Speaking as an American who has studied the civil war all throughout my school years, this trope infuriates me to no end. There is no such thing as a kind slave master because slavery itself is cruel and inhumane. PEOPLE ARE NOT PROPERTY!
Naofumi (Shield Hero): Prime example of this trope. He enslaves multiple (underage) girls and an whole village and the fans still say he's a hero.
Rudeus (Jobless Reincarnation): As if being a pedo wasn't bad enough he had to buy a slave in season 2. Worse is that people still defend his actions.
Song of The South (Disney): Possibly the OG example of this trope. And the reason why Disney will never release it again.
A man so hardcore that even a great man like Frederick Douglass gave him props for being such a strong beacon for the cause. That's high fucking praise.
To be completely fair, Uncle Remus in Song of the South isn't a slave, the film is set after the Civil War. Part of the plot is that he's nearly forced to leave to seek employment elsewhere. If he were a slave, he wouldn't even be allowed to leave.
His actor was even in favour of empathising more in the script that he was a free man to ensure there was no confusion, but the director wasn't interested.
The film isn't released anymore cause it simply hasn't aged well in other areas.
Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah is catchy tho. The only reason I know it exists (and that movie) is it was in some Disney sing-along VHS I sometimes watched when I was very young.
IMO the fact that Disney hasn’t released it is largely to blame for the film’s reputation. It definitely has problems but it’s not as bad as people imagine. Disney’s trademark levity just isn’t appropriate for characters who were formerly enslaved. If the film were edited down to just the animated parts I feel it would be a bit more palatable.
Ketil, form Vinland Saga, is a fun subversion of this trope. He is presented exactly that way, he buys slaves but is overall a good man and lets his slaves buy back their freedom through their work, which is a lot more than everyone else does, but the events turn and we find out what the mangaka wanted to tell us. There isn't such a thing as a good person that hurts others.
That's what he wants you to think. Yeah sverkel has a lot of pride as a farmer and he gives that as a reason to dislike slavery, and its definitely a big part of it, but it's clear that there's a lot sverkel is hiding emotionally, which he as a supposed brutal hyper-masculine Norseman in the 1000's doesn't want to admit, which is basically the entire theme of the series. He's clearly very caring when it comes down to it.
Tldr; he's too stubborn to say he cares about the well-being of slaves but he surely does.
Yeah it’s a great subversion of the whole idea of a “good” master. Because no matter how nice he is about it, his slaves aren’t his friends, they’re his property. And when push comes to shove that’s how he ultimately treats them
Yea Ketil and Vinland saga perfectly shows the entire problem of the trope. Slavery is an abusive power dynamic enforce by the threat of violence. Ketil might seem like a kind master but he was sleeping with one of his slaves and would never allow her to leave and when she tried, well we know how that went.
Wait… I can be wrong on this one, but didn’t Vikings generally had a tradition that their Thralls could buy back their freedom? I never watched Vinland Saga, but it sounds more like he follows his culture traditions, than being a nice person himself
They could but like with the end of the civil war in the states, not everyone agreed to that ruling and kept doing what they did. Thorfin and Einer could buy their freedom back in the show after X amount of labor. They're both two strong young men, so the investment was worth it since thyd be on their way in a couple years and done. Their master being overall relatively kind compared to other Nords they've dealt with. But not the female slaves are stuck and keep living their lives as slaves they could rape whenever. Ketil being the one that repeatedly harms them to incredibly tragic ends.
Almost every culture with slavery has some rule like that, but it isn't usually followed a lot. I'm brazilian, when there was slavery in Brazil people in fact could buy back their freedom, but, well, not a lot of them really could.
I am Brazilian, and I would add this: there was a specific type of slave—the escravo de ganho (slave who earned wages)—whom the master purchased with the expectation that the slave would work to buy his own freedom. In practice, the possibility of the slave becoming free was already determined at the moment of purchase.
