Slavery in LN
-
Does anyone else find the Japanese attitude towards slavery offensive? So many LNs have slavery in them, and the MCs don't seem to have a problem with it. They act like it's normal and ok, whether its young women being sold as sex slaves, or even children as sex slaves, they show no moral outrage. They just shrug their shoulders and move on, or even buy one for their own use. As a modern western man, I find this very offensive, even when the author tries to justify it, I find their arguments hollow. I would have thought by now the Japanese and Koreans would have a more modern understanding that slavery is evil and unacceptable.
-
@folker46 said in Slavery in LN:
Does anyone else find the Japanese attitude towards slavery offensive? So many LNs have slavery in them, and the MCs don't seem to have a problem with it. They act like it's normal and ok, whether its young women being sold as sex slaves, or even children as sex slaves, they show no moral outrage.
No, why would you?
We're talking about worlds where it's already an established practice and social norm. Pretty much every instance I can think of that doesn't involve a character native to the society isn't in a position to do anything about an entire cultural practice. Moral grandstanding and outrage in such a situation accomplishes nothing and would likely make things worse.
They just shrug their shoulders and move on, or even buy one for their own use. As a modern western man, I find this very offensive, even when the author tries to justify it, I find their arguments hollow. I would have thought by now the Japanese and Koreans would have a more modern understanding that slavery is evil and unacceptable.
It's very, very likely in the same situation you'd not do much different. In many cases buying a slave in that situation offers far more protection to the slave than offering them shortsighted freedom back into a society that enslaved them once already.
Slavery still exists in parts of the world today and a majority of those who oppose it wouldn't think of acting out if they found themselves in such a region of the world. It also happens that Japan and Korea are geographically closer to many of the regions that still have a more public slave trade.
The question is do you react this way to other depictions you disagree with? I can say my reaction is consistent with those of murder, death penalties, blood guilt, collective punishment etc that i disagree with yet don't have an issue seeing an isekai protagonist encounter them in a wholly different culture they're dropped into without the power to change.
-
I don't mind slavery in story but I don't like lazy slavery like the usual "save slave girl from obviously evil slavers." as it's just lazy writing to introduce a sympathetic character.
I also don't like moral characters from the modern world immediately going to buy slaves just because they can unless it makes sense in story.
-
@folker46
The attitude towards slavery is offensive, but if you look at the work culture in Japan it can point to reasons why they think that way and why there are so many novels with slavery in them.After World War II, Japan had a social contract in place where workers basically put the company first and worked for the same employer for life to be "taken care of". So they had to give up freedoms like choosing who they worked for, when they worked for them, the ability to "job hop" etc. to basically get peace and prosperity.
If you look at anime today, a lot of anime deals with school life. Why? School was a simpler time when you had more freedoms, time, etc. and weren't expected to work long grueling hours at the expense of other facets of your adult life. And karoshi is the concept of overworking yourself to death. While this happens in all countries this seems to be a bigger issue in Japan.
So you basically have a population where for decades, people are expected serve one employer for life, have curtailed freedoms, look back yearning for simpler times, and have become numb to the concept of working themselves to death. Considering the parallels, you can see why slavery features so heavily in lots of light novels. And of course authors are going to shrug their shoulders or actively justify it because writing stories is a way to explore their own conditions and this is the easiest parallel.
However it looks like the social contract that Japan had in place has started to break down. People marrying less, having less kids, and feeling more uncertain about their future. This has gotten severe enough that this has become a national issue. And look at the most common concept in isekai. People go die to escape their problems and start over in a brand new fantasy world.
So your probably not going to see light novels with abolished slavery, main characters working to free/liberate slaves, or slaves rising up for their freedom in the new fantasy world until the work culture shifts more in Japan.
-
This post is deleted! -
Yes, the slavery tropes offend me. It's a worse reading experience for me when it seems like a bait and switch.
For example, in Campfire cooking, it was mentioned in the first book that the world has slavery in it. However the story was mostly focused on his online supermarket skill, and I thought it was neat slice of life series where I could zone out and think about shopping and cooking instead of various stressful things happening in real life. Then, several volumes in, the main character casually became a slave owner, with the author showing no understanding of why that might be morally wrong, and I no longer enjoyed reading that series.
-
@strangeattractor yeah, but in Campfire Cooking specifically, their slavery is basically contracted employment, not traditional slavery. They employed under a strict, for both parties, contract that everyone has to agree to. Even then, they all say quite often that they live better under him than they did before their debts forced them to seek slavery employment.
