Smokey

Bunker Type (Stepfordization)

Added 2023-10-25 12:00:05 +0000 UTC

So, this story is gonna be a bit of a different animal from my usual work. It's still stepfordization, but it's a different setting (and universe) from my typical Stepford stuff. It's also a story that, at least to me, feels a bit more sinister than my other stories. Your mileage may vary, of course. It deals with both stepfordization and (particularly) pregnancy/breeding tropes.

Bunker Type was also inspired by two pieces of media that I really disliked! Not in a "fix it fic" kind of way, but rather I borrowed some elements that I found really fascinating and disturbing (in a good way) from those stories, despite how much I dislike the stories themselves in practice. The first, and more obvious, is the movie The Bunker Game, which is about a bunch of people LARPing as fascists in a breeding program in a bunker in some mountains. I found the first act of the movie INCREDIBLY scary in a good way, but then they just. Abandoned that premise in favor of a boring ghost story, and I lost interest.

The other source of inspiration is the comic SF/SX, which should have been incredibly up my alley, but which I heavily disliked in terms of how its story was executed. The main thing I pulled from that comic was my character Alex, who is inspired by the character Jonesy. Jonesy's deal is that she was a strong and confident rebel who was brainwashed by a fascist government into hating and hunting down her old friends. Sadly, her arc ended in a way that I reeeaaaally did not care for (I was hoping for more of a redemption/deprogramming and they opted for something that I found rather cruel instead). But that idea of a tomboy rebel being turned into an agent of the oppressor found its way into this story.

Hope you enjoy! Next story will be the return of an old classic: The Stepford Ad Company!