Anyone else uncomfortable with mind control all of a sudden?

Netori Popeye

Active Member
Sep 7, 2017
787
861
I used to love mind control games like Nano-control, but now I can't play them without feeling a bit icky. Feels like a worse version of rape since you're removing their agency and personal autonomy. I know it's just a fantasy so I'm not saying you're a bad person if you enjoy it, I'm just wondering if anyone else feels the same way.
 

bethrezen0

Member
Jan 27, 2022
156
210
I never understood the appeal of this kink anyways. Mind-control, hypnosis, i would also compare it to sleep sex fetish. And i find it incredibly boring as a concept. Not turned off by it, but would prefer if it was without those things when i see something with these kinks in it.
 

woody554

Well-Known Member
Jan 20, 2018
1,275
1,616
I've always felt weird about them so can't really relate. but sometimes that's the exact reason why a mind control story interests me.

like with horror it's the negative feelings we look for. the second a horror movie doesn't scare or disgust you it becomes just a boring movie.
 
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balitz Method

Active Member
Jan 30, 2018
760
1,107
Never liked it. It's both a lazy way to justify a bunch of skeev behavior and nearly the opposite of what I like in erogames. Hypnosis bypasses the character's personality and trivializes them into a fuckhole. As far as degredation-play goes that's incredibly boring on top of being a really pathetic sort of rapey.

Not that a mind control game -couldn't- be interesting, but all the ones I've seen are just hypnotizing girls into acting slutty or hypnotizing guys into acting like slutty girls.
 

Pretentious Goblin

Conversation Conqueror
Nov 3, 2017
7,792
6,590
Yeah, it's another way of dominating someone against their will. Though I don't see it as worse (more traumatic) than rape. Unless the person knows their agency is being sapped away and they can't do anything to stop it.
 

balitz Method

Active Member
Jan 30, 2018
760
1,107
Knowing what's happening as their agency is being sapped is actually one of the more interesting avenues for mind control. That's treading one of those lines between horror and eroticism.
 
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Orgitas

Well-Known Member
Jan 5, 2023
1,986
6,676
Half the reason people like AVNs is because they can fantasize about the stuff they can't/won't do in real life. A great thing about AVNs is that you can also quit them and get a different one if it isn't to your taste. My "ick" are average looking MCs with the intellect of a pet dog who can't, for the life of him, think rationally. Which, sadly, is a vast majority of AVNs out there. How I long for a decently written MC and well designed visually.
 

baneini

Well-Known Member
Jun 28, 2017
1,936
2,988
Hypnosis, aphrodisiacs, love potions, brainwashing etc. are writing tactics that usually remove agency and you generally want agency for exciting interactions. Same thing with rape, rapes just not exciting on its own.
It's possible to use non-con tactics in a way that have implications in the rest of the story that are interesting. If you have the female make the initial decisions that lead to non-con scenarios and thats embarrassing, builds relationships, enables further scenes or whatever later its fine. You just take a step back in the chain of events to enable agency.

If you have male protag and you're already playing a harem game where literally all women are objects that exist to be fucked there's not even an illusion that mind controlling them would be bad, but those games can be boring from the outset.

The biggest turn off for me is simply seeing that the author doesn't have the ability to write meaningful scenarios that naturally lead to sexy situations and the mind control is a short cut used to alleviate underlying writing issues. Very common in jap games.
 

NRFB

Hi (。・ω・)ノ゙
Game Developer
Feb 14, 2020
303
626
Hi, I've written thousands and thousands of words about mind control before and am now going to ramble here.

I think it's important to keep some amount of mental distinction between mind control as a plot element and mind control as a convenience.

In the case of the former, yeah, it probably should be disturbing the more you think about it. If a story/setting has mind control in it and takes itself in any way seriously, it very quickly approaches the zone of "the most fucked up things you could ever do to a person". Any setting/story that has mind control being possible in any repeatable form SHOULD have to contend with a whole lot of questions about how things haven't already descended into an authoritarian hellscape ruled by the most morally depraved and least respecting of personal autonomy (like real life) yet.

