Early Bird Sneak Peek: “Uber Pussy”!

(This story was actually posted on 9/16, but for bookkeeping purposes I’m still posting the sneak peek. I’m not going to crosspost it anywhere, and feel free to ignore it if you’ve already seen the story.)

Hi all! It’s time for another Early Bird Sneak Peek, where I share a glimpse at the story my lucky Early Bird patrons will be enjoying next Saturday thanks to their pledges at my Patreon page! Of course, if you’re not an Early Bird patron, you’ll still get a story next week–“Questions and Answers”, teased previously, has already been submitted to the EMCSA. But the Early Bird patrons will be getting “Uber Pussy” (MC)!

Another in my series of occasional brainwashing inductions, this one focuses on a particular body part and developing an erotic fixation with it. I’m sure you can guess which one. Here’s a taste:

“Imagine tracing that outline with your hands, following the gentle swell just above the hooded clit, down around the outline of the labia, caressing that channel that leads deeper and deeper into pleasure. The cunt in your mind might be shaved, or it might have a downy coating of hair that tangles delightfully and captures the scent of arousal from the partner you’re envisioning. The pussy lips might be plump and pressed together, making your fingers twitch with the desire to part them, or they may be narrow, giving you a tantalizing hint of what lies within. You can take a little time now to study them, fixing every detail in your consciousness as you let everything else float away into blissful irrelevancy.

“Every detail reminds you of sexual pleasure, from the tiny glistening droplets of musk that cling to the labia and the nest of pubic hair to the flushed, engorged clitoris that peeks out from behind its hood in anticipation of your touch. This is an organ made for pleasure, evolved for it, and it wants everything you have to give it. You can picture it almost as an altar that accepts your offerings of devotion, whether cocks or toys or fingers or tongues, swallowing and surrounding each of them with its powerful clenching muscles, its slick and soaking arousal. You might imagine yourself as small in comparison.

Hope you enjoy it!

Is It Hypnosis? – Part Forty-Six

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I think one of the hardest parts to this particular series where I look at the hypnosis in stories and discuss its realism (and ethical practicability) is determining exactly where the line between “hypnosis” and “mind control actually is. Like, I skipped “Unaffected” for this installment because I felt like a brainwashing signal piped in a flash down the optic nerve was too close to nonsense technology, but I kept “Middle of the Night” where someone is being brainwashed in their sleep by a series of hypnosis files. The demarcation there is a little blurry, but I feel confident I’ve stayed on the right side of it as I tackle these next five stories. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Pink Cloud: This damn well better be both possible and practical, because I spent a good 3000 words showing what it’s like to negotiate a hypnokink scene between two consenting adults before I even started the induction and I’d hate to think I wasted all that time. Make no mistake, this was me very consciously writing a story that I could point to and say, “Hey, you want to see what real-world hypnosis play looks like when practiced ethically? This is a good model for your conduct and behavior. Negotiate, stick to what’s negotiated, and practice good aftercare.” I feel like I absolutely succeeded, and I will hold this up as a good standard-bearer for this series as a whole.

Middle of the Night: And by contrast, this one is both wildly implausible and something that should never be attempted outside of the realms of fantasy. I don’t think you can really do covert brainwashing to someone in their sleep – I certainly do think it’s possible to hypnotize a sleeping person, because we drift in and out of deep sleep several times a night and there would absolutely be times when you were awake enough to absorb the hypnosis but not awake enough to really think about what you were hearing, and I think you absolutely can use that to condition a subject who’s consciously bought into the idea of being programmed in their sleep, but I think hearing it from someone you didn’t already think of in that framework of a relationship dynamic would just wake you the hell up and you wouldn’t be susceptible to that person’s suggestions, either.

And again, even if you did, anything involving truly covert hypnosis is by definition non-consensual. Yes, you can have some fun times with faux-covert hypnosis where someone’s either given you blanket permission to hypnotize them in sneaky ways or where someone’s negotiated a specific scene involving amnesia suggestions and hypnosis they’ve agreed to and chosen to forget, but absent some major special pleading this is not that and Gillian is just gross. (But still, hot for fantasy’s sake.)

