InsaneJournal

Current mood:	contemplative
Entry tags:	akb, meta

Meta: The Boy in A Kept Boy
A Kept Boy. A Kept Boy. A Kept Boy.

Though I'll be the first to tell you that I'm horrible at titles, I nonetheless invest a lot of time, thought and meaning into them. A lot of my titles come from song lyrics, particularly songs that speak to me about that story. Sometimes—rare, blessed times that they are—they spring up full-formed.

At the time that I started writing AKB, I was stuck on the title of another book—one I haven't actually read—called A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth. I honestly have no idea what the book is about, but I'd seen it mentioned by one friend on my flist and then, a number of months later, I saw it in the house of another friend and something about the title captured my attention. I don't know how it works for other people, but I get these momentary pashes; phrases, songs, images that stick crossways in my head and repeat ad nauseam until they've run their course. Sometimes that course is years' long, but whatever.

Anyway. 'A Suitable Boy', while alluring, was also, obviously taken. And, I thought, not entirely suited to the story that would become AKB. The other part of 'A Kept Boy' was the BDSM connotations. I think I have mentioned before that my intentions weren't originally to write something as SRS BZNS as AKB has become. My original plan was something much more typical, much more id-fic. And what's come out is still very much an id-fic, I think, but in different ways than I anticipated.

And, so, lately, I've been musing not so much on the 'kept' part as I have the 'boy' part.

AKB Jensen is, in some ways, a very difficult character to write because, while he's chronologically an adult male and I want to write him as much of both those things as I can, he's also been kept by his masters in a kind of extended childhood, unable to express any of the emotional or psychological markers of adulthood—specifically those regarding dependency versus independence and self-assertion over sublimation of self into the 'family' unit. And while it's monstrous to call Jensen's relationship with his masters a familial one, it's also the closest analogue he's had since he was seven years old and deprived of his actual family.

I worry a lot about the maleness of my male characters. I know I'm not alone in this; for many/most of us (in my circle), it's all conjecture anyway. And there are times I know I definitely have written my men as somewhat less masculine than I would like, due to the needs of the story (though I think it's a sticky and potentially offensive slope to define masculinity so starkly and in such a binary fashion). With Jensen, I feel like it's an even finer balancing act, because I have to combine his adult maleness with those moments of childlike dependency, his undeveloped (or, really, underdeveloped) emotional palette that doesn't even have a language for his likes or dislikes, his wants or desires.

I've also talked before about growing up in a mental health environment. It's formed the core of my own experience and how I look at both the real world and my characters. It's also given me a fascination with the environment itself; the ways and means of achieving mental health both in and out of a therapeutic environment and what, at the end of the day, mental health means, which...on some level, is what AKB is all about.

One of the many things I've learned, in my life and, again, in the course of writing AKB is that how people define therapy—its goals, its purpose, its methodologies—is as individual as the people involved in it. And I think it's very easy to be an armchair psychologist and much harder to deal with an individual's reality right there in person, particularly when it deviates so widely from one's own.

There's a very meta element to writing Jensen's therapy with Cate. More than just keeping in mind that these are two different people with, often, two different agendas, it's positing how Jensen's damage is/does manifest itself and by what means it can be expressed, alleviated and/or fixed. And I have to do that not only through Cate's eye, but through a godlike eye, as well. It's a juggling act and I struggle with those scenes more than any of the other scenes because it is important to me to try and get it right, imperfections, misunderstandings and all.

A big part of what I see as Cate's self-determined role as Jensen's therapist is giving Jensen the space and opportunity to revisit the events that made him who he is and create the need (by putting Jensen in a position to explain) for Jensen to question those events and their composition in a way he couldn't when he was living them.

One person advanced the notion to me that Cate's quest to fix Jensen is a disservice. As usual, I'm grossly behind on answering feedback, but what I thought when I read that comment—and what I think now—is that Cate isn't trying to fix Jensen. I think Jeff still holds out hope that Jensen can somehow be fixed, like a broken china doll, but I think Cate is proceeding on the notion that Jensen is who he is and that anything she does in his service isn't going to change his now-fundamental nature.

Moreover, if Jensen is going to be Jeff's slave—or, more correctly, a slave in The Trust, but for all intents and purposes, Jeff's slave—he's going to need to go through those maturing moments that have so far been denied to him. To function in his new circumstances, Jensen is going to have to be more adult than he's ever been allowed to be when he was owned by more jealous, possessive masters who wanted and needed Jensen to be completely dependent on them. Because Jeff is never going to be the kind of master who will be comfortable holding Jensen that close to him or that dependent on him.

Another thing that's struck me about Jensen's therapy—and the audience reaction to it—is about the idea of comfort. The idea that therapy should not be uncomfortable, that it shouldn't be disturbing, that—by pushing Jensen, by forcing him to relive or revisit these memories, by breaking Jensen's current modes of protection and coping, Cate is doing Jensen another disservice.

For me, change has always been a disturbing event. Sometimes even catastrophic. I think we exist in our little ruts, not questioning 90% of what happens around us because familiarity has made it dully commonplace. We often change because we are forced, by circumstances to do so, bumped out of our comfortable rut. The rarer alternative is that we may choose to change. And to move out of that rut, to cut a new channel of behavior, to alter ones' circumstance…it's literally disturbing.

Or, to take the analogy in a different direction, utilize a different metaphor, Jensen is already built on an unstable and flawed foundation. While razing the structure and starting from scratch isn't feasible, parts of the structure still have to be knocked down, moved around and restructured or rebuilt to bring a sustainable stability and solidity to the whole. And that means a certain period of 'pardon my dust'.

A lot of time has been spent in showing that, although Jeff shares in the privileges of being an owner, he is very different from any master Jensen has had before. I think it could be extrapolated, if one looks solely at Jensen's history, that all masters are as cruel and depraved as Jensen's owners (or the majority of them, anyway) but I've always posited that Jensen has simply been passed through a similar clique of owners in the same way that many of us pass through the same social circles of fandom, even if we only know each other through friend's friends and usernames glimpsed in comments. I think that Jeff represents another polar point of masters but doesn't represent the mean point of owners any more than Lord Cruise does. However, Jeff is entirely representative of the change in Jensen's life and circumstances. Jensen has moved out of his previous rut and the pernicious influence of his bad masters and into a hopefully more helpful, healing and healthy circle of influence. And while that move will presumably—and again, hopefully—end up in a more positive place, Jensen still has to undergo a mental and emotional journey from one site/state of being to the other.

I don't know that any of his has any real point; part of my creative process is to have these random thoughts, lines of speculation, conjuration and inquiry that don't always lead anywhere, that simply lay their fertile imaginative eggs and add to the roux that will eventually ferment itself into story. Which is a hell of a mixed metaphor. *laughs* But the point still stands. I record a lot of this for my own edification, my own recollection; I record it to cement these thoughts into my mind more firmly or to prod the fickle affections of La Muse. And because it's a pleasure to spend this time in this world, thinking about its workings, both grand and minute.

There's an innate tragedy to Jensen's story, in spite of the relative sweetness of his relationship with Jeff; robbed of any kind of childhood or meaningful adolescence, he has a long way to catch up, let alone move forward into an adulthood. And going through adolescence, even without the hormone-haze and the physical changes, is no easy gig. It's young bucks clashing horns, with peers and authority figures, in the effort to carve out space and meaning for oneself, to figure out where I bleeds into us and what parts can be held sovereign and inviolate. And not all of them survive. Plenty of teens of every stripe never make that passage into adulthood, perishing in the struggle to establish themselves. Jensen's coming to it late and, like with measles or chicken pox, catching it so late in life is infinitely more dangerous than going through it with everyone else when you're a kid.

And even more so when one is a slave. Because even with so benevolent a master as Jeff, any defiance, any growing pains, any expression of self Jensen goes through, it has to be tempered by the fact that he is still property. He cannot leave Jeff. His assertion of self is completely bounded by that fact: he cannot leave. He cannot be an autonomous being because he is always going to be a slave and dependent on his master and his master's goodwill. And it limits Jensen's ability to develop in perception as well as in any theoretical objective reality. The limitations are there and, more than that, Jensen is keenly aware of them. And Jensen is well-versed, or maybe well-trained is the better term, in binding himself in his limitations without the intervention (or even desire, in Jeff's case) of his master.

At the end of the day, Jensen is who he is. He's not going to spontaneously become healed or a different person. There's no time-warp that will stop or fix the things that were done to him. He has to live with that damage and that abuse for the rest of his life. And so will everyone around him. On the other hand, he, like anyone else, is capable of change. Capable of integrating the damage into a structure that is stronger for having been tested and weathered through storms. The things that Jensen has always had going for him are still, unequivocally true: the will to live and the capability of feeling and expressing love. More than that, Jensen possesses the hopefulness of love; that if he gives completely and unselfishly from himself, there will come a time when someone—some master, because that's how Jensen's coded—will return it in equal measure.