when you learn about historical forced labor institutions and how they sometimes allowed for more freedoms and upward mobility than modern wage labor but rather than coming to the conclusion that wage labor is a particularly abhorrent and insidious form of slave labor you go “oh I guess slavery isn’t that bad though, cool!”
Gonna spoiler this because it involves kink discussion.
NSFW kink
I’ve noticed a parallel to this in how (in my experience) it is extremely common for people who enjoy the slave role in master/slave play to be people who feel alienated from a society that is indifferent or actively hostile to them. In that sense, I can understand how a master who knows their name and gives them personal, individual attention (however perverse the form) can be infinitely preferable to an enormous machine that looks at them and sees only a faulty gear.
The guy who made his self insert a pedophile is pro slavery?
Imagine my shock
Where did the isekai obsession with slavery begin? I feel like the easy answer is shield hero, but that itself is so derivative that it had to take the idea from somewhere else. What is the patient zero here?
Shield hero can’t be it, because that would mean it did something remotely original, when it’s otherwise such a tropey story that it seems impossible.
What is the patient zero here?
Saber Marionette J was a 90s harem anime where the “Marionettes” are not human, they are robots, but they’re also property.
My bet is that the trope of main character collecting a harem morphed into just a literal slave harem via “acceptable” things like “they’re not human so it’s ok”. Combine this with other things like Pokemon where the acceptability of the Pokemon working for the humans is ok because “they love it” and they’re not humans is established despite the clear ability to communicate… Then add in Isekai tropes and the trend of the isekai worlds having videogame rules… I can see the transition over time into acceptability.
Really putting the blame on any one specific thing is quite hard. But trends over time can be seen as shows influence other shows and establish new boundaries of what is acceptable or normal to put into a story.
It kinda goes hand-in-hand with having a harem of objectified and dehumanized subordinates that Isekai is founded upon, it’s just a natural development from the premise itself (unmitigated misogynist fantasizing that appeals to teenage boys in a reactionary imperialist/colonizing culture)
Isekai, at its core, the appeal is “what if I could go to this unspoiled mystical land and be superior to everyone there in some way and dominate them?” It’s the colonial urge. It’s not a coincidence that Isekai MCs are always godlike OP for no reason whatsoever, so that they can exert their will upon the “NPCs”. And since the MC is a stand-in for the audience, what they would almost always do is create a harem of girls - the more helpless and dependent the better - that they have total power over. (Over-compensating for their past incel life where they could never get any girls)
You have the two flavors generally. The more normie-coded benevolent Isekai dictator, who merely happens to accumulate a harem of girl followers through his good deeds & the incel-coded evil Isekai dictator, who lecherously indulges in what he’s doing. Some anime fans would like to say only the latter is reactionary, but really they both are. The first one is just the “rightful king” and “white/japanese savior” and “white mans burden” all combined (the Japanese see themselves as whites).
No Game No Life (which may arguably be even worse than Shield Hero, if less explicit), an isekai about a world that runs on yu-gi-oh style calvinball bullshit where the losers become slaves, predates Shield Hero by a couple of years. I haven’t read this (or Shield Hero for that matter), but I did slog through the anime on netflix a decade ago; it’s not good, and as bad as the anime was, well, just look up what the cover of volume 1 of the LN is. I only saw that recently, which unfortunately reminded me that the series existed at all.
Shield Hero itself may be what popularized it for isekai slop, and was probably drawing on just nebulous fantasy tropes about slavers. Or was drawing on hentai tropes, that’s a very real possibility.
Mushoku Tensei is often credited as being the progenitor of a lot of the worst isekai trends, for all that it’s still better than the baseline for fantasy anime in general on a lot of poitns, but it was late to the ball for this particular point. It does seem to have arrived at it on its own without copying more than general fantasy genre tropes, though.
It’s wish fulfillment for middle class and downwardly mobile people who wish they were the boot on others’ necks making ill-gotten surplus value rather than the other way around. That’s why it has slavery, solipsistic supremacist plots, etc. in it.