Keys to My Heart: And the absurd and nonsensical fantasy hypnosis keeps on coming! Sure, it’s a hot idea to use typing to trick the subconscious mind into thinking it’s getting buy-in from the conscious mind when it’s really not – it’s honestly the same trick Dominants pull whenever they have their submissive repeat what they say or even just cup their chins to move their heads up and down into a nod. Getting someone to agree with something, even if they think they’re just saying it to go along with the flow, is a powerful conditioning tool in the real world and it’s one of the reasons so many hypnotists love double binds – no matter what the subject says, they’re always buying in.

But it’s not this powerful. You can’t just get someone to the point of helplessly masturbating under your command in a single hypnotic session without any kind of initial rapport or consensual agreement on their part, and even if you could you shouldn’t. Just for the record, I am not anything like the writer in this story, it’s not even a teensy tiny bit autobiographical, and this should stay on the page where you can enjoy it as a not-real thing.

You Can’t Look Away: The hypnosis in this story is pretty much real and achievable, don’t get me wrong. But this is that kind of insidious consent violation that really does make me do this kind of blog post, because it’s very easy for me as a fictional writer to set up a scenario where yes, the two (or three, or four, or thirty-seven) characters involved in the story really are into each other and are just too shy to express it until one of them “takes charge” and makes a move without asking. In fiction, that’s hot. And in fiction, that always works out really well because both of the characters are exactly what the writer wants them to be and it’s easy to cheat.

But in the real world, if you assume someone’s as into you as you are into them and you just need to take charge and make the first move (and in this case hypnotize them) you might find that you are, in fact, just very badly misreading things and you’ve just committed sexual assault. Because that other person isn’t a character in your story, they’re a person, and you need to treat them with the respect that people are due. That’s why things like this stay on the page, and why Han Solo is a terrible relationship model but I won’t get into that right now.

Goddamn Trigger: Which is why it’s nice to have a fun, silly, entirely unproblematic relationship between two consenting adults who have made bratting and CNC into a part of their negotiated Master/sub dynamic and who enjoy every part of overcoming entirely mock resistance through entirely real and realistic hypnosis. About the only thing I can ding myself on here is that blog title, and this was before we knew what a shitbird JK Rowling was. (By the sequel she’s changed it to “fursona”, which is I believe the current acceptable vernacular for this kind of joke.) Everything in this story can be done, from drinking bacon soda to watching Critical Role to snacking on leftover Valentine’s Day candy, and everything in it is enjoyable, except perhaps for the bacon soda. But hey, to each their own.

And that’s five more stories! We are not catching up, I don’t think we’re even gaining ground, but that means just more time to spend in this particular fun thought exercise. See you next time for more!

Early Bird Sneak Peek: “I Couldn’t Help It”!

(This story was actually posted on 9/9, but for bookkeeping purposes I’m still posting the sneak peek. I’m not going to crosspost it anywhere, and feel free to ignore it if you’ve already seen the story.)

Hi all! It’s time for another Early Bird Sneak Peek, where I share a glimpse at the story my lucky Early Bird patrons will be enjoying next Saturday thanks to their pledges at my Patreon page! Of course, if you’re not an Early Bird patron, you’ll still get a story next week–“X-Rated”, teased previously, has already been submitted to the EMCSA. But the Early Bird patrons will be getting “I Couldn’t Help It” (MC MD FF MA)!

Bonnie’s been having a little… trouble recently, when it comes to resisting post-hypnotic suggestions. She’s going down a deep rabbit hole for her new Master, sinking into brainwashed obedience and losing track of exactly what was her idea and what she was programmed to do. But when she realizes she sent a powerful hypnotic spiral to her best friend, she knows she’s got to do something to help. Here’s a taste:

Bonnie was lying in bed, her pale, chubby legs spread so wide her ankles dangled over the edges of the queen-sized mattress, her trembling hand resting quietly at last on her sated cunt, when the horrifying enormity of what she’d just done finally hit her. It broke through the drowsy afterglow she felt, pierced the fog of trance that still clung to her muzzy thoughts, and sluiced into her brain like a whole bucket of ice water. Her cloudy blue eyes refocused again on her surroundings as she fumbled around for her phone, desperately hoping that what happened wasn’t really real.

