[Fic] "Cut Clean" -- The Homeward Bounders

[edenfalling]

About two-thirds of this story began its existence as the introductory section of To Be of Use, my Yuletide story. But I ran out of time to get past Joris and Konstam's first meeting, which meant all this stuff didn't have any training sessions in Khan Valley, or demon-hunting missions, or post-book interviews and strategy meetings, or Joris's

Comments

[uminohikari]

♥~ Aww, Granna is really human

[edenfalling]

Thank you! It was an interesting exercise to try to get into Joris's grandmother's headspace -- to think, what sort of society would make selling your grandson seem like a rational option, and what would that do to a person even if you thought it was the best of several bad solutions? -- and I still think this verges kind of on the wrong side of the line between drama and melodrama... but yeah, this is pretty much how I can see it happening, and Isabel Mauer is pretty much the kind of person I can see making that choice.

[askerian]

Oh. That broke my heart a little. Poor kid. ;__; It helps to know he'll find good people eventually.

I like how much about the world you manage to convey in the story, without even a hint of infodumping. You did a good job of making me want to know more about the canon at any rate. XD

[edenfalling]

That broke my heart a little.

Victory! That's what I was aiming for. (And that's why I had to lop it off "To Be of Use," because that story, while much more hopeful, is not quite happy enough to balance out all this angst.)

We don't actually get much information about Joris's world, but the few details are fascinating, and everything I've done here is designed to work with and explore the implications of those details rather than contradict them.

[smokyglass]

I like it! Granna was fascinating. I have yet to find this book - is she mentioned in canon? And I hope you get at least as far as writing the training missions so we'll know everything turned out okay, because this is a little heartbreaking.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! Joris's grandmother is mentioned, but very much in passing, so she's almost entirely my own invention. About two third of the way through the book, Jamie summarizes a conversation between Joris and Adam Macready, like so:

Then he went on to tell Adam that, no, he had not been born a slave. His grandmother had sold him because the family was too poor to keep him.

"How much did your grandmother get for you?" Adam asked. He was commercial-minded, like me.

"Five thousand crowns," said Joris. "The Khans gave ten thousand."

And then they go on and discuss prices and monetary conversions for a bit, before returning to plot-related things.

Things do turn out okay for Joris -- he has a good profession, the Khans treat him sort of like an adopted member of their extended family, and he's going to be emancipated as soon as he turns eighteen. That's all canon. But I do wonder what he thinks about his blood family and whether he'd try to reestablish contact with them once he's a free man.)

[lesserstorm]

This was painful, but so, so good.

I think it's the small details that make it so powerful -- the state of a society whose law will require children to be educated until aged 12, but won't object to them being sold as slaves; the pressures on the grandmother, but also the ways her thinking is shaped by her society that make selling Joris seem like the best practical option; the small details about the people who work in the trading house and are kind and personal about the way they are assessing him as saleable goods.

Fantastic.

[edenfalling]

Thank you very much!

World-building is my not-so-secret obsession (and one of my favorite things to play with in fanfiction), so trying to construct a functional world out of the hints Diana Wynne Jones gives in The Homeward Bounders has been a lot of fun... especially since Joris's world, while in many ways very advanced, clearly accepts and condones certain things we consider immoral and intolerable. Even the Khans, while disapproving of slavery and treating Joris as a family member, do still own him and obey the laws about not manumitting him until he's eighteen years old; so far as we know, they're not campaigning for abolition or otherwise resisting the accepted state of things.

So while I figure that slavery is going to hurt on a personal level -- I wanted to give Joris a loving family, which meant selling him had to be painful -- the mere fact of its acceptance on a social/cultural level means that people will consider buying and selling children to be a thinkable option. And while there might well be laws to protect slaves

[lesserstorm]

Exactly. And it's an interesting question -- when does the "good" response stop being to personally dislike slavery and start being to work to change the entire social order? But the need to keep control of the demon situation must weigh against doing anything that could create chaos in the short term

[xsmoonshine]

Wandering in late, but, awesome. I'm really enjoying your thinky thoughts about Joris's backstory and his society. We got so little of any of the worlds in canon.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! Yeah, Jamie's not much use as an anthropological reporter, is he? But for some reason, the few sketched-in details we get about Joris's world intrigue me more than the ones about Helen's world, though hers is also objectively very interesting. I think it's the contrast between high technology, demons, and backwards social institutions that catches my imagination.

And Joris seems so well-adjusted (aside from the slavery thing) that I figured he probably came from a fairly functional family... until they ran out of money. (Also it's just more dramatic if he's torn from a loving family, but I swear I had character-based reasons first. *grin*)