Keptverse Thinky Thoughts #1
LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY darkrosetiger)
Part of the thought behind having a comm was because there was so much good meta discussion about the world going on in various places. So...here: have some meta. :)
For me, one of the things that's been fascinating is seeing the ways in which Jensen, Joe, and now Kyle are both similar and very different, and how closely that's tied in with their childhood experiences. (Jared as well, but unlike the other three, he's not a body-slave, which adds another layer of difference.)
Kyle is coming from a completely different place from Joe and Jensen, since he was enslaved as a teenager. Joe and Jensen were both enslaved as very young children--Joe at 5 and Jensen at 7--but for them, the key difference is in the households and who their owners were. Jensen, of course, was owned by Tom Cruise (who I loathe in this fic even more than I already do the real-life version). He was trained by private tutors, and from what we've seen so far, he never had much contact with other kids his own age--in fact, it seems like he was never actually allowed to be a child at all. His only source of affection was Cruise, who was also his master, making him dependent on him both for emotional feedback and literal support. And...Cruise was good, and by the time he was through, Jensen seemed to have internalized the propaganda of this world, so that he genuinely believes that Master Is Always Right, and that he has no identity outside of his master's will.
Joe...well, not so much, for one reason that I didn't actually plan. While on paper, his owners were David and Sarah Neal, his master was Dylan, a boy only a year older than he was. Basically, they bought Joe for Dylan instead of, say, getting their son a puppy--and then, because they were overprotective, they didn't tell Dylan that Joe wasn't just his best friend who happened to live with them until they'd been living each other's pockets for over a year. Joe and Dylan did kid stuff together: playing video games, swimming, and just generally goofing off. Joe knew what the real situation was, but for the most part, it didn't affect his daily interactions with his nominal master.
Then Dylan and Joe went to school. Again unlike Jensen, Joe was constantly in the company of other kids who were in situations similar to his. But when the instructors tried to indoctrinate their slave charges, and to get them to understand that their masters know best because they're the masters, they ran into the rigid logic that kids often have. Joe's weighing what he's being told against his own experience, where Dylan's older but more passive, and much more willing to let Joe take the lead--or, as he puts it much later, "They were trying to tell me that my master was inherently more capable than I was, and I kept thinking, "Yeah, but he's a year older than me and sometimes he still wets the bed."
Even after Dylan figured out what Joe's true role was, he wanted desperately to believe that Joe liked him for himself, not because he had to. Especially after he got Joe beaten, Dylan hated to give Joe orders because he was terrified that Joe would go into perfect slave mode, which both of them knew was fake. Joe grew up thinking that Dylan was nice but really clueless, a mix of mild contempt for how helpless he was and an older sibling's protectiveness. Joe and Dylan were a bit of an extreme, but in general, I think the trend for rich kids having their own body-slaves from a very early age would become less common over time because it does lead to an over-familiarity, and slaves who don't hold their masters in awe.
The other big difference between Joe and Jensen is in who their parent figures were. Jensen had Cruise, but Dylan's parents made it clear from the get-go that they weren't interested in playing that role for Joe. (They weren't all that good at doing it for Dylan, frankly.) He also seemed to have Mimi for part of the time. Joe, on the other hand, was essentially the baby of the staff, and everyone, especially Kim, the Mistress' body-slave, Andy, the head groom, and Sherri, the cook, positively doted on him. I've got a whole separate post of what it meant that Joe was close to the other (non-body) slaves in the household. But in terms of parental affection, he got it from people who weren't supposed to be above him in station.
Looking at some of Jensen and Joe's formative experiences, it's easy to see how this made a huge difference in their later outlooks. Jensen had Cruise blindfold him and leave him to find his way out of a huge room with all sorts of obstacles, to teach him how slaves must rely on their master's guidance. Afterwards, Jensen remembers that Cruise picked the glass out of his feet himself, as a sign of affection.
At a similar age, Joe got beaten by Dylan's father in order to teach Dylan about having responsibility to his slave. Dylan's parents were concerned with their son's well-being, but they did have one of the other slaves come in and take charge of Joe. I've only shown that moment so far from Dylan's POV, but after Andy took Joe, Kim and Sherri ran a bath for him and hugged him and wrapped him up in Andy's bathrobe and gave him ice cream. More importantly, though, they let Joe vent for a while, and scream about how much he hated Dylan. Eventually they did explain that he couldn't say that--but they also validated Joe's feelings and agreed that Dylan had been wrong and that Joe had a right to be angry.
The staff also served as a reality check for him. He could come back from school and ask if it was really true that the masters knew more because they were masters, and get the answer, "No, it's not--but you need to pretend that it is." When Dylan's father was obviously interested in having sex with Joe, everyone (except for poor Dylan) knew it, and disapproved even if no one said it out loud. Here again, Joe's sense that David wanting to fuck him was wrong was backed up by the messages he got from people around him, even though it contradicted what he'd been taught in school (you're property; your owner has the right to use you as he sees fit). If anyone ever suggested that Joe'd been raped, he'd give them a John Sheppard-style smirk and say, "Don't be ridiculous--the law says that slaves can't be raped."
Jensen and Joe were both given indoctrination in how to be a good slave, but where Jensen internalized the messages because he didn't have anything to counter it, Joe was constantly having those messages subverted, and learning how to fake it enough to get by. He had people around him who loved him for himself, and a master who would have been happier if he and Joe could have just been friends.
So does this mean that Joe's healthier than Jensen? No, actually. Where Jensen's armor is his "perfect slave" mantra, Joe's is his cynicism. Jensen believes that the masters really are superior; Joe has enormous contempt for masters as a class--but in both cases, it's what lets them get through the day. It's tiring to have to maintain the masks, and to pretend you respect people that you generally despise.