Also like... not all fear is overt. That's part of the fantasy. Once someone has been conditioned to accept learned helplessness, the fear is morphed because of external stimuli pressure that forced the brain, particularly the amygdala, to adapt to that pressure with covert emotional responses rather than overt emotional responses. That's a big part of how brainwashing works, and a big part of my "I want to be brainwashed" fantasy. That's why it's written in what is, I am now learning, a way that people could misidentify as "love".

But in the real world, those are fear responses. You don't put someone else above yourself if you love them. That's just not what love is- that's what fear is. Like, objectively, that is an emotional "fear" response. If you're in love, you have a focus on yourself AND on your partner or child or whatever. You know that you can't love another person without a functioning sense of self.

Fear is a less complex emotion than love- which is why we have to remind people to move past "fear" and into "love" in a fearful, stressful situation. That's why planes have those, "Put your oxygen mask on before you put it on your kids" messages- because when you're AFRAID, your first response is, "I have to protect my child at my own expense." But when you're in love, you see yourself as a member of a partnership.

Fear is not a negative emotion. Sentient creatures display a range of complexity that actually begins with fear as the most simple and moves into increasingly complex emotional intelligence. Fear is a mechanism that we evolved early on during the "species preservation over self preservation" span of our societal development. Fear is often displayed in irrational (sometimes positive in the sense of like "good/happy seeming") thought schemas through periods of trauma- both short bursts like a plane crash, and extended trauma like brainwashing. So that's what you're seeing here- the same fear that leads a father to suffocate and die so that he can protect his child, when the loving thing would have been to stay alive and help his kid make it through the crash.

Covert fear that manifests like this is not something that the person who experiences it will always see as a negative emotion. When we look at survivors of human trafficking, for instance, we will often see them make this same mistake- and it takes a LOT of therapy to get past the, "When I'm 18 I'm signing myself out of here and we can be together! You people just don't understand our love!" Stage. It's a pretty common misconception.

The thing is- it's not a misconception that I have, or that I'm cool with us having as a society. That's a big part of why I wanted somewhere where I wouldn't be judged or recognized to post this shit. Because I /know/ it's wrong. I know it for what it is. And there's not a lot of places where you can be wrong like that on purpose. I'm not trying to add to the zeitgeist like, "Oh, true love can look like this." I'm trying to say that I know what it is, and I want it anyway, and I know that's wrong and I would NEVER try to find it in real life- I mean, outside of bdsm play sessions. But... sometimes fantasies go deeper than that. Sometimes you want to be this brainwashed pretty little /thing/, who never has to think, who can just do what they're told and just /exist/ and it can be enough, and you don't even have to have a self-preservation instinct, you can just be wrong about it. That's not a real thing and I know I'm not making a lot of sense. I might can explain it better when I get home, but I feel like it's this really fucked-up mindset that you either have or you don't. It's not even exactly self-destructive or suicidal because you /know/ how fucked up it is. But it's there, man. It's in there. It's in my brain and the discussion tab led me to believe the brains of a lot of other people.