There are a couple of fundamental thrills with bondage, being controlled and having control taken away from you. A very effective way of doing that is taking away or limiting the ability of the bottom to communicate.
This can, of course, be role played. I’ve done that and it’s good but it does not compare, for me, to trying to say something to the top only to have gibberish or nothing come out. It makes me feel controlled. As a top that is my goal, to have the bottom under my control and RLV can do much to achieve that.
Communication in SL happens in a number of ways
- Chat
- Emoting
- Private Channels
- IM
- Notecards
- Pictures
And other sneakier ways (no I’m not going to tell you, that’ll do for now). Each of the listed methods can be controlled by RLV, what gets controlled is dependent on the context. If you don’t know what context means, look it up because I’ll be using that word a lot 😉
This is a big subject, so I’m going to break it up in to a number of posts. This one’s going to concentrate on Chat and emoting.
Chat
Well this one’s easy, slap a gag in the bottom’s mouth. That’s as basic as it gets, it can get much more involved, but let’s run with that for now.
Gagging is a bondage staple. Before we had RLV, hell second life, bottoms would emote being gagged. It was a choice made by the bottom to respect the covenant that a gag’s in place; something from the bottom might look like this:
bottom mumbles behind her gag, shaking her head violently from side to side.
I’ll be quite frank with you, I still prefer that over what we have with a gagged bottom in RLV
bottom: mmf ppf mmom pfmm
With absolutely no emoting that green spam doesn’t really do it for me on its own. Something like this works really well though:
bottom: mmf ppf mmom pfmm
bottom’s eyes go wide as she mumbles incoherently behind her gag
Now let’s back up a moment, here. The top’s directing the scene by gagging the bottom, the bottom is not a passive entity in this. The bottom reacts to the restriction in an appropriate way that empowers the top. If the top gags the bottom and the bottom just spams the screen with green gag nonsense, that’s not doing a great deal to convey the import that being gagged has on the bottom.
Tops, you can do something about this. Let’s say you’ve gagged a bottom and all the bottom does is spam the screen with annoying gagese…let’s pick it up from there.
RR Ballgag applied to bottom
bottom: mmf ppf mom Pfmm
bottom: pff mmmfow pfffme
bottom: mmfwo ppo mmmmow
Top sighs as she shakes her head in bemusement
Top:Silly girl, can’t understand a word your saying. Now hush up, and answer me by nodding or shaking your head.
Top proceeds to play twenty questions with the bottom. This works on a couple of levels. Firstly it re-enforces that the top is the one pulling the strings. The bottom has very limited options in how she can respond. Secondly if the bottom is not skilled at emoting, it can encourage that skill and that’s never a bad thing.
Deaf
This is an edgy one, I advise against using it with strangers. Deaf does what it says on the tin, it makes the bottom deaf to all local chat. All the bottom will see is this:
…
…
…
Next to the name of whoever said it. Thrilling huh? Well yes, it can be. It all boils down to context. Consider the following scenario, the bottom has been bound, gagged etc. Another party comes along, someone who’s a participant in the scene. In the days before RLV what would happen with skilled RPers is something like this:
Top roughly manhandles bottom, inserting ear plugs in to bottom’s ears, rendering bottom deaf.
Top leans in to Top’s Buddy, and talks quietly with him; neither Top’s voice of or Buddy’s voice are comprehensible to Bottom.
And the conversation between Top and Buddy would take place in IM. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s good RP. The effect is somewhat spoiled though if this is happening in a public place and the bottom can hear all the chit chat that’s going on around non-participants. That’s where RLV comes in.
Mute
It’s arguable I should have covered this under the section all about gags, however if you’ve ever tried to totally silence someone (or yourself, you pervert) then you’ll know that it’s next to impossible to silence someone completely.
What would work is locking someone in a soundproof helmet, such helmets exist in SL. Speech and hearing are facilitated by microphones and speakers; that’s one of the few occasions I’d mute a bottom’s chat.
Emotes
Emotes cannot be completely curtailed with RLV, they can be truncated to 15 characters. The question is why would I as a top want to limit a bottom’s emotes?
For me the circumstances that this may happen are possibly amongst the most contextual of any RLV restriction. It goes against what I generally want from a bottom; good feedback through RP.
Off the top of my head, here’s an example where it may be appropriate to truncate emotes. Let’s say I’ve transformed someone in to a statue. Well there’s a reason to mute and deaf someone perhaps, maybe just mute. Deaf/mute would be incredibly boring. Consider if the bottom is a wordy emoter, you might have something like this:
Bottom struggles to move but finnds that her body is rigid with no movement possible. She panics, wondering what is to become of her, only able to hear the voices around her but unable to even moan.
Now as a bit of narrative prose, that’s not too bad but in the context of the scene, is it appropriate? When’s the last time you walked past a statue and managed to discern that sort of information from it? No, me neither. Now ideally my bottom knows to keep quiet and to not emote, but it may pay to truncate emotes just to re-enforce the point.
All that said I have a general dislike for truncating emotes, I don’t allow it on myself and would need a very good reason to do it to a bottom.
Special case: Chat redirection (renaming)
Gagging works by redirecting local chat and garbling it, chat redirection. It does have another use, though, particularly useful in de-personalisation scenarios.
Some devices such as the Krystal Klaarrs Iso-Helmet, the Mo Renamer and the DD remnamer, allow for either the top or the bottom to change the name associated with chat. Imagine 3 avs all dressed identically and all speaking with one voice, a true hive mind. It can be quite disconcerting 🙂