lilth

This person points out that there's a bunch of spells in D&D that take away someone's free will, and most people are perfectly fine with it, but if those spells were real, they'd be horrifying. Which is something I've thought about before, in other contexts.

In my Ravenstone series, any act of magic that takes away someone's free will is considered a very serious crime, regardless of what you do with it. It's not illegal to be able to do most of these spells, since it is possible to cast them on animals and sometimes you have know how to cast the bad spells in order to protect yourself and others from them. But casting them on another human being or on most other sapient races (like the various faeries in the world) is a serious crime. There are some exceptions... government officials can sometimes legally cast compulsion spells on people to get them to calm down and cooperate if nothing else works (which doesn't happen often, as there are simple knockout spells and the like).

And if a young mage has a Gift for one of these kinds of magics -- meaning they can do the magic as a natural talent rather than having learned it -- they get some legal leeway, given that they can almost never control it at that age. Also there are sometimes good arguments to be made for self-defense, and it really depends on the spell and the mage's proficiency with it. Vedya Ravenstone has a Gift called Fear Projection, which causes another person to experience their worst fears; she gets in a bit of legal trouble using it a couple times growing up, but doesn't go to jail because she's so young and can't control it.

The way I came at this realization was the cavalier attitude mages and the author herself had in the Harry Potter series towards love potions. They were seen as this mostly harmless thing, the school even taught how to brew them, and I feel like this should've been a huge sign that Rowling is a fake feminist because using love potion on someone is basically rape. And yeah, Voldemort was conceived under a love potion, but even then it was downplayed by the characters and the narrative. She could've gone the route that he became evil because his mother had committed an act of evil in enchanting Voldy's father, but she instead focused on the fact that Voldemort's birth had basically been to try to anchor his father to his mother after she stopped dosing him with the love potion, and Dumbledore says that he went evil because he had never been loved. Which is a very problematic take on its own, that Bitchula could have countered by having pointed out that Harry couldn't possibly have known he was loved given the age he was when he was orphaned and how his remaining family treated him. Instead she did some nonsense with his mother's love protecting him from the killing curse and from becoming evil when he was hated by his caretakers, which is also stupid because if that was possible, why was Harry the first to survive the killing curse? Honestly, that whole series is a mess of nonsense and contradictions.

Anyway yeah, love potion comes up a couple times in the Ravenstone series, mentioned as an extremely restricted substance you need special permission from the government to even research, and pretty illegal to use on another person, in fact it's called out in the series by the characters and the narrative itself as being sexual assault just to use it on someone at all, regardless of your claimed intentions. I even have a little aside in one of the books where some member of one of the sports teams got expelled and went to prison for dosing someone with a love potion.