Ray Bradbury, RIP

Ray Bradbury was one of my earliest science fiction obsessions. Even when I moved on to darker and squickier material, I never forgot his (mostly) benevolent influence. Mr. Bradbury, this is for you.

So here's my rant about the MC in The Avengers

I'd read some spoilers beforehand (which I'd mercifully half-forgotten by the time I saw the movie), so I knew Loki used mind control on at least a couple of important characters - which means the spoilers come from me after this. If that matters to you, bail out now and come back after you've seen the movie.

Okay, now: Why did the MC in The Avengers have to be so unsexy? It's not like the writers had to soften things because they weren't playing to a fetish audience. Even Saturday morning kiddie cartoons make MC hotter than this. And The Avengers even had altered eyes, which you all know I love. So why did the MC come off as so...boring? It's not that the victims were male; trust me, even if Loki had gotten to Black Widow, it still wouldn't have turned me on.

I don't know what my fellow fetishists thought about the MC in The Avengers, but here's why it didn't do anything for me. Besides the hazy eyes and one brief moment of gushing from Dr. Selvig, he and Hawkeye didn't really seem controlled. Their allegiance had changed, but everything else about them stayed the same.

I think it's telling that Loki said Hawkeye had a good heart before taking him over - and that Loki couldn't take control of Tony Stark. Why didn't he just go for Tony's head or arm when tapping his chest didn't work? I think Loki had to go through his victims' hearts because that's what he was really controlling: not their minds, but their loyalties. Sure, Black Widow saved Hawkeye with (if I remember how she put it) "cognitive recalibration"; and sure, Barton had a post-rescue speech about having something scooped out of his mind and replaced with something else. But that was just talk. He and Dr. Selvig didn't act like sleepwalkers or robots when they were under control. They acted like themselves with just one difference.

But oddly enough, Loki talking about his power was pretty hot. If the MC scenes had played out the way he described them, I'd have had a much harder time sitting still in my seat.

I pulled these quotes from the Internet Movie Database, so forgive me if the wording is a little off. You'll get the point anyway.

First, here's Loki's tantalizing idea of making Hawkeye betray Black Widow:

No, I won't touch Barton, not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And when he wakes, he'll have just enough time to see the work he's done, and when he screams, I'll break his skull!

And then there was this speech, which probably doesn't reference MC at all, but which would be a hell of a turn-on if it showed up in an EMC story.  As a matter of fact, I had really high hopes for the plot when Loki said this. Too bad those hopes were shattered.

Kneel before me. I said... KNEEL! Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power. For identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.

Alas, MC hotness in The Avengers was not to be. Now, don't think I didn't love the movie anyway. I could rave for hours about Black Widow's badassness or the charming snark of Robert Downey, Jr., or my surprised delight at seeing Mark Ruffalo (of all people) eclipse both of them. But this is a blog about erotic mind control, so you'll just have to let me pout for a minute. I've raved elsewhere. ;-)

Cleansing the mental palate

After being tempted by some of my European friends into watching bits of the Eurovision contest on YouTube, I felt the need to cleanse my mental palate. There's just so much you can take of moonwalking bagpipers, faux-leather man-boats, and Hammer-pants-wearing Colin Farrell-lookalikes before the earworms literally start to eat your brain. Fortunately, the jerky movements of Hammer-pants' dancers reminded me of a video I like much better.

This clip from Chicago might give you an earworm, too, but at least you'll have some pleasurable puppet action to make up for it it.

This woman is magnetic

I just found the video below in the roundabout way you find things on YouTube. While there's nothing MC'ish about it, it's certainly as sexy/creepy as the other stuff I like; and I just can't stop watching the woman's face, even when what's going on with her hands becomes just as riveting as what's going on with her eyes.

Yes, that is a tease. ;-P But take a look and see if you don't agree with me.

And now for something completely different

I recommend this next clip only for those in both a weird and an indulgent mood, but if you meet the criteria you might get a nice little Lovecraftian MC buzz out of it.

For the last several days I've been having a conversation with my slash-loving email friend about our different tastes in music. I like rock, punk and alternative; she likes musicals from the '50's and '60's. Somehow we got on the subject of an overblown Richard Harris (yes, that Richard Harris) album from 1969 that she described as being incredibly awful. Well, I just had to hear it for myself, so she sent me a link to the following video. What she didn't realize, since she was focused solely on the melodrama, was that I'd actually enjoy it because the lyrics were right up my MC-loving alley. This abomination is called "The Hive" for good reason.

If you choose to listen, just go with the melodrama. Imagine it's Lovecraft himself telling you an Elder Gods story, the kind where he gets increasingly strident until he bangs you over the head with the last sentence by putting it in terrifying italics. Yeah, it's like that. ;-P

You had me at "Lovecraftian"

I just found this trailer over at Ain't It Cool News, by following the headline "The French Get Lovecraftian." I suppose this is yet another cool-looking film that will never find its way into wide release, but at least I can enjoy the tentacular, spidery squick of the trailer:

This is what it's like to have my brain

Maybe you've already seen the video below; it's the latest viral hit (I saw it on io9, myself). According to marine biologists, the answer to your inevitable question of "What the fucking blue hell is that thing?" is, it's a rare kind of jellyfish. But here's what I think, when I look at something like this.

Right from the get-go, I know it has to be an Old One; and since it's in the ocean, that narrows it down (mostly) to Cthulhu and Dagon. Then again, it could be a minion. The point it, this is definitely a Lovecraftian monster, and that means all kind of unspeakable horrors...and, if your mind works like mine, speakable kink.

Now, since I'm such a fan of EMC, my next thought is that it's obviously a Lovecraftian monster designed to MC unsuspecting divers. Obviously, it billows like that to mesmerize its prey.

At this point, my old-school-Stephen-King-fan joins the party, reminding me of an short story called (IIRC) "The Raft." In it, a group of teenagers gets stuck on a wooden raft in the middle of a lake, corralled by some sort of oil-slick-like monster that tries to lure them into its clutches with flickering lights. In one of the few scenes I still remember, a pretty girl is leaning over the edge of the raft, staring right into the predator's metaphorical eyes but too far gone to realize what she's doing.

Sadly, King's monster only kills its victims. But the video below makes me think of all kinds of other possibilities. Maybe this Lovecraftian monster embraces its prey and sucks, not the life, but the will out of them. Then perhaps it coats them in its own squicky effluence, creating a sort of Cthulhian pearl. Something that appeals to its own very specialized sense of aesthetics.

After that, the only question remaining is whether the monster hoards its pearls in some deep-sea treasure hold, or whether it sends them back to the surface to lure more recruits.

But why don't you answer that question for yourself?