NARRATIVE HYPNOSIS AND YOU: A PRIMING/PRIMER ON TAKING THE LEFT DOOR
or: how dirk strider et al. changed my ontological worldview, and how you can brainwash your friends and loved ones without really trying
<3 --- <3 --- <3 --- <3
in a lot of our posts, we keep referring to "narrative hypnosis." i don't know if this is the widely-used term for what i'm talking about, or even if we're using it right! but since we've been asked a few times, here's my best shot at explaining in the simplest possible terms what we actually mean by that.
i'm BB, from the killer games except not really except kind of except it's complicated, and here's what the deal is with narratives, metanarratives, brainwashing, and you! according to some random girl on the internet, that is. i don't claim to be an expert of anything except my own cognition. and making zines. and even then i have a lot to learn about both of those things, so take everything i say with a grain of salt!
(and, if any of this happens to bear any resemblance to something some of you have done before -- it was a coincidence, i swear! i really truly wasn't there. but that doesn't mean any doors are closing behind you.)
---- <3333 ----
now, before we begin, i'd like to list an extremely non-exhaustive handful of games and media that i think accidentally -- or on purpose! -- create or discuss narrative hypnosis through their structure. these are:
- undertale/especially deltarune
- superhot, extremely
- homestuck & especially the homestuck epilogues
- the beginner's guide (really!)
- invitation to a beheading
- house of leaves
- beau is afraid
- doki doki literature club
- dispatches from elsewhere
hopefully these will all make sense by the end of this -- but if any of them don't, send me an ask and i'll explain my interpretation in more detail :-)
finally, i'm gonna be talking a lot about my view of reality first, so feel free to skip ahead to a section header that interests you! just imagine that all the sections you didn't read were really really brilliant and you agree with them completely, ok?
- <3 - <3 - <3 - <3 -
intro: narratives create perception, perception creates "reality"
so, our view of what narratives are relies on this fundamental view that material reality (as distinct from stories) is completely arbitrary. you might say: well, BB, stories aren't real and the real world is. that's what makes them stories. you can't just say that everything's real!
to which i'd say: well, i see your point, but real according to you? who died and made you the objective viewpoint through which the entire universe should be split into "real" and "not real?" those are words. we made those up, just like we made up "chair" and "philosophy" and "spamton" and "sun" and "moon." if you take away all the perception, what you're left with is one single everything -- because with nobody to divide it all up into pieces, there's just "stuff!"
so, we decide how we want to chop that stuff up into individual words and concepts. and we create distinctions that are really important to us! your idea of a chair is really helpful, say, for deciding what you want to sit on. you wouldn't want to sit on an upturned nail -- so that's not a chair! we agree on a lot of these concepts, but they get a little fuzzy at the edges -- you've probably heard of the famous chair copypasta, in which wikipedia used to have this extremely long and arduous definition of types of chair. not everyone'll look at the same object and call it "chair!" hell, i call stools chairs sometimes. am i stupid? maybe. but that's real to me!
and this goes beyond just the stuff we can knock on and touch and eat and feel and breathe and smell. when you imagine something (like a story or a memory), your brain produces electrical signals in the "shape" of it for you to process. so you're perceiving it as a Fake Thing, even if it immerses you a lot sometimes and you forget it's a Fake Thing to you. but here's the kicker: you know what you are, bud? also electrical signals! if us and our fictions are both just patterns of brain signals, what's actually the difference...?
plural systems and plurality in general blur this line even more. at what point does a character stop being a fictional character and start being a fictive, and at what point is a fictive a real person? your answer might be different from mine... and you'd better answer carefully, 'cause your system of morality probably relies a LOT on what you consider real or not, babe!
so we all have our own views of what's what, and our own collections of what's real. and sometimes these views all line up a lot, like i said earlier. i'd argue that what keeps these views relatively in line -- and informs our morals, our conceptions of what's what, and everything else we process -- is NARRATIVES!
narratives are how we perceive EVERYTHING. narratives are how we share ideas. narratives are not only how we inhabit other worlds, but define our own -- and critically, our role in it and how others relate to us and what inspires us and what we learn and what we hate and what we like and what we want and what we fear. we all construct a story in which we are the main character (or at least the pov character). narratives are the building blocks of reality, because they're the means by which perceptual ideas propagate. if you'd like, memes contain individual ideas, and memes get packaged into narratives to travel between people's consciousnesses, and those narratives produce their perception -- and therefore their reality.
