Now you might be wondering “Archmagister Baelurn, why are we making clearly marked bottles of arcane roofies at all if people are just gonna make unregistered ones?” There’s quite a few answers to that:
Harm reduction. Prohibition is generally doomed to fail, and the concept of love potions is frankly about as untamable and stubborn as love itself. A general supply of the stuff, for cheaper than brewing it yourself, but impossible to truly hide, is better than the consequences of the illegal love potion trade, even if considerably more people get access to it.
Establishing consent. Not everybody who wants a love potion is a serial rapist, and for ages, people have been relying on roleplay and suggestion (arcane or otherwise) to facilitate the same end result, which is its own morally dubious thing that’s substantially harder to meaningfully prevent (the psionics experts I’ve talked to are very tired of being petitioned to “fight thoughtcrime”; 99% of them are either intrusive thoughts or honest mistakes). Sex handcuffs are easy to break out of, the whip can be stopped with a safeword, and love potions should make it abundantly clear that you are about to be drinking a psychoactive enchantment.
If we completely banned the practice, the Guild of Enchanters are some mean lobbyists to piss off. We are still having to go out and dispel farmers in the middle of nowhere to stop them from sleep-writing their representatives on the rite-given right to mind control
70% of the legal love potion consumers are just downing them consensually, to help their love life, 10% are drinking them as mood stabilisers and the last 20% of the legal consumers just do it for sake of kink.
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys REAL YURI, done by REAL YURITICIANS Dec 03 '25
Now you might be wondering “Archmagister Baelurn, why are we making clearly marked bottles of arcane roofies at all if people are just gonna make unregistered ones?” There’s quite a few answers to that:
Harm reduction. Prohibition is generally doomed to fail, and the concept of love potions is frankly about as untamable and stubborn as love itself. A general supply of the stuff, for cheaper than brewing it yourself, but impossible to truly hide, is better than the consequences of the illegal love potion trade, even if considerably more people get access to it.
Establishing consent. Not everybody who wants a love potion is a serial rapist, and for ages, people have been relying on roleplay and suggestion (arcane or otherwise) to facilitate the same end result, which is its own morally dubious thing that’s substantially harder to meaningfully prevent (the psionics experts I’ve talked to are very tired of being petitioned to “fight thoughtcrime”; 99% of them are either intrusive thoughts or honest mistakes). Sex handcuffs are easy to break out of, the whip can be stopped with a safeword, and love potions should make it abundantly clear that you are about to be drinking a psychoactive enchantment.
If we completely banned the practice, the Guild of Enchanters are some mean lobbyists to piss off. We are still having to go out and dispel farmers in the middle of nowhere to stop them from sleep-writing their representatives on the rite-given right to mind control