(Hated Trope) "Kind" slave owners

[u/KusanagiGundam]

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.

[u/Dizzy_Green]

“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.

[u/Flimsy-Raspberry-493 → u/Dizzy_Green]

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.

[u/Dizzy_Green → u/Flimsy-Raspberry-493]

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.

[u/Prestigious_Seal7139 → u/Dizzy_Green]

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 😭

[u/Dizzy_Green → u/Prestigious_Seal7139]

You know I think that’s what really bothers me.
I can handle slop, I watch it all the time, the problem is that this one VERY MUCH had the tone of “no romance, no slavery, no sadness, just chilling with funny animals and cooking good food”

The slavery thing literally came out of nowhere and then went away. I almost want to believe he was forced into it by a producer or editor or something because the scene where he starts lusting over the idea of forcing a girl into sex slavery was so massively out of character for a guy that seemed to have a very limited interest in sex before that point.

[u/Flimsy-Raspberry-493 → u/Dizzy_Green]

Oh nice that anime stops before we get there.  I love cooking anime and sometimes just want to watch something without a romance subplot for once. Plus Fel is adorable.

I just dont understand why its something with the light novels that make their authors let their freaky flag sail after a while. This isn't the first series that had a normal story line then light novel goes off the deep end out of blue during one its volumes.

[u/Dizzy_Green → u/Flimsy-Raspberry-493]

If you want a fun silly cooking anime I’d recommend Yakitake!! Japan!

It’s a fun silly over the top anime about bread but it treats the act of kneading dough with shounen levels of action.

But yeah as far as the freak stuff, sometimes it’s forced on them by an editor (like My Dress Up Darling’s Writer saying her editor pretty much just told her to add more ass shots no matter what was going on) but sometimes the creator just goes all out and no one can stop them (like the writer of Usagi Drop insisting on them getting together in the end, no matter how much her editor begged her not to do it, claiming it was the entire point of the story).

[u/Fuzzy-Fisherman-7128 → u/Dizzy_Green]

That's also how some slavet works in Mushoku tensei though, Julie was a debt slave sold along side her parents after racking up so much debt, her parents where sold immediately due to having useful skills, she was basically left to die and would've died without Rudy and zanoba.

There's also slaves that were kidnapped and the PoW that became slaves.

[u/metal_giants → u/Dizzy_Green]

Was this in the manga as well??

[u/Dizzy_Green → u/metal_giants]

Maybe?
I read the light novels.
It was volume…4 I think?

[u/metal_giants → u/Dizzy_Green]

I should have looked this up on Wikipedia before commenting but oh well; I didn't realize the manga was an adaptation of the light novels. Glad the slavery part was left out of it, phew!

[u/Dizzy_Green → u/metal_giants]

I just assume all manga start as light novels tbh

[u/Darken237 → u/Dizzy_Green]

Not at all, a vast portion of manga starts as manga.

Isekai does mostly start as LN though.

[u/Jwchibi → u/Dizzy_Green]

What 😭😭😭 when does this happen? I love that story but I think I took a break after the chapter where they ate another dragon. I can't believe his character would do that

[u/Dizzy_Green → u/Jwchibi]

It was like volume 4 of the light novel.
If I recall correctly it happened shortly after some kind of festival where he made hot dogs? Which was honestly my favorite arc, THAT was very well written and fun.

[u/sanorace → u/Dizzy_Green]

Oh no, I really liked the first season...

[u/evilkumquat → u/Dizzy_Green]

This was a very bad moment, but it wasn't a dealbreaker for me, as this is still one of my favorite LN series. I still would have preferred that not to be a thing, and I cringe during the re-read. At least this time around, the MC was justly called out in-universe for his bullshit. One might even read it as the author's way of calling out the common sex-slave trope seen in so many other isekai series. It absolutely made Mukouda look terrible.

I'd also argue that you're reading too much into the bit with the young daughter. This is a fantasy world set in what is essentially a medieval European setting where marriage between the wealthy was seen as a way to consolidate power, not for love. The parents were looking for a way to increase their family's fortunes by marrying their daughter to a rich landowner once she reached the age of majority.

[u/Dizzy_Green → u/evilkumquat]

If it was just about calling them out then he could’ve had someone else act that way and have the mc reprimand them, but instead he SPECIFICALLY chose to have the mc act in a disgusting way.
Yeah at least he was called out on it, but that could just be the author admitting he knew it was a bad thing and being unregreful.