Quite a few stories on this site involve mind control or some form of domination. I am curious, which do you think people most want to read about? 1. People kidnapped from their homes and forced to obey their captors through some form of coercion. 2. People who are born and bred in captivity; trained and indoctrinated to accept their status as chattel. 3. People who are mind controlled to either enjoy their bondage or be oblivious to their submission. 4. An engineered life form that is imprinted with neuro engramatic programming. Waking up as a functional adult with artificial memories and subliminal training. 5. A bio-bot that is physically indistinguishable from a person but is fully programmable and controllable. Follow up question. Do you prefer stories set in a world where owning people is legal and chattels are flaunted or settings like the real world where slavery is considered the greatest of evils and the characters must sneak around to enjoy their living toys.
Well,when I see the word thrall,the things that immediately come to mind involves vampires or demons, no?or is that too cliche and on the nose?
The problem with setting your story in a world where your fetish is legal and normal is that it eliminates the taboo. Say you're a dom on Earth in 2025, and you're ordering your sub to walk around in public in a skimpy outfit. Ooo, humiliating! Sexy! Lots of sneaking around, hiding in bushes, close calls. What do the dom and sub feel? How do people react? Endless possibilities! Thrills and chills! Now do the same in a fictional world where everyone walks around in skimpy outfits. Well, now it's just a Tuesday, please get out of the way, I need to get to work, OK? Deep sigh, can you believe these people? Taboos are only hot because you're doing something that people frown upon. If you remove the frowns, you lose that eroticism. You make it ordinary and that's the greatest disservice a writer can do their work. Converting living breathing sentient beings to robots without feelings, emotions, or ability to resist is boring to me for the same reason. I'm not a huge mind control afficionado, but I dabble, and to me, the attraction of it is the struggle between the controller and the controllee, and especially how the latter resists it, reacts to it, is overwhelmed by it, takes secret pleasure in, it, accepts it, requires it, and more (not necessarily in that order!). Otherwise, what you have is just a blow-up doll with a voice box.
Ah, I didn't mean for my post to apply to all fetishes, but in hindsight I agree I didn't phrase that very well. The stories I'm talking about tend to focus on fetishes that are taboo in our society, and that people find hot because they're taboo. Incest is the most straightforward example.
I sometimes use thrall too. Usually when the controlled person is driven by lust. I also often use subjects, toys, victims. I've noticed I have a bit of an aversion to using the word slave. I do really favor the type of mind controlled person who retains their personality. It helps give that character things to do and drive the story further. The type who know they are under control and enjoy it are really fun too. There's this aspect I like of seeing a person suddenly and radically changed. The fact that they are suddenly doing and believing things they never would have is pretty exciting. The person turned into a programmable fuckbot type is also pretty neat. With this one though I find that a lot of the fun comes from turning the person into mindless drone. After the mind controller has their way with their new toy there's not much else to the story. That's where most of them end unless something else is introduced.
Taboos and tension are what make certain dynamics thrilling, it’s the risk and the struggle that amp up the excitement. If everything’s normalized, it loses that edge. And yeah, mind control without resistance or emotional complexity? That’s just... meh. The real fun is in the push-and-pull, the internal conflict, and the slow unravelling of control. Totally agree, keep the stakes high and the emotions messy!
Keeping the personality intact adds so much depth, it’s way more engaging when the controlled character still feels like *them*, just... altered. The "enjoying it" angle is super fun too, that mix of shock and pleasure is a goldmine for tension. And yeah, the fuckbot trope can be fun, but you’re right, it often peaks early unless there’s more to explore. It’s all about the journey and the emotional stakes!
I understand where you are coming from with the notion that certain fetishes are most interesting because they are taboo. I also appreciate that a story about a character with a dark secret that they are afraid of being revealed for fear of shame and legal consequences is good drama. But, escapism and world building are themselves a different sort of flavor one can use in building a story. I am fascinated by societies that considered slavery to be a normal, acceptable practice and the people who create them. Most people for most of history lived in a place where owning another human being was something that was seen as aspirational. So when I write sci-fi or fantasy, I more often than not write about civilizations where slavery is common and practiced prolificly without fear of rebellion. The hows, wheres, whens, whos, and whys Dominance/submissive dynamic that give the setting its philosophical richness.
