Why the hell does all this Isekai crap have slaves!?
Someone recently put an idea in my head to do another thing involving all my Ranma analysis, so I'm working on that, and since I needed a break, and have just sort of had manga on my mind from random things here and there, so why not engage in an old guilty pleasure, find some manga scanlation site, click that gender stuff category they always inevitably have, and just scan through some quick highlights of what's new and what's popular. Get a pulse on what the egg-y authors are up to, you know?
Historically, this used to work out pretty well. I've established that I'm a pretty big fan of Ranma, and the same category used to also bring up a lot of stuff from Osamu Tezuka and Go Nagai, who both go to that well suspiciously often. Then you'd get interesting sci-fi works really digging into the premise, stuff that actually took the premise seriously like Stop, Hibari-kun, stuff that just throws gender stuff in and then refuses to acknowledge it at all like Birdy the Mighty, and it used to be people through anything with queer stuff going on under the umbrella, so it was where you'd find Sailor Moon and Utena. Plus the alternatives would be like, clicking the shonen tag and just gettng DBZ knockoffs.
Later sampling sessions like this over the years, usually spread out by 5-10 years haven't really steered me wrong either. There was a stretch last time I had a poke around in like 2010 when you'd just get a lot of porn-y stuff that's not my cup of tea, but then you'd get some real Theory stuff. Once came across something where men sort of went extinct so everyone just kinda reinvented gender from first principles, sorting everyone into butches and femmes, which I figured would be a vehicle for doing some gay romance but giving everything a fig leaf of having no choice and being basically het, but then no we're doing this forbidden love thing between two butches. Doing all this convoluted world building just to go and make things some kinda high concept Double Gay, so that's cool. Plus some proper non-fiction autobiographical about an actual trans woman that was nice and upbeat, and a general trend of like Sailor Moon knockoffs where the protagonist gets turned into a magical girl and hey, jokes on you, turns out they were trans and loving the upside here.
Today though, everything sucks. There's a consistent set of problems I'm pretty sure are related. Everything is Isekai, and while I understand why that's not going away any time soon, it's still a creatively bankrupt genre. Rigid cookie cutter structure, too much emphasis on being a power fantasy over having a plot, but I've kinda made my peace. Then we've got dialog that feels like it came from someone who isn't fluent in either Japanese NOR English, just weird incoherent machine translation having hard problems with pronouns and tenses, sometimes flecked with channerisms. And then of course the third problem, as referenced in the title of this post, the protagonists in all these things are totally down with the concept of owning slaves for some reason!
Now, it is entirely possible that I am just trawling the wrong sites here. Without the guiding light of Anime Web Turnpike, and with the general awful state of search engines, maybe I am just suffering the misfortune of stumbling onto the nazi-channer-specific scanlation sites, where it's mostly just lazy creeps who can barely be bothered to learn one language seeking out the worst garbage to feed into auto-translators, and mostly channer creeps voting up the grossest stuff to the top. That's entirely possible. Another possibility is that the landscape of Japanese media in general (and formal localization for it) has gotten a bit friendlier to overt queer themes, and there's less reason for internet randos to be doing their best to translate it, so all we have is the fringe here.
All that said, there's still a definite trend going on here. And even if it's on the fringes, in just the really depraved stuff, I feel like the number of Isekai series where slave markets feature should really be zero? I mean to be clear here, I'm not talking about just some super sexist harem crap where like, the main character defeats the local goblins so this goblin girl follows them around forever now, then they took out the lizard people so here's their lizard-wife, then they take out the rampaging wild boars, etc. I'm talking straight up slavery.
Now, it occurs to me there is an outside chance not everyone knows what I mean when I'm talking about Isekai garbage, so to review (and yeah, there are broader definitions I could use), here's the formula: Some loser guy is walking somewhere, goes to cross a road, and he gets hit by a truck and dies. He then comes to in some fantasy setting, specifically based on a game, usually a video game, sometimes an MMO, sometimes a console RPG, and in addition to having access to some game UI stuff, we establish that everyone in this world has some game mechanics-y special ability, and by some amazing coincidence the one the protagonist got is ridiculously broken allowing them to basically take over the entire world and live in untold luxury by like, chapter 5 at the absolute latest. And the title of the work is just a straight up paragraph long summary of the premise. Sometimes the loser guy also ends up being a girl or some monster or inanimate object as part of this. And I guess in an incredibly small minority of stories "getting reincarnated" means they start as a baby and not just like, a 20 year old standing in a field with no questioning of this.