-
@kotenmaru said in Slavery in LN:
@strangeattractor yeah, but in Campfire Cooking specifically, their slavery is basically contracted employment, not traditional slavery. They employed under a strict, for both parties, contract that everyone has to agree to. Even then, they all say quite often that they live better under him than they did before their debts forced them to seek slavery employment.
Yes, and it's a load of crap. I dropped Campfire Cooking for the same reason. Whitewashing slavery like that is offensive, and it's particularly bad because Mukohda actually does have enough power to break the institution completely...and decides that his business ventures are more important.
-
Like most of life "it depends."
The depiction is fine for me in some LNs, and a cringe-worthy element in others.
Criminal slavery makes sense in worlds when there is no will to spend a significant amount of money warehousing criminals in prison and there is no magical mental manipulation to reform them. Less developed societies don't have the surplus of resources to be so kind as to use prisons, the alternative to slavery is execution for most crimes.
Contracted indentured servitude like in Mixed Bathing also makes sense for that world.
Death March has some compelling reasons for the MC to own slaves, which he considers and treats as wards. Two of them are bound to slavery by a curse that he is seeking to lift, and two are very likely to be re-enslaved without his protection.
-
Even if a character is a "good slave owner" it implies the existence of non-good slave owners. He treats his slaves with common decency and they fawn over him and say how grateful they are (which seems to be part of the point of this trope.) How bad do things have to be usually for common decency to elicit such praise? Pretty bad. I would not want to live in a society like that. And the author glosses over how bad it is and seems to expect me to find it heartening like "Aww, isn't it so nice how he treats his slaves." Blech.
-
@strangeattractor said in Slavery in LN:
Even if a character is a "good slave owner" it implies the existence of non-good slave owners. He treats his slaves with common decency and they fawn over him and say how grateful they are (which seems to be part of the point of this trope.) How bad do things have to be usually for common decency to elicit such praise? Pretty bad. I would not want to live in a society like that. And the author glosses over how bad it is and seems to expect me to find it heartening like "Aww, isn't it so nice how he treats his slaves." Blech.
Yes, Campfire's slavery was one in the cringe-worthy category for me. It's almost made me drop the book but not quite yet.
Land Mines' handling was fun but I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't read this LN yet.
-
Problem I find with most stories is that the author just uses slavery as a vehicle to get someone to join up with whoever the MC is. There's no real backstory that the plot goes into for it and it's rarely revisited after the person is "liberated". Half the time it only serves to show how "wonderful" the MC is in freeing someone who had been either wrongly enslaved or through no fault of their own put in that position.
The actual fact that slavery exists is not really something I find problematic. I mean some countries prison systems right now use inmates for forced labour, and wage garnishment is a thing to settle monetary debts owed as well which is not actually all that different than how debt slave and criminal slave systems are set up in some of these novels.
-
@saffire Mukohda doesn't really have to power to change it, the best he could do is ask Fel to level the kingdom, which wouldn't change the overall situation. Also, why should an isekai protagonist start overthrowing existing systems just because they can? That seems incredibly shortsighted and high handed.
@strangeattractor There might be, but it's probably less common since everything is contracted there. It was made clear that there were punishments for breach of contract, even for the owner.
I'll admit, when reading, I don't like slavery, but it's usually not a deal breaker for me. I understand that these are fantasy worlds, and while not right, it's on the author to decide how to write their worlds. Slavery is wrong, but it did, and still does, exist. Sorry if this sounds preachy, it's not meant to, but I can never tell if tone comes through text well.
-
@jpwong said in Slavery in LN:
Problem I find with most stories is that the author just uses slavery as a vehicle to get someone to join up with whoever the MC is. There's no real backstory that the plot goes into for it and it's rarely revisited after the person is "liberated". Half the time it only serves to show how "wonderful" the MC is in freeing someone who had been either wrongly enslaved or through no fault of their own put in that position.
I agree with this. Slavery in itself isn't the problem, it's the way in which the author treats it. If it's a way to glorify the MC for being "progressive" then it's not being treated correctly. If it's used to show some characters, perhaps the MC, are not good people because they accept or condone slavery, well, that's pretty ham-handed, but it's at least leveraging slavery correctly based on our modern perception of the idea. If it's simply a reflection of how our world had developed at the point in time the author is basing her or his world, then it's at least trying to be truthful even if the truth is unpleasant.
Just as violence and murder and rape are unacceptable but can still be effective storytelling devices when used conscientiously, so can slavery. I will also agree that light novels and manga frequently do not use slavery well, so I can also understand why someone might just be sick of it appearing in general.