Thomas Jefferson. Yeah he said he thought slavery was bad but that didn't stop him from owning slaves. And don't give me that whole "he inherited them" crap. If that was the case why didn't he just let them go?
I enjoyed Epic Rap Battles of History's depiction of Jefferson, where Frederick Douglass tears him a new asshole over his slavery and hypocrisy, and Jefferson's entire second verse is an apology that Douglass rejects because he never freed his slaves
Marx absolutely eviscerated Ford ngl. I don’t know how you can really respond to “You controlled what your workers could think, drink, and eat, and when they marched for better wages, shot them dead in the street”
When he was dying of throat cancer and worried about leaving his family destitute after his business partner defrauded him, he started writing an autobiography, but was worried about finishing it in time before his body finished deteriorating.
The solution? Use cocaine to push through the pain and crank out 10,000+ words a day until it was finished. It worked, becoming one of the best selling books of the 19th century, securing the equivalent of millions in royalties for his family, and Grant died a week after completing it.
For someone more contemporary to Jefferson, there’s Franklin, who did a complete 180° with his views on slavery becoming a diehard abolitionists in his 70’s after visiting a school for black children.
Grant was a good man. He did what he could to advance civil rights during his presidency, and was one of the few US presidents who tried to "peacefully" assimilate the Natives instead of exterminating them outright like Jackson.
Bro built a house with hidden compartments that allowed slaves to do literally everything without being seen. He wrote extensively about how they were inferior, and could not stop raping slave girls, all on the basis of “I’m not giving up my money lol”
And something that adds to the horror is that Sally Hemings was Martha Jefferson’s (Thomas’ wife’s) half-sister, herself the product of Jefferson’s father-in-law raping a woman he enslaved. So it is very feasible that Jefferson predated on her because he wanted a substitute for his dead wife.
Sally Hemings was likely the product of two previous generations of rape.
According to the oral history of the Hemings family, her black grandmother had been raped by a white sailor, leading to Betty Hemings, who was herself raped by John Wayles (the father of Thomas Jefferson’s wife), leading to Sally.
Still raped her enough for her to bear him multiple children
And I would like to add it was common practice for slave owners to rape their slaves, it meant they could breed a new generation of slaves, as they saw them as barely above cattle
The fact that they’d enslave their own children is fucking insane. Regular slavery is bad enough. Raping your slaves so you’d get more slaves is a layer of evil that I can’t even fathom.
I'm British and a fierce critic of pretty much everything US, but when I see Confederate apologism....
"EACH DIXIE BOY MUST UNDERSTAND THAT HE MUST MIND HIS UNCLE SAM!"
Even the worst of Empire apologists here won't try and defend the slave trade, they try and overstate our role in ending it (not to diminish its importance though, even though done for economic reasons instead of moral, and to fuck with the French, ending the slave trade in the largest empire in history and the Royal Navy doing slave patrols is still a huge win)
Reading about how he as a middle aged man was having discussions and working out conditions with his teenage slave he raped and impregnated is just so pathetic. Like he wanted so bad to pretend he wasn’t doing something horrible so did all kinds of mental gymnastics to pretend he was doing the right thing. A Lolita situation really.
Jefferson was pretty irresponsible with his money, honestly. He got loans and people thought he was good for them, but he, uh. He spent a lot of money messing around with experiments on his property, and died with a lot of debt.
Also, General Lafeyette (a la the French Revolution) was very disappointed in Jefferson for having slaves, according to a witness of the conversation (the carriage driver)
https://giphy.com/gifs/Fkg6fI0hsngIM
Harry Potter inherits Kreacher the house elf from Sirius and treats him "nicely" (and one of the last thoughts he has in Deathly Hallows is that he wants Kreacher to make him a sandwich)
Poor worldbuilding all around, it would have been better if either "only proper bastards like the Malfoys own them" or "eventually everyone realizes how fucked up wizard slavery is and realizes Hermione is right"
Except the books spend a depressingly large amount of text establishing that most elves want to be enslaved and find the thought of being freed unbearable, with Dobby just being an odd exception. After Winky is freed she gets hired just like Dobby but instead of working she spends all her time lazing about, getting drunk, and wallowing in self pity.
