Is changing someone's mind worth to work for?

[Penelope]

Crisantemos - I really sympathise with your situation and you've had enough of a debate going on above that i'll leave out my own opinions on "controlling" other people and just reply with my own experiences. You might benefit from them or not but I for one always at least kid myself into feeling a little more prepared, a little more settled after reading that somebody else has done x, y, z and advises on their own trials and errors.

I am not, not, not putting forward either a 'for' or an 'against' influential magic. However i'll say that I do sympathise because as Vashta said above, sometimes it just gets to the point where there isn't anything else you can lean on but magic, and sometimes you need something that you can do from your own home without meddling with any social balances.

Experience One: Getting somebody laid. I mean a boyfriend.

CRASS, I know. I was fed up of their moaning about being "alone forever" (at thirty, my God) so all I did was a little candle magic (easy to look up) and a fired off a sigil. The resulting shag, er, boyfriend came along fairly swiftly, which was in the check plus column. It didn't last more than three months, because they had never actually done any work to get to know each other and it turned out didn't have a great deal in common. And so began a great year of many a boyfriend, none of which were actually all that suitable for a long term relationship with this person and eventually I took the cosmic hint and removed all magical influences. The shiny new men ceased appearing and actually everybody was a lot happier.

Well, no, the person is back to moaning about being "alone forever" (at thirty three, God) and I have just stopped listening. Moral: Sometimes you think you know what you should give somebody, but it's not actually what they need. Even though it looks like it.

Experience Two: Making somebody feel a particular way about a particular thing because I wanted them to.

YES, I know. So basically this was a servitor deal, a big pestery Feelingsy servitor who followed this person around and "infected" them with these feelings until they felt more organic and were essentially set in stone. In personality. Whatever.

I couldn't tell if this had worked for a long time. Mostly because it was all about feelings and not about actually mentioning the feelings to me whenever they arrived. In the end I got some evidence that it DID what it was supposed to do, but actually I didn't get a bean out of it because it was all internal for this other person. I'm still not up on the entire moral here, except that really, there wasn't much point to this beyond experimentation - because there was no end satisfaction for me whatsoever. If you want somebody to think something, make it something you will definitely hear about.

Last experience I shall share: Keeping somebody away.

Their car broke, their work has been sporadic and they aren't keen to pay to fix it, there were storms that nobody wanted to travel in, they haven't managed to get here in a while. Cars breaking seems to be a theme with me for some reason. This one worked in all of the ways that I wanted it to. I used a hypersigil - a sigil done and fired the normal way that worked with a sigil I have tattooed on my body. I asked my familiar for help but that's never a guaranteed thing.

Really basic work but really effective, because I didn't try and get in somebody elses head, I just tried to KEEP THEM AWAY.

Based on everything i've done that ends up in a story like these these (which may or may not have been helpful) I have learned that in trying to influence people to do things, it will probably work best if you stay out of their thought processes and in the more practical side of things. Does she need a job? Another distraction to distract her from her nastiness? Is she missing somebody? EVEN is there some astral parasite or something sat on her head keeping all of her actions nasty - some things find people in times of stress and latch on, tiring them out and making them cranky.

Also, whatever you think this person needs to fix them? You never know what's going on inside somebody elses head. It's fucking tricky, guessing at what YOU can do to get people to do what you want in complex situations like you described and I swear this is why modern folk have resorted to just leaving be and/or throwing people at paid therapists.

TL;DR anyone? [shh] [shh] [shh] [wink]