But no. It hadn’t been a horny, sexy daydream that simply popped into Bonnie’s head somewhere around the second hour of edging and repeatedly listening to the hypnosis file that was now officially her masturbatory obsession. She could see the text right there, sent to her oldest friend in the whole wide world almost a solid hour ago. ‘Hey Claire Bear Stare, check this shit out!’ Followed by a link to the exact same video that had gripped and held Bonnie’s mind in an inescapable grasp for almost a solid week now. And followed by a little notification that was just one ominous, terrifying word. ‘Read.’

Bonnie immediately sent a follow-up as fast as her fingers would let her, hoping and praying she was in time even though she knew full well that Claire was sitting at home with nothing better to do than scroll through social media and shit-talk Leslie’s ex on the group chat. There was absolutely no way her friend hadn’t already clicked on that link on the assumption that it probably led to a new TikTok dance video, or some juicy bit of YouTube drama they could cackle about at brunch tomorrow. But it didn’t stop Bonnie’s thumbs from hammering out, ‘Dpmt’ c;ock tjat! Ot’s spam!’ and hitting send before she could even realize her right hand was too tired from hours of masturbation to type properly.

Hope you enjoy it!

The Misogynist Pathology Behind Transphobia

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As you might have imagined from the title of this post, this is going to be something a little bit heavier and more serious than some of the other things I’ve written. First and foremost, if you are not up for a discussion of transphobia, perhaps because it hits close to home for you, I encourage you to skip this and find something else to read. Second, while I’m going to try my best not to put my foot in my mouth, please do assume positive intent in what I’m saying here because I am going to talk about what motivates transphobes and I’d really rather not hear anyone saying things like, “Oh, so you think they have a point?” No. They do not. Let’s get that out of the way right now before the cut.

Early Bird Sneak Peek: “Objects in the Mirror”!

(This story was actually posted on 9/2, but for bookkeeping purposes I’m still posting the sneak peek. I’m not going to crosspost it anywhere, and feel free to ignore it if you’ve already seen the story.)

Hi all! It’s time for another Early Bird Sneak Peek, where I share a glimpse at the story my lucky Early Bird patrons will be enjoying next Saturday thanks to their pledges at my Patreon page! Of course, if you’re not an Early Bird patron, you’ll still get a story next week–“Unison”, teased previously, has already been submitted to the EMCSA. But the Early Bird patrons will be getting “Objects in the Mirror” (MC FF)!

There’s a mirror in the room – not made of glass, but made of another living person whose descent into hypnotic obedience perfectly reflects the woman looking back at them. They’ve also been hypnotized, and the two of them deepen each other elegantly and easily into the most delightful trance… and here’s a taste of that just for you.

The slave in the mirror couldn’t escape. And so of course, neither could Kay.

All she could do was stare into those cloudy blue eyes, so vacant and unfocused as they gazed helplessly back at her. All she could do was watch her own fingers as they moved languidly to caress the soft, lush curves of her pendulous breasts and she moved right along with them. All she could do was smile in sleepy rapture at the sensations of pleasure that each slow, sensuous touch elicited from her own body. The slave in the mirror looked so happy to be hypnotized and brainwashed and compelled to play with her own heavy tits. Kay wanted to be that happy too.

And then she remembered that by definition, she was. When she looked into the mirror, she saw another blue-eyed blonde girl with big tits and a vacuous grin on her bubble-gum pink lips, and even as hypnotized as she was to the very point of disassociation, Kay understood that the slave in the mirror was the same person who was tugging on her nipples until they stood up stiff and proud and tingled with hot, heady bliss. It only seemed like it wasn’t because Kay was in such a deep and profound state of trance that her perceptions were distorted and her thoughts moved with the sluggish laziness of a weak, wriggling kitten. Kay looked in the mirror and saw a slave. Who else could that slave be but her?

Hope you enjoy it!

