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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9743007" data-attributes="member: 907">This can be a bit setting-dependent. I'm going to get into some spoilers for the Dresden Files series, specifically Proven Guilty.[SPOILER="Proven Guilty"]In this, Harry Dresden (wizard/private investigator) learns that Molly, the daughter of his best friend Michael Carpenter, has a magical talent, and that she used it on one of her friends who had gotten another one of her friends pregnant, in order to make him give up drugs and take care of the girl and the baby.This seems like an altruistic use of magic for mind control, but the way magic works in the Dresdenverse is that a practitioner can't use magic to do things they don't truly deep down believe is right. (This is also why wizards are forbidden to use magic to kill mortals, including other wizards, so those who find the need to take lives would use weaponry instead.) So what Molly has done is essentially to say that she knows better than her friends what's good for them, and this does leave a spiritual stain on her, first causing powerful fey creatures to target her and her friends (because they feed on the supernatural fear she has instilled in her friend), and later leading to Harry having to take her in as an apprentice and taking responsibility for her actions, putting both him and her under a Doom of Damocles (basically a suspended death sentence in case she falls back into black magic).[/SPOILER]Now, this is specific to how magic works in the Dresdenverse – breaking the laws of magic corrupts you and makes you more likely to break them again in the future. But it is an example of how even seemingly altruistic mind control can be evil.</blockquote>

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