Weekly Spotlight #1

To start the spotlight series, I'll refer you to a classic story: The Experiment, by Mountain Man.

Mountain Man has a lot of good stories, but this one always stands out. The premise is simple: a college girl signs up for a psychological experiment, and is gradually conditioned to become a sex slave. It's a common hook for a story, but in The Experiment, the best parts are what happens along the way.

There are a few common pitfalls these hypnosis stories fall into. Sometimes, it's that the hypnotist snaps their fingers, and the victim instantly becomes a slave. This always breaks suspension of disbelief for me, because no one comes preprogrammed knowing what a master/hypnotic slave relationship ought to be like. In the same vein, sometimes the conditioning is so abrupt that it's jarring - it's one thing to convince someone to present themselves in a sexier way, but it's a totally different thing to change fundamental parts of their personality. That's just how people work on a fundamental level.

The Experiment refreshingly avoids all these problems. It takes place over months and months, during which the protagonist's conditioning is built on one block at a time.

Yet, for me, what makes this story truly shine is how it intersects with other people in the main character's life.

In one scene, the main character is tasked with hypnotizing a classmate for an assignment, and we get to see how she relates to the situation not as the victim, but as the perpetrator. Seeing her excitement over 'turning in her assignment' to the professor is fun in an exceptionally twisted way.

In another sequence, the main character's roommate realizes something is wrong. However, when she attempts to save her friend, she winds up being drawn into the web of hypnosis instead. Then we get to see the roommate turned into a tool to better serve the main character's conditioning, while the main character simply accepts her friend's corruption with a sort of detached interest.

Overall The Experiment is a long, gradual story with slow pacing, but if you're willing to put in the time, it's very much worth checking out.