E.M.C.S.H.: Arillia
This post discusses and links to fetish fiction that features sexually explicit writing involving violations of consent and sexual assault as well as mentions of incest.
sad part about sex being a taboo topic is that sometimes really funny things happen during sex or related to sex or at weird sex clubs and you cant tell the story to like 90% of people in your life because of the sex context. the contsext. do you ever wonder how many people have funny sex stories theyre just sitting on. its tragic.
@redstonedust on Tumblr
I love infodumping about things that I enjoy. I have two podcasts, like. And one thing I have a wide experience in that I have been less inclined to talk about is kink fiction. In particular mind control smut. I have read a lot of it over the years and it can be as funny, varied and weird as any other artform. People having been writing, sharing and iterating on the concepts, tropes and forms of these works for decades. The Erotic Mind Control Story Archive website is thirty years old and originally archived stories from the alt.sex.stories Usenet group. So I want to try to occasionally share some of the stranger or more interesting stories, mostly from the E.M.C.S.A. and the more modern1 Read Only Mind.
Welcome to the first The Erotic Mind Control Story Hour! Or, really, the second. I will be counting my post about Girl™s as part of this as well. More or less every story I will talk about under this tag will involve violations of consent and things that would very obviously be rape if they were actually possible to do outside of a fantasy story, and the story I’m going to talk about presently also features more mundane sexual assault and mentions of incest.
These are not recommendations or reviews and do I plan on going into any graphic or erotic detail. I just want to highlight little weird stories that rattle around the back of my head in the same way that the worldbuilding of Sonic the Hedgehog or The Ring does. Speaking of worldbuilding:
Today’s aesthetic: fic that spends several thousand words establishing Kink World, the world structured entirely around the author’s excruciatingly specific kink, does one sex scene in like chapter two, then spends the next thirty chapters interrogating the sociopolitical implications of Kink World.
@prokopetz on Tumblr
This quote doesn’t really describe what is going on in Arillia by Illuminati Architect, but I wanted to use the quote and this is a story published to a kink site that definitely seems to be more interested in its plot, or at least its protagonist, than any kink, or sex in general, or even its own original conceit.
The Princess and the Gamer2
Arillia starts with a man named Greg starting a new playthrough of an R.P.G. that he knows inside and out, only to find himself isekaied into the body of the eponymous princess, the protagonist of the game. Actually no, that’s a lie. It’s a bit weirder than that. Arillia starts with the eponymous princess attending her own birthday party when she finds that she now has a voice in her head named Greg talking to her insisting that she’s a fictional character in a video game. Arillia is the protagonist and narrator, describing her own experiences. Greg is just along for the ride. He can see, feel and hear everything that Arillia does, but has absolutely no control or agency. When he starts trying to make (pervy) demands of her she immediately stabs herself in the finger, mocks him for being more sensitive to pain than she is, and threatens to do much worse to herself unless he falls in line.
Arillia immediately uses knowledge from Greg to not just min-max her story, but to avert the entire plot of the game from ever happening. Instead of killing her uncle in self-defence, fleeing home and becoming an adventuring wizard she remains Princess Arillia Aurora Angleland of Ioa (still a wizard), with all the resources of her family available to her on top of an otherworldly gift of prophetic knowledge (that is, Greg) which she uses to find, rescue and recruit all the available party members from the game, who all, of course, turn out to be lesbians.
Control
The first of the girls is Elizabeth, a huge, blonde, warrior woman from “Nordisle”. Arillia finds her in the slums, having been magically enslaved by a man is who is going to sell her. Arillia walks in on the two of them fucking and is distracted long enough ogling Elizabeth for the man to order Elizabeth to pin her down and cast the same enslavement spell on Arillia, forcing her to do anything that she is ordered. Thankfully that includes Greg, who tells her to just stab the slaver which she immediately does. Now, it might occur to the reader, this being a story posted on a mind control erotica website, that Greg might take advantage of this situation and take control of her. Greg thinks of this too, ordering her to always obey anything he says, but the slaver is already dead and the spell already broken, and for most of the rest of the story the only kind of mind control present is a more peculiar one.
Despite Arillia repeatedly poking fun at video game abstractions that Greg tries to explain—visible mana bars, healing spells that instantly regain hit points—one very video game-y rule is still enforced in her world: She is the protagonist and when she orders people to do things they do them.