So I’m saying it doesn’t have to come from anywhere, it’s a recent development since SAO, etc. got popular.It’s not an idea that’s spread due to media influence, it’s a political idea that’s spread since at least crypto but probably MLMs and stuff at least.
I think it was Shield Hero where it took off.
Somehow I doubt this person would be ok with someone kidnapping them from their home, chaining them up and forcing them to do hard manual labour from dawn till dusk.
Miyazaki said “Anime was a mistake” though he often talked about his perspective on these things, if someone draws inspiration from the world around them, from real place and experiences, they become a better artist, someone capable of creating truly new and inspiring things, if they only learn from existing art, not experiences, they aren’t going to be capable of producing anything other than derivative slop that just exists to pander to the worst people.
Miyazaki said “Anime was a mistake” though he often talked about his perspective on these things, if someone draws inspiration from the world around them, from real place and experiences, they become a better artist, someone capable of creating truly new and inspiring things, if they only learn from existing art, not experiences, they aren’t going to be capable of producing anything other than derivative slop that just exists to pander to the worst people.
This is why I like to say that if you want to build a compelling fictional setting, don’t start with Brandon Sanderson. Start with Karl Marx.
Also, Clausewitz. The first section of the first book of On War alone (“WHAT IS WAR?”) is incredibly illuminating.
This is true for so many things. Legend of Zelda is based on Miyamoto’s experience exploring caves in the Japanese countryside, whereas every single forgettable LOZ clone is based on LOZ.
Yeah, I’m actually in the final stages of making a Zelda clone that incorporates my own idiosyncratic personal interests. The enemy is a colonial empire rather than an evil wizard and the final boss is a gargantuan steampunk tank that incorporates my interest in weird WWI/WWII era early tank designs and real-world anti-tank insurgent tactics (targeting treads, engine grilles, viewports).
Hell yeah.
I’ve had this idea for a zelda clone where the “trading sidequest” is to build a motorcycle. It’s all very half baked but I think it follows in the spirit of making your game about things in the real world instead of about other games.
The only exception to this rule that comes to mind for me is Tunic, but that game seeks to capture the experience of figuring out how to play a game from instructions in another language, so even though it’s meta it works.
Thinking about it, it’s kind of like how AI LLMs operate, taking and consuming original materials to regurgitate it into some sort of slop, that it then reconsumes and regurgitates once more, and so on and so forth, leading to increasingly inbred products that bear no resemblance to any original thought and only ponders to the worst people.
Anime is like AI slop. You heard it here folks
Of course, the best anime is counter-cultural in some level.
IDK Toriyama’s politics as much as I should, but he fucking hated real estate speculators which he inspired that asshole Freiza off of.
Half the fun of the Pokemon anime is pure escapism, even if it’s the highest grossing media franchise it still depicts a post-scarcity sci-fi world where nature and man coexist in some level.
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing depicts rebels fighting off Treize, an aristocrat from the empire with countless war crimes.
The episode of pokemon where the lead construction worker cancels the dam project bc it would kill the digletts is one of my favourite episodes of anime ever. In addition to post-scarcity ecological scifi, pokemon is a world where a construction worker can choose to veto a dam
Toriyama definitely doesnt seem to like real estate guys or militaries (and he loves nature), but lacks the theoretical basis to be more consistent or imagine a non-capitalist world, hence why Bulma is a billionaire’s daughter. He reminds me sort of Tolkien in this way.
The entirety of the second half of this show (12 episodes) was about the main character overcoming their erectile dysfunction.
I am not joking
what a fantasy
It also turns into that shoujo romance genre that’s specifically about a crossdressing girl doing fake yaoi romance with her crush for the duration, which is very funny.
It’s only going to get weirder in the next season if it has the pacing I’m assuming it will have, because that’ll be when it starts to reveal a hint of what’s actually going on with all this bullshit and why before the series turns into, and I’m not even joking here, “imagine the Dresden Files if Harry Dresden was less weird about women. Still weird, just not Harry Dresden level weird.”
