yonmei

yonmei @ 10:36 pm: Le weekend: and watching AI:AI
I'm extending the weekend with TOIL tomorrow for Pride last Saturday. It's time I took it. But. I have spent a weekend doing Not Very Much, not even housework.

I have a bunch of things Not Working at the moment: my landline is not working properly: one of the TV boxes is not working (which I suspect is probably Bob's doing, since she used to like to sleep on it: on the other hand I've had it since February 2004, so it wouldn't be impossible that it's just stopped working) and neither my VCR nor my DVD player are working properly (I suspect with both it's the remote controls rather than the players, but the problem with modern technology is that once the remote controls go, the boxes are no longer very usable: and my broadban Internet connection is dead - though Virgin Media were making noises about how "our engineers are aware of the fault and fixing it!" I'm posting this via my T-Mobile dongle. (Also, though this is hardly on the same level of Not Working, two of my cute baby dragons died - and again after they'd had enough clicks and views to grow up. Bah.)

I am watching AI: Artificial Intelligence, and thinking about the Keptverse. (Which is, if you haven't been following, the AU North America in which debt and birth slavery exist - and in which it is legal for parents to sell their minor children into slavery, developed by poisontaster.)

The first half hour or so of AI:AI is about Monica, a woman who cannot get over the death of her son - because technically he isn't dead: he's deep-frozen, in stasis. So her husband buys her a very expensive toy - a mecha, a humanoid robot, shaped like a small boy, with the functional capacity to be bonded permanently to its owner - to thereafter behave as if it had an emotional attachment to its "parent". Which does, in fact, console the woman enormously - she can love and play with her mecha "boy" . But then the woman's son can be awakened and cured.

...and it turns into the story of a Pinocchio. The toy who wants to be a real boy. Which the real son makes clear to the toy by having his mother read the story to him. (Also, of course, because the film-maker wouldn't count on an American audience remembering Pinocchio unless it was associated.)

But, watching it, I thought it would be easy - if poisontaster weren't against any fanfic that isn't RPF written in this universe - to write a fannish retake on the film. Because it is a story about slavery - if you can say that an intelligent toy is enslaved.

It's not something poisontaster deals with directly in the Keptverse: and darkrose only indirectly: what if a couple who wanted a child/didn't want one - the same kind of ambiguous emotional state Monica's in when her son is frozen - instead of adopting a baby, bought one... and then got their real child back? Old enough - as Monica's son is in the film - to know that the toy isn't his brother, but something bought for his mother to play with, a substitute child.

I don't think it's a story I want to write: it's very nearly unbearable as it is, and it becomes worse when I think about how it changes if the mecha toy is actually a human who is abandoned. "You won't understand the reasons, but I have to leave you here." - "Is it a game? When will you come back for me?"

Monica drives out of the story then. She is really still so completely emotionally screwed up that she fails in all possible directions to be a convincing character. I mean really: doing this to her mecha toy makes sense neither if she's fully aware it's a mecha, nor if on some level she thinks he's a real boy. Gigolo Joe walks into the story then - a mecha programmed to be the best possible lover, a toy who becomes the toy's parent.

AI:AI is about what happens when you create intelligent machines and treat them like things: in a sense, it already is a Keptverse story....