InsaneJournal

Meta: Societal Musings (AKB)
I've said several times that I see AKB largely as a love story. For that reason, I've had to keep the focus very tight on Jensen and Jeff, even though there's a lot about the greater society that a) comes into play and b) that interests me. And so I think about it a lot, even if it only makes it obliquely into the greater story.

Sometimes it's very small things, like how the regular presence of body-slaves has changed/impacted the automobile industry, a subject that came up when I realized that, in addition to cramming Jeff, Jensen, Javier, Anne Hathaway and Jeff's mother in a car, I was going to have to also include three more body-slaves (Crispin, Joe and Anne's unnamed body-slave--who gblvr tells me should be Chris Pine).

Sometimes it's things like how it's potentially impacted crime statistics because these children and women are almost literally never alone. At the same time, I have to question how much of that theoretical down-turn in violent crime is because people from lower classes can (in all likelihood) be assaulted with relative impunity because who wants to incur the expense of a hospital visit? Especially in communities where victims have to pay, for example, their own rape kits.

And, proceeding from there, has there been a corresponding rise in back-alley medicine, neighborhood herbal medicine, etc?

One thing that occupies a lot of my attention when I think about the society as a whole, and something that has seeped very deeply through the story is the kind of pressures that slavery puts on a family, both at the macro and micro level.

In a case like Jensen's, it's a case of seized--stolen--children and broken families trying to close up around the gap. I read darkrosetiger's meta, which details how AKB Joe Flanigan's brother cut off all contact with his family after two of his siblings were lost to Commerce. It's particularly poignant because on the one hand, the brother's inability to forgive his family for their failure is both understandable and heartbreaking. On the other hand, his choice to sever himself from them isolates him from any 'protection' that might have been found in the pooled resources of a family structure. For better or worse, he's on his own. And I think that's a choice that isn't made easily or lightly.

Politically, I can see the Laborists touting society in the wake of slavery's reinstitution as a return to traditional values: families banding together, neighbors looking out for each other, a deeper sense of responsibility and connection... But at the base of it are serious, ugly and practical motivations. Families that band together have a greater resource pool.

(And thinking about that, I wonder if college admissions have gone down because fewer people are willing to take on the debt-burden of student loans AND whether the academic community has put together any kind of grants, scholarships or other type of emergency funds to prevent the potential loss of brilliant minds who might otherwise be unable to start or continue their secondary (tertiary?) education)

In any case, there's a strong motivation for families to stay together physically, financially and emotionally that doesn't exist in our reality. More than that, I can see a new level of anxiety created at the prospect of being out on one's own.

(Hmm. I wonder if there's been an increase in home-births, too?)

In families right up against the poverty line, I imagine that even the children are working from a relatively early age, doing their part to keep the family stable; a whole new echelon of child-labor.

For the most part, the stories I've read written in the AKB universe have focused on the rich and powerful, and the slaves at their mercy. This is true of mine, as well, and I think it's understandable that they have. At the same time, I'm interested in stories from the other side of it; the destroyed families, the neighborhoods that have drawn together to save their own, the massive additional stress on folks that are/were just barely getting by at the best of times, in houses where children (and adults) have nightmares about Commerce stealing them away, houses lit by candles to save on electricity, houses falling into disrepair because repairs cost money... I think about coyotes who promise to get you OUT of the USNA and what percentage of those end up turning you over to Commerce anyway. I think about the upswing in suicides, when the choice is death or slavery.

I said to rivers_bend that I feel like a bit of a one-trick pony lately because it seems like all I can and do work on is AKB, but at the same time, it's such a hugely consuming world. I mean, not for everyone, I expect, but for ME. And there's a part of me that wishes I had the time and energry to write all the things I'd love to, but realistically, all I can do is keep on trucking on the thing that I'm working on and worry about the rest later.

But I keep thinking.