patient is guarded, so absorbed in themselves they seem incapable of sharing emotional truths with anyone else, attempting instead to connect with others through their fantasies. they experience lurid fantasies of being mentally overpowered and puppeteered, and in a chemically relaxed state told me i was at the centre of many of these fantasies. they begged me not to cure this abnormality, which of course i will take into account while devising their treatment.
their familial relationships are strained, hence i suspect they look to me as a father figure of sorts, a source of stability, which is not uncommon for the therapeutic relationship. they are desperate for my approval, which is being withheld for their own good. they can only receive the approval they crave if they continue to comply.
they call their affliction 'brain rot', which reminded me of a method i had previously devised to simulate the decay of the brain, to make the body think temporarily that it is long dead. it was intended as a disciplinary measure in high-security settings where solitary confinement was inappropriate or ineffective. it was only possible to administer a few minutes at a time without permanent, adverse consequences. since my departure from arkham, i have never seen a client so desperate to sink into the border between life and death. they may be the first person who would take to this treatment as a cure, and not a punishment.
hi! thanks so much for visiting my shrine - i hope it's a fun place to be. as well as wanting to do some cheesy patient notes to read myself for filth, i thought it would be nice to talk a little bit about why hugo means so much to me.
i discovered hugo strange at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, in 2020. i was background watching gotham and hugo's introduction was the first thing in that show to get me to look up from my animal crossing island. i was already a fan of dc comics and related media, but prior to hugo i had flitted around the batfamily and various 'classics' and bits and pieces by favourite comic writers. hugo was really the first batman villain that grabbed onto me and refused to let go.
there were lots of reasons for this, but all of them can be summed up as: he filled needs of which i was deprived. it appealed to me that he was a professor, a dispenser of knowledge - i was in grad school during the lockdowns, my grades steadily dropping, and i suddenly couldn't get by needily dropping into my advisors' offices for pep talks, because they were swamped in transferring their syllabi over to online teaching and, you know, the collective trauma of the pandemic. imagining a fictional researcher taking advantage of my inexperience felt right, somehow, a way towards the validation i craved, as well as an appropriately maladaptive band-aid for the fact i am a whole lot of void without external validation to remind me i exist. my experiences of mental health care, especially during lockdown, had also disillusioned me to the institutions of therapy and mental health, and so hugo felt very vindicating and cathartic and right as a character to fantasise about, someone who is just the worst aspects of that system rolled into one. and finally, of course, he aligned with my mind control fetish and a good majority of my kinks. he was perfect.
quickly gothamverse turned into comics turned into arkhamverse. i had to consume all the essential stories as quickly as possible. i started writing x reader fic about hugo, really vent porn about the painful reflections of the pause of lockdown, of being in my early twenties and not knowing where i would be by the end of it. i was in the process of realising that i didn't actually want to do a phd, and it felt increasingly appealing to consider a life perpetually trapped inside, physically and mentally locked away, objectified and selfless. it's all that felt present to me, these flights of deathlike sexual fantasy, so it's all i wrote about, just desperately attempting to find something sexy within the profoundly unsexy experience of lockdown trauma and agoraphobia. hugo was and is a wonderful conduit for these feelings, the man standing at arkham's gates and decreeing who could enter and leave, who deserved to be isolated.
nowadays i'm doing a lot better, though it's true i still carry all those wounds and identity crises within me. hugo has lingered, though. he is still where my fantasies tend to lie. he is the face to the voices of the brainwashing mp3s i listen to for fun, he is an endless aesthetic and literary muse, and he has nudged my interests and hobbies in lots of fun directions. prior to hugo, i didn't necessarily understand why people self-shipped. my faves, blorbos, etc, were really more reflections of myself or who i wanted to be, rather than characters i actively desired to be with. now i get it. he unlocked a lot for me and i'll always be grateful for that.
if you'd like to get in touch, the links to do so are at the bottom of the page. thanks for checking out this little corner of my brain!