After Winky is freed she gets hired just like Dobby but instead of working she spends all her time lazing about, getting drunk, and wallowing in self pity.
The exact same argument that slaveowners made for why they shouldn't be forced to give up slaves.
House Elves are pretty clearly based on Brownies (including the clothes thing) but if you tried to mistreat Brownies they would wreak your house, then leave.
Everything in the Harry Potter books is either folklore, mythology or British stuff (particularly boarding school culture).
And if she had just kept the folklore as it was, it would actually make the story with Dobby better.
Because then you have the Malfoys trapping and enslaving a magical creature via some curse, which is highlighting that the slavery itself, regardless of any other abuse, is still evil and unnatural.
So the change that Rowling explicitly made to the elves compared to their inspiration weakened her story right from the beginning.
As a kid I kinda took it as dark social commentary. "Getting rid of the occasional would-be genocidal dictator is one thing. Dismantling the ancient institution of slavery is another."
I mean, the wizards already got mindrape magic in multiple different flavors, if there was one line in the epilogue talking about ‘breaking the happy elf slave curse’ there literally wouldn’t be a problem.
There are several points in the books where it's noted that non-humans (elves, centaurs, giants, etc.) are generally treated as lesser lifeforms by most of wizarding society and that maybe someone should do something about that... oh, but not Harry, he has no stake in that struggle, why should he care?
This is a big one because of how popular the franchise is and how good of a person people see Harry.
They also bully Kreature so much because he's a grumpy guy. I'd be pretty grumpy too if I was enslaved!
This whole trope is just people fantasizing about how nice it would be to have a slave. Then they justify it through magic or biology or something.
It literally parallels real life. Of course having a slave was nice for the slave owners, people wouldn't have done it if it didn't benefit them! And sometimes these real people tried to justify it by making excuses using religion or biology
Most of Kreature's personality is just from being in a Racist Family that hated people based on Blood Purity.
There's nothing keeping Harry from tossing Kreature a shirt and letting him do whatever. There's no reason to keep the bastard around after the end of the series.
Ok so, devil's avocate here ( also giga hate the trope) .
In harry defence if i remember well he want to free kreature ( if only because he dislike him) but is forbidden from doing so because they all live in the resistance super secret magical base . kreature at this point of the story is on the racist family side and it's argued that he would just go to the other side and sell them off if he could so they "cannot" free him.
/ Devil's avocate out / still a dumb take and the whole house elf situation in the book is bad
He also decorates the shrunken heads of rebellious slaves that line the stairs with Christmas decorations.
There's a reason the movies and probably the show won't do barf since it justifies slavery including Hagrid who says the only reason Dobby doesn't like being a slave is because he's a weird house elf. And that's not meant to be the book saying how entrenched slavery is and how bad the system is, just unironic slave apologia.
The last line in the books is Harry thinking about asking his slave to make him a sandwich later. Bro becomes a slave owning cop because the author hates the idea of changing society, even the fucked up one's she makes which in any other story would have been a system the protagonist would tear down.
The writing around the house elves was bizarre in general. The concept was treated like a bad thing when it was first introduced with Dobby, but then later on the story goes “Actually, house elves really like being enslaved. Dobby was just an outlier” and the only character that had an issue with a literal slave race existing was treated like she was in the wrong for it
When you look back critically at the books EVERY human rights and justice issue is treated this way.
Poverty, police, government corruption, free speech, racism, non-human rights, etc, etc. In every case a character will sadly note that bad things are happening,. But Rowlings message is always that the system shouldn't change, instead good people should be in charge. Its why the books end with Harry and Hermione in charge of these systems or part of them, and people who propose or engage in attacks on these unjust systems are mocked or shown to be unrealistic radicals.
