Archive of Our Own

The purpose of this collection is to collect stories that do a good job of demonstrating the kink I describe as unpersoning. There are a lot of elements that go into this but I feel like the acronym 'ODD' does a good job of encapsulating it:

• Objectification (also, Ownership), both as a process and an end state: former persons who become unpersons and live as objects/animals fully owned by other people.
• Degradation/Dehumanization: stuff happens that establishes the powerlessness of the unperson and the irrelevance of their wishes, usually in painful and/or humiliating fashion.
• Display: the unperson is always required to be naked—with limited exceptions for functional clothing on the extremities—and this nudity is shown off publicly in a way that ocassions little social comment. This can shade into degradation when 'private moments' of the sub are put on display to an audience, namely sex acts, medical examination, urination, and childbirth.

I conceptualize unperson and narratives on a spectrum running roughly from 'house slaves' in the antebellum US and modern Arab Gulf States—only with enforced nudity—to a status I call 'creaturedom,' where the ability of unpersons to speak is removed and society generally believes them entirely in capable of complex/higher cognitive functioning. Broadly, I can divide these into three categories:

1. True creaturedom: the unperson is permanently and unable to speak and is assumed to have the higher cognitive functioning—at best—of capuchin monkeys. You don't tell a 'creature' what to do except with the kind of simple commands you would give a dog, but you do do stuff to it.
2. Talking livestock: much like slavery as traditionally practiced in Central Africa and the Pacific Islands, unpersons can talk, they can be understood, but persons will only talk back in order to make clear that needs and desires of unpersons are irrelevant. People understand them as capable of doing complex tasks, but think so little of them they rarely go through the effort, instead seeking to train them to perform by rote.
3. Naked enslaved people: I generally object to the awkward circumlocution 'enslaved people,' but it works perfectly to describe this category. These are people who are legally and socially still considered livestock and the absolute properties of their owners. Owners can kill and even eat them, but you also have owners who treat them more like housepets. They are assigned complex tasks and while it is expected that they will only speak when spoken to, when they are spoken to the people in the society will listen, but maybe not heed them. However it still needs to be normal that they must be naked.

I don't actually know a lot of stories that conform to my expectations in the third category. I have tried to write stories in this category. I never got very far with them, but there are two I would like to restart. Most of my own stories fall pretty clearly into the first category. Meanwhile, 'Melissa's Willing Enslavement'—which I did not write but practically designed this collection because I wish I had—is a phenomenal example of the second category. It shades slightly into the third at times, but like I said it's a spectrum, and I'm just laying these categories out for future sub-collection classification.

'Unperson' is a verb, a noun, and an adjective:

— I have an unperson kink and write unperson fiction about:
— characters unpersoning other characters
— turning said victim into an unperson

 
The first unpersoning timeline I specifically named I called the "Creaturedom" timeline, after the term 'creaturedom': the state of being a 'creature'—or unperson—in that timeline. I frequently use the terms 'creature' and 'animal remains' from that timeline in other unpersoning timelines where I don't have dedicated terms.

Please read these rules carefully to determine if a work qualifies for this collection.

For inclusion, a work should:

1. Fit the ODD criteria of 'unpersoning'.
2. Be set in a social system where the culture and/or institutional machinery enables 'unfair' unpersoning.
3. Focus primarily on the social context that creates/reinforces the unpersoning process and/or the internal experience of an unperson.
4. Make the unperson fit the needs and whims of its owner and either increasingly marginalize/ignore the wants and needs of the unperson.
5. Feature unpersons that are physically human in face and upper body either fully or mostly (demons, catpeople). IE, not a furry work, not 'hucow' stuff that's actual human/cow hybrids.
6. Feature unpersons that would act largely like humans except for the act of unpersoning. IE, no zombies or catpeople who naturally act like actual cats.
7. Feature on persons who would have the capacity to understand the horrifying nature of their situation. IE, no severe mental impairment or small children.
8. The characters causing/reinforcing the unpersoning are recognizably 'human' in thinking, lifestyle, and motivation. IE, no immortal vampires, godlike aliens, AI superintelligence.
9. No stories focused on or graphically describing animal/human digestion, especially not the 'end results.' (I'm fine with plant digestion.)

These rules are based on my own personal idiosyncrasies and there are probably many implicit criteria for inclusion or exclusion that I won't realize until people try to add stories that don't fit, so please don't take it personally if I reject your story nomination, despite it fitting the rules.

Except for the aforementioned digestion, and a weak exception for stories involving children under 15 (I don't like that but can make an exception if the story is exceptional—as with 'Cannibal 4H' on the BDSM Archive) I am into or OK with pretty much everything else considered 'extreme,' as long as it fits the unpersoning theme. Notably, I myself like to write stories featuring A. graphic depictions of genital mutilation/extremity amputation, B. heavy emotional sadism and 'bad ends', and C. snuff—provided the victim becomes food for people, plants, or pets. I also—despite my own hard limits of anything 'digestion'-related—happily write about urination and menstruation where it will humiliate the 'unperson.'