"Watch your head spin
Like a mesocyclone
Bouncing off the walls
Now there's nowhere to run"
Like a mesocyclone
Bouncing off the walls
Now there's nowhere to run"
Shiny Toy Guns - Ricochet
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"These are the prisons, these are the crimes
Teaching life in a violent new way
Teaching life in a violent new way
For who can bear to be forgotten?"
David Bowie - Ricochet
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"Drugs are for losers, and hypnosis is for losers with big weird eyebrows"
Futurama S03E14 (2001-2002)
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Baldur's Gate 3 has its good points, but I've never liked Larian's attitude that "adventure = random shit" or their nonexistent worldbuilding and infantile pandering characters. I've particularly hated their handling of the illithids and more broadly the question of telepathy, to the point I flat-out refused to participate in that facet of gameplay altogether.
I reached the end of the campaign without ever using a single tadpole (also avoiding mind reading / control spells while at it, much as I could) and if the boss fight requires me to have done so, this is a hill my drowid will gladly die on.
Telepathy is wrong.
When setting out on this rant I was sorely tempted to get up on my pre-millennial high horse and pull a "kids these days" routine, but the truth is we've always been shaky on the morality here (return to why later) as exemplified by the Trois on ST:TNG thirty years ago. Prof. X is a... hero... right? At least that's what I find myself thinking all of a sudden when he scratches his magic cue-ball. Not to mention D&D always threw charm spells and other mental enchantment casually into the magical mix; in their defense, the folklore they indirectly drew from also does so. But I would contend I'm seeing more blithe, unquestioning acceptance of mind reading and mind control as generic tropes recently.
Drive's latest chapter kicked off this train of thought. I've long said that telepathy is a dead end for science fiction in particular. Drive's driving phlebotinum is, ostensibly, the titular interstellar drive accompanied by a requisite smatter of space opera laser guns and antigravity, quirky aliens and navy jargon. As soon as the space squirrel's sixth sense turned out to double as "mind-speaking" I cringed in anticipation of what has now happened: singlehandedly weaponizing it to instantly disable an entire fleet and receiving galaxy-shaking military intel via seance. A.k.a. invalidate any/all of the setting's technology, weaponry or strategic planning or... y'know... the plot. (Or backgrounds, is your setting gonna just be a telepathic blank void from now on, Kellett you lazy hack?) Who gives a shit if the enemy outnumbers, outguns and outpositions you if you can just nuke all their brains and call it a day? So long dramatic tension. Other stories may throw in some kind of "forgetfullness curse" to patch up plot holes like why hasn't anyone addressed some obvious threat until the hero notices it (hint: it's to make the audience feel smart for NOTICE THING) or to fast-forward intimacy or skip language barriers or any other number of lazy plot shortcuts.
Which leads me to my first sub-point: if telepathy is now so casually accepted that brain-zapping draws no more attention than zombies or a generic zap gun, the very least we could say is that telepathy's kinda played out.
Second, my original focus was on SF, because telepathy's mere inclusion in such a setting undercuts the technological precept of the entire genre. But more and more its rampant abuse as crutch for incongruous writing has grown detrimental in horror or fantasy as well. This became apparent while playing one of the few video games without supernatural elements, Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Its main quest's middle portion revolves around tracking down groups of bandits, with an interlude as medical detective's apprentice. (Cholera! It was cholera! 'Poisoned water'... why-I-oughta microscope yas *mumble-mumble*)
Playing gumshoe in the age of clogs made me realize how much more interested I felt in each witness' actual testimony as opposed to being automatically informed a character is good or bad via notarized brain fax. But aside from it being a cheap cop-out for actual plotting and character development, let's return to the inherent creepiness of mind invasion.
Unsounded remains one of the best webcomics out there. Among other details, I appreciate Cope fairly consistently portraying mind-reading as an invasive or destructive/deconstructive process, despite leaning on it a bit heavily as plot crutch herself. Bonus points for the Etalarche curse, which condemns the victim to be hunted down by all its countrymen in a murderous rage... specifically for thinking the repercussions through and showing how devastatingly such a curse upon the minds of an entire country may be subverted by the first invading enemy with a megaphone to cause the equivalent of a suicidal rout among your most hardened soldiers.
