🐕‍🦺 Sappho's favourite castellan 🐕‍🦺

rob and lerios are both my full legal names. she/her/he/him or hy/hym if you feel like being cool

i'm a good dog, a middling artist, and a bad writer, and i plan to embody those 3 things to the fullest. currently pursuing my PhD in nuclear physics and green energy, so forgive me if i'm busy or awake at strange hours or if i blow up half the country 😇💕

i love getting asks and @/s but for some reason answering them takes 1-12 business months. this will never change <3

i'm big time dyslexic

my art tag is #my art.png and my writing tag is #written, neither get enough use. this year is the year of the #thing a week challenge 2025 inspired by jonathan coulton and i'm failing it. BUT! i am drawing much more, and we take that as a win

i'm not a doctor who fan but narvin gallifrey has stolen my entire soul. my gallifrey insanity tags are #gallifreyan fascism, #gallifreyan civil religion, and #gallifreyan hornyposting. i hope they're relatively self-explanatory (apart from when they overlap. which is often 🥰)

as i lose my mind falling through the extended universe my listen statuses are:

gallifrey: on WR2.3 transference #gallifrey relisten counter measures: all of it! #my belovedest them sarah jane smith: all of it! #my beloathedest them war master: S1 and anti-genesis for narvin. he should have fucked that old man. #war master blogging the omega factor: on going! louise jameson makes me UNWELL #the omega factor the bennys: finished season 3 #benny blogging main range: i listened to charley and c'rizz like a normal person and now i pick whatever seems fun almost completely at random #main range rambling dark eyes: tbc. its next on the list

and i'm currently watching classic seasons to see my babygirl the lord president of gallifrey and her human wife #classic who tag

my tardis.guide.

'mind control' is typically used to mean something far beyond any sort of human technology. some sort of un-counterable godmode magic. a crystal, a telepathic monster, some alien beam, straight up possession, whatever. the appeal is, as i understand it, a complete lack of control or perhaps the fullest possible domination imaginable. this is what you'll see most frequently in media at large--very present in sci-fi and cartoons in particular. being fundamentally cartoonish, it's simple to represent visually and acting-wise, but this means it tends to come off as incredibly one-note. it's a fair bit more wishy-washy and ill-defined than any of the others, and covers most of what happens to one Allison Williams of the intrusion counter measures group. the possibilities are endless, which is actually rather dangerous in that, with no restrictions at all, there is absolutely nothing holding it to any semblance of realism or in-universe rules--there are no stakes, there's no fight to be had and thereby no catharsis to be found in losing. a lot of things that get called hypnosis or brainwashing in media are actually this. anything going on here is entirely non-consensual, which is typically part of the appeal.

the most immediate examples of mind control in media are anything that's ever happened in scooby doo, or the dnd spell dominate person.

(there is also the sub-catagory body control, in which the mind is completely unaltered, conscious, aware, watching as the body (and sometimes voice) acts outside of a subject's control. it has similar causes, appeal, and writing issues. also common in sci-fi and cartoons.)

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brainwashing is insistent and forceful. this one refers to either magic or extreme coercion (or both!) depending on who you talk to. people refer to what real life cults do as this, but also what shadowy evil space corporations get up to. at its most powerful and unrealistic what differentiates brainwashing and mind control is time, both in terms of the time required for it to take root and the time it tends to last; this is a (potentially magic) process not an instant magic beam, this is the months-chained-up-in-a-basement type stuff, but equally it is time-consuming and wonderfully whumpy to break. on the opposite down-to-earth end of the scale, what differentiates brainwashing from hypnosis or conditioning is the intense social/environmental aspect--i'm a lot less qualified to talk about this stuff because its an actual real life awful thing as well as a fiction/kink thing, but the point is that it requires being immersed in a consistent extreme conditions meant to link pretty much all good stuff (especially all basic human social needs and the joy (and safety!) that those bring) with specific people/beliefs/behaviours, and you get top marks if you can fold an idea of morality and 'right' in there too; that's pretty much the most useful and persausive idea you can plant in a person's head! people will do all sorts of insane shit for what's 'right' <3