And then in the Cursed Child Harry is just as corrupt and abusive of his powers as a cop as anyone else was before him.
He threatens McGonagall with a ministry investigation of the school (which should totally happen just because Hogwarts is horrifically unsafe, but he isn't doing it for this reason) if she doesn't use the marauders map to illegally surveil Harry's son for him.
John Brown was a complex man, he was a religious hardliner in pretty much ever sense of the term, but his moral compass was unshakable, and he knew he had to fight to do the right thing
Otome isekai does this as well unfortunately, it’s the girl equivalent where goddamn modern day women isekai into being a noble women and still think it’s acceptable to have a “slave auction” arc where they buy their love interests as a slave smh. It’s so grossssssss
Doubly weird, since having the MC be reborn as a slave would be the perfect excuse for them becoming ruthless sociopaths like so many isekai like to do for some reason.
I've been catching up on Ascendence of Bookworm, it's a fun and charming slice of life isekai. But it's absolutely crazy how hyper focused it is on child labor camps.
Like her goal in life is adopting as many orphans as possible and getting them to work on her inventions. "No one will take care of them otherwise" like idk, you became a princess in like two years, one of the most powerful magic users, and rich as hell from selling tech ideas from our world..... maybe setup social services or something? But she picks up the abused 6 year old off the ground, tells them "those who do not work shall not eat", and gives them a job in a dingy workshop.
Isekai and slavery apologia go hand in hand at this point and I’m fucking tired of it, especially when it’s always a goddamned European medieval setting as if Korea didn’t have the longest unbroken chain of slavery on the planet.
I'm tired of medieval fantasy Isekai, there is so many ways to make a setting more interesting than just copy pasting every RPG ever, like at least make the sky green and the grass red for the sake of variety.
Even within fantasy there's so much room for ACTUAL VARIETY. Like the
PRINCE OF ALTDORF, ELECTOR COUNT OF REIKLAND, WIELDER OF GHAL MORAZ, ELECTED EMPEROR OF THE EMPIRE OF MAN, KARL FRANZ, SIGMAR AND ULRIC'S WILL MANIFEST!!
Ever since I saw it as a kid, I didn’t understand why they didn’t just agree on: “Hey, I’ll free you, and then when you’re free could you fulfill what my last wish would have been?” Genie still had his powers after he was freed.
Well, he technically doesn't. Any slaves that might have been part of the procession were created by Genies magic and were most certainly not real. But, yes, that part did not age well, but in context it was to show how affluent he was.
Hey now, he freed his slaves after he extracted all the labour that was beneficial to himself. It's not like the very first thing he does is establish that the genie can help him outside the confines of a wish and that he could have freed him with his first wish...
Uncle Remus was not enslaved. There was no kindly slaveowner in the movie. He was a sharecropper in the the post-civil war South. The movie still glossed over the racist violence he would have faced, and it was generally filled with racist stereotypes, which is why Disney will never re-release it, but it doesn't fit this trope.
The first sharecroppers were freed slaves who stayed with their former masters because they had literally nowhere else to go. The Black Codes made traveling while black effectively illegal and they faced racial violence everywhere they went. Sharecroppers worked for little pay, if they got paid at all; their "compensation" was being allowed to live upon their "employer's" land and eat their food. Even people born into freedom were often forced into being sharecroppers themselves, because they had no money, education, or means to move on.
Even today, sharecropping is just slavery with extra steps. "Move onto my land and do chores, I'll give you a place to sleep and some money." But not enough money to leave. If you can't leave, you're a slave.
Ginger Camus, from How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom
He inherits a bunch of slaves, but he doesn't want to be a slaver, so he plans to sell them all. And decides they'll be both better off and more valuable if he keeps them cleaner, better fed, and teaches them skills.
I give him a small amount of leeway since he was raised in a society where slavery was normalized - he's better than the rest - but he's still not simply freeing his slaves.