It is genuinely really fucking funny just how unhinged the show is.
I found it quite watchable in a way that Shield Hero is not because Shield Hero’s MC is a fucking irredeemable dipshit who is just leaning into “fine, if the world is shit then I too will be shit because fuck the world!” whereas Mushoku Tensei’s main character is actually genuinely trying to use his isekai life to be a better person, he’s still not a good person for several reasons but I find it more watchable because it encourages striving to be a better person through self-improvement rather than encouraging being a bad person. They have different ideologies and Mushoku’s is brighter even if several things within its writing are extremely fucked up.
I am prepared to be wrong when new seasons happen, I have no idea what’s in the manga or LN or whatever the source of it is.
In the LNs the monologue at the end of season two is the turning point where Rudy starts being sort of a fundamentally decent and healthy if vapid and very flawed person. He never really comes to believe in anything more than wanting to hang out and make cool stuff with his friends and family and is entirely dragged along by crises and necessity getting in the way of his dreams of just chilling and never doing anything dangerous ever again, but is also just a sort of respectful and empathic person towards people who aren’t actively out to hurt him or the people around him.
The failure to ever reckon with the thriving slave trade in the place he chose to make his home, or to follow through on any of the identified social ills he kind of notices and goes “damn that sucks huh” and then immediately forgets about, is the big glaring flaw with the otherwise very good latter half of the novels.
Oh, and the whole apparent gay panic thing he does in the anime is contextualized differently in the LN, with him being way more “wait, I’m in love with another man? Guess I’m gay or bi or something and just have to accept that, because I am very much in love with him,” and even all the obsessive trying to “make sure” is couched in passages of him telling himself that the most important thing was respecting what “Fitz” wanted to identify as regardless of what he found. There’s just the dichotomy between his inner principles and him being an obsessive weirdo who can’t help but pry.
That’s why my take on the author is that he seems like kind of a vapid lib rather than a chud. Rudy’s meant to be flawed and kind of unmotivated to actually change the world around himself after changing himself, but the themes of the novels are resoundingly cynical about violence and emphasize over and over this focus on respecting others and not treating them as playthings or trying to control them. That’s why even if Rudy isn’t the sort who’d stick his neck out to stop the slave trade (because he’s a flawed
), the text should have still found a way to cast that as a clear failing of his, that he’s wrong for taking this stance, and that it instead just kind of went along with his bullshit rationalizations and that the author seems to agree with those rationalizations is a huge problem with what is otherwise the best stretch of the series.That’s why my take on the author is that he seems like kind of a vapid lib rather than a chud.
This was what I assumed. Shield Hero has the ideology of a chud. Mushoku has the ideology of a lib with almost no political education beyond passive absorption so they’re very muddled and brainwormed.
Anyway with all that said I still condemn the fuck out of reborn adults who go on to date teenagers. It’s an incredibly shitty narrative tool where the “adult” part is just forgotten because it only exists as a marketing gimmick in the first place to tick 3 or 4 different marketing groups.
Yeah literally none of Rudy’s relationships are healthy or ok. The anime did kind of do Sylphie dirty compared to the ice cold veteran who had to grow up way too fast she is in the books (in the anime she’s way too fluttery and flustered all the time, vs the books where she’s explicitly supposed to be the shoujo Prince archetype), but her relationship with Rudy really is not healthy; the early books even had a sequence of what was basically Paul turning to the camera and explaining over a page or two exactly why grooming and codependency are bad and unhealthy and how it would be extremely toxic and harmful if Sylphie were codependent on Rudy, leading to the plan to split them apart so they could each grow and be their own person. Then there’s the inverse with Roxie whom he unironically worships as a literal god and who took advantage of him when he was a complete wreck of guilt, goaded along by Sylphie’s shitbag grandmother. Nothing about either direction of his relationship with Eris is healthy or ok either, neither the bit that the anime covered nor what will happen presumably at the end of the next season or in the one after that.