-
@folker46 Nope. But I am finding your attitude offensive. As a "modern western man" myself, I frankly have no clue what your problem with a social construct that's fallen out of favor actually is and what's offensive about a randomly assigned label. Especially when there are plenty of "modern western" socially acceptable constructs that are just as bad, if not worse, than slavery**.
Bonus trivia, in Mixed Bathing in Another Dimension, Touya expressed a very similar sentiment in a very similar way to you. Though instead of "modern western" he used "modern Japanese". I cringe every time I read it, partly due to the very obvious projecting a particular value set onto an entire class of people. Oh, content warning if you do happen to check that series out: the hero buys a slave, and also considers getting a slave for sex.
** I was going to clarify that I meant chattel slavery, as seen in US history. But the aside ended up getting too complicated and derailing, especially considering that slavery is still present in the "modern western" world, illegally and legally. There certainly is illegal slavery mostly seen in sex trade, but there is also legal slavery particularly in the US prison system (see penal labor, for those interested in looking the topic up more).
-
@jpwong The "Save slave girl from evil slavers" trope is just lazy writing.
The trope fulfills four purposes:
- A sympathetic character
- Her past can be unimportant due to being a slave
- An easy way to add to the MC's harem
- Slavers are an obviously evil group of people for the MC to defeat and show off how awesome he is to
-
@folker46 said in Slavery in LN:
They act like it's normal and ok, whether its young women being sold as sex slaves, or even children as sex slaves,
I can't think of any LNs where a non-evil MC thinks it's "normal and OK" for children to be sold as sex slaves, can anyone else? Unless your definition of "child" is something like a modern US one of "everyone under 18"?
-
@village-idiot Yep and there's no thought about how they're going to incorporate the system into their story going forward so the story moves forward pretty much as if slavery vanished off the face of the planet again outside of that one encounter.
@strangeattractor said in Slavery in LN:
And the author glosses over how bad it is and seems to expect me to find it heartening like "Aww, isn't it so nice how he treats his slaves."
I'd have to go back and re-read exactly how they lay things out, but I'm pretty sure in Campfire Cooking debt slavery is equated to being similar to a government social security net by Mukohda. If you've seen some of these news stories about how pitiful the lives are of people in modern first world nations who are essentially living off government monthly income (which can often be way below the poverty line), if a billionaire stepped in and helped a family achieve what I'm sure a lot of us feel is a basic standard of living, I could completely see how the people helped might pile on the platitudes.
I guess even if it's inclusion feels a bit cringy the author has at least put some thought into how the system can be explained and how it works and integrates with the story at large. It's at least a step up from the stories where slavers seemingly just go around to random farmsteads kidnapping people to sell in towns and no one questions it.
-
@jpwong said in Slavery in LN:
It's at least a step up from the stories where slavers seemingly just go around to random farmsteads kidnapping people to sell in towns and no one questions it.
Thoughts on Apothecary Diaries where that's apparently what they actually do? It's just made more complicated by being tied into palace politics.
Whoever said nothing's impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
-
In my opinion it all depends on context and narrative.
Yes slavery is wrong, that is the norm and values which exists in our culture in the modern era however you need to remember this was not always the case.In isekai stories, apart from the well mentioned trope of evil slaver, must save the female lead, love interest etc, there has to be an understanding that the character is not in our world but in another world with its own defined culture, owned defined narrative and history.
In our own world, trying to force a view or having an opinion on another culture based on your own culture is defined as ethnocentricism. It is also the main issue being found by revisionist history. Human history is not pleasant, but it is foolish to try and ignore and brush it aside and pretend it did not exist.
Now is any narrative, could any character single handedly and in a short time force a change on a nation, or even the entire world where slavery, or indentured servitude is the norm? Absolutely not, the reason is due to human nature and would be unrealistic. You could force it, but all that would happen is that loopholes would be found, it would be pushed into the underground or the character when no longer necessary would be assassinated. To force an unnatural stance is a route into tyranny.
In a JNC series, an example most recently showing this is in Seirei Gensouki where Lisolette is trying to explain why democracy could not work in the world, not yet. There has been no ground work, there needs to be the meeting of set perquisites e.g. literacy rates, ideology revolutions, the development of a middle class which will slowly take away the power and privileges of the noble and upper class. Examples which exist in much of the western world and those borrow from it.
Even in our own world, forcing a change which is different from the cultural and social norms is always met with resistance and often when the outside, external influence is removed, it leads to devolution or reverting to the former norm.
Just 2 pence.
Author of Praetor's Blood.
Find out more at www.jmacnovels.com