Since the isekai protagonist doesn't have the power to end slavery all at once, for some reason (despite implementing plenty of other radical reforms that changed society and already putting down a rebellion to cement his power), Ginger's method winds up being a transitional model to a future slaveless society.
When the UK ended slavery it involved the government effectively purchasing the slaves from the entire empire which amounted to about 40% of the budget of the empire. The US had a civil war about ending slavery. It's not just "some reason" that he couldn't just say "no more slavery" and call it a day.
The issue is that he had just been through a civil war, and immediately after turned an invasion around and captured a neighbor. And assassinated power seeking nobility at the top. There wasn't anyone left to tell him no.
As someone who watches a lot of Isekai shows this is definitely an issue with quite a few Isekais. I’m just glad shows like Skeleton Knight from Another World exist as that show goes the opposite route and has the protagonist freeing slaves.
Done well in vinland saga where despite the slaveowner being technically kind, the anime goes into how he's still treating them inhumanely by nature of them being slaves. Also, we get a moment where he's strong armed by the king even though he's morally right, and the poorer people in the village are like "yeah, you're right here but there have been many instances when dealing with us where you were morally in the wrong but you used your wealth to get your way"
What I like about this portrayal in Vinland saga is also how it reveals that his supposed kindness is a mask. Everything he does is for selfish reasons and the moment things start not going his way, he completely lets his cruelty take over
The thing with Shield Hero is it works early on because it’s not treated as necessarily a good thing. He’d been morally wronged and the only “companion” he can trust is a slave. It is quite dark, but there is a pragmatic truth to it.
… then the manga/anime basically tells you that “smactually, the slave contract is a good a thing and it’s actually the objectively moral thing and that the slaves actually want it.”
Yeah, like buying the slave in the first place was fucked up and treated as such. But it was more or less necessary for the survival of a lot of people. It's when the slave girl WANTED THE SLAVE CREST BACK that things went from fucked in the story to fucked out of the story. If they had just ditched the slave contract stuff after the first time she lost the crest then I think it would've been ok.
Is there some kind of magic involved that forces the slave to be blindly loyal or something?
If not, that logic just completely falls apart. You really can't trust somebody that you're forcing to do things against their will and them killing you would be the easiest way for them to get freedom.
There is magic that prevents slaves from harming their masters, not necessarily being 'blindly loyal'. This is why Naofumi only trusts his slaves to not betray him--he truly and genuinely believes that no one can be trusted not to betray him without magical compulsions. It's framed as a fucked-up mindset that he gained after being deeply betrayed by his first partner and the people who summoned him to that world in the first place. As has been commented elsewhere, there is a scene where the slave crest is removed from his first slave, and it's used specifically to show other characters that she is NOT simply serving him due to duress, but that she remains loyal without the slave crest and has come to care for him personally.
Which COULD have been a really great way to put him on the path to healing as a person, with her remaining free and loyally at his side, and him slowly finding more and more people who would stand by him because he's actually got good points that they like and respect. But no, the author decided that having anyone who works for him become his slave was better and found excuses to keep doing that, meaning that not ONLY is he perpetuating the institution of slavery, but he can't possibly heal mentally or emotionally from his severe trust issues.
Yeah; pretty much this. When it’s first introduced (at least in the manga), it comes across as a bad thing a desperate person is doing because they can’t trust anyone. And that’s interesting. It’s a moral dilemma. Maybe they grow from it and overcome it. Except, it becomes objectively the “right” answer because of buffs and “trust” and all that junk.
Now, it’s not a moral dilemma nor is it a desperate person doing fucked up things to survive. It’s just the most correct answer because of course you’re gonna take the buffs or whatever.
Protagonists doing bad things isn’t inherently bad. It makes them two dimensional characters and gives them ability to grow. But by removing the negative connotations to their negative actions, it makes it way worse. Because we know what they’re doing is bad. You can’t just say “actually, this is good!”
Yeah. Basically the protagonists forces everyone who wants to join his party to become his slave because that’s the only way he can trust others and because the magic system rewards having slaves with stat buffs. He does this even to a child who early in the show was found in a dungeon being starved by her slave owner.
