Despite relevant progress in treatment and prevention, people with HIV and those around them are still targets of heavy discrimination in their working and social lives, thanks to old stereotypes coming from a mostly homophobic and judgmental culture.
Experiencing stigma on our own skin, we wondered with ourselves how we could take action against prejudice by doing something “new” and agreed that if the problem stems from communication, that is where we need to work because simple empathy is no longer enough.
Many institutional campaigns all over the world communicate through fear, and we will counter it with an opposite but equal force: satire, which exorcises death and terror all at once.
Positive (poz) world: what’s all about?
Real world’s HIV is a dangerous virus causing millions of deaths and suffering, for this reason all nations try to do their best to fight it, prevent it and hopefully eradicate it from Earth as soon as possible.
We have no medical or psychological skills to fight against this infection and its social implications, but we want to give our 2 cents for the cause anyways: taking advantage of our love for fiction stories, we created a fantasy world: the positive, or better “POZ”, world.
In the reality, people living with HIV are discriminated for their condition at work, in their family or they experience difficulties in love or sex relationships.
The POZ world is the opposite instead: a positive HIV test result is the ordinary condition, while being negative is the most degrading situation possible which causes a heavy stigma – no poz person can touch a neg, or vice-versa, unless the negative accepts a status upgrade.
In this reversed setup HIV virus participates to the world’s life entirely, including the right to vote. No decision can be made by a human being if their virus does not agree and, overall, HIV has the right to decide which individual can be their next host, regardless of the person’s desire.
A status upgrade happens if the positive, the negative and the virus agree. Otherwise nothing changes.
Reversed worlds have already been explored through the years, both in literature and cinema but they mostly concern physical aspect or sensory conditions:
- The Country of the blind, by H. G. Wells, 1904. A sighted man finds himself in a country where all people are blind, eyes physically do not even exist. The man falls in love with one blind girl then.
- Blindness, by José Saramago, 1995: sighted people find themselves suddenly blind, due to a pandemic.
- See, 2019, Apple TV series: a post-apocalypse world where human genetics have been modified so that everyone is blind – even talking about sight can cause a death sentence! Until one man was born sighted after centuries that didn’t ever happen.
All those plots are mostly dystopic, but we dislike this kind of approach so we asked our selves some questions:
- Why would HIV virus want to befriend humans? Why would it feel the need to respect creatures belonging to a species different from its own?
- Who’s the patient zero for this particular virus strain?
The answer came from a video where an Italian music journalist heavily offended Freddie Mercury accusing him of having unprotected sex despite being aware of his AIDS condition.
We could have reacted with anger but preferred the opposite direction instead: despite disliking every aspect of that journalist’s speech, both him and us have a common interest.
So, if music in real world is able to create peace among people, in the Poz World it’s the communication channel between humans and the virus: through songs, HIV learns how to give messages to its hosts and allows it to explore the complex worlds of feelings.
In the end “Plus Brothers” name was an automatic association between music and the positive community: the “Plus” sign, the brotherhood, and the similarity with music band “Blues Brothers”.
Speaking about locations, the main setup is invented – a fake town named Bugdom, whose university works with the Chicago hospital where E.R., a famous TV series from the 90s, was set.
Poz world sections
- BugDom Town and university: students, teachers and their friends share their stories inside and outside the Bugdom Campus.
- BugDom Talks: the town’s politicians and authorities in general, want to keep secrets about what really happens around. They want to hide crimes, but with a talking virus going around, that’s so difficult! Planning to share both audio and text contents.
- Characters: explore Bugdom people’s back stories, beyond the town’s everyday life.
- Positive stories: every country in the world has its legends and fairy tales. Getting inspiration from them, we create Bugdon’s traditions.