I'm less impressed by the SF comic Forward, which established from the start that its entire populace have electronics hardwired into their brains from birth, but only recently admitted the logical downside: the implants are NOT one-way. The user is part of the machine, and can be reprogrammed as such. Except it's not treated as a downside. It's very casually dropped into the conversation that your perception can even be altered in real time to censor anything you have chosen not to perceive... or which you are considered mentally incompetent to perceive... or to freeze you in place unable to even speak for yourself because you triggered a subroutine labeling you a threat to others. Now, having read Tailsteak's previous two comics and then some, I'm trying very hard to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's going somewhere with this (maybe to the Futurological Congress) other than just a quirky little risque comedy of errors for our hero, his beefy love interest and his bestest robo-buddy.
If it's foreshadowing for a dystopian reveal, then grats Tailsteak, you've earned your keep. But otherwise, you can't drop brain editing into the conversation without the wider totalitarian applications being painfully obvious. Plot, conflict, affection, enmity, strategy, goals, perspicacity, means, motive and opportunity, none of it matters once mental invasion is in play. "Nuke their brains" is the ultimate cheat code. The ultimate absolutism. Thought, independent, personal thought is existence itself. Cogito ergo sum, the foundation of reason.* By effacing individuals as independent actors, telepathy erases personhood, erases being itself more thoroughly than Big Brother's recording devices and torture ever could.
We used to know that. Or at least suspect it.
While telepaths have always popped up in pop culture, Vulcan mind-melding at least shared the stage with acknowledgements of destructive potential. George R.R. Martin, before hopelessly wedding his name to "tits and dragons" had quite a few deservedly famous short to novella length tales to his name, among them A Song for Lya, which skillfully juxtaposed the fear of death with the night-mare Life-in-Death via the logical end-game of telepathy. The Man from Mars' corrective mechanism is not a brainwashing spree; it's a killing spree. The rest is up to earthlings. It used to be accepted that being made a cog in a clockwork orange is unacceptable, no matter the perpetrator's crimes, that execution would be preferable. Transcendence in Alpha Centauri was a desperate compromise short of complete annihilation of all sapience before Planet's presapient omnipotence. Even the Matrix, mass-market action flick that it was, at least stuck by two critical precepts: "ignorance is bliss" is a villain's line, and make-believe cannot substitute for reality. Even up to Dragon Age: Origins, it was understood that mind control is inherently wrong if not unforgivable, something demons do, the darkest school of magic. But by Tides of Numenera, it was chiefly Avellone's character Erritis that acknowledged such tuning of others' minds as inherently self-interested and destructive, with most writers encouraging you to rewrite others to suit yourself and even featuring "psychic warriors" as young adult novel heroes. The moral question of manipulating the "tides" themselves is barely scratched, and left up to a villain to pose.
I was disgusted in BG3 when by the third act I found even picking up a brain parasite automatically adds it to your "collection" a.k.a. shoved it into your brain, as if they couldn't imagine I might not want to. Forced me to do some container juggling to capture each one to my camp chest instead, so I could screenshot my whole refusal to partake above for a hearty "go fuck y'self Larian" now.
Go fuck y'self, Larian. There is no such thing as beneficent mind control.
Most aggravating, the game's writers played off the issue as if they can't even discern any moral objection but only childish fear of ookiness, as the undesirability of illithidness is played every time in terms of face tentacles and floating, and not the existential horror of erasing personal existence by one's very nature. You skip merrily through the idea that you should be building up your psychic powers to invade and delete others' very selves. That's all cool. The game only and at long last plays your illithidity as "problematic" when your next mind-raping powerup might give you the physical features of one as well.
"Puerile attachment to my material form" - ? What? I play a freakin' shapeshifter! No, you idiots, my objection to mind flayers is the flaying of minds! And that attitude, of openly touting it's fine to rape minds so long as you don't look ugly doing it, does further show notable degeneration in modern pop culture, the depths to which two decades of "reality" TV voyeurism have dragged us.
Finally, let's note this was probably inevitable. The Enlightenment and scientific progress were a brief blip of rationality in the million-year life and death of an intrinsically irrational breed of apes. The 20th century's short outbursts of rationality were themselves coextant with and sandwiched between long decades of dominant thought-erasing fascism, spiritualism, cloying sentimentality, romance, advertising and religious revivals. As the old scorpion parable goes, it's in your animal nature.
Any creature that wants some magic sky-daddy reading its mind is not mentally competent, regardless whether it sports face tentacles.
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* Even if Descartes did undercut his own stroke of brilliance half a page later by reaffirming his devotion to idiotic caveman superstitions. Not that he'd be given much choice in the 1600s with the whole continent torturing witches to death left and right.
P.S.: The only time BG3 voices a flat, concise repudiation of make-believe it's via the teachings of a canonically evil D&D species.
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