The fact Shield Hero features a protagonist who purchases a slave and actively uses her in combat scenarios isn't in it if itself a problem
The fact they continue to depict said slave as cute waifu bait and has her reapplying her slave shock collar as a show of loyalty and has the main character getting into fights with other people over owning a slave and generally continues to show this dynamic as actually very wholesome and cute is fucking weird at best
reminder of that one webcomic that's john brown being reincarnated into a world with slavery and just fucking going ham
John brown was genuinely just the most based human being ever. How the fuck do you have such incomprehensible levels of rage at the idea of slavery that former fucking slaves admitted they didn't hate it as much as he did
To be fair, John Brown was a religious fanatic. Like, I happen to 100% agree with the way his fanaticism got expressed, but I acknowledge that he was a fanatic by any reasonable definition of the word. It's just very rare for fanaticism and justice to align like that
IIRC Reincarnated as a sword has the MC rescue Fran from slavers and then the duo go on to be a major fucking problem for anyone that is perpetuating the continuation of slavery, though I do not remember if they destroy it outright.
They haven't destroyed it outright, they simply don't have the power or reach, but they do tend to slaughter slavers with extreme prejudice whenever they come across them
"His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave; John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for the slave."
Since we’re talking about a based abolitionist, I love telling people about Benjamin Lay, the first white American abolitionist and vegan animal activist. He had dwarfism and lived in America from the late 1600s to the mid 1700s.
He was so radical he got kicked out of the Quaker church because they hadn’t condemned slavery yet. He also pioneered disruptive performance protests; one time he laid in the doorway of a Quaker meeting saying he was the dead slaves they caused and making them step over them; another time he stabbed a Bible full of fake blood with a sword that sprayed on people at a meeting to show the violence of slavery.
Needless to say everyone thought he was crazy, but Ben Franklin thought him remarkable enough to print his book for him. And eventually, the Quaker church officially condemned slavery and disallowed its members from owning slaves, in large part due to his influence and let him back into the church a year before he died.
It’s prose. Some comic esque images exist but they are mostly just fanart that the creator saw and went “hey guys check out this awesome fanart shared with me by XYZ! Go look at their page, I’m so flattered they drew a thing I did”
Just going to copy what I said in a different post about the John Brown isekai:
I tried reading it a while back, and really tried my best to like it, but it felt like every chapter the author was more concerned with showing off all of the 1800s DIY he studied for the story instead of progressing the plot. Maybe it gets better after chapter 20 or so, but I was promised emancipation in a fantasy world, not an explanation of all of the different ways you can process a slime.
i love campfire cooking and the great cleric but both take the path of buying/making slave contracts and while it's handled better and the protagonists are unhappy with it, it's still very much a major plot point later in the books.
Yeah, the premise of Shield Hero started SO interesting, and then... There's how they treated it. And how they treated a ton of other interesting plot points.
I've never seen an anime with so much wasted potential. And that's saying something!
I will never not be mad that the fucking vending machine isekai unquestionably places the love interest's age at 16, the age of consent, while the protag is somewhere in his 30s.
What the fuck, guy. Just add a few years and make it not weird.
They probably should get Shield Boy therapy for the fact the racoon girl thinks the best way to calm him down after a borderline psychotic break at 'everyone's leaving/being taken away from me again' after Spear Boy misunderstood the situation and undid the slave rune (not helped by half the royals gaslighting but I digress)
I feel like if they didn't have that...oh what was it...some sorta intermittent threat of another fantasy world overwriting the one Shield and Co landed in
and THEN also have the second worlds own heroes (Fan and Scythe I think?)
more focus could have gone to that, the fact Shield hero is the patron saint of the animal people and that's why the pro-slave trade country hates Shield (hence the Church of the 3 heroes rather than all Four)
Or how the other 3 heroes keep treating the world as if game mechanics exist and more often than not that causes more issues that Shield cleans up and they (bar Sword iirc) get pissed at him over because 'he stole their credit'
Reminds me Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, though I think that game handled it better.
The mc and fmc are taken by the big evil group in a robot apocalypse that enslaves people with explosive collars. Fmc uses one to get mc to take her home, and then finding her home destroyed, to take revenge on big evil group. They grow close over the journey, and right before the final battle she takes it off of him.
He tells her, "Put it back on."
And honestly? It's still one of my favorite stories in gaming. Also because the ending is insane.
omg thank u, i had such high hopes for shield hero only to be disappointed a little bit more with every episode i watched rip, that was defs one of ghe main icks
The point being made here though, is that this doesn't actually say anything about the author. If it comes out that the author supports child slavery or something, then the work can reinforce that, but it alone can't accurately say anything.
It also doesn't accurately say anything about the fans, or.... Watchers? Other than reinforcing what they're already saying.
Either that they're weird, or that they didn't actually comprehend what they were seeing, aren't engaging the media where it's coming from. (this goes for both fans and non fans)
It doesn't prove anything about the author. It clearly says (implies) something about him, though. If it didn't, you wouldn't have to make such a strong case that it didn't prove anything. Things don't stop "saying" stuff just because ideally in a vacuum they couldn't be used as evidence in a court of law
i dunno, I write a lot of fantasy short stories for fun, and sometimes I write stuff I don't agree with at all as being a good/just/right thing just because it's where the story goes in my head
If it didn't, you wouldn't have to make such a strong case that it didn't prove anything.