Liner Notes for August 2023

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It feels a little weird, trying to play catch-up with this blog even as I try to figure out whether it still serves a purpose and how much work I want to put into it when I’ve got so many other creative plates spinning right now… but I know that whatever winds up happening with it, I still want to continue the monthly Liner Notes feature because it’s a nice little bit of comfort writing and I look forward to it every month. So let’s talk about August’s stories, and what exactly went into them to some degree of detail or another, and let the rest worry about itself for a while.

Hail to the Queen: Having said all that… look, IDK, man. Sometimes shit just happens, okay? Sometimes you look at a perfectly innocent song title and think, “Oh, hey, that sounds like something the victor in an epic rap battle might say,” and that leads you to imagine what an epic rap battle between two brainwashed and hypnotized playthings might sound like, and then you’re spending a couple of hours with the RhymeZone website open in another tab while you work your way through a series of freestyles and wonder just how weird all this really is. I like it. I’m proud of it. But I can’t say I can explain it.

You Always Get Your Way: The moment I saw this title, I developed a few different ideas about it almost simultaneously. I knew it was going to be a workplace story, and I knew it was going to be a workplace story about a woman who used sex appeal to manipulate a male boss because unfortunately men frequently treat their female subordinates as sexual objects and many times women need to find ways to use that in their favor simply to avoid being steamrolled over. Someone always getting their way fits into that context very well.

And I knew that because of the “you” in the title, it was going to be about another woman who was frustrated with the first woman’s ability to manipulate their boss with sex, because there are fundamental issues of fairness and equity involved when one person is getting preferential treatment due to social factors and not workplace performance. (I’ll be honest, this is kind of a problem in my own workplace, where we’re being told that it’s necessary to end remote work despite the continuing threat of COVID because glad-handing and schmoozing is just too important to our corporate culture. But I digress.) Obviously, from there I decided the conflict would be resolved through hypnosis, seduction and lesbian sex, because wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if we could solve all our problems that way, and the story flowed naturally from there.

Oct 33: Oh, I loved writing this one. It just poured out of me – as soon as I thought of a world where Spooky Season never ended and Halloween was just the beginning of a perpetual eldritch hellscape, I found more and more little details to add in. Honestly, the only thing that restricted me was the title; knowing that it had only been two days since the calendars refused to change into November left me a tiny bit limited in my ability to describe a fully transformed society. But I loved doing this, I loved everything about it, and I would love to revisit the idea if I ever got the opportunity. This is one of my favorites.

The Joke’s on You: This one came about mainly because I knew I wanted to do another long-form story arc after the conclusion of “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny”, but I also knew that one of the biggest problems with crossovers in real comics is the unfortunate tendency to scope creep – having successfully saved the whole planet in one crossover, you feel like you have to up the ante to the galaxy or the universe or the timestream in the next simply to keep readers’ attention. (Like with ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ – okay, we’ve stopped the destruction of reality, now what do we do for an encore?)

So I consciously decided to go smaller scale, and it was when I was brainstorming how to do it and which character to focus on that I realized that yeah, Azure would have been teleported away to her native reality just like the Punishment Detail, and yeah, she doesn’t really have anywhere to go back to. So she’s lost in a variety of parallel universes, bouncing around like Scott Bakula in ‘Quantum Leap’ or the cast of ‘Sliders’ (or to keep things comic-oriented, like the Exiles) and we’ll be seeing the consequences of that as we go on. And this first one was Mary Pranxter both because the title suggested it and because I just love Mary Pranxter as a character and I always want to do more.

(She’s inspired by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose true stories were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his book ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’. I love the sheer depth that theme can provide to a gimmick villain.)

And so that’s something to remember, something to look forward to, and hopefully something to enjoy as we continue catching up! See you next time!

Early Bird Sneak Peek: “Jet Lagged”!

(This story was actually posted on 8/26, but for bookkeeping purposes I’m still posting the sneak peek. I’m not going to crosspost it anywhere, and feel free to ignore it if you’ve already seen the story.)

