Enthrallment

Thralls are a complex concept in this setting, and one which varies widely in execution. The basic concept of enthrallment is that a person is subjected to intense enough mental magic that their actions are effectively under the control of someone else. There are a ton of ways to do this, and pretty much all of them are pretty fucked up. Enthrallment is not at all the same thing as subtle mental influence, or even the kinds of high-intensity emotional manipulation which Capinera is capable of. There are qualitative differences that are somewhat hard to define but extremely significant.

To start with, enthrallment is a sustained state. It is not a spell you cast on someone once and move on. Capinera makes you feel something while you’re hearing her sing, but when the song is over you get over it. That’s a big part of what produces the qualitative difference. When the CIA was doing extremely unethical large-scale experiments with LSD (yes, this is a thing that really happened, and Project MKUltra is fascinating to read about in a horrifying way), this would be the difference between the people they dosed once during an interrogation and the people who were on a bad acid trip for six months straight in a mental hospital. One of these things is going to do a hell of a lot more harm to someone than the other, even though both are using the same drug and the same basic methodology. A thrall is like the second one. The enchantments applied to them are not transient in nature, and that matters a lot.

There are a lot of ways someone can go about this kind of magic. By and large, they’re going to be sorted into categories in two distinct ways, depending on which part of the experience is being discussed.

The first part that can be considered is mechanism. That is to say, it’s the type of magic in use or the type of mental function being impacted. So in Melissa’s case, for example, she was a thrall under the influence of emotional magic. That plays a huge role in the way that it affected her, long-term, and in the way she acted while enchanted, as well as the subjective experience of it in the moment. It’s a very different kind of violation than someone who used other methods. It created a complicity that Melissa felt very strongly, a perception of herself as being the one who was making the choice and carrying out the action. The control applied to her was happening at a level where she made the choice herself, but did so while feeling an emotion so strong that any rational thought or natural emotion did not matter in comparison. She truly, deeply loved her captor, with an intensity that no natural emotion can possibly match. She was aware that she hated it and was in hellish suffering, but that cognitive awareness had effectively no bearing on her actions or even on her beliefs and motivations.

That’s really awful. But it’s not exactly worse than other methods; it’s just a distinct type of violation. Someone who has full awareness of their emotions and hates every part of what’s happening, but has no control over their actions, is living a different kind of nightmare. They experience something similar to locked-in syndrome, watching from the inside as their body does things they have no input on. They can feel themselves doing it, and attempting to change the action has no effect; complicity for them is replaced by total helplessness, and that’s really not any better. Other targets might include perception and cognition, in which case someone doesn’t know what’s going on and doesn’t know how to manage or influence their own thoughts; the conscious mind is the target in this case, and that has yet another kind of impact. These people are likely to be left permanently uncertain in their own mind, constantly second-guessing their own thoughts and memories because they cannot tell whether those are their own thoughts now.

This, then, is the first metric, and it’s an important one. From the perspective of the victim and anyone who cares about them, the nature of the magic used on them dramatically changes the details of its horror and the trauma left in its wake. From the perspective of the perpetrator (or, really, anyone doing more scholarly or technical analysis, the researcher as opposed to the social worker), it’s important because it informs a lot of how the enthrallment works, and what the limitations of the magic are. The emotional magic applied to Melissa carries the inherent limitation that she was, in fact, the one making choices and carrying out actions. You can push emotions to extremes in very specific ways, but that doesn’t afford total, precise control over how she responds. He had to be aware of that in how he went about things. Someone who is only controlled at the motor level has some degree of potential for subversion or malicious compliance; they don’t actually feel the same kind of desire to help that someone who has emotions or executive functioning being controlled might, and that can matter.

So, all of that is the first metric, the question of mechanism. The second is both more and less straightforward, and involves a distinction between hard and soft enthrallment.

Soft enthrallment is like Melissa’s case (though she’s pretty close to the line, and the two aren’t as binary and separate as people sometimes like to think). A soft thrall’s actions are still essentially completely controlled by another; it does not refer to any weakness of the behavioral control that characterizes enthrallment as a concept in this setting. With both soft and hard enthrallment, the general target is that if you tell your thrall not to move, they will stand completely motionless and let you slit their throat. Melissa definitely would have. But a soft thrall retains their sense of self through the process, and that’s a big deal. They are still, underneath the magic, fundamentally the same Self. They are a person, and continuity can be recognized in the person they now are from the person they were before this happened.

A hard thrall is not. They have been shattered beyond the point of remaining who they were on a fundamental level. This distinction matters just as much as the method, and it is similarly significant for both the scholar and the social worker.

To start with the technical side of things, there are advantages and drawbacks to each. Hard enthrallment is simpler, requires less technical skill. You don’t have to have a detailed understanding of who a person is or how their mind works, because once you’re done it won’t work like that anymore, making the question irrelevant. It is usually quicker. However, it requires more raw power, and it’s not subtle at all. A soft thrall can, for example, be left in a position of political power to effectively give you control over the government. A hard thrall is almost never able to function in that way, and people tend to be able to identify them very rapidly. You lose any skills and knowledge they might have had. The product is generally not able to do any particularly complex tasks, and certainly not any which require abstract thought; you have to micromanage them as closely as a construct for that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, soft enthrallment is subtle. It requires less power. Soft thralls last longer; hard thralls, generally speaking, tend to collapse and lose function over time, until eventually there’s not even enough Self left to do basic executive functions and manage motor commands. A soft thrall can be made to retain all of their existing skills, which means they have the potential to be much, much more useful. However, it generally requires time to really set in. You have to have a decent understanding of psychology, and most of the time the enthrallment process requires extensive use of more mundane tools, gaslighting and the types of high-intensity conditioning that get called brainwashing being the main ones. While a soft thrall can be controlled as thoroughly as a hard thrall, there’s always going to be some degree of risk that they will manage either to go against the compulsion or undermine you somehow without needing to do so. If someone manages to break the magic on them, they still know things that they learned while they were your thrall, and sometimes that includes really significant information. People who keep thralls tend to treat them more like pets or even furniture than people, and as a result they talk in front of them without really thinking about it much. This can easily produce a massive security leak that would simply not be possible if someone recovered a hard thrall, since hard thralls do not generally have much in the way of memory and have essentially no ability to communicate.

