Again I come back to my original point of view... What possible reason would Suspiria have to put on that entire dog & pony show... JUST for Crest's benefit? If she had the power to control minds so thoroughly.. why not just MAKE Crest love/believe in her! Heck she didn't EVEN use that 'alleged' power to coerce Crest to give her the affection she so wanted and just have her way with him..EVEN just once... she likely could have made him believe he wanted her {which.. I'm not entirely convinced in some part of his heart he did not desire her..small as it might be}, or even just erased the 'coupling' from his memories.
Occam's razor -
"other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones"
I STILL Think Qtalda's lying and she has the magical power to cover her tracks by altering other people's memories... but only time will tell the truth.
I think you're overthinking this.
From what we've seen of Suspiria, she tends to use direct magic. It also seems like in Flipside universe, people tend to learn spells that suit their personality. Qtalda is a creepy killer, so she has a death bug spell. Suspiria tends to rely on spells that are reflection, flight, and raw power and very to the point (no illusions then). So it wouldn't stand to reason she's been playing a manipulation game, unless she started even at the point where we first met her. That explanation is so hopelessly complicated it makes no sense.
On the other hand, a simple "but here are her parents? See?" sham is rather easy to pull off. If Crest chills out a bit, he'd get just how flimsy that lie seems.
http://flipside.keenspot.com/comic.php?i=2317http://flipside.keenspot.com/comic.php?i=2319http://flipside.keenspot.com/comic.php?i=1951Also. This makes no sense. She appeared in front of her classmates, hurt but not killed them and destroyed the wall of her room. From an even basic read of the situation, this is not a manipulator, this is someone out for revenge.
Her "violent" side, considering her awesome power, was relatively controlled. Her classmates hurt her, but aren't the target of her revenge. On the other hand, their first action is to use lethal force against her. Further, Qtalda admits to erasing her memories, killing her parents, the whole bit. But only Crest and Suspiria know this, and Qtalda pulls out these people to call her motives and sanity into question. What were her motives if not revenge?
What really troubles me is the whole deal where Qtalda's body is elsewhere. We have no idea what this person looks like.
I agree that it's flimsy, but there would still be some chance that Suspiria wanted "genuine" loyalty/other from Crest based on lies more than she wanted to just turn Crest into a puppet directly. That or she wants to use him somehow where such mind control would be discovered, undermining her plan.
It most definitely does not add up.
- We have not seen her use mind control, just truth spells
- Qtalda, on the other hand, not only admitted his crimes, but has erased memories before. This implies someone skilled at manipulating events
- He only admitted this to someone he was sure would die, and mentioned "searching the forest" for witnesses. Meaning this was something he definitely did not want anyone to know about.
- If she only wanted trust, she could have done it in a better way than risking her body with a decay spell, putting him in a situation where she had to cure him.
- It is possible this is a massive illusion. We do not know the Flipside rules about illusions, but I would assume most of them, aside from the big one of the Qualia have certain limitations, such as an issue with touch not matching up to sight. So, Crest was decaying from the spell fallout until her stabbed himself. He definitely felt that. And it definitely made an effect on her decay. She would have to be a first rate illusionist to make the effect match up to everything with the right timing. And Crest would have been able to test the workings of the sword from his swordfight on return to town.
- From this, we can conclude there is no illusion or mind control. Just a simple con artist job by a wizard who could be anyone. Including a "harmless pervert."
The simplest explanation involves no mind control:
Suspiria is troubled and angry but not insane, there is some definite stuff going on here, without any manipulation from her. Qtalda is produced fake "parents" to throw shadow on her accusations of dead parents. She probably even had them "move into town" and introduce themselves so as many people as possible knew them. Suspiria thought she was crazy, everyone else didn't know better. I also think this is less "mind control" and more Qtalda using Jedi mind tricks to make what he's saying sound reasonable. As in, Qtalda isn't controlling minds so much as propping up words and "proof" with magic. Everyone acted like they took stupid pills, and didn't question why she would randomly attack someone with no motive.