dumbtime wrote: Gothikka has created her subjects the way they should be - secretively. No one, not even the heroines themselves, knows what's been done or realizes that they have been turned in worshipful pets. Besides the fact of the subtle realizations happening, I doubt they will be able to tell they have undergone the transformation already or know that something was done to them. To me, that is true mind control at the max.
I second Dumbtime's point here -- it touches on something that bothers me a bit about a number of the villains. Oftentimes their failure to cover their tracks leaves me wondering "What are they thinking?!?" For example, in Body Image, Valliant Girl goes for a photo shoot at a magazine, where she is brainwashed by people who are known to work there. They proceed to send her to wreck the studio of one of their rivals. This has to be noticed, and it will be trivial to trace it back to them. Motive and opportunity, hello? I may not be a master criminal but I'm pretty sure if I committed a crime I could cover my tracks better than that. Belinda Giolla is making the same kind of mistake right now in Forbidden Fantasy. Valliant Girl and Chrissy Tanner go to the Funhouse and don't come back. Might that trigger a larger-scale investigation? And it isn't like Belinda has much in the way of concealment if Chrissy can just walk in on her like that. For someone so smart, she sure doesn't seem to think things through. (Perhaps there's something about Valliant Girl that makes villains into idiots? I mean, I can understand male villains becoming idiots in her presence -- there's two good reasons for that -- but what's Belinda's excuse?)
Lest this come across as unduly harsh, let me point out a few examples of villains whose plans seem to have been better constructed. Lance Hardwood from Club Pump is one. He had a clear plan beyond merely getting a bunch of women under his control. He covered his tracks well, and he had a fallback when his original plans went awry -- which they only did due to an unknown limitation on his control method. The guy (whose name eludes me) who runs Headlights is cut from a similar mold. Subvert and exploit. Ringmistress is also very good on this front. She clearly puts a great deal of thought into not being caught, so much so that her current actions in The Resort Tales are motivated explicitly by that.
Keeping the balance is a tricky thing. Ultimately we're all here because we want to see the villains reduce the heroines into mind-controlled puppets of one form or another. If they ever win completely, the story ends, and that's no fun; conversely, if they ever lose completely they go to jail and the story also ends, and that's also no fun. The art is in making the villains competent enough that we can believe they never get shut down completely, but still have them make believable mistakes that allow their plans to be thwarted most of the time.
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