Though if you think about it, to some extent Ianto's cultural world was too. He bolted from Wales like a bat out of hell, if we believe Rhiannon, and built a life for himself in London that I tend to think he found much more suited to his personality than the world he'd grown up in.

Even in a huge organisation like Torchwood One, there had to have been a lot of secrets, plus -- well, just in my personal experience, all my friends except R are work friends, and so I've always thought most of his social circle was probably killed at Canary Wharf. It's not quite comparable, but he certainly felt heavy losses.

The collars have a certain metaphorical meaning at the tail-end of the story, but originally I introduced them as a sort of random kink :D They're inspired in about equal parts by the removable collars men used to wear a hundred years ago and by bondage collars. Perhaps that's a part of it -- the social normalising of something that we view as kinky and transgressive?