Oof, stressful week, I have horrible headaches, but it is still the Easter season, it is the weekend, and I have some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood to play! And I’m caught up on all the books I had been planning on, so that is a bit of a relief (now I need to find some more…).
And I got Return of the King (Extended Edition) from the library!
On Mind Control/Possession
Many years ago, I read Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan to my mother, and she had a comment that I still think about sometimes. Towards the beginning of the book, negotiations between the two main factions of good guys are disrupted when one of the heroes, Leo, opens fire and bombs Camp Jupiter. Why does he do this? He was possessed by an eidolon.
My mother was surprisingly bothered by this Plot development. Mind control and possession, she told me, felt like cheating. Bad things were happening, and the main characters were doing them, but it wasn’t because of choices anyone made, it was because the bad guys made them do it through methods that our heroes had no knowledge of before this point. And I don’t think my mother was wrong to point this out–it’s less egregious here because it’s a kids’ book, but Riordan has never before this point indicated that this sort of thing was possible, so it comes across as a bit contrived.
It’s an issue with mind control and possession stories: it takes agency away from the characters. Which in and of itself could be an interesting narrative device, if done well. Often it’s not. I just started playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood again, and the story of that game ends with Desmond being mind-controlled by Juno and stabbing Lucy. Except this is not given satisfactory explanation in-game–it’s handwaved with some dialogue in later games, but while it works as a twist in the moment, later on it just feels like a cheap swerve to throw you for a loop.
[And it feels even worse when you find out that the reason Lucy was killed off was because her voice actress/model, Kristen Bell, wanted to re-negotiate her contract for better pay because she was becoming a higher profile actress.]
When you take away the agency of characters, and don’t really work it into the story, you run into problems. If bad guys could possess or mind control our heroes, what’s preventing that from happening at any moment? Supernatural actually got through this by having our heroes put on anti-possession sigils in tattoos, but not everyone thinks of that. There’s a scene in the first Iron Druid book that particularly irks me, because it has the villain mind control a guy to shoot the protagonist. Except in that case, the hero and the villain are both immortal, and the villain’s been chasing the hero for thousands of years–having it so that the villain could have apparently mind controlled someone at any point to kill the hero makes me wonder, “Hey, why hasn’t he done that?” because it totally would have worked plenty of times beforehand. As it is, it comes across as just a happy coincidence that it didn’t work out this one time.
The same would also apply if the protagonists could mind control other people. Okay, then why don’t they just do that and fix the Plot? There are ways around that, too–Professor X in the X-Men movies can’t do that to Magneto because Magneto found a way to shield himself from the Professor’s telepathy. In other cases, mind control is given limits like requiring eye contact or hearing (like in Alphas).
If you don’t establish those limitations, though, it all feels artificial. The story is no longer moving forward because of the characters and their decisions, it’s moving forward in a way that shows that at any moment, the author might decide to have characters do things that they wouldn’t normally do because they’re being controlled.
And for goodness sake, do not make it so that possession or mind control are good, actually. One of the main issues I had with Testament of Loki by Joanne Harris is that it involves Loki possessing a teenage girl, and it’s just a thing the two of them have to get used to. Loki going and surprise-kissing this girl’s crush is treated as a way to teach her that ‘Being gay is okay!’ when, uh, I’m sorry–using someone else’s body to do something without their consent is a type of action that has specific words, and they are not good ones!
[Also it takes place in the modern world, when none of the other books in the series do, so that just felt weird.]
I am not saying, ‘You cannot have mind control in fiction’, as much as I am saying ‘Be very careful in the way you apply this trope’. It’s very tricky to get right in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re cheating the audience of having actual character choices with emotional consequences. If characters did something because mind control, then it’s not their fault! They didn’t make the choice! It’s the choices that make good character development though, so if you rely too much on mind control or possession tropes, it’s like you’re avoiding character development, and just need something to happen for Plot even when no one involved would actually do those things.
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