Initially she uses this, surprisingly, to pair off the girls she recruits, away from where Greg can perv on them using her eyes. She assigns Elizabeth as a bodyguard to her younger sister Carnel, with the strong and obvious implication that they should hook up, which they immediately do. Carnel is, according to Greg, actually meant to be the main villain of the game. Growing despondent when her sister disappears, she resorts to summoning demons to try and find her, only to end up possessed by one of them. That never happens, though Arillia and their parents early on make several comments about Carnel seemingly having had some kind of breakdown prior to the start of the story, dropping out of education and generally being quite erratic. They also seem to suggest that she had some kind of incestuous interest in Arillia. Stories with incest are generally marked as such these kinds of sites and when family starts coming into the story in a big way I often scroll up to double check the tags. In this case nothing really comes of it and it’s dropped after a few chapters (though, this being a story about royalty the prospect of marrying cousins does come up a bit).
After Elizabeth, Arillia finds and brings home Rebecka, a noblewoman raised by wolves who looks nearly identical to Arillia and is suddenly revealed nine chapters later to be able to talk to horses. She is paired off with Alice Reltucs, the castle librarian who is fated to die in a cutscene after recruiting the blue-haired, purple-eyed blessed girl Polly Posgort, but Arillia is able to save her with foreknowledge. It’s only with Polly that Arillia really starts taking advantage of her Protag-kun3 powers and not just ordering Polly around, but ordering Polly to sleep with her. Even this is mostly devoid of eroticism or of emphasising or exploring control. After the first sex scene very little further ink is spilled on it. Arillia just remarks in passing on all the sex she’s having off-page. It’s all very perfunctory.
It’s until quite late in the story until Arillia really starts going wild with this ability. She can rewrite people’s entire personalities just by ordering it. But the story doesn’t have a scene that seems to get properly horny about mind control until chapter nineteen (of twenty-three), where Arillia revels in making a woman who just tried to assassinate her sister utterly devoted to her. But even then she swiftly moves on to how to use her new slave as a double agent against the conspiracy that she had been part of.
But before that the final girl that Arillia recruits is Amelia Amadev, who she needs as a lancer to slay a dragon. It’s only then that the story moves to Arillia playing politics and manoeuvring against various plots and threats to her kingdom using intelligence from Greg. Or at least presumably using intelligence from Greg.
Voices
I say presumably because as the story goes on Greg becomes more and more periphery. Arillia will simply mention having learned things in an off-page conversation with him or even just bringing up new information suddenly without any explicit source. The storytelling generally can be feel very jerky and disjointed, with Arillia making an abrupt speech introducing a problem, then telling everyone how they are going to deal with it (even before she starts using her power to order people around in earnest she has a very instrumental view of people), and then them all just doing it. Greg also starts instructing her on his surprisingly extensive knowledge of science, engineering and mathematics. The man has a shockingly good memory. Seemingly able to describe in detail to Arillia (off-page) the layout and composition of the periodic table, how to construct a computer and formulae to calculate the structural stability of a wall. He also seems to describe a lot of popular culture to her to the point that she starts quoting Star Wars and making really out of place pop culture jokes. It really does feel like after a certain point the story wants Arillia herself to be a more standard isekai protagonist and Greg is just an afterthought and inconvenience to the narrative.
But Greg is not the only voice in Arillia’s head. On top of him she teaches her sister a spell to allow them to communicate telepathically and also gets a pair of earrings that allow telepathic communication between the two wearers, which she gives to her doppelgänger Rebecka to help Rebecka pretend to be her during her schemes. Three different possessed items also come into her possession: The first is a sabre haunted by the ghost of a legendary swordsman named Sparot, the second a jewel eye containing the spirit of her elf shaman ancestor Koching, and finally the wand of her human ancestor Martinia Fireblood. A funny detail is none of the various voices in her head are able to hear each other nor hear her thoughts. She can telepathically communicate with Carnel and Rebecka but for Greg and the ghosts she has to answer them out loud and none of them can hear the other voices in her head at all.