Hi all! It’s time for another Early Bird Sneak Peek, where I share a glimpse at the story my lucky Early Bird patrons will be enjoying next Saturday thanks to their pledges at my Patreon page! Of course, if you’re not an Early Bird patron, you’ll still get a story next week–“The Joke’s on You”, teased previously, has already been submitted to the EMCSA. But the Early Bird patrons will be getting “Jet Lagged” (MC FF)!

Audra’s a little jet-lagged after flying from England straight to Los Angeles, and unfortunately her friend’s girlfriend won’t stop talking about how mazy and exhausted it must be making her. Audra’s getting a little bit tired of it all… but she’s also just getting more than a little bit tired. Here’s a taste:

Audra frowned. Perhaps she was simply sensitive to intonation as an actress, but Jan was putting her emphasis in the strangest places when she spoke. She had an oddly monotonous vocal style, so it wasn’t like she raised her voice, but she kept putting stress on the wrong words. ‘Relax and sleep’ surely wasn’t the most important part of that last sentence, was it? “I’d heard that,” she replied, despite her growing disinterest in pursuing the conversation, “but I always thought it was… you know, the kind of nonsense you always hear online. There’s always something new to frighten people with, isn’t there?”

Jan chuckled as if she’d just heard a very small child say something utterly foolish in an effort to sound grown up. “No, this is very real–and it’s happening to us right now, in fact.” She gestured again to the windchimes, as though she’d just put them up and was inordinately proud of their cheery, jangling presence in the window. “Right now, even as you watch those crystals gently turn in the breeze and fill up your eyes with rainbows, you’re getting a dose of blue light. And normally, that would be good. That would be natural. The blue light would tell your body to wake up and enjoy the bright, sunshiny day.” Lord. How did Meadow put up with this woman?

“But our bodies aren’t really made to move so far and so fast that we wind up in the wrong time of day entirely,” Jan continued, seemingly oblivious to Audra’s mental retreat from the entire concept of social interaction. “Your brain is used to sunlight adjusting that mental clock and telling it to wake up, but not to resetting it this drastically with such a small amount of notice. Everything in your head is telling you to sleep, but everything in the outside world is telling you to try so hard to ignore that mazy, drowsy exhaustion and stay awake just a little while longer. And your mind can’t handle that confusion. It gets fuzzy. It gets groggy. It gets so soft and befuddled that you don’t even know whether you’re properly asleep or awake anymore. Everything takes on that strange, dreamy quality, doesn’t it, Audra?”

Hope you enjoy it!

Do Subliminals Work? (Insert Flashing Image Here)

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I was thinking that I might do a blog post on one of the all-time classic mind control television episodes today, whose identity I will not yet reveal because I’ll probably be doing it a few posts down the line, but it occurred to me that I was going to be making claims about the absurd degree of effectiveness to its subliminal messaging and I would have to know a little bit more about the topic to do that. So I went down a little rabbit hole about subliminal messaging and decided that yeah, I should probably just write about that, instead, because it’s pretty interesting in its own right.

The modern myth of subliminal messaging (and let’s not bury the lede here, it is a myth, at least as it’s typically culturally constructed) began in 1957, when a market researcher named James Vicary created a brief panic by announcing that he’d been able to improve the sales of concessions at movie theaters by inserting just one or two frames into every film that said things like, “Eat Popcorn”, and “Drink Coca-Cola”. People freaked out at the notion that their actions could be manipulated by images and ideas implanted below the threshold for conscious detection, bypassing their critical thinking faculties, and several countries preemptively banned the practice of subliminal advertising, but things calmed down considerably when Vicary’s results couldn’t be replicated and he was forced to admit he made the whole thing up.

Another very similar concept wound up entering the cultural consciousness in 1990, when the band Judas Priest was accused of putting “masked” instructions into their music that caused the death by suicide of one fan. (In this case, the masking was described as “backmasking”, where the instructions were inserted as a reverse audio signal that sounded like gibberish to the casual listener, but other forms of masking like low-volume audio or sped-up audio have also been posited to exist and to influence behavior.) Wilson Brian Key, who spent most of his career arguing that images in advertising contained hidden graphics intended to associate the product with basic drives like sex, helped out the plaintiffs in the Judas Priest case but it ultimately foundered when a) they couldn’t demonstrate the existence of any backmasked tracks, and b) they couldn’t demonstrate any kind of statistically significant correlation between Judas Priest album sales and suicide.