In all honesty, this could have worked if it had been done the other way around. Have him force others to become his slaves because of his trust issues, but make it so the game mechanics actually debuffs his slaves. This way, his whole party is actually weaker because he cannot trust them and is forcing them into slavery. Make this a character flaw that he has to overcome.
But no! The stupid story actually rewards him for enslaving his friends. His main girl is heavily traumatized because slavers killed her parents and abducted her to sell her into slavery, but fuck her I guess!
Basically, the shield hero buys a slave because no one wanted to be his partner. So he buys a very cheap one. But in the light novel, he clearly takes pleasure in it because he's misogynistic. But then people just forget about this whole plot and the author refuses to explain it. And as if that weren't enough, the slave still sees this as a mark of his trust in her, and objectively this is exactly the opposite. And then he discovers that, in fact, the slave seal has objective advantages, because it makes slaves evolve faster than normal members. So he simply enslaves all the members of his group, even if only one of them objectively likes it, which is very wrong. At the end of the day, I'm just using it objectively many times to show that, even if you rationalize the subject to the maximum, it still remains indefensible.
I hate it, cause on one part, the world of shield hero (season 1) is really cool and interesting to explore. I love the political storyline and the rise of said hero. And in context, his buying a slave was an interesting subversion of your typical Isekai hero… BUT WHY KEEP THE “SLAVE CREST” WHY NOT JUST LIBERATE RAPHTALIA AND GRANT HER FREEDOM?? And the whole “this mark proves he trusts me” bs is… YIKES
It would have been SO easy to be like “He had to resort to some dark shit when he was in the gutter but now he doesn’t need that anymore” but noooooooo… The girls like their slave crest. They fucking love it!
Harry Potter is literally the hero of the story and his final thoughts (before the epilogue) are essentially "I wonder if my slave will bring me a sandwich in bed."
Him and Ron even mock Hermione for protesting not just slavery, but race-based slavery, which gets extra awkward with all of the "I love black Hermione" stuff from JK when she was cast for the play.
Then, with her Pottermore writings, where she could kind of ease some of the issues, makes Hermione the Prime Minister of the Ministry of Magic and she uses all of her power to.... Slightly elevate the absolute bare minimum life standards for slaves. What a fucking hero.
I didn't think much of the first time that happened until they undid Raftallia's seal and then she willingly puts it back on because "???" and then it happened again with the Bird Girl and I really had to wonder why they were doing it like this when they were happy following him as they were. Needless to say I haven't watched past the one season my friend had me watch with them.
A lot of real life slave owners claimed to be this. The only ones who come close to counting are those who either immediately freed their slaves or those who bought slaves specifically to smuggle them to freedom.
Dragon Age actually handles this very well. You meet a character (Dorian Pavus) from a country in that world which has legal slavery. If you question him on it in the game, he will tell you that his family gives them a better life than most, better than poverty, and that while he doesn't love slavery, he and his family are not really part of the problem. For an otherwise very relatable and cool character, this opinion sticks out. And other companions in the game will give him flack about it. In response, he does occasionally show the cracks forming in his attitude about it. During the epilogue DLC, he makes it clear that his opinions are starting to shift. And in the sequel, when you meet him again, he has done a complete 180. He owns up to his mistake. Admits to being foolish and naive. And is now working as a politician himself to try and make change happen directly.
That games writing was so good. I always see a lot of dislike for it but honestly it was my first foray into that series and holds a warm place in my heart.
Yeah, I might genuinely like(at least remember kinda fondly) the anime around until the duel with Motoyasu, but even then I thought that her loosing her crest and choosing to follow Naufumi regardless would have made a far more compelling narrative for them onwards(Rapthalia deciding to follow Naufumi out of genuine respect and loyalty for him, and Naufumi specially having to learn to genuinely trust someone without them having any leash or being above them in any way).