All of these relationships are probably personal experiences from different parts of the author’s life.
and ignoring buying a child slave to make sculptures
Isekai has had some… interesting takes about slavery since shield hero hit the scene. Maybe there were earlier ones but that was the first one where I was like wait what
JK Rowling got isekai’d?
My contempt for this series is vindicated yet again
common Diddy Tensei L
I think that may be about the character’s perspective (since Rudy at his most moral is literally just
), but the treatment of slavery as just something in the background that everyone just tacitly accepts is one of the major failings of the later books, even if slave traders are consistently portrayed negatively and have an antagonistic-but-too-concerned-with-self-preservation-to-actually-be-antagonists role. In contrast, one of the earlier arcs has the moral compass character massacre slavers wholesale and this is uncritically presented as a good and correct thing to do. That’s one of the few areas where the series got worse as it went on instead of better.Actually I think most of the problems of the later books relate to that refusal to actually grapple with the evils of slavery, with how Julie is at once effectively an adopted daughter to both Zenoba and Rudy whose technical education would make her one of the foremost experts in several fields and at the same time is still explicitly and literally their chattel property (and they don’t even seem to understand the concept of emancipation and adoption/business partnership as a means of further entrenching power over someone particularly talented and valuable, which was a cornerstone of the classical slavery systems its heavily drawing on), or Linia technically being an indentured servant even as she’s the warlord boss of an international PMC/intelligence agency alongside Aisha (who invented the concept from first principles). Rudy repeatedly internally calling out and being annoyed by Lilia grooming and verbally abusing Aisha but then never actually doing anything about it until she just kind of stops doing that on her own is another related issue of just tacitly accepting shitty things going on around him. It’s kind of funny that the implicit sexism of the world and the attitude people had towards his daughters is about the only thing that actually made him give any pushback on the world’s shittiness at all, given he started out as a raving misogynistic dipshit even worse than the world he was dropped into.
But yeah, I don’t think there’s anything in the books that made me think the author was anything but a kind of vapid lib who’s maybe good on some things but awful on others, even when the books were being very good in general like with the treatment of the horrors of war or how the ultimate conflict is completely pointless and wasteful and doesn’t end in glorious victory but is instead just over and everyone is diminished by it, or even more subtle things like how despite being mostly a first-person story with a power-fantasy harem protagonist all the female characters are capable and have their own independent stories and goals going on in the background even when the narrator-protagonist isn’t looking and Rudy’s impulses to be patriarchal and sideline them are actively reckoned with and treated as wrong.
Cultural relativism but based and redpilled.
Hell, conservatism and fascism is just cultural relativism. “I may be a barbaric savage, but that’s just my culture and if you don’t respect that, you’re a globalist!”
Michael Parenti (RIP) has a very good critique of cultural relativism in The Culture Struggle that everyone should read.
The short version is that instead of looking at cultures as the atomic actors, we should look at the living, breathing human beings that comprise those cultures, how those cultures affect them, and how they resist them, e.g. instead of looking at a monarchy and saying “it’s just their way,” you zoom in and see the peasants who are being brutalized by it and fighting back against it.
“after all, they’re just marutas!”
atrocities
To dehumanize prisoners in their minds, the scientists of Unit 731 called their test subjects “Marutas” or logs. Unit 731 faculty’s observation of Marutas included their reaction to bubonic plague, typhoid, paratyphoid A and B, typhus, anthrax, smallpox, tularemia, infectious jaundice, gas gangrene, tetanus, cholera, dysentery, glanders, scarlet fever, undulant fever, tick encephalitis, “songo” or epidemic hemorrhagic fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, pneumonia, erysipelas, epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, salmonella, frostbites, and many more deadly viruses, germs, and bacteria. To observe the real-time effects of these harmful agents, these prisoners were often subject to vivisections without the use of anesthesia. In the case where a human experimental subject was exhausted from the experiments, they were to be killed one way or another. Some test subjects were handed potassium cyanide tablets, while others ingested porridge with heroin.
from https://www.pacificatrocities.org/marutas-of-unit-731-guide.html