The thing about questions like this, and one of my biggest gripes with mind control as a whole (although it is one of my favorite genres) is that a lot of mind control stories tend to go 'too far'. I am fully aware of how incredibly vauge and subjective that is (and I am ashamed to admit that I am extremely lenient with that line if what I see is hot enough and/or I'm horny). What I mean by too far is things that are just objectivly morally wrong. As in, literal slavery, rape, breeding people as sex livestock, kidnapping, emotional blackmail, et cetera, et cetera. The thing is, is that it's really easy to make these things 'digestable' by simply making the victim give consent. The problem is that a lot of the appeal of mind control, for most people, is that 'unwilling desperate resistance'. I think that, to a certain point, I'm being a bit of a prick, but you really gotta make it clear at some point that I should be getting horny, not feeling sympathetic for the victim, you know?
I am curious to know if you think I go "too far" with my interpretation of the Nano-mechanical Omniracial Xeno Enslavement Technology in my sci fi erotic space opera. https://chyoa.com/chapter/The-Voyages-of-The-Seed-of-Truth:-Contact!.1634400
An important thing to be aware of with mind control, and any other fetish concerning objectification and dehumanization, is where line is. There is always that point where the audience won't feel excited anymore instead feeling bad about what is happening to a character. That point is also very personal usually based on experiences. Everyone has a line they don't like to cross and it's different for everyone. It's a sliding scale with certain areas people will generally cluster around as going to far, and the farther you go beyond them the less interest you will see. Areas like non-consent, force, violence, and suffering. For many people immediately hitting on one or more of those will depress them. Since it's one of the topics you're asking about I'll single out chattel slavery as something that goes too far for myself. Even if for whatever reason every single character in the story is genuinely happy with how the world works and their position in it I cannot get into it because I can't separate slavery from the suffering and violence it is historically known for. I know too much of the history of chattel slavery to ever find it sexy. It's like a person who knows someone who was raped. They wouldn't enjoy a rape fantasy story because they feel sympathy for that victim. With mind control and domination there is a line between feeling aroused and feeling sad. Sometimes you cross someone's line with just one step.
Actually, that's entirely irrelevant to the conversation, and it's very possible that he might agree, in fact. George R.R Martin is a great author who told a great story. As he says, we the readers wouldn't read a story where everyone is happy and the skies are never grey. But he's talking about conventional literature, stuff we read for the sake of reading. We aren't. We are talking about porn, erotica, doujins, works we read not for the sake of reading, but for the end goal of getting ourselves off. Now, for a site like this, there are often more conventional pieces of literature within the porn, but at the moment, we're not talking about that, either. We are talking about lines, and what happen when we cross them. George R.R Martin uses these lines to his advantage, to create a compelling story where charcters suffer and we feel sympathetic, to advance the plot and keep readers engaged (Will my favorite character be okay? What will happen to that guy next?). The thing about porn is that it's a lot harder to reach that end goal of getting off if we're personally upsetted by the crossing of these lines. And, that kind of upsetting line-crossing comes waaaay earlier in the story in erotica (usually being part of the major premise) than it does in a regular novel, so people are much less likely to be invested enough in characters to want to stick around.
You don't read my work, do you? I also get the impression that you have never read Game of Thrones. In my experience all of the best literature has an erotic element.
@GyroscopicGraphite, I don't think the difference between erotic or non-erotic fiction is as big or as black-or-white as you make it out to be. In both cases, there are limits beyond which our discomfort, disgust, or <insert negative trait here> becomes too great to continue. That's just as true of sexual acts (violent or otherwise) as it is of, say, cheesy drama, or ultraviolence, or even just loud noises. If there is a difference, it is of degree only, and it differs from work to work: plenty of non-erotic stories have paper-thin plots that are only there as an excuse to engage in, say, senseless violence and plenty of erotic stories have gripping plots that enhance the sexual content. The erotic games Pale Carnations or Sanguine Rose feature more engaging stories than anything Quintin Tarantino has ever made.
Like you've said before, all generalizations are over-generalizations. To clarify, I didn't mean to imply a black-and-white (though I can see where you're coming from), but I think it holds true that this site leans more towards a darker grey than one might find on public library bookshelves, if you know what I mean. And also like you've said, any number of negative feelings or traits of a story can make someone drop a story. This is a problem that's just kinda part of the package when making really anything; there will always be someone who gets offended. Coming back to this a few hours later, I think the best way to put it is something like this; you come into a 'mainstream' story expecting plot and hoping for some good erotica. You come into erotic literature expecting erotica and hoping for a good plot.
Correlation, not Causation. Very strong correlation, but still. The reason Game of Thrones (and presumably your works, too) are good is not because they are are erotic, but because they are actually written well. It just so happens that, like any other creative works, writer write best when not limited by things like maturity or the current state of our world. So, talented authors like you and so many others are able to mix a good plot with good erotica, without either feeling out of place or subservient to the other. Many stories stuggle with that, so the ones that can pull it off are considered a cut above the rest.