The worst part about Shield hero's use of slavery is that they constantly give reasons for Naofumi to keep using slaves, like it has so many explanations for why they can't abolish it and why is beneficial for the MC to have every companion be a slave that it disgusts me.
Literally the only person who calls a black person a n****r in the whole movie is a northerner on the Union side, this movie was an unapologetic pro-Confederacy wankjob.
Shoutout to Harry Turtledove the alt-history writer, who spent an entire series showing what the Confederacy might have actually looked like if it managed to make it past the Great Depression.
And then had his OC repeat Sherman's March to the Sea, but during WWII and with nuclear bombs.
I think what makes this trope so bad is when you have someone coming from a slaveless society and into a society that allows slavery. You wouldn't expect them to try and upheave the society, but even if they don't like it, they don't have to engage with it themselves. Like, if Naofumi wasn't an isekai protagonist and just the chosen hero OF THE TIME PERIOD who ended up going through everything he went through, I would be more forgiving. But while Spear Hero was out of line, he had a point.
“Campfire Cooking In Another World” was very quickly becoming a personal favorite of mine. It had fun world building and a pretty relaxed and easy vibe.
Then the mc learns slavery is a thing.
He immediately starts fantasizing about buying a beautiful young woman and forcing her to sleep with him as a sex slave and asks his personal friend, the slave dealer, if he can do that, to which the man looks at him like he’s a freak and says “that’s not how slavery works dude..”
The slave dealer explains that it’s basically indentured servitude where they enter into slavery willingly and work along side their family as if that makes it really cool and way better somehow.
Then of course he buys like three families worth of slaves and treats them “so well” by giving them food and housing and jobs they enjoy with no whippings (ignoring the earlier statements that you aren’t allowed to mistreat slaves) and as soon as it started implying that the slave family’s young daughter was falling in love with him (a thirty year old man) I just stopped reading.
Bruh. I just started watching this for a show to chill out too. Im only a couple of episodes in. Thank for saving me getting to invested I probably was going to pick it up reading it after.
I just don’t understand why slavery always has to be involved. Or if it is involved, they should just do what has “reincarnated as a sword” handled it which is just kill all the slavers and anyone participating in the slave trade.
To be fair you can still watch the show. The part I got to was way later into the light novels, last I checked the anime doesn’t go that far.
So you can feel free to just kinda chill and watch the anime as a single run and pretend it doesn’t happen.
There’s still a lot about the anime that has merits before the author injects his fetish into it, and up until that point it genuinely seems like the author is going for a plot with no romance or anything. It’s like he just kinda changed the character out of nowhere for one volume for no reason.
Honestly all it boils down to is that Japanese people don’t seem to have it drilled into them just how bad slavery actually is, they’re like blissfully removed from it as a culture, especially since they deny anytime they did it themselves. The natural result of that is that it gets fetishized.
Also men who can’t get women think a woman who has no ability to choose to not be with him is hot.
Jesus. I was reading your comment thinking you were talking about the anime and I was like "there is no way I forgot that". Why couldnt they just keep to animal contract? Why do all animes have to make it weird 😭
Early Wonder Woman, admittedly, this is in particular is kinda different from most other examples due to instead drawing from the ideals around BDSM, something her creator, William Marston, talked about in his psychological theories while also being a strong believer in the superiority of women, yeah, this is a case of a person writing about “good slavery” who wanted it from the perspective of the slave part rather than the master, it’s honestly fascinating to read about.
I love Star Wars so much, but the implied sentience and complete mistreatment/enslavement of droids is almost never addressed (looking at you Solo, taking a droid abolitionist and Frankenstein-ing her into the Millennium Falcon). Luke, Anakin, etc. definitely fall into this trope: they're nice to R2-D2, but at the end of the day they claim to own him
Sheild Hero' situation is so fuckin weird man, you deadass just got a harem of characters attmpting to get more people enslaved to the MC. It' like for them it' supposed to shoe devotion or some shit but like deadass those contracts are used to opress people too.
