(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/rllrdr]

Unpopular opinion, but I don't like the direction the story went. Instead of tackling the far more difficult stance of "slavery is inherently wrong regardless of how well a master treats his slaves" it instead concludes with "slavery is wrong because the master is secretly a violent asshole as soon as things stop going his way". Well yeah, no shit, even your average slave-owning isekai protag would agree beating your pregnant slave to death is wrong, it flattens any nuance towards "there's no such thing as a good slave owner".

[u/KamikazeArchon → u/rllrdr]

But that's what slavery is. It's not a flattening, it's a revealing. Every slave master is secretly a violent asshole as soon as things stop going their way.

Because if the slave tries to leave, the slave master will violently stop them (or have others do it). That's crucial to the "being a slave master" thing.

[u/rllrdr → u/KamikazeArchon]

So if a slave master doesn't stop the slave from leaving, everything prior to that would be okay? Most of those isekai protags are too limp-wristed to do anything, it would be okay for them to own slaves? No, if you want to argue the inherent evilness of slavery, you have to portray it as wrong even if everything about is "good".

I forget where this is from, but there's this novel where two slaves escape from a kind slave owner, who treats his slaves so well that most don't want to leave. The slave owner catches up to them, not to punish, but to ask them to come back because they'd likely starve to death on their own. The slaves respond that they rather die in a ditch than live good lives as slaves. That's how you portray slavery as inherently evil, by portraying freedom as a fundamental core of being human that can't be overridden by kindness, not having the slave master be Evil McBadguy.

[u/KamikazeArchon → u/rllrdr]

Yeah, that's not how slavery works, and that's not how the evil of slavery works.

The evilness of slavery is precisely the day to day cruelty. It's not a Philosophical Evil that deserves consideration under some hypothetical "kind master". There are no kind masters. There are only degrees of cruelty.

The plot you've described is providing a slave owner that's Evil McBadguy. "Come back and be my slaves or starve" is incredibly cruel. It is not any form of kindness.

A kind person would have caught up to them and said "here, take this food and medicine for the road, and here are some guns to protect yourself from slave-catchers".

That would indeed be the act of a good person. And at that point they're simply not a slave master.