Okay, before anyone start throwing rocks, I did a quick search around the forum and found no answer to my question (come on, there are like more than 600 topics here, who would read all of them?)

I've recently got curious about how hypnosis and brainwashing work in real life, so I began searching videos, blogs or anything with someone talking about it or experiencing it.

Turns out I've found a lot of "training" videos, mostly on youtube, which aim to make someone a slave, a slut, a sissy or whatever. Everything following the same method: buzzing sounds, lots of different voices speaking about obeying or being somehing in a sultry or demanding tone, a sequence of flashing images (mostly porn) and sometimes words about obeying and all that.

I sincerely don't know how someone could get in a trance just by paying attention to it, or if it can even affect a mind already under trance.

So my question is: are those videos serious hypnotism tools designed to really have an effect over the mind or are they just some random hypno-clichés thrown together to make some kind of roleplay?

Everything I've heard from relatively reliable sources points to the latter.

Many people claim they work, but many people claim a lot of things. Most of which are untrue, biased, or otherwise caused by something else which wasn't taken into account by the one making the claim.

Though there's no reason it couldn't legitimately work for at least a handful of people. There's got to be someone, right?

From what I've been able to read up on, there's a whole lot of speculation into how hypnosis works. In short, we really don't know. There's oodles of scientific theories and hypotheses which try to explain the actual process and inner workings of hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion, but the bottom line is that we haven't figured out the truth of it yet. I mean, these theories can't even all agree on whether or not hypnosis is a real phenomenon or if it's just an interesting case of people so believing it is real that they end up acting as though it is.

One of the most popular ways to consider hypnosis is to think of it as a way to make suggestions to the subconscious mind that won't be as closely considered or filtered by the conscious mind. Thus, heightened suggestibility. The effects of your average hypnotic trance seems to support this idea, as well. If we take this consideration seriously and just for a second pretend it's truth, then it's possible for those videos to work if the viewer is either already in a trance or extremely susceptible to trance and suggestion to begin with. It may also be possible if the viewer wants it to work strongly enough and believes that it can work.

That said, I'm almost 100% sure that nearly all of the videos of that type are made for fun rather than function, and aren't actually designed to work for real, despite any claims to the contrary.
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Brainwashing is a bit of a different beast than hypnosis. Brainwashing, generally speaking, is taking advantage of the brain's ability to learn and form habits. Most "brainwashing" experiments in the past seem to focus on "training" a subject with a mixture of pleasure/pain responses to their actions, as well as drugs. I imagine the drugs are to keep the people a tad loopy, and possibly more suggestible, in order to stop them from hindering their brain's natural habit-forming process by overthinking the situations which grant them pain or pleasure.

Granted, it's not like I'm some sort of specialist in the field (or am I?). This is all just from my general understanding of what I've looked into, not personal experience (or is it?).

Wow. That was...quite insightful ._.
Thank you for the help. Even though it raised even more questions for me, it's nice to know more about it.

There's always more questions. :P

I think that if you seriously begin to look into and research hypnosis, even just in your spare time, you'll find that the reality is that we have no solid answers. As I said, everything I've read indicates that we just don't know much about hypnosis. There are endless questions on the topic in need of answers, and each answer we have for these questions is only a good guess at best, even if the guesses are educated.

It really boils down to the complexity of the human mind and human psychology. There's just so much of the physical brain and of human psychology in general that we simply don't understand. Until we do, answers for questions related to hypnosis may not be answerable.