The swordsman, Lord David Argyle Sparot, is the funniest of these. Having been dead for for more than two hundred years he makes an deal to allow Arillia to wield his sword and borrow his strength and abilities if she will help him address his biggest regret in life: Not being a big enough pervert. He makes her swear an oath to fuck more women and let him design sluttier clothes for her to wear. With Greg providing some inspiration the three of them of course make and put her in (what else?) a French maid outfit. It is also after taking this oath that Arillia starts using her powers of persuasion to indulge herself rather than just pairing everyone off. There is a funny moment where Arillia allows Sparot to possess her so that her fencing instructor can spar with the most famous, legendary swordsman in the history of Ioa and he immediately and easily beats the most famous, legendary swordsman in history because his techniques have been extensively studied and everyone who trains in swordfighting knows how to counter them. Speaking of funny worldbuilding details…
About that dragon I mentioned earlier
It’s a pterodactyl. Everyone calls it a dragon and no one uses the word pterodactyl, but when it’s described in detail it is clearly a pterodactyl being described. And it doesn’t breath fire. It drinks seawater, shits high-sodium guano and exhales chlorine gas. Every once in a while this story, janky as it is, throws in a kind of brilliant or at least compellingly bizarre detail. It also becomes clear over the course of the story that the seemingly generic medieval fantasy kingdom of Ioa is, in fact, in a medieval fantasy version of America (called Hahnunah). A map that accompanied the final chapter spells out that Ioa is specifically medieval fantasy Ohio.
Now, you might wonder, if this is medieval fantasy America was it colonised by medieval fantasy Europe? Yes. Arillia’s elf ancestor I mentioned? Elves are the stand-in for indigenous Americas and Arillia describes her ancestors as committing genocide against them.
Moving swiftly on from the questionable to the simply strange: In the second half of the story Arillia gets word of a fantasy version of Napoleon (Ramolino) has taken power in France (Frankia) following a revolution and has already conquered several other kingdoms in Europe (Avrupa). But what really concerns Arillia is that he is supposedly unusually charismatic and has introduced the metric system, which she concludes must mean that he is also operating on isekai-sourced information and may have the same protagonist-based powers of compulsion as her. It is genuinely unclear to me, having read this story twice now, if that is actually meant to be true or not. Arillia remains pretty sure of it but Ramolino never appears in person and nothing in the plot really requires him to have otherworldly abilities or knowledge. Napoleon formalising the use of metric system in France only requires a fairly small fudge of real history.
But also, if he is meant to have a protagonist powers then what exactly is he a protagonist of? Does the game that Arillia is from have a French-themed sequel?
Actually, what the fuck is this game?
I called Arillia eponymous earlier and that is in relation to the story itself and not the metafictional game that exists within the story. That game is never named and the details we get of it are extremely strange. It’s apparently a V.R. game, with Greg initially thinking that he simply starting repeat playthrough of a game he’s played a million times before in V.R. He puts the down the fact that everything looks so realistic, there is explicit nudity, that is going immediately and wildly off-script and Arillia talking back to him in-character to him having somehow been “crosslinked” with someone playing a mod and being really into roleplaying. Before he realises that he can’t even feel his body any more and is completely trapped he asks her to log out to see if it will disconnect them because he can’t seem to bring up the menu.
The game itself is clearly some sort of R.P.G. The blue-haired, purple-eyed magical girls present in the setting as well as the recruitable members being a harem of young women who all act quite sapphically but who, in the game, apparently never have any explicit romantic or sexual relationships point to a general anime aesthetic suggestive of a J.R.P.G., but Greg’s description of the stats system makes me think of a more directly Dungeons & Dragons-inspired C.R.P.G. Greg also blames the dragon being a pterodactyl on a “translation issue with the art team” which I guess means that there was a multilingual development team? But I have no idea what kind of translation mix-up would cause someone to be told to model a pterodactyl instead of a dragon.
There’s plenty of things that just seem questionable from a game-design point of view. Arillia starts off the story knowing a dozen spells already, which seems like a shockingly high amount to start a game with. A couple of those are basic utility things like making lights and the detective vision-giving magescan but she has several strong elemental attacks and can magically seal or unlock any non-magical door. A very unbalanced starting arsenal.
And the general structure seems odd. Greg talks about there being many paths to take and directions to go in there seem to be a lot of timed events tied to being in specific places by or at certain dates if you want to save and recruit the various girls and on top of that events requiring to have already recruited specific characters in a way that that seems excessively unfriendly to any kind of open world or very branching structure, especially when there doesn’t seem to actually be that many characters to recruit in the first place. Greg also passingly mentions that the game has “a limited ability to generate new random lore” so I guess it also has a bit of Dwarf Fortress in it.
And then there’s the persuasion system. When Arillia’s ability to order around her companions comes up I at first interpreted it as a representation of the unquestionable authority of the party leader in an R.P.G. When you order characters who to attack, what to equip, what actions to take, they do it. Once someone is in your party there is rarely a question of if they have a will of their own; they are simply yours to command. But this is not really how the story actually presents it. Arillia can order around almost anyone. She rewrites the personality of a woman who hates her and wants her dead simply by speaking it into being. But there are, Greg says, a specific list of characters in the game with an “implacable” flag applied to them which prevents her from doing this to them. This suggests some sort of much more systematised persuasion game mechanic and one of the characters with that flag is one of the party members that she recruits.
