Quote:
Originally Posted by Question
I dont think its a coincidence that the MC is always justified. If the author just wanted vengeance, he could write a scenario where the MC gets revenge on soldiers who were just doing their jobs, or things like that.
But no, the soldiers werent just normal people doing their jobs, they are cartoonishingly evil villains that rape and murder, so when the MC tortures them to death, its OK.
And all these slavery series...not just shield hero...they always do the same thing. MC is a pure and innocent good guy who would never abuse his slaves and the girls always falls in love with the MC near instantly so its not REAL slavery. And slavery in this world is a good thing because of [convenient reason here] so its not like real life slavery okay?
You can practically imagine the author sitting there thinking "OK, i want slavery in my manga, and i want my MC to own slaves, but i want him to be a good guy...how do i make him look like a good guy...?".
Where are the series where the MC owns slaves, treats them as tools, where the slaves want freedom and resent the MC for treating them like property? There doesnt appear to be any, because it makes the author look bad. I dont think its just a cultural difference either, i am sure that Japan is well aware of what the common depictions of slavery are...the author just doesnt want to make his MC look bad. There ARE typical depictions of slavery where the slaves are treated as tools, abused, etc...its just that the MC is never the one who does it. Its always "bad guys" (and naturally the MC steps in to save the day).
And then you have series like Re:Monster where the author goes to great lengths to justify his MC confining and drugging people till they agree to become his sex slaves, because they were bad people so its okay.
I just think that its lame that the author wants to put X in his series but wants to make his MC look good doing it and starts coming up with all kinds of flimsy excuses to justify it.
|
Either you're missing my point or we're talking about different stories, again pointing to Flame's statement about "most" anime/manga. But again, I think to some extent the point isn't always justification but rather getting a satisfying vengeance. Imagine you're a guy who grew up bullied and ostracized. Everyone takes advantage of you and persecutes you while laughing. People you thought friends gleefully betray you with smiles on their faces. You simply try to be friends with a girl and she treats you like a creep while treating a guy who doesn't even hide his predatory desire like prince charming, and the other girls sneer at you for thinking someone like you had any business talking to someone like her. What do you think would be more satisfying, a story where the "hero" beats and tortures some guys who unfortunately ended up hurting him in the process of doing their jobs, or a story where a guy turns a girl who ruined his life with false accusations into his personal slave? There's a sadly big audience for stories about wronged people getting vengeance on those that hurt them, and at least in my experience, more series seem to be about giving people exactly what they want, vengeance on the villains who laugh about their mistreatments, than about making it "OK" to torture a cute girl.
That's not to say there aren't plenty of the other kind. There's the slave harem series currently airing, which indeed just treats slavery as something that people are happy to be in, or Skill Taker, where the first girl the hero meets is a free waitress but within a chapter or two comes up to him with a happy blush as she asks to be made his slave. This is indeed just indulging a fetish, and there's nothing more to it than that. There are markets for weird fetishes, and so you're going to find stories that aim at them. There are even stories where the "hero" has to break his slaves in, gradually forcing them to accept his position as their master and learn to love him.
But as Lex79 indicated, there's just not as much of a market for the sort of thing you're asking for. There's a market for slave fetishes. Heck, there's even a market for people who want to
be slaves. There's a famous old isekai where a guy is summoned as a girl's slave and at the start she treats him like dirt, demeaning him at every turn, only showing what concern is "appropriate" for a "master", beating him for the slightest mistake, and the story is to a large extent about him showing her the error of her ways, becoming so impressive that she can't help but respect and eventually love him, and as the seasons progress the scale and nature of her abuses shift. But again, this sets the main character as the boy made a slave. Heck, there are even stories where from an outsider's point of view the hero's actions are clearly evil, but it's treated as cool and the morality is handwaved.
What you're asking for would make it extremely difficult to make a hero that people would want to see, and frankly makes the slavery and torture at best incidental, a pragmatic act to achieve a different goal. And even then, if the main character is treated as the "good guy" then that pragmatic goal is treated as justification, and there really isn't as much of a market for watching the legitimately unsympathetic "bad guy".