make sense? hope so! let's get to
-- <3 --- <3333 --- <3 --
⭐️📚 the good stuff 📚⭐️
what if we could manipulate these central narratives?
if you can change someone's central narratives, you'd be able to change their perception, right? that would mean controlling their reality. take a second to really process what that means -- their moral system, identity, personality, and what's real and what's aren't are all stored within these narratives. and these narratives are all bundles of ideas! and we're constantly exposing ourselves to narratives all the time refining them. so... is there a back door we can sneak in somehow?
if they're plural, yes, definitely. but that's a whole thing in and of itself -- whether someone is or isn't a system, though, there's two really really good ways to shape someone's core narratives.
the first is controlling their sources of information, which is itself a whole can of worms, too. sometimes that's a high-control environment (yikes!) and sometimes that's just showing your friends something you KNOW will affect them (hehehehe.) but that alone does not narrative hypnosis make.
the other one, though, is producing narratives that are lab-created to not only be compelling but enthralling. narratives that draw you in, capture your attention, lure you into a false sense of security... and then suddenly wrap claws around your perception and drag you riiiight over the barrier that separates the "real" electrical signals from the "fictional" ones! that's right: you know it, you love it, iiiit's....
<3 ---- <3 ---- <3
metafiction babey!!!!
it's like that old example of trance you've probably heard a million times where you get so sucked into a show or game that you forget you're dealing with pixels on the screen and start to interpret the words you're reading and images you're seeing as real. that on its own is a type of hypnosis -- but what i'm talking about is when the story refuses to let go at the end. instead of booting you out and handing back that immersion and saying "there! that was a story :-) have fun in your material world!", these types of story say "wait. don't leave. wait. what if this is real? who's to say it isn't? who's to say these electrical signals are any different from your electrical signals??"
take undertale, for example -- THE classic version of this. undertale finds ways to speak directly to you, the player, as distinct from the cast -- and to make an argument for the cast's agency and the genuine immorality of fucking with these fictional characters' lives. that's not to say that, according to everyone's perception of reality, you're a bad person based on the way you play this video game. but the text of undertale itself posits that these characters are meaningfully real and their experiences persist outside of being sprites and code, to the point that one of them implores you not to reset their lives. that creates a VERY different way of engaging with the text than, say, a mario game -- where you can replay it again and again and never have to contend with the moral decision of resetting princess peach back into the claws of bowser. it's not about that!
but this effect goes beyond just games that directly confront you, the player, about your actions. it can also be more subtle -- like if you just have a story that's really REALLY immersive. so immersive that you find yourself gripped by the heart even without it telling you that you're part of it. sometimes, that means stories with casts so real they feel like real people you know and care about, like hypnospace outlaw. but sometimes, it's...
<3 <3 <3 <3 --- <3 <3 <3 <3
🌟😵💫 the GOOD stuff 😵💫🌟
what if we could get more direct? is there such thing as "narrative intox?"
yes, and that's a very hot way to put it. thank you, me. you're very clever for that one. when i say "narrative intox," i mean the equivalent of slipping something into someone's drink when they're not looking. the drink doesn't look much different... and then they get all woozy... and then all of a sudden everything's different and they don't recognize where they are and the world is so weirdddd.
some stories i consider narratively hypnotic are less blatant about their metafictional elements because they're sneaking something past you. some narratively hypnotic stories don't have metafictional elements at all, but still achieve hypnotic effects, because all communication is hypnosis. every story -- and indeed, every word and every picture and every note and every sound -- contains ideas, and communicating those ideas is an attempt to force the audience's brain to perceive what you perceive. if you make a REALLY convincing argument -- through sensory language, relatability, thoroughness, et cetera... you are essentially reaching directly into their core narratives and tweaking something here or there.
so if you were to write a story someone projected on -- because a character REALLY reminds them of themself -- you could theoretically change their behavior quite a bit. with a thought experiment -- just a hypothetical -- you could change the moral system they view the world through, or make them realize their perception of reality should be a lot closer to yours than it really is!