And for a long time, that was pretty much where things stood. There were three thresholds for evidence in the hypothesis of subliminal messaging, and researchers couldn’t meet any of them. To wit, 1) Is a subliminal message detectable at all, 2) Does that message influence behavior, and 3) Does it have a greater effect than superliminal messaging? (That is to say, do you get more out of flashing two frames of “Drink Coke” than you do out of a thirty-second Coke ad?)

That third one remains very much in doubt, but thanks to MRI machines and statistical analysis, we do have some interesting answers on the first two. Studies in the 2010s indicated that although a two-frame exposure is not sufficient for the conscious mind to recognize an image presented to them (that is to say, people asked “Did you see a picture of X go by?” answered no better than random chance would anticipate) scientists nonetheless detected brain activity in the visual cortex under those circumstances, and association tests between the stimulus and the exposure did improve on random chance. So if you saw a subliminal image of, say, a diamond, and you were asked to pick out a shape from a batch of pictures, you’d be more likely to pick out a diamond than a circle or a star. So in that sense, it does influence behavior.

Likewise, in a 2006 study, people who were given salty snacks to make them thirsty and shown subliminal images of a particular brand of ice tea picked it out from a list of beverage choices more than random chance would expect, although this effect didn’t extend as far as making people who weren’t already thirsty decide to ask for a drink. A later study in 2015, though, showed that this effect was extremely short-lived, and that within just fifteen minutes the correlation ebbed back down to what you could expect from chance. And it’s very important to note that none of these studies had a group who was shown the messaging at a superliminal level to see what they would choose.

So there is some evidence that subliminal messaging may have a very weak, very temporary effect on human behavior. That’s a long way from how it works in any stories where someone might, say, stare into a spiral and see words flickering past too quickly for their conscious mind to follow, but it is an interesting place to go for further study. I don’t think we’ll ever discover a statistically significant “mind control” effect as Vicary and Key posited, but hey. If it gives us fun sexy fantasies, it’s worth it.

Early Bird Sneak Peek: “X-Tasy”!

(This story was actually posted on 8/19, but for bookkeeping purposes I’m still posting the sneak peek. I’m not going to crosspost it anywhere, and feel free to ignore it if you’ve already seen the story.)

Hi all! It’s time for another Early Bird Sneak Peek, where I share a glimpse at the story my lucky Early Bird patrons will be enjoying next Saturday thanks to their pledges at my Patreon page! Of course, if you’re not an Early Bird patron, you’ll still get a story next week–“Oct 33”, teased previously, has already been submitted to the EMCSA. But the Early Bird patrons will be getting “X-Tasy” (MC MF MD)!

Joshua’s gone back to his high school reunion, and he can’t deny it – he’s excited to see his old crush, Tasy Cooper, after all these years. But it turns out Tasy isn’t Tasy anymore. She isn’t even Anastasia. She’s a slave, now. And she’s got a gift of obedience to give to the man who still desires her. Here’s a taste:

“There,” she said, tugging him to a seat next to her on the long wooden benches. “Now we can talk without having to scream over a medley of Jewel songs.” She swiveled to face him, sitting with one leg crossed under the other, and gave him a beaming smile. “So how have things been going with you since the divorce? I know you got that big promotion, and I’m so happy for you, but I’ve really been worried since Sue broke up with you. Please tell me you haven’t gone and hidden yourself in a shell or something. You deserve so much better than that.”

Joshua honestly didn’t know how to answer that. Any of it. “I–you–have you seen my Facebook posts?” he asked, his eyes widening in bewildered shock. Admittedly, his list of Facebook friends had kind of metastasized over the last decade or so, what with his professional, personal, and familial connections all sending him requests, but he felt sure he would have remembered Tasy. Anastasia. Whatever she called herself these days. She was a part of his life every day for fifteen years, from nursery school right up until graduation; he simply couldn’t imagine clicking ‘Accept’ on her without even noticing it.

