have an rss feed set to /r/manga to keep up with serials that I can’t use other feeds to track and, unironically about every couple months or so, there’s a new entry in the set I like to call slaveslop, in which the protagonist (usually faceless):
- buys a slave
- bonus if they’re a fantasy race (subtle)
- gives them a glow-up
- treats them like either their child or their spouse
- bonus if they are never even offered emancipation???
like I’ve seen so many of these when I was still actively browsing reddit, and even now that its just the feed I can still see they’re still being pumped out from the slop factory. is this the pure id of the weeb? i know isekai is also dogshit for slavery apologia but this seems to be cutting the fanfare and serving it as the main course.
what’s the deal mack 
Isekai and the adjacent genres are all about power fantasy wish fulfillment (or its negation for comedic value, or both), but of a very specific kind where the protagonist is externally different from the reader and at the same time, internally a normal person/a sad loser, just like the reader. A main form this wish fulfillment takes is getting to spend time with attractive women. It is more compelling if they like the protagonist for who they are internally rather than externally, but why would a woman like the reader?
The world needs to be such that the reader would be special in it, and a natural ways to do this include having the main character not be racist towards catgirls or whatever, and not be cruel to their slaves, unlike the general population. We have arrived at weird slave fiction.
Then finally, the way the manga industry works, where the most realistic way to actually make money as an artist is to produce a lot of beginnings of stories that would catch people’s attention, causes popular concepts to be iterated endlessly and distilled. Add some misogyny and a lot of horniness, and you have slaveslop.