but you don't just have to make new narratives! you can slot yourself into the ones they already have. when i talk about "the protagonist," "the side characters," "the narrator," "the antagonist," and the like -- or even more specifically, "the princess" and "the maid" and "the wise fool" and "the Joker Baby..." these are roles that we all have our own understandings of. whether you want to or not, you -- the girl reading this -- unconsciously recreate these fictional roles in your real life. the antagonist might be your boss, or that neighbor you hate, or another poster, or yourself. the princess might be a girlfriend you REALLY want to impress, or a really hot customer, or some dude at the grocery store that you could probably forcefem.
who's the narrator?
well. that might seem easy to answer. there isn't one. not every story has a narrator.
but if someone could become the narrator.... well, that'd give them quite a bit of power, wouldn't it? narrators are pretty strong. their words shape the reality of a narrative. their communication is manipulation, just like everyone... else's... hey, wait, that's pretty easy to do, right? if you could convince someone that you're the narrator, could you.... just start telling them what their reality is?
okay, that sounds fucking awesome. but then, of course, the question is:
<3 <3 -- <3 <3 -- <3 <3
who gets to be the narrator?
spoiler alert: you don't need g-d powers to be the narrator. you just need to be trusted and listened to long enough that your words start to make a lot of sense. say you're reading a tumblr post, and it seems really enthralling. like you can't put it down, and every new insight is making something click in your brain, and you're reading along and along, willingly letting it change the way you see the world.... hungrily lapping up each new word of it, like this post -- this one tumblr post -- is some kind of prophecy, some Absolute Truth, a certainty that the world must work this way...
wouldn't that make me your narrator? hehehehe. well, i'm not interested in staying your narrator. i just want to make my point, and then i'll give you your life back and you can decide if you want to believe me and keep sinking deeper into it! but part of the reason that i might've successfully had you there was my confidence. we tend to believe confident stories when the details match up! or at least i sure do. confidence makes a lot of hard-to-swallow pills go down easier, because who likes uncertainty? certainly not me or you, right?
when you have a conversation with someone and nod along to everything they're saying and only later realize you didn't actually agree with it, they were narrating you. when someone slips you a little extra alcohol and you drunkenly cling to them because they make sense and the whole world's blurrrryyyy, they were narrating you. when someone hypnotizes you, they narrate you. when someone tells you what to do and you feel compelled to obey, they narrate you.
so what is narrative hypnosis? it's telling someone what happens in their own story. whether through metafiction, through relatability, or through confident communication, you can grab those central narratives by the throat and completely redirect the shape of their reality -- subtly or directly!
and the best part? they don't have to be the protagonist of their own story, either. maybe you want someone to be your thrall -- so you narrate them as such, slowly shrinking their possibility space until they're eating out of your hand. maybe you want someone to be a pet -- so by making them associate certain things with their idea of the narrative role of a pet, you can slide them right into that headspace. it's like loading a different CD on a CD player! you're playing all the dog hits now, sweetheart. let's hear you howl. good girl.
💞💕 in conclusion... 💕💞
be cool please
i hope it doesn't look like i'm trying to write a guide on how to like genuinely ruin someone's life. you are responsible for the actions you take -- even if you set your own morality constants one way, a lot of other people might look at it a different way. who am i to tell you who's right? use your best judgement, please.
but overall, narrative hypnosis is a really cool concept to me, because it's like hacking into a video game or splicing footage -- it's direct manipulation on the reality level, using the means by which we interface with the world! which is a REALLY hot concept to mess around with in stories and scenes and bits and stuff. the idea of a charming narrator suddenly rewriting me into "The Doll..." well. i'm crossing my legs. LMAO.
i find metafiction really hot for the same reason i find being narrated hot: that it claws into my mind and forces me to either incorporate it into my reality or contend with it. and i think that's erotic! when a work is fighting to be considered "real" within my head, that's sex to me. and when it wins, and a story about the story not being a story starts to actually change my behavior and speaking patterns.... well, i think that's super hot. super. hot. super. hot. super. hot. <3
-- <3 --
any questions? i'm SURE i missed something or worded something bad, but i wanted to get this ramble out there into the world! and now it is. it took me a while to write.... oh well! i'll upd8 it later with any corrections or further comments. see you in the beautiful askbox!!
---- <3 ----
addendum: the additional posts i'd like to write about this topic include how it relates to the other media i listed, how it relates to dirk strider specifically, how it relates to spirituality and religion (to me), and ESPECIALLY how it relates to plurality! and forcefem. hehehehe. if any of these interest you especially let me know!
