hugo is at the centre of most of my selfship fantasies. i have other favourites, of course, but none have come anywhere near as close as hugo. i find his look and demeanour - confident, authoritative, cerebral, pompous - very attractive. he is also the most utilitarian choice of all my character crushes, because i can envision him fulfilling most of my kinks and fetishes. allow me to overshare about some select fantasies that bounce around my head like pinballs.
my favourite thing to imagine with hugo is based on his manikin in batman: prey, which is probably the biggest red flag a person could say aloud. being hypnotised and brainwashed by him into a perfectly blank and pliant living doll that he takes care of and hides in his closet. the doll is his ultimate shame and his ultimate weakness, the receptacle for all his psychodrama, but it also gets poured fancy liquor and dressed up in pretty lingerie and frotted against. it gets all the semblances of a person, it gets play acted into all the right scenarios of being seduced, of being invited for nightcaps, but of course it isn't a person and they both know that deep down.
when hugo needs a woman to help him psychologically torture bruce with reminders of his mother, he ties her up with rope and duct tape and beats her with a baseball bat to get her to comply. so perhaps prey!hugo guarantees a harsh and brutal conversion process with a resistant subject, he could burn off my self with vitriol rather than peel it away slowly.
but then maybe he wouldn't, because his seduction of sgt. cort (and it is indeed a seduction) is so gentle and slow, a mental dance. he is continually reassuring and building up cort to be exactly the fiction he wants him to be (while also unravelling cort's headstrong, violent masculinity) and that's so fucking hot let alone the sight of a man in nothing but boxers resting upon his couch, unable to move unbidden. hugo constructing the most intricate ritual to touch another man, that of deep hypnosis where his pliable subject won't notice anything lingering in his touch, will he?
he is incapable of real, defenseless vulnerability save when there is no one to consciously see or respond to him, and i would be incapable of vulnerability because i am emotionless and senseless. he could take out all his violent anger on me and i would be completely nonrespondent. he is tortured by his inability to accept his sexual desires so his living doll, between humanity and inhumanity, has to be masculine to be deliciously violable but must also be somewhere between or beyond gender. after all, isn't that how batman ends up being the head of the big titty fuckdoll? i 100% accept that as a misogynistic psychiatrist from the early 90s, he would see my gender identity as a delusion, a symptom, and one he would degradingly humour with 'it' pronouns, and only that because it suits his purposes for me. that's okay! it's hot this one time.
the connection i feel with this hugo is deep and full of all the most angsty and contradictory of my desires. i love and lust for almost all hugos, but it feels like prey!hugo and i were made for each other.
gothamverse hugo is my choice for scenarios around more intensive medical and psychological experimentation. it is extremely hot that he is so powerful and is able to just disappear people into his basement lab, but he's also notably protective of his subjects to his own detriment. you would be so well treated as his patient. he would give you enrichment in your cage. he has a paternal relationship with them, but also sometimes an erotic one. it's complicated and fucked up in all the ways i like.
i like that gotham hugo has the technology to eternally resurrect people but struggles throughout the series to resurrect them with their memories, so often has to imprint new ones onto them. there is so much that can be done with that, with being repeatedly killed and galvanised until you don't know who you are, you simply do whatever the good doctor says you need to do. he is the orchestrator of your reality and that's close enough to god, isn't it?
hugo's backstory in many of his iterations, including arkham city, is that he was previously a psychiatrist at arkham who was dismissed because he kept disappearing patients and doing his own experiments on them. so, a very similar thing to gothamverse hugo, but there was always something a bit seedier about the way arkhamverse hugo's activities were described. i like to think about that a lot :)
i recently developed a self-indulgent au with my self-insert mat finish. mat starts off working as an assassin for the mob (probably falcone's, for no reason other than that falcone is hot too.), is paid to kill hugo, and hugo instead traps and brainwashes them into his own personal combat doll. he gives them a new name, manikin, and remolds their psyche to service him both as a protector/killer and also as a personalised fucktoy. the idea for manikin was just because i was thinking about how many other batman rogues get to have cheesy, sexy themed sidekicks whom they are clearly fucking, and i felt that hugo had spent far too much time alone.