Now, I have played a lot of fantasy games in my day. I've played a ton of D&D and derivatives thereof, I've played damn near every console RPG there is, I've had a poke around plenty of MMOs, and I don't recall ever, even one single time, in any of these, finding a slave market. That is not a place people go with fantasy, generally speaking. In games anyway. I am aware that Gor is a thing. Maybe, MAYBE, some evil villain will conquer some village off camera and have the whole population chained up in a big non-specific mine until you beat some boss and free them, but other than that, and even that's pretty damn rare, yeah we don't have slaves in our source material. We also don't usually tend to have unique personal super power skills, but whatever I understand how that part caught on.
Also like... it's real messed up to even want to write a protagonist who has any sort of desire to own a slave, in any context, but I kinda feel like it's redundant when you're already doing some absurdly extreme power fantasy thing? Like I dunno, when you have the magical ability to gain all the cool powers of anything you spit on and you immediately run out and spit on a whole forest worth of weird monsters and you've become the unquestioned ruler of the local kingdom now that you can fly and breath fire and shapeshift and teleport and yada yada yada, like... you can just ask people to bring you food and drink to your big comfy chair and seduce whoever you want. You don't need to like... pay money to someone to give you a whole person they've tortured and beaten until they are totally servile and will do whatever out of fear of death? That's just really messed up? But yeah it's a thing, and it keeps showing up in all this random manga I'm glancing at looking for weird queer themes. And in all this other stuff I'm ignoring because I've got a brand going here.
So anyway here's a standout example from this latest poke-around. Loser guy gets Isekai'd, he has the ability to copy anyone else's special power, and for some reason people think that power sucks so he just gets immediately thrown into the kinky slave gladiator system to endlessly participate in a tournament arc where uh... here I'll let the trashy manga explain itself on this one.
Now you would THINK the reason to have this particular convoluted setup would be to have our protagonist here turned into a cute girl, get banged by another girl and then have some weird revenge arc leading long term to some lesbian harem thing, but no! What part of my description of the Isekai genre were you not paying attention to? The main character with his broken superpower does not ever lose a fight. That is not how this genre goes. He always wins and gets new slave wives to add to the pile. Right, so, clearly we must be going for some kind of force-femme fetish thing then? He beats a bunch of dudes in the arena and then oh no they suffer the humiliation of becoming hot girls for this power-copying dork to bang? Also no, somehow! I'm not exactly reading this garbage cover to cover here, because the premise is awful and the art is just kind of a sloppy mess, but skimming through, somehow Chekhov's Force-Femme Spell seems to just be mounted on the wall for the whole play and is never once brought down and fired (aside from the backstory of a girl-of-the-week or two). We've just got this messed up elaborate setting detail just to provide fake stakes for an obvious never-lose protagonist and his literal slave harem.
And this too seems to be the recent trend. "I got turned into a girl and have to deal with how society treats me differently" is out, "this girl I'm about to bang used to be a guy in theory" is in. Now, if this were happening in nice wholesome women-respecting manga, that'd be fine. Go hunt down Stop, Hibari-kun. 80s manga about some guy who ends up hanging out with a Yakusa boss' trans daughter and falling for her, that's all well and good. Or develop a crush on the singer from Mospeda, or Fushigi Yuugi, or like 30 things from around 2008 or so. But all I'm finding in this current dive is weird objectifying power-play stuff and purchasing slave girls with the money earned from killing slimes with overpowered special skills.
Well that's not entirely true. I also found something called Kanreki Hime which seems to be a real slow boil thing from the creator of Gantz where half a dozen physically quite unpleasant middle-aged guys with poor social skills decide to play Russian Roulette with some kinda sci-fi turn-into-a-hot-girl pill and then spend a while getting all paranoid if they're the one it's force-femming. That could go somewhere, potentially. No idea where, but somewhere!
Anyway I don't really have a particular point here. Honestly my approach to life in general tends to involve rolling the dice on questionable media in search of hidden treasures. I'm going through my entire library of stuff from bundles in my steam library playing stuff like that awful homunculus wrestling thing because who knows when I might find the next Contrast. I used to order the less than 1 star obscura through Netflix back when it involved the postal service (these days Tubi's good for this), saw a lot of unwatchable garbage, but it's how I find stuff like I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle and Wolfcop. And previous efforts doing this sort of trashy manga dive have turned up things like this one I forgot the title of where someone unionizes the magical girls so they can't be pulled out of classes to deal with weird monsters or whatever, and a surprisingly upbeat non-fiction thing about a trans woman first jumping through all the various medical hoops (Umareru Seibetsu wo Machigaeta!/I Was Born the Wrong Sex, it's honestly very cute/funny/educational, would recommend).
Today though, no, it is all JUST trash, with slavery and misogyny and cowardice.
