#'actually becoming a monstrous overlord who keeps slaves is bad'

[not-poignant]

Thank you for writing Palmarosa! You write Astarion’s trauma so beautifully and I’m so excited to read more. For you, what is the most fun to write about for Palmarosa?

Hi anon!

I enjoy the interplay between Astarion and Raphael the most, but I have to be careful with it. Too much where Astarion and Raphael are getting along, and the tension fades and Raphael becomes just like... 'cute soft devil man' lol, and too little isn't good either.

But mostly I just enjoy writing them talking or spending time together, whether that's tense or fraught or calm or painful or terrifying or fun. Getting them both in a room together and forcing them to interact makes me happy :D

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

The inimitable Noralities did an excellent video on being Tired of 1000-year-old Lolis.

I feel like a similar handwaving I'm getting sick of is Isekai Protags Who Buy Slaves.

There's a basic, and then a separate meta, level of handwaving there. And it gets really gross really fast.

A lot of them play it as, "well, he buys her and he releases her and she's grateful so she sticks around" and that's still got some notable problems and that is the least offensive of what I've seen.

Far more of them keep the girl as a slave and she buys into the social expectations around that so he doesn't have to maintain the aesthetics of her being enslaved - he doesn't have to keep her locked up at night so she won't slit his throat in his sleep. The slave girls in these stories never seek freedom. After all, they have one of the good masters! He's one of the good ones, ladies. And this is the thing. It's a callback to an imagined good ol' days when women submitted and this arrangement of kindly male masters and subservient wives clearly made everyone happier.

In some of these the guy even leaves on a magic mark that would act like a shock collar if she were disobedient. But she won't be, so it's no problem! Don't think about it. It's fine.

Some of them also dip into the Born Sexy Yesterday trope, with the girl having spent all her time in a filthy cage and therefore being socially inexperienced (oh but also having perfect skin. Didn't you know that being beaten and spending all your time sleeping on straw and stone gives you perfect skin?)

Anyway the meta bit is, of course, that part of why the protagonist is treating it as okay is because the world is often a close relative of some game he's played. Which means his real-in-the-narrative gross morals are being derived from his own poor reading of the moral situation around how to treat game systems if they become real?

Like, there's an argument to be made that if you could discern that you were in a simulation and the simulated entities were really not thinking or feeling, then acting out bad impulses wouldn't be harming any actual people. But a) these slaves are always treated as real people by the narrative and b) they're also treated as real people by the protags who buy them and then treat them as property. There is not an attempt made to judge whether they're false people, before the decision is made that it's fine to treat them as property. The protag just decides it's okay because everything else is running on game logic, so why not follow the local moral mores too?

My opinion is that the trope does well because of some pretty rampant sexism: a desire to treat a woman as property and have that be seen as morally acceptable - possibly even righteous - by the community. But this "righteous" vibe generally requires the slavekeeping system he decides to partake in to be more monstrous, and then most of these authors do a bad job of making the protag even show distaste toward the whole slave trade. Not even a "Wow, that's fucked up. Can't do anything about it as a level 2 fighter. Maybe I'll put a pin in that one and come back to burn this industry down when I'm more powerful."

To be entirely honest, I feel like fucking OVERLORD is on more stable moral ground on this front. He's got a bunch of obedient waifus, but that's because they see him as God, because he literally created them. Any sexism there is much more "man of the house" kind of stuff, and Overlord does a nice job of undercutting all the sex stuff attached to the trope by making the protagonist Magically Ace (seriously, when he encounters sexual situations a magical effect he has no control over snaps him out of being aroused automatically).

I dunno. I could probably keep going but I think I've penned enough of my thoughts for the moment.