So, all of that in mind, considering the more personal side the difference is immediately obvious. Even a soft thrall will almost certainly have PTSD, and in many cases it will be extremely severe. They will be damaged in ways that are not likely to fully recover; even beyond ordinary impacts of trauma, and even setting aside the ways that the experience is beyond what humans normally experience, there is often actual, direct damage happening to their mind, structures breaking where magic was applied too strongly. They sometimes have symptoms similar to a stroke victim. You can help a soft thrall, and with enough work, support, and time, they might one day be able to function. They might make some progress on healing and learn to manage the PTSD. But the reality is that there genuinely are wounds that are too deep for healing, and enthrallment often involves several of them. There is little chance that anyone who has been even a soft thrall for more than a short time will ever be quite the same person again.

But a hard thrall will never be a person again. And that’s an extremely different situation to try and live with or support. There are edge cases; as noted, these aren’t binary states, and someone like Melissa can straddle the boundary. She’s a person, certainly, but emotion is a pretty fucking important part of what that involves, and hers are never going to be okay again. She will never be able to somehow recover from the alexithymia; there is no realistic way that is going to happen, not with how much those functions and ideas were damaged. This is something Melissa herself is fully aware of, too. As Kyoko has mentioned, that Melissa has even recovered enough to (with extensive support) get through life at all is a remarkable achievement.

She is a person, and I would say she was on the soft side of that line, but there is a part of what “person” means that she cannot get back, and that is the defining quality of hard enthrallment. So, in that sense, she actually does kind of straddle the boundary, and that’s not really that uncommon. Researchers in-setting have developed models of this, describing what qualities can be damaged in the process and attempting to estimate the severity. There’s a boundary layer where it’s hard to call someone one or the other.

But once you get past that boundary, there’s no helping people anymore. There’s no recovery. No way to heal. The person is gone, in every way that matters. Sometimes there are shreds of them left, a limited amount of perception or identity, flickers of thought and memory. But there is not enough to reconstruct a Self. There is not enough left of who they were to be anyone at all, not anymore, and you quite simply cannot fix that. There are specific types of hard enthrallment that are pretty well-studied and which absolutely no one has found a way to reverse.

At that point, the social work perspective takes on a different tone. It’s the equivalent of someone being in a coma, left in a permanent vegetative state and essentially brain dead. In some cases it’s actually worse, because there are still enough shreds of the person left to wish they weren’t; their body might be up and moving rather than comatose, but that’s not any better. At that point it’s generally agreed that the kindest thing you can do for the person is put them out of their misery. It’s not good, and nobody likes euthanizing the victims after they’re recovered from captivity. (Or, at least, nobody who isn’t absolutely monstrous; as evidenced by the fact that this practice exists at all, some people are.) But a quick and merciful death is usually the best you can offer them.

So, that’s the basic gist of what the ideas are and how they’re applied. Any given thrall will more or less be defined by these two metrics. Thus, to again use Melissa as an example, you could call her a soft (or mostly-soft, or whatever specific phrasing you happen to use for that boundary layer) emotional thrall. And yes, sadly, in this setting it is a thing that happens enough for people to need that kind of shorthand. Kyoko’s world is rarely a kind one, and almost never gentle.

That said, though, hard enthrallment is universally recognized as a massive harm. It is considered as being at least as bad as murder and in some cultures worse, and it gets addressed as such. Sometimes that doesn’t mean anything, particularly if the victim was not affiliated with any major factions and did not have any personal protectors. But the victim’s kin are likely to cry feud, and they aren’t likely to accept wergeld as adequate recompense. In many cases, if someone is found to be practicing hard (or sometimes even soft) enthrallment, their own people’s justice system will come down on them harshly, and even a third-party actor who happens to become aware of what they’re doing may well decide to become involved in the matter. Soft enthrallment is more complex in how it’s seen and varies more within application; it is at least possible, for example, for someone practicing that kind of magic to attempt to mitigate the damage it inflicts. There are limits on that and not many people will bother, but it’s possible in a way that it is not with hard enthrallment. It also does not cause inevitable and total ego death in the same way; what happened to Melissa was absolutely unconscionable, but it’s hard to create a direct comparison between this and outright murdering her, which makes the legality much murkier.

All told, it’s a complex topic and the ways people see it in-setting vary. My emphasis while discussing it has a lot to do with trauma recovery, and I don’t include this in this setting for shock value. As with many things in this story, it is something that I have incorporated for both thematic and personal reasons. Much of how I approach and describe enthrallment is me processing some unfortunately very relevant trauma within my own life, and I hope that in doing so I am not coming across as flippant or as though I am writing this for the sake of grotesquerie.