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.

@zebratron2084 I've nothing deep or insightful to offer, unfortunately, but I will say that I resonate with you *powerfully* here.

I can't stop thinking about it, either. Particularly poor Noelle.

That whole chapter had a hell of a lot of MC and cyber/drone stuff in it, and it gave me a lot of feelings.

Brains are weird.

@Phorm Currently my brain is trying to wrangle a fixfic scenario to route around the damage: before Kris can get anywhere near the Thorn Ring, someone dressed like an elf sells him the Wreath Ring-- which turns her into the Christmas goddess she always wanted to be. It still trances her, but all she can do is give her "enemies" mugs of steaming cocoa, build snowmen, and rain tinsel down on people. Kris becomes a Lvl 2 Loving Hypnodom and Miss Holiday is very confused but just can't stop smiling.