Interestingly this is actually something that I kinda respect in Harry Potter's worldbuilding (yes I have read other books this is just an easy example). The mind control spell is an unforgivable crime, and when it was at the peak of rampancy you had huge amounts of problems like not being able to trust anyone because they might be controlled by a bad guy or how people could avoid consequences for previous actions by asserting they were controlled and there was no way to prove it. Of course then you start thinking about it didn't actually come up that much over the actual course of the events in the story itself and other harry potter setting problems like how memory charms somehow AREN'T similarly unforgivable despite being longer lasting and even worse in some ways and blah blah blah anyway moving on from the mid as hell wizard book for children.

The point is that mind control when taken as a serious plot element should have a MASSIVE impact on any story that contains it, but it doesn't HAVE to if it's made within a context where everyone is willing to suspend disbelief on things. It should be a lot easier to do that when you're talking about the much more common type of mind control used in porn.

Rather than being a major plot element, mind control often ends up as a story telling convenience that is used to make a character act out of character without having to go through preliminary steps to make those actions actually make sense.

So like, hypnosis is a real thing, but it's very complicated. It's definitely never going to make someone instantly ahegao and suck their way through a forest of dicks. Doujin artists aren't going to care about that though, they're still going to have their faceless bald males pull up the shady hypnosis app on their phone within the first few pages so that they can get to the content people actually picked up the book to see and can save money on print costs. They're never going to have to fully justify the existence of that app or explain the wide scale implications of it existing, and nobody minds. It's just the nature of the media being presented. Everyone understands what's going on, and picking at it too much isn't going to make anyone happy, so why bother?

I'm not trying to say "oh it's just porn, just turn your brain off and enjoy", but more like "Is the mind control being presented in this story actually meant to be thought about?" If the answer is yes and it then makes you uncomfortable, that may very well be the point. On the other hand if the answer is no and it still makes you uncomfortable, are you sure you even want to be reading the story at all?

Basically, there's a whole gradient of the mixing of seriousness/sexiness of mind control in fiction. Not all of it is sexy, but not all of it is meant to be fucked up either. Everyone should have their own comfort level, but having a level of "no mind control at all" seems unnecessarily squeamish to me.

I am a little biased though.
 

EvolutionKills

Well-Known Member
Jan 3, 2021
1,048
3,314
Yeah, it's another way of dominating someone against their will. Though I don't see it as worse (more traumatic) than rape. Unless the person knows their agency is being sapped away and they can't do anything to stop it.
Aww man, Johnny Silverhand would have some very unkind words for you.

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Orgitas

Well-Known Member
Jan 5, 2023
1,986
6,676
Yeah, hypnosis doesn't actually leave you with out agency. It won't make you do anything you won't ordinarily do. It may make you more suggestible but there is a hard line. The folk who get up on stage and start barking like a dog are just as likely to do it with out the hypnosis.
 

Crichton

Member
Aug 5, 2018
440
396
I also used to enjoy it, not so much anymore. It's honestly more boring than "ick" (not to imply i'm into "exciting" stuff now.)

The total removal of emotions or control is a no go. It's closer to snuff than it is domination I say, even if they do go back to normal. Changing them a bit with a maguffin still works for me tho.
 

Guntag

Active Member
Donor
May 3, 2017
642
783
I used to love mind control games like Nano-control, but now I can't play them without feeling a bit icky. Feels like a worse version of rape since you're removing their agency and personal autonomy. I know it's just a fantasy so I'm not saying you're a bad person if you enjoy it, I'm just wondering if anyone else feels the same way.
They are game characters, they don't have agency, mind control or not. The game's author is forcing them to have sex with you. Do you really think you could score with all those hot women otherwise ?
 
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