I’m currently reading a great series (Defiance of the Fall) that unfortunately uses one of my least favorite tropes in Fantasy often: the helpless female slave.
To be sure, not all of them are “slaves”, technically. Just women and girls being hunted by powerful men, and seemingly unable to stop their advances.
Our MC visits a new town, but notices something strange. When he visits with the mayor of the town, he’s surrounded by a dozen mostly-naked women. The women show signs of not wanting to be there. Our hero incapacitates the mayor, not wanting to kill him, but one of the women jumps over and kills him. He takes 80 of these girls back with him to train as an all-female militia.
The same hero visits another town, and notices a couple (husband and wife) hanging dead outside the front gates, on display. He hears a noise, and finds some men surrounding a young teen girl, the child of the couple. The mayor of this town wants the girl, but the parents hid her. Our hero kills the men, and the girl insists on coming back with the hero to his own home.
The same hero visits another town, and the mayor is found to be telling a young female prisoner (our hero’s sister!) that soon he will have her for himself… sigh.
It seems to be a common trope in some of these Fantasy books that the hero discovers a pretty female being kept prisoner (or hunted) by the powerful, evil man for obscene purposes. And of course, the hero saves her by killing the man and she instantly trusts him and wants to come with him.
It does seem possible that, in a new world without laws, the powerful will not only capture the treasures of the land but look to capture slaves as well. That’s believable. But, in Fantasy books that I’ve read, we don’t see a variety of slaves. We only ever see one type of slave:
- Female
- Young and good looking
- Resistant to the advances of the evildoer (successfully usually, but sometimes not)
We never see:
- Male slaves
- Old or average looking slaves
- People voluntarily giving themselves to those in power
I don’t really want to read a book all about fictional slavery, so I am not asking for more examples of slavery to be added to books. But why does every female slave have to be 15-20 and “the most beautiful girl anyone has ever seen“?
I would expect 100’s or 1000’s of men to be taken into slavery as brute force workers. Military needs front-line fighters and construction needs muscle. Even older women would be used as cooks and cleaners and other non-sexual servants. But these are never mentioned. The hero never encounters these, and is never shown to be freeing these.
Another of my favorite books, Battle Mage Farmer, basically starts out with a poor girl and her brother being surrounded by both a mayor and a gang leader wanting her to “voluntarily” choose them for her own protection using various threats. But luckily, the MC in that series rebuffs both and the girl is allowed to become very powerful. Which is another trope in fiction, but I don’t mind it as much.
