SecretBaboon wrote:Vore is usually just a step away from being full-on horror. Yes, you can be turned on by something that you're afraid of, but that's not the case with everyone. Someone who has never seen anything related to vore in any capacity and then sees it for the first time, I'm willing to bet their initial reaction isn't gonna be "I'm very turned on right now", and more likely "that person is gonna die in a very graphic way".
Calling something "vore" automatically has sexual intonations, since that's the name of a fetish. The idea of eating someone can be used as a trope to advance a story with no sexual attachments at all, but then it's not "vore". It's just a storytelling facet.
In a similar vein, there are some real-life examples of humans partaking in what can be considered vore, although it's in a rather metaphorical sense most of the time. With Christianity, the idea of communion is "taking the body and blood of Christ". Even though it's usually just wafers and wine, the concept is rather vore-like. I would guess that even Christian voraphiles who partake in communion wouldn't see it as something sexual.
TL;DR: Describing something as "vore" gives it sexual tones, but the act of consuming someone whole doesn't always qualify as vore.
Your post reads like a response to someone in the thread, but I'm not quite sure to whom—the OP's post from 2 years ago seemed to imply the initial question was addressed to vorarephiles, not just whether any old person can watch vore without being aroused.
As for the rest of your post, I definitely see it from a different perspective, more in line with some of the others in this thread: as a vorarephile who felt weird genital feelings from cartoon characters being swallowed whole far before puberty, any depiction of a living creature being eaten alive counts as vore to me since it triggers that same sexual physiological response. When a story uses the trope of people being eaten alive to advance their story without intending for it to be erotic content, it is still a distraction for me, pitting my rise in arousal against the strength of the story's immersion.
Even concepts related to vore, like eating wafers and calling it a prophet's body, or draining the blood from someone via leech or vampire, or popping peoples' souls or essence into the mouth like candy, or even creatures being sucked up by a vacuum or couch cushions or a shower drain, can trigger arousal in some vorarephiles for that resemblance to traditional vore.
Something qualifies as vore to me when it is a depiction or conception of the consumption of the living, full stop. Whether the creator of that instance of consumption intended for it to be erotic or explicitly labeled it vore has no bearing as to whether I would be aroused by it, so I find it hard to relate to vorarephiles who express the ability to "turn on" for sexually-toned images of live-prey consumption and "turn off" to watch certain episodes of Futurama and Attack on Titan like a normal person.