Well, yes and no. He's certainly aware and not drugged, but the implication is that he's been fully mentally re-arranged, "trained", so the drug is no longer needed. I think Dash was thinking more of a scenario where Mezz is REALLY drugged and just wants to stay like that, which probably wouldn't work because he'd be too out of it to be thinking in those terms. Still potentially interesting as a more general idea though.
I was more thinking the opposite tbh.
A scene where Mezz isn't drugged, but has been defeated and therefore trained so many times that the barrier between his hypnotized self and his regular self is very thin. So in his lucid state he asks Mahir, of his own will, to put his Hyena cock up his ass.
Because lucid Mezz must be able to tell what's happening at least a little. And it's scary to not know...but there's also a part of him that wants to know what it's actually like. Like...there's gotta be a reason why drugged up Mezz wants it so bad. So in a moment of vulnerability or being unsure in himself, he asks the only person who knows how he's conditioned (and therefore maybe knows how not to put him into the drugged up state) to, let's say "let him know what it's like".
Part of my mental image is: after asking Mahir pulls out the clicker to put Mezz into that state because they don't entirely get what the bunny is asking for her and Mezz goes "No wait! Not with that."
And after that the full implication of what Mezz wants sinks in and once they understand they begin teasing Mezz about it.
Ah, pardon then, misunderstood. But at that point then it would pretty much just be...ordinary sex.
Pardon me for going on a bit of a tangent here, but I think this is something a lot of people misunderstand about Mezz: He's not a slut. No, genuinely. He's a switch (though he'll never admit the sub side), but that's not the same thing. That's why it's hot. That's the crux of the whole thing. There's no hook, no humiliation, no exciting aspect to taking someone who's already a slut and...making them a slut. A lot of people seem to think the hypnosis angle is just about forcing him out of denial, and maybe I haven't helped that by joking about it. He has deep-seated subby tendencies, and those can be exploited to reforge him INTO a slut, or an obedient toy, or whatever. That's what the tape personality is tapping into. Yes, he has the POTENTIAL to become a cum junkie cocksleeve, but he isn't ALREADY that and just trying to pretend otherwise. He isn't encountering the boars or hyenas or whatever for the first time and going "man I wonder what's in their pants?" All of his brain space in those fights, at first, is just fight moves and trying to think of cheesy one-liners.
And again this is key, because you have to have that separation for the kink to work. You can't have a fall if there's nothing to fall TO.
Fundamentally, CS is a series about changing into something, either good or "bad" as time goes on. But lucid "old" Mezz is never going to volunteer to wrap his lips around a bad guy, even under duress. It goes against the whole way he sees himself. Remember even in the center path and the host club the plan was always to just pretend. Is there something else under that? Of course, but he can't consciously choose to access it. Which is why all the mindfuckery is needed.
Not at all an attack on you though Dash, and I actually appreciate the chance to clarify this a bit. And I don't want to be too absolute about any of this; we've still got many games to go, and things often shift in my head as I work with them. But at least right now, this is the way I see the setup.
I don't feel attacked at all. In fact I really like this kind of in depth character analysis. This does make the section where you need to sneak past hyenas make more sense to me character wise.
It seems to me like Mezz can tell that he's just a few words away from just "giving in" but he's still so determined to complete his mission. So even under what amount to extreme danger and a high likelihood of falling he's still not giving in and it takes drugs and implanted conditioning to make him do so.
I do want to say that the original idea is more like "how much the conditioning and repeated fucking is affecting him and wants to indulge even for a moment" than "he's an inherent slut wanting to let loose."
But understanding his character more makes that not work more in my brain now. I get why he wouldn't do that. It's interesting that I often see a lot of character depth and porn games like this. There are obviously games where that's the whole point but I often see it emerge seemingly as a side consequence as well. I think because it brings out things that are crying out to be explored creatively but don't get explored in a lot of media.
"I do want to say that the original idea is more like "how much the conditioning and repeated fucking is affecting him and wants to indulge even for a moment" than "he's an inherent slut wanting to let loose.""
Fair enough, and that is a different thing. But for the most part I've settled into the path of normal, gradual corruption/loss of control, and then if it goes on long enough, "new" Mezz, altered in how he sees the world (Not needing the ear clips with the boars in GT, normal eyes at the end of GT when serving Mahir etc). Again, the engine of the whole thing is the tension between "old" Mezz and the "new" version that's gradually eating away at him in each scenario. If the old version willingly gives in, then that destroys the tension. And if you mean the point at which the new version gains enough control that "he" starts doing things "voluntarily", then...again, that's pretty much the Mahir scene at the end. Sorry for being so difficult, but in my mind at least it snaps to one of those two binaries: either he's being slutty (which doesn't fit), or he's been fully trained/corrupted, which is awesome, but already in the games. For me, the point at which he starts "willingly" giving in/asking for it/going along with it/submitting is the point where "new" Mezz crosses the threshold into having more control than not. So there's never really space for "old" Mezz to do that.
Glad you're not annoyed though, I do enjoy the chance to be forced to actually explicitly think through why I'm doing certain character or story things sometimes, though it can be a little like trying to consciously remember the steps of tying shoelaces.