How to Consume a Human
My last three reads, in order, were Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars, Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous, and Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh. (It was a terrifying experience, I assure you.)
Beyond intense gore/body-horror, they share a common theme: humans owning other humans (or pieces thereof). Eventually, my head spun off and I had to get it out. In Part 1, we considered how the authors employed a robust set of mechanisms to make their dystopias plausible. Part 2 dives into character roles within them.
Part 2: Character Reaction
The human consumption premise generates situations that we find monstrously unjust. As with any injustice, we can categorize its participants by where they sit within that situation, as well as how they react to it.
Which side of the line?
In other words, beneficiary or victim? Consumer or consumed? Each of our books employ a different vocabulary to denote their characters’ status, above or below the line:
How do they react?
Faced with only terrible choices, characters on both sides of the line adopt different stances to the situation:
Embracers: actively control and exploit the system for their personal benefit.
Endurers: engage to the minimum required degree, scrape what little comfort they can, and hoard it
Fighters: bring down the system! These can manifest as either Protesters fighting from within, or Revolutionaries—though in fiction, Protesters nearly inevitably break Revolutionary
Criminals: flying under Enforcement’s radar, either for personal gain or disruptive effect
Fodder: doomed from the get-go
Let’s extend our analysis of the three novels to include the roles occupied by some of their characters:
Journeys
Note that the table above denotes each characters’ initial status. What’s more fun is to plot their migration over the course of the narrative. For example, In Autonomous, Threezed eventually ascends from Indentured Fodder to Franchised Endurer (perhaps Fighter?). Similarly Marcos shifts from Accepter to Criminal, before his reflexive snap-back in the closing paragraphs of Tender Is the Flesh. Micky Wright’s disillusionment in Chain-Gang All-Stars demotes him from wildly successful Embracer to, at best, Endurer.
This framework can also be of value—while outlining your own human-consumption themed novel—as a plotting tool. Locate your characters in their starting cells, and diagram their journey through the narrative.