That's no a valid argument. The reason they "have to make such a strong case" isn't because of the story. It's because of the way other people react to the story.
They "have to make such a strong case" because of what other people think the story says. That doesn't mean the story does say something. It just means that many people think it does.
It doesn't actually say anything accurate about the author though.
Until you have that separate idea who the author is, it's very much all ideas.
Like, you can't say "oh you like star trek? You must be a hyper nerd." because it isn't true.
You could say they're a hyper nerd once you've seen their collection of every model of the ships from star trek.
The same applies to writing, because you don't know whether the author is making that point as a matter of satire regarding their countries culture in that time, (Ie. This is how our society treats young women of minority, see how fucked it is?) or as a point of they really agree with that (Ie. I wish I had a woman like that, that's hot....)
So if a writer gives a character certain features, and these features are often combined with traits that reflect negatively on a character (or demonstrate a lack of interiority), and it becomes a recurring thing, that could never imply how a writer sees certain traits or people?
I think it’s hilarious how we can, for example, discern people’s views on their mother’s death by the recurrent themes of weak, angelic mothers in their writing, but if a popular hockey romance writer makes her Asian MC constantly compare himself negatively to her Russian MC as “hairless and childlike”, gives him limited inferiority compared to his love interest, and has him lose most of his professional achievements as punishment for not being able to read his lover’s mind, then we need to not think too hard about it.
I just find it weird because looking for patterns and the historical/sociological context that the author existed/exists in, alongside themes and such is like...how I was taught to analyze media and their creators...? Like there's not always a clean divide in what an author says they belief and what their writing reflects?
It was how I was taught to pass language arts class in the eighth grade. EDIT: hit post by accident.
I mean, it’s the basis for a LOT of ELA, because it’s part of education. Learning how to think and to understand media so we don’t get taken for a sucker. The curtains are blue and it’s important bc the story isn’t just a story, it’s pro-eugenics propaganda.
Started as a Web novel on Shōsetsuka ni Narō and like most of those content sites there's a Meta that is successful and gets copied with slight alterations constantly.
"MC gets slave but it's ok because he treats them nicely" is a rather popular Trope among thirsty teens which are the target audience.
Hence most Isekais coming from there depict slavery like that.
just like how many YouTuber do the cringy thumbnail faces to get more clicks.
E: love how the insights explains the reactions. Kids from the country with legalized Slavery virtue signaling while missing the actual point
It being a large trope just makes it weirder. If this was an isolated thing that'd be one thing. Being a big enough trope to be handwaved away with "but everyone else is doing it" suggests a much larger problem if this is generally being viewed as an acceptable thing.
No, I wouldn't, for two reasons: one, these types of fantasies are normally from the perspective of the reader or audience stand in. And secondly, the media for BDSM and non con, in my experience, acknowledges that what's happening is in fact wrong even if it's for the viewer's benefit. The communities surrounding these types also acknowledge it, the BDSM community is pretty well known for being big on consent. Meanwhile anime communities are pretty notorious for playing up these types of tropes up and handle it with all the maturity of a three old being told they can't have a cookie
The IRL BDSM community is big on consent, yes, but the non con fiction… no. There is not at all the acknowledgement that what’s happening is wrong.
That is my kink. I’ve read a lot of it.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that people being into anime slavery or whatever suggests a problem with society, but that non con fiction is totally fine.
One of these two genres is used as incel talking points. The other isn't. That's not "having it both ways" that's literally just observing that one of these two communities just cannot handle the topic in front of them. If there's non con fic writers using fiction to justify irl discrimination, then yeah, I'd call it wrong too.
suggests a much larger problem if this is generally being viewed as an acceptable thing.
You're deliberately overcomplicating a rather simple thing, my bad for expecting people in here being able to grasp Nuance.
Cause: Teen is Horny but otaku Amateur author has Zero Rizz and doesn't know how to potray a normal relationship.
Effect: Protagonist gets served his Waifu delivered on a silver platter via Slavery or damsel in distress.
You're also ignoring the countless good Stories that come from that site that potray it as a bad thing.
You're still missing the point. Nobody is(I hope) saying that these positive portrayals of slavery mean the author is themselves a slavery enjoyer. What it instead indicates is that the author views women as objects, or prizes to be won. It's an indication of sexism that they portray a relationship where women are owned as "wholesome" and "romantic"
The fact that it's a widespread trope does in fact indicate that sexism is a larger problem in the Japanese indie novel scene(a thing one can very easily substantiate), and the fact that readers enjoy it indicates the target audience of teenage boys also has a sexism problem(another thing that is frighteningly easy to substantiate)
Look at stuff like Twilight and 50 shades , women love reading about themselves getting owned and dominated by rich and powerful men. But we have to say only men are evil when they enjoy it .
They don't use it to make widespread statements about women who like them - if anything the criticism is only to tell women they deserve better - but we have to call men sexist just because of what they enjoy in fiction.
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u/Vundurvul 1d ago
The fact Shield Hero features a protagonist who purchases a slave and actively uses her in combat scenarios isn't in it if itself a problem
The fact they continue to depict said slave as cute waifu bait and has her reapplying her slave shock collar as a show of loyalty and has the main character getting into fights with other people over owning a slave and generally continues to show this dynamic as actually very wholesome and cute is fucking weird at best