(the problem is that, taken to its logical and non-horny conclusion, this could encompass an awful lot of things; what, really, is the difference between light city and gallifrey aside from how blatant it was made to us as an audience? where is the line between a candles-and-robes type cult in the mountains, LDS/scientology, and 'regular' organised religion? do people have good reason to be freaked out by the pledge of allegiance or the walmart cheer? group activity, movement, and the appearance of shared joy are encouraged to promote a specific set of values either way) ((although if we're going to dip into real reality then it might also be worthwhile to note that 'brainwashing' is a term made up by the us government to explain why POWs might not want to murder koreans/vietnamese people soooooo its basically bullshit. the term has been largely reclaimed by anti-cult types though))

ideally you can combine any and all of this with isolation, sleep deprivation, torture, whatever <3 generally the thing that tends to bridge the gap between the 2 genres of brainwashing is MKultra style regiments of sometimes outright fictional drugs. some obvious brainwashing examples in media would be the winter soldier or river firefly for the fantastical type 1 versus theon/reek from game of thrones or the entire cast of far cry 5/midnight mass for the less nonsensical type 2. consent here is incredibly dubious at best.

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hypnosis is a matter of focus and suggestibility. it's real (although the ways in which it is written rarely quite align with reality), it's meticulous, it is slow-going and requires work, it's a gradual slide out of control, it requires a crack in the subject's armour, it requires temptation. it requires trust. it is all, every bit of it, driven or at least allowed by the subject themselves; a hypnotist is never making a subject do anything, only ever speaking them closer and closer to the ledge of giving in to what they really want (or can be convinced that they want) deep down. i'm sure you can see how this applies to people so desperately repressed as some of our beloved time lords 😌💕 consent here is completely up in the air and wonderfully unknowable--victimblaming always within reach.

(as for the time lord 'hypnosis' that we see from brax, the master, and the doctor, that varies depending on who's writing it. sometimes they do actually have to slowly, frog-boilingly talk people into thinking a certain way, just with a little extra help in his 'persuasion', but usually its more of a mind control situation.) ((the further matter of touch telepathy and manual mind manipulation, the almost physical fiddling with synapses and pleasure centres, is its own matter with its own genre and terminology--although it is usually rather close to snuff and/or snuff circles outside of time lord related spaces.))

anyway, i think the thing that makes hypnobullshit compelling to me is the 'own goal' of it all, the fact that a temptation must be present, the assisted self-destruction--the horrid burning embarrassment of knowing you did all that, with just a helping hand from whoever else. narvin would HATE it (especially given that, as a fully inoculated CIA agent he would surely have to be even more an active participant in his defeat). cope and seethe time boy <3

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conditioning is the most down to earth of them all, perverse in its length and subtly, the tact required. this one you see the least in fiction, its long timescale and day-by-day mundanity stops it being compelling to most audiences or easy for a piece of media to communicate. in its most extreme cases you have an electric shock collar (hiii veklin) coded to certain places or behaviours, or on the most more laidback end there's pavloving someone. it's animal training either way. just biology. a human (or time lord) is an animal as much as anything else is and can be trained to associate a stimulus with a response. that's all it is. i honestly don't recall ever having seen it in fiction (although this should happen more!), but noble kinksters in real life claim to have been able to successfully established any subconscious mental link you'd see in animals and more. people are out there clicker training each other like dogs. slay. also the humiliation inherent in saying that anyone (especially a time lord) has been 'trained' is very tastey 🥰

this is different from hypnosis but very combinable with it, and you could make coherent arguments both that it does and does not belong on this list. personally, as it is literally rewiring the paths of a person's mind, i think it classes under 'mind control' as drawn closer to reality. the main difference i guess is that consent in these situations is pretty much unaltered.

anyway

mind control is too magicy for me, it's cheap and schlocky and quick, usually used as a device to make porn happen rather than as the object of eroticism itself. can be used well, but almost always isn't 4/10

brainwashing is usually more plot than smut or even angst and is rarely committed to hard enough, but when done right in a sustained and culty deeply fucked up sort of way 8/10

hypnosis is my jam. there's so much slow insidious dialogue and temptation and misplaced comfort to be written, there's a massive question of trust, a lot of opportunity to be utterly pathetic in terms of why and how a subject's subconscious is allowing (causing) the events to happen, 10/10

conditioning is delicious when indulged in properly, with the added bonus that it is only biology and as such is practically unavoidable--the subject may well even know it's happening and be unable to stop it. rarer but still impeccable, mostly from a humiliation and control angle 10/10 (anyway dr anne reynolds you should have clicker trained that boy. and also he should have been a woman)