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serpentinemalign[nsfw text ahead! read with caution!]
In your own space, Talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
In college, my creative writing professor warned me off my love affair with the second person. He said, it's tough to pull off. You have to have a good reason to use it.
What's a better reason than to be a fucking slut?
I think, from my admittedly limited perspective, that it's a good time to be a self-shipper. Cringe is dead. Everyone was always horny for characters, but there's less sneering, more open acknowledgements of the practice. Everybody seems to have gotten in touch with their inner children, how free it was back then, drawing yourself kissing L from Death Note on your math homework. I shipped canon/OC ships on and off for my whole fandom career, but I only realised the true and dreadful potential of selfship after I became enamoured with a character who could impressively cover the gamut of my fetishes.
x reader fic, though, feels maligned even in selfship communities. By x reader fic I mean the kind of fic where it's in second person and you are meant to insert yourself into the protagonist's position directly. I think the self-indulgence can make people uncomfortable. I think it's also the honesty of the genre, of the direct address. It says: "I know what you're here for."
A lot of people project onto canon ships and ask why that's not enough. I do that too! (And then I have plenty of ships where I don't really want to be either person? Which tends to go ignored. Ships don't have to be wish fulfilment and people may want to seek their wish fulfilment from separate sources!) But there is something fun and carnal about being so blatant about your own self-projection, about sharing in a fantasy for which you can yearn with your full heart. It feels exhibitionistic; it feels delightful.
On twitter kink circles, or at least my kink circles, a lot of microfics are in fact 'x reader' fic; they're just not called that. They're in the second person, and they're very direct. They don't beat around the bush. You're on Twitter trying to get off (a horrible place to do so, but it is one of the few sites that haven't banned your kink thanks to credit card providers). To get off, you don't need to learn who Jane is or why she is being strapped into a brainwashing machine or the corporation that made the machine or the nefarious hands into which the machine has fallen. No. You want to feel the restraints tight around your wrists, hear the electronic hum around you, the click of the visor as it snaps into place, the vibration between your legs, the melting down of your mind and body into something malleable and usable.
The second person cuts out the middleman of imaginary conceit and makes things seem more real.
And for people who love words that are just very much visceral and in the present without needing to worry too much about exposition or scene-setting (which, coincidentally, is like 90% of the hypnosis community! and is like 90% of what hypnosis is!) it's a great place to be.
I think most kinks centred around power play and D/S work very well with the second person, and especially if the reader is the submissive. It is, itself, a power play, a seizing of agency. If you project onto a separate fictional character with a distinct identity, you are partly removed from anything they experience, including their being robbed of agency, if that's what floats your boat. Meanwhile, if you read:
"Brainwashing is good for me!" you said, grinning ear to ear.
There's an uncomfortable jolt inside yourself as your brain tries to unite the two 'yous' together.
I think the difficulty of the reader to insert themselves into an x reader story is overstated. It's no more a suspension of disbelief than reading anything fictional. The Reader, with capitals, isn't meant to be your reader exactly. The Reader is, too, a character, but their vagueness makes them a less self-indulgent character than if you crafted an entire OC to ship with a canon.
I think a lot of OC/canon hate, which I'm glad has died out over the years, is the 'so what' factor. People not having been sold on the idea that this OC is a necessary addition to the canon, without diverting from the focus on the canon cast. (Of course, this perspective is entitled, and it's rooted in the idea that fanfic is a consumable object like any franchise, that fic writers owe you shit. But that's a rant for another time.)
By contrast the Reader is typically constructed to feel transparent, blank and nondescript. They have no name, and sometimes (my favourite ones always do) no gender, no precise details of appearance - in erotic x reader fics, the most you'll get is knowing they have a skirt that can be pulled up, a shirt to open, a collar snapped around their neck. They will probably have a boring job, or a boring job for the universe. They are a mundane receptacle for the heights of fantasy. (One exception would be the kind of reader fic that uses "y/n" and "[eye colour] eyes", but that's not something I have actually encountered in the wild of the ao3 explicit tags lol. So I feel safe saying that's a different demographic completely and it's not the kind of fic I'm discussing here.)
In many respects the Reader is the "acceptable" OC fuelled by anti-Mary Sue sentiment from like 15 years ago. They are designed to be invisible and ordinary and they pose no threat to the extraordinariness of the central cast. In fact they're designed to accentuate the canon cast's exceptionality. They are the ultimate foil, your means of showing the raw truth of that character (or characters!) as you see them, undisturbed by preexisting dynamics.
To me, the reason that the Reader works as a character and isn't boring, despite being so nondescript, is that they have the unique characteristic of being perfectly crafted for that one hindbrained fantasy in the fic. The people who read your story have the common ground of being interested in this fantasy, and so too does the Reader, even if they don't know it yet.
And that goes double if the Reader's consciousness is altered in the fic. If they are forced to do things against their will, it just feels so much juicier and visceral when it's all couched in the second person. It's another layer of power play. Does it matter much if it's the writer or the character of affection that's pulling the strings? It's like the contrast between playing a game and watching it. When you're playing a game, you are sometimes an active participant, sometimes not. And that makes a lack of choice seem all the more jarring. We can't quite simulate that with non-interactive mediums, but we can get somewhere close, and it just takes a three-letter word. You.
The anonymising of the Reader is a further step towards it being the perfect pairing with mind control kink. The Reader, in being as relatable as possible, in their homogeneity, ends up being the perfect, empty, passive object. To step into the Reader's droneskin? person suit? is to accept whatever happens, to make oneself open and vulnerable to having things done to you.
As someone who needs personal attention and needs it now now now, hive minds and collective consciousnesses hold little sexual interest to me. But in x reader fic, there is a sort of collective consciousness you get to share with the Reader and all the other readers and it's almost spiritual. The connection doesn't really exist but in that moment you can have the faith that you are admiring a paradise of collective creation.
So it's not even that x reader fic is well suited to mind control kink. Reader fic is mind control of the most delicious variety, letting the writer into your own driver's seat, piloting your words.
And I find that comforting and honest. It feels like coming home. It feels like: I'm not alone anymore. I don't have to be.
