Emotion Suppression

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    Human emotions can be quite an obstacle. Fear can make you unable to face the danger. Compassion can prevent you from shooting the dog even if it's necessary. Love can make you crazy, dumb or lead you straight to the Dark Side. Let alone it hurts. And then there are such things as anger or hatred. Anyway, emotions cloud your mind and impede logical thought.

    So, what do you do with them? Well, in the world of fiction you can find a way to relieve yourself of this burden. Via some sort of training or some Applied Phlebotinum you can completely remove your capacity to feel emotions. Results and consequences depend on the author and how exactly the emotions are suppressed.

    Portrayed as a good thing, Emotion Suppression can be used to enter Heroic Safe Mode, to escape Mind Rape or simply to concentrate on the fight clearing your head of unimportant thoughts. This kind of supression is almost always temporary and always voluntary.

    Sometimes it is portrayed as a bad thing. In that case the character in question can at best hope to be an a loner or an Emotionless Girl not knowing This Thing You Call Love. At worst, the character will be put in a sort of Uncanny Valley, being human in appearance but not human in behaviour. Any sort of permanent Emotion Suppression will probably turn out this way, Bonus Points if it is not voluntary.

    This trope can also be carried out on a massive scale. There can be a human or alien culture where every representative has their emotions supressed. This situation also has little chance of being undeniably good. At best, (other) humans will just leave it as it is, perhaps after some demonstrations of how emotions can be useful. If it's done by an Evil Overlord or... uh... a caring and benevolent ruler who is unable to paint smilies on their subjects' souls but at least wants to remove tears from there, you've got a ready dystopian setting.

    This is part of the basis of The Stoic and the Emotionless Girl, Ice Queen and The Quiet One characters, The Baroness, the Deadpan Snarker (and Little Miss Snarker), the Broken Bird, the Sugar and Ice Personality and the Aloof Big Brother. Compare and contrast Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul or Lotus Eater Machine: Emotion Suppression does not make you happy, it just makes you, well, emotionless or lets you get rid of certain emotions.

    Examples of Emotion Suppression include:

    Anime and Manga

    • Sai from Naruto, being a member of a special ANBU branch, has undergone a training that removed his emotions. It also left him with No Social Skills.


    Film

    • Equilibrium takes place in a society where everyone uses a drug called Prozium to suppress their emotions. Refusal to administer it is punishable by death.
    • The Soviet film Teens in The Universe features a planet where robots driven by crapshoot AI decide to make all people "happy" by removing most of their emotions. People are forced to undergo this operation with a form of Mass Hypnosis. Did not end well: the entire race almost died out because of no desire to love and procreate.


    Literature

    • We: people of the One State are calculating, emotionless and strive only to follow only logic. In the end a way is discovered to truly erase an individual's ability to feel emotions by irradiating a certain spot of the brain with X-Rays and everyone is irreversibly brainwashed.
    • The Chronicles of Grimm Dragonblaster: the titular character has to repress his emotions using dangerous addictive drugs in order to confront a demon mage who draws magic from negative emotions, renedering him emotionless and logical.
    • Philip Jose Farmer's The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. In this retelling of Around the World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg is actually an agent of an alien race. His habitual reserve is due to a mental ability to shunt aside negative emotions so he can act normally.
    • In Sergey Lukyanenko's Genome the specs (specialists who are genetically augmented for certain jobs) have certain emotions suppressed and others modified as part of their specialization.
    • "Dissociation" in Strata is a type of meditation with this effect.
    • In Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles, Kvothe learns a mental exercise called "Heart of Stone" which places the practitioner in a state of dispassionate calm where all other emotions are temporarily shunted aside.
    • The telepaths in the Firebird Trilogy possess this ability. However, the stronger the emotion, the harder it is to completely suppress; only the best telepaths are truly capable of controlling all their emotions. The suppression is completely voluntary; it is generally used to ignore painful or unhappy emotions.
    • In Max Barry's Machine Man, Dr. Charles Neumann is not very emotional to begin with. However, after mapping his emotional responses with an MRI, he suppresses any traces of guilt or regret. Chemically.


    Live Action TV

    • The Vulcan culture has Emotion Suppression at its core.
    • In Farscape, Crichton spends the first half of season 4 taking drugs which are intended to suppress his love for Aeryn. She's... not happy when she finds out.
    • Vampires in The Vampire Diaries have the ability to turn off their emotions, presumably to stop things like guilt getting in the way of their hunting. Apparently, this ability fades after a few centuries. In the first season finale Jeremy attempts to become a vampire so he can shut off his grief. In the third season Klaus compels Stefan into turning his off so he'll stop resisting his orders.
    • In Doctor Who The Cybermen have no emotions because they have them removed when they get changed; in the past series, this was due to being subsumed by the Cyberman Hive Mind system practiced by Cyber-Controllers and Cyber-Planners, and in the new, it is done through emotion-nulling firmware. Breaking them out of this ends with the Cyberman writhing in horrific pain as everything they've ever denied rushes into them.


    Tabletop RPG

    • Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) supplement The Asylum and Other Tales, adventure "The Asylum". One of the drugs Doctor Freygan has developed is called Mood Flattener. It temporarily suppresses all emotion in the recipient, whether positive or negative.


    Video Game


    Western Animation

    • Teen Titans: Raven has to constantly suppress her emotions lest she lose control of her powers completely. Hence the meditation.
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