(no subject)

[iniquiticity]

Please give me your feelings on this. Back in the olden days, slave AUs were a definite thