InsaneJournal

Meta: AKB Jeff, Screwed Up and Screwed
You know, I've spent a lot of time and energy and verbiage talking about Jensen's past factors and, to a lesser degree, the past factors of other slaves in the universe, but I don't feel like I've spent a lot of time explicitly talking about Jeff's past factors.

Audience reaction to Jeff, in particular, seems to run the gamut...though I like to tell myself that people are coming around. (What? We all need our illusions.) I don't really want to speculate how much of that is a lack of love for RL JDM, but as an AKB character, I think there are two major contributory factors. 1) Jeff is an owner and holds an unconscionable amount of power over Jensen and every other slave in his possession (and arguably, ANY slave) and 2) Jeff is a very flawed 'hero', who makes many mistakes with his power and privilege.

Which...when you get right down to it, is kind of why I love AKB Jeff. His deep flaws, his chronic mistakes and his continual effort to overcome them and do better is a journey that resonates to me on a personal level and, consequently, interests me deeply on an intellectual/authorial level. While I think there's a place and time for a protagonist who does everything right and treats everyone perfectly and never makes mistakes, it's not a protagonist *I* am terribly interested in and it's not a story that I generally want to tell. Life as I see it is messy, mistakes are inevitable and what I most want to see and know is how you recover and move on after you've screwed up things royally. Or, alternatively, been screwed up royally...which are not necessarily entirely separate things.

There are several things that we know in-story about Jeff's past. First of all (and potentially most importantly), Jeff's grandfather was very involved and reasonably important in the Laborist movement that got the New Articles of Slavery written and passed. So, in a very real way, Jeff's family (and Jeff by extension/association) is responsible for slavery as a whole and for the plight of a good number of his close friends, as a result. That's no small head trip.

Secondly, we know that Jeff is somewhat estranged from his family and that he left home at a pretty young age (17) for the sole purpose of getting away from them. Less explicit, but available for extrapolation, is that slavery was not Jeff's main issue in moving away from them. It's still several years later that Jeff will be at Billy Zane's party where Christian is the party favor and we know from Christian that the majority of Jeff's reformation comes after that encounter. More on that in a bit, but in any case, I think it's obvious that Jeff had problems with his family long before he became an abolitionist in any meaningful sense of the word.

The Jared outtake is probably the most specific reference we have to Jeff's former home life, especially since it's from Jeff's point of view. Specifically, there are several references to Jeff's grandfather (Franklin Morgan) and the implication that, as head of the household, he runs the house (which further contains Jeff's adult parents) fairly tyrannically. Jeff argues with his father and grandfather about moving into his own place (only made possible through the inheritance left him by his recently deceased grandmother), there's reference to Jeff's previous attempts to run away from home, beginning in early childhood, and the ironclad belief by both Jeff and by his former body-slave, Deirdre (Jared's mother) that Franklin Morgan would sell the infant Jared away from his parents largely for spite.

So it's pretty fair to say that Franklin Morgan overshadows the Morgan household in a big way and that he is not a particularly benevolent dictator. Further, Jeff's relationship with his mother isn't shown to be (and really isn't) terribly more congenial. His father is shown to be largely absent in the story, but where mentioned, his relationship is, at best, strained and fractious (the aforementioned arguing, as well as his absence in the story) and Jeff's relationship with his half-brother Javier is, at best, only semi-congenial, covering a lot of familial politics and resentments. The closest 'familial' relationship Jeff has, is probably with Ever Carradine, who is supposedly a cousin by marriage. So the Morgans are not exactly the Bradys and, within the story, it's obvious that Jeff has spent his time building a new, found family around him to replace the blood family to which he feels no real strong connections.

At the same time, Jeff hasn't cut off contact with his estranged family in any meaningful way—both Javier and Jeff's mother felt completely free to come to Jeff's home with no prior warning—and though he's physically separated himself from them, Jeff also still shows/feels a lot of responsibility toward them. In Chapter 15, when Ever asks after Javier, Jeff realizes he hasn't heard from Javier in a while and the he "should look into that." Moreover, though Jeff has tried to establish himself financially separate from his family, he still runs Morgan International 'for' his family, tying him inextricably to them, and to his family's politics, indefinitely.

And so we have a picture of a man who, on the one hand, has done everything in his power to distance himself from his family—financially, physically, emotionally, politically, philosophically—and at the same time assumes an incredible burden of responsibility—for both his families, blood and found. And, largely, Jeff's flaws come from those two, conflicting, traits: the desire to flee from everything his family represents, and the inability to actually say fuck it all and actually chuck all his responsibilities.

Even so, Jeff is still very much a product of what and where he came from. As with any of us, our desire to flee the templates of our parents is at least somewhat futile. So, for Jeff, growing up in that hothouse atmosphere of pervasive anger, pervasive privilege and pervasive disregard isn't something he's ever going to erase. He works very hard to overcome, beat down or otherwise ignore those traits and urges he regards as bad, but he can't banish them completely. The work to get past them is never done and is instead the product of a lot of fairly constant practice.

On the flip side, the traits our family imbues us with cannot be condemned as all bad. The very sense of responsibility that motivates and cripples Jeff in so many ways is the product of that same family. It doesn't manifest itself in ways they'd probably approve of, but it is from them, even so. Jeff's projected financial acumen, as well, the thing that guarantees his ability to be apart from and defy his family (within certain parameters), is the product of growing up in such a Big Business household. And at the end of the day, the tight-fisted desire to hold his own ground, hold onto what is his is also the product of growing up in the shadow of the Morgans. So while Jeff is the cuckoo in the nest in many ways, he is still a Morgan.

And then, looking into a more recent period of time, Jeff's reformation into the person we know "now" is exactly that: recent. Jeff was a grown man when he raped Kane. There were extenuating circumstances (to some degree; Jeff was unknowingly as drugged out of his gourd as Kane) but Jeff was at Zane's party of his own free will, presumably with some idea of the kind of parties Zane threw. Both Jeff and Kane contribute Jeff's abolitionist sentiments to that encounter, a defining moment that Jeff's been trying to both atone for and recover from ever since.

However, Jeff's operating without any kind of template. He has no better idea how to accomplish sweeping, personality and lifestyle change than the rest of us do. And the necessary secrecy of the abolitionist part of Jeff's life cuts him off from most forms of support and guidance outside of his own social circle…many of whom are just as damaged as he is.

From the very start—and like most of us—Jeff is winging it. And, as shown in all of the above verbiage, his background has given him certain things, certain advantages, but it did not provide him with the necessary tools to be the kind of person he desperately wants to be. It didn't teach him how to make that kind of change. Honestly, I think very few of us are ever given the kind of survival tools we need to become the person we most want.

We can only hope to be lucky enough to find them, along the way.