Social Services

[Shocker]

I really enjoyed this story. The first paragraph hooked me, and the story was very well paced, the action kept coming without too much background noise. I am sure I miss a lot of good stories on this site because they start with pages and pages of backgound detail.

Thank you very much, I try to write my stories in a fashion, that the first sentence/paragraph should intrigue the reader enough, to cause continue reading the second. Often that means starting in the middle of the action.
A lot of my old stories are a lot more drawn out, and it works for some but not for others.

As a tip as I don’t know if you have seen that yet, when you hover over a story title, you get a little teaser, which could wet your appetite. I try to write my openings in such a fashion that they will work as teaser as well.

[enabranpr0n]

The situation our victim finds herself in, with all its humiliation and degradation, and how it plays out works fine. So I have no comment on the main thrust of the story, as it were.

What I might suggest could enhance the story is a change to how she got into the mess in the first place. I acknowledge that these details are not what we’re particularly interested in, nor the focus of the story, but for what it’s worth…

Given Rebecca presumably has lived in and grown up in this society and it has had these institutions in place for 50 years, I found it hard to accept that she was utterly ignorant of the social service and what goes on within their walls.
So perhaps she could have been a foreign exchange student or somehow else have a plausible reason for her ignorance.

Then, how she learns the history of this society (and therefore how we as the readers learn it) would feel more natural. Perhaps there could be an orientation video playing in the background as she’s forced to strip? I’m imagining something like the beginning of the Loki miniseries when he’s arrested and being processed by the TVA.

Second, I felt it was not clear if this was supposed to be seen as a just punishment for a girl who did something wrong, or a tragic miscarriage of justice that it was happening to a girl who did not deserve it.
Are we supposed to be rooting for her or against her?

The courtroom scene at the beginning makes it clear she was acting in self defense, but the judge obviously has no interest in finding the truth. He just sees an opportunity to force an attractive girl into sex slavery. And the guy in charge of the social service facility is likewise blatantly corrupt.
Is the corruption supposed to be tragic or celebrated?

The government is otherwise described as being competent, even achieving such things as eliminating homelessness, prostitution, and STDs (not to mention having built a sophisticated, efficient pubic transit system). But this seems inconsistent with a state that has deep seated corruption.

So I would suggest that the details be altered to either make it clear Rebecca was in the wrong (acting entitled and disrespectful to an honorable police officer, for example) thus making her punishment well deserved, or playing up the injustice of it all, making what she endured feel that much more intense because she didn’t deserve it.

[Shocker]

Yes Rebecca didn’t deserve it based on our understanding on how justice works. She is a young naive woman, who grew up in a more rural area. So social service stations might have not been talked about, same as typically nobody would talk about brothels to a young woman. Her life experience ought to have given her the knowledge not to strike the police officer, but again she is a bit out of her element.

Yes the government is showing signs of competence, in the same way as Mussolini making Italy’s train system punctual, or the Nazis actually building a highway system. I made the setting deliberately dystopian, and chose not to tell the reader about that, other than the parts I actually showed.

I completely agree that an outside perspective, would have allowed for a much deeper analysis of the society, and today I might go for that. This story was written a few of years ago, because somebody challenged me to come up with a scenario where the setting of a porn site “czech fantasy” could be real.

Thank you for taking the time of providing such detailed feedback. It’s always good going back and rethinking what motivated writing decisions, as well as learning what worked for a reader and what didn’t.