Current mood: haunted by Noelle Holiday's plot line in Deltarune: Chapter 2.

I'm not even an Undertale fan, but the just-revealed "Snowgrave" genocide route hits home pretty hard.

Spoilers: basically the painfully kind and meek reindeer character is manipulated into becoming a murderous, psychologically abused, tranced-out ice mage by your PC and a series of cursed rings.

It's so closely kink-adjacent for me. The idea of a hypnotized, empowered minion as a conduit for someone's will is HOT. But god, not in that form and not poor Noelle.

So much of my hypnosis/mind control kink comes from a deep, deep separation anxiety I had when I was a preteen. I'd have nightmare after nightmare about various Forces possessing my friends and family and making them emotionally unavailable.

But honestly? Like so many of my nightmares, they were kinda fun-scary. And like with so many scary ideas, they got transmuted into kink. And there's still that edge of horror to them.

And seeing Noelle suffer-- especially 'cause my oldest and dearest headfriend is ALSO a Neutral Good pokey hoofer named Noelle-- is gumming up my emotional works today in a fascinatingly complicated way. I can't look away from it.