And her answer… she said it like she was trying to reassure him, but his expression went well past shock and into goggling astonishment when Anastasia replied, “No, no, nothing stalkery like that. But Master still keeps in touch with a lot of people, and he mentioned it to me the other day. I think we were both kind of surprised when I said I wanted to see you and find out if you were doing okay.” At least, that was what Joshua thought she said. Honestly, he was so stuck on the ‘Master’ part, she could have mentioned she was the Zodiac Killer and he wouldn’t have really noticed.

Hope you enjoy it!

The Tropes of MC: Evil Conspiracies

(This post has been brought to you by the efforts of my 176 not at all evil Patrons! Visit my Patreon page to learn how to become one of them.)

We’ve long ago passed out of the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories – back in the 1990s, when the Internet was still new and fun and decentralized, it could be highly entertaining to find some self-designed website on Angelfire or Geocities with all sorts of wild notions about cryptids and aliens and who really killed JFK. These crossed over with late-night radio call-in shows and science fiction TV series, giving you a modestly thrilling glimpse into a world where the truth really was out there and we were all just one clue away from finding out who DB Cooper was and whether he got away with it.

(And yes, I know. It was Jimmy James. Or Loki. Or possibly Jimmy James was Loki. Have you ever seen the two of them in the same room?)

But even though that whole constellation of interconnected beliefs has gotten increasingly depressing as the people who believed them in the 90s were gradually funneled into racist hate groups and their gullibility was weaponized, it can nonetheless still be a fun fictional trope to invent conspiracies among the rich and powerful, especially when it’s about something like obviously impossible mind control and not the Q-Anon bullshit we’ve seen rotting people’s brains in real time. And there’s a certain intuitive logic behind the idea that if mind control was real, it would either rapidly become a tool used by the rich and powerful or the people who had it would become rich and powerful through the use of it. And if there’s one little hook of truth to hang all this fiction on, it’s that rich and powerful people enjoy treating people like they were things.

So yes, there is a bunch of MC fic out there that posits a secret cabal (or multiple secret cabals) that possess mind control technology and use it to both cement their power over society and to disappear people for later use as sex slaves. Sometimes they’re rich themselves, sometimes they work on behalf of the wealthy and powerful to procure toys for their amusement, but they’re always untouchable and inescapable, and simply being in their crosshairs eventually consigns you to a life of mindless obedience (which may be a good thing, given how much capitalist overlords control our life anyway through means that aren’t nearly as much fun as the ones they use in kinky brainwashing stories).

As for examples, while I’ve got plenty of rich and powerful individuals and more than a few small-scale enslavers, the full-on Evil Conspiracy is a little bit thinner on the ground. Setting aside the Boys and the Girls (who are attempting to brainwash the entire human race, but perhaps not for the same reasons other groups might) we have the Mind Control University of “Good Morning Little School Girl”, which is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; there’s the extremely sinister slavers of “This Is You Throwing In the Towel”, who are very overt in their assertions that mind control is actually better than freedom; there’s the conspiracy in “Watch the Tapes”, which has been around since the 80s and is exceedingly powerful and quite, quite evil; there’s the brainwashers of “V.I.P.”, who throw in a free enslavement as a perk to the wealthy and successful; and of course there are the clashing cabals of “True Colors”, which I consider to be one of my best stories.

But nothing – not the grim realism of “The Abduction of Margaret”, not the gaslighting of “A Question of Time” – nothing holds a candle to the MKPerfect Corporation, whose machinations play out over the course of “I’m a Slave 4 U”, “Even the Stars Fall 4 U”, “Bent 4 U”, “Kill 4 U”, “I Would Die 4 U”, “4 U 2 B Free”, “This Is Just 4 U”, “I’m Coming 4 U”, and “All 4 U”. Beginning as a covert mind control program within the CIA, they become purveyors of perfect slaves to the rich and powerful, before one of them finally gets the bright idea to cut out the middleman and take over the world themselves. (And are they stopped? Well, you’ll just have to see.)

Hopefully these examples will help you get an idea of just how broad and varied the concept can be… and who knows? Maybe they’ll inspire you to write a story of your own!