were eventually allowed to evolve as characters, it was all but mandated that every episode end with them blasting off.

Actually, a big part of what not only put them on this list, but bumped them all the way up to the #3 spot on this list, was how the anime did them dirty in the end. When it was announced that Ash Ketchum's ark would be ending, all expectations were that Jessie, James and Meowth would get a proper sendoff too. I imagined it being something like Ash leading all of the friends and allies he'd ever made in an assault on Team Rocket HQ to end their villainy once and for all, during which Jessie, James and Meowth would finally abandon the syndicate and fly off into the sunset in their Meowth balloon with all of their Pokemon and a big bag of money.

Instead, they got blasted off again, same as every episode before. The closest thing they got to closure was a feeling of being resigned to this fate.

What kept them from going any higher on the list was the fact that they ultimately chose this fate. I blame the writers for this one sucking so hard.

#2: Tai Lung

I wrestled with whether or not to include this one too. He certainly does have a tragic backstory that is very much worthy of sympathy.

But just like Shere Khan, the movie ultimately decided that, in spite of this, Tai Lung had to die.

And the thing for which he died? Nothing. Absolutely fuckall. The big reveal at the start of Act 3 is that the Dragon Scroll -- the thing of alleged great power for which he was locked up for twenty years to ensure that he never obtained -- was blank. They could have just given it to him and the likely result would have been him either thinking it was one final test and getting stuck, or coming to a conclusion that, for all we know, he already had.

We never find out what was going through his mind when he attacked the temple the first time, but it's hard for me not to think that he hadn't had this revelation: "I don't need some crotchety old tortoise to appoint me the Dragon Warrior. I AM the Dragon Warrior. I just need to prove that I am the Dragon Warrior." He may very well have thought the scroll was blank, except that they imprisoned him for twenty years to make sure he didn't get at it.

But with all of this going for him, and even after Po had beaten him senseless, they still felt the need to skadoosh him into oblivion -- an act that tarnishes what would have otherwise been an excellent movie to me.

Okay, just like last time, here are some honorable mentions.

Pinky & The Brain
Similar to Wile E., their folly is seemingly just fate being an asshole. But they're trying to take over the world, and some of their plans have been straight-up genocidal, so even little kid me couldn't wish anything other than that they would stop.

Iago
The Return of Jafar lays out what I long suspected: That Iago really had no choice except to be a henchman. But it also sets up his heroic redemption (much to the chagrin of my asshole older brother), so he got an exemption.

Lord Shen
I can totally relate to being neglected or worse for being weak, but all that sympathy goes out the window once he let prophesy seal his fate by committing genocide. How many stories have there been of people meeting their fate specifically because they tried to avoid it?

Pitch Black
The Boogyman himself. Who was very likely intended to be a Guardian. But unlike the other Guardians, children feared him instead of loving him. Of course, that was all his own doing. He could have been the Guardian against fear. Instead, he became his agent. And he did so quite deliberately.

Lotso
I actually didn't have much sympathy for this character at all... But he's relevant to something I'm going to discuss with my #1 entry, so I feel like this is an obligatory inclusion.

Any wild animal from any medium

This is most prevalent in video games, but it sometimes shows up in movies and TVs too. And I hate it every single time: When they try to "keep the action going" by throwing a few wild animals at the protagonist to slaughter. Especially if it's an endangered species.

And on a somewhat related note...

#1: Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed

What puts them ahead of Team Rocket and Tai Lung is that, for them, there was quite literally no other option. Team Rocket had the option to leave the syndicate and/or stop trying to capture Pikachu, but chose not to. Tai Lung could have just walked the other way after escaping from the prison and never returned to the Valley again, but chose not to.

The hyenas were destined to land in their villainous role from birth. The "Circle of Life" shafted, not only the three of them, but their entire species. The lions ruled "everything the light touches" from Pride Rock while the hyenas could only scavenge in the elephant graveyard. Their options were to either fight the power, starve, or start eating each other.

The closest thing they get to any justice is after Scar betrays them and they tear him apart. Yet even then, this occurs just before Pride Rock is engulfed in flames -- a strong implication that they and God only knows how many other members of their cackle burned alive, like they were demons who dragged Scar screaming into Hell just like Dr. Facilier and his friends on the other side.

You wanna' know what inspired me to eventually take an interest in mascots? Stumbling across some footage of these three as meet-and-greet characters at a Disney theme park and watching some little girl kick one of them from behind and then run away. If I had been there and seen that or anything similar, I likely would have scolded her, and then (if her Karen mother didn't try to pick a fight with me before then) asked, rhetorically "Would Disney allow them to be here at all if they weren't reformed?"

The other that I alluded to with Lotso was a video in which he was a meet-and-greet where the kids were all scared of him and the parents had to keep assuring their kids "No, no, it's a different Lotso" or that "he's very sorry for what he did". That was what gave me the idea to possibly write something that spelled out the nature of costumed characters without breaking the immersion: Sympathy for the villains and for the people with the unfortunate task of portraying them.

Sympathy for the hyenas quite literally changed my life trajectory. That alone makes them my #1.