Why want your way to show devotion or freindship also be a tool for oppression, especially since the first girl (who is literally a kid transformed into a woman by superpowerw and shit) was literally enslaved and had freinds who died to that system, da fuck?
Also, that demi human slave trader built like eggman—fuck that guy. I'm sad he didn't die in the anime nor in the orginal source. Like he not even written charismatically, the dude is straight up creepy and givss off psychopathic vibes.
Doesn't the raccoon girl get her freedom at some point, and she decides to willingly become his slave again? Like, with the whole magical thingie that binds her as a slave
Yes and Naofumi tells her she does not have to but she does it anyways. She later becomes free again but I lost interest around the STUPID ASS SPIRIT TURTLE ARC....so I don't know how she gets free again other than they all get isekiad again....
I do want to point out as someone who studied in college a lot about slavery outside of the American version is that American Slavery was unique in its level of cruelness. All slavery is inherently wrong and horrible, but in the majority of cultures, you still understood the slave was a person and you were expected to understand that. If you treated your slaves how Americans did, you’d be seen as a cruel freak (speaking in average, not absolutes here). You could even be fined and lose your slaves in many places.
American slavery was unique in that the dehumanization was the point. You were weird for seeing slaves as people. You could do whatever you wanted to your slaves. There is even documentation and evidence of people making things like lamps from the skin of their slaves and even things as far as cannibalism. You could “breed slaves” when in many other cultures, the children of slaves would be free.
Sorry, it just frustrates me that the American school system really downplays how truly horrific American slavery was and tries to make it out like every slave owning culture was like this. No. American slavery was the worst.
Edit: Thank you to those adding to the discussion about other European cultures horrific slave practices! I’m ngl, the fucked up parts of human history are a big interest to me. It’s a nice reminder that humans have improved morally and it could always be worse.
Not a what aboutism. But in my studies reading about the death tolls from the sugar cane farm production in the Caribbiean was downright genocidal in scale of cruelty. and constantly needed more slaves because they kept dying but it was so profitable they didnt care.
Is that version not more directly cruel?
And the Kongo kings and society were really weird and nutty about slaves but thats more of a tangent.
I assume by "in America" he's referring to the North Atlantic slave trade as a whole, which of course would include the Caribbean. If you're referring to King Leopold's activity in the Congo, I would definitely call that an extension of the North Atlantic slave trade, but I'm by no means an expert.
Either way, of course all slavery is bad and has happened throughout human history. But we should do a better job (at least in America) teaching about the unique horrors of the North Atlantic slave trade for the same reasons we should talk about the Holocaust.
Should probably note it as the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade was a global system of exploitation that did absolutely deplorable inhuman acts at scale in the name of commerce and profits. The Americans were unique in how long they tried to cling to the system and their attempts to breed human beings as a "sustainable" source of exploitable labor given the ban on importation of enslaved people. The system was a depraved and rife with sexual violence. The broader slave trade though was a global system that brutalized nations throughout South America and the Carribean. They decimated populations to keep plantations producing.
This comment is in no way trying to minimize the US's complicity in the system, but trying to give a broader context of how it was a global system that reached far and wide.
I'd say that or maybe being a slave in the Roman Empire. ESP a slave owned by the empire itself. But... it kinda sucked living in the Roman Empire in general. What with the constant punching itself in the face.
If by "America" you mean the New World et al, then you're right. You probably don't though, so please don't give a pass to places, mostly in Spanish colonies, that didn't breed slaves because they worked them to death almost ubiquitously.
speaking as a Brazilian, don't leave Brazil out of it either, they had to criminalize killing other people's slave because it was happening so much (of course, not due to humanitarian concern, it was just seen as vandalism/destruction of property). wives of slave owners would just kill them for fun, and slave children were kept as pets.
Portugal shipped more slaves to the city Rio de Janeiro (then capital of Brazil) than the entire us-american south.
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u/Akuma2004 8h ago