I learned that the reason pillow-shading is a problem is because light doesn't smoothly blend over the whole surface, the blending comes from the scale of the light source. With interior lighting it would be smooth but with a tiny circle like the sun you get a much sharper edge on the shadows. I'll try to get the shading sorted out better in future, fur and skin has more tones than is just caused by light and shadow, there's complex interactions I might have been doing wrong this whole time. Small steps for now.