What the fuck is this system? Greg says that what stops it being overpowered in the context of the game is that you are limited to fixed, pre-programmed responses, which sounds like a normal dialogue system but one would not expect a normal dialogue system to result in characters always doing what you say. Outcomes would be bespoke to situations and the script, not just everyone always agreeing with protagonist. If there is some kind of charisma-based skill check why would you undermine that by making the protagonist always pass except against certain characters? Can N.P.C.s do persuasion checks on each other? To what end? How the fuck does this game work?
These are, of course, all silly questions. The game only exists notionally to serve plot purposes and doesn’t need to be consistent or sensible. The story doesn’t even care about it enough to give it a name. But every strange detail just adds to the surreality of the story as a whole.
Politics
Okay. There was some sort of plot here at one point I think? Let’s try to drag ourselves back to that slowly. I said earlier that after Arillia recruits all the girls the story starts to concern itself more with her politicking, but what are her politics? At one point she describes herself as a “wild, murderous, psychopathic, revolutionary” but she is very much does not seem to be in favour of any kind of revolution or even much reform. She certainly has no plans to unseat her own family and, in fact, is quite a traditionalist streak, shooting down the idea of legalise gay marriage because she thinks it is each generation’s duty to maintain and pass down the laws and traditions of the previous with as little change as possible, though she also argues with one of the girls she recruits that she shouldn’t be ashamed of being gay because Leviticus 18:22 was a mistranslation.
She does express a desire to be a good ruler, to ensure peace, prosperity and happiness, but has a very utilitarian view on how to achieve it and a very instrumental view of using people to get it. She tries broadly to protect people but does not care about who she kills or immiserates in the process. One might call her a progressive in a medieval society in so far as she does seem to express a fairly modern nationalism, being concerned with locking down migration through her borders and with being outbred by the blue-haired magical girl population.
But if she is doing political manoeuvering, who is she manoeuvering against?
Ramolino
That was the name of fantasy Napoleon if you weren’t keeping track. His first mentioned in chapter thirteen and hangs over the rest of the story as… antagonist? Narrative distraction? Arillia maintains convinced that he also has isekai compulsion powers and there is just not really any evidence of that outside of him gaining power quickly and Arillia’s aunt noting that he is unusually charismatic. There is a conspiracy against that she blames on Ramolino without, as far as I can remember, any real evidence presented as such. I feel like most of the time we are just meant to take Arillia’s assertions as true, but maybe here the ambiguity is intentional? He is not, in the end, the actual final villain of the story and Arillia’s focus on him and desperation in fighting a conspiracy that she believe he is in charge of is what allows her to be tricked, in the final chapter, by the ghost of her ancestor Martinia who inhabits her wand, into swapping bodies. Martinia takes over Arillia’s body while Arillia ends up trapped in the wand, still being wielded by Martinia in Arillia’s body and forced to obey Martinia and cast spells for her.
Slut4
If that came across as a very abrupt turn then I assure you that it is that sudden when reading the story as well. Arillia finds Martinia’s wand in chapter twenty, the body swap happens three chapters later, and fifteen hundred words after that the story is over.
Martinia returns to Arillia’s family’s castle, is immediately spotted as an imposter, a fight breaks out, several characters die, Greg (now a voice in Martinia’s head) distracts her long enough for Carnel kill her and then… well… I feel like any description I try to give of the ending is not going to get across just how abrupt it is, so here it is in full:
As I was no longer in [Martinia’s] grasp I no longer had her permission to cast spells to defend her and with her eyes closed she didn’t see the flying dagger that stabbed her in the eye.
And with his sacrifice it was “Game Over” for Greg. I wonder if he returned to his world?
Three decades later, at Carnel’s deathbed, her son picked up her wand for the very first time.
Hello, King Arnold. I’m your aunt Arillia.
“Aunt Arillia? Why are you in Carnel’s wand?”
Well, I was going to try to cheer you up with A New Hope, but if you really want to hear it, I’ll relay the sad tale of the Wicked Witch of the Midwest, as you command. It all started on the evening of my 18th birthday with a silent prayer.
What happened with Ramolino? With Greg? With anyone else? Why did Carnel die so young? Story’s over. Go home.
Oh bloody fuck this spiralled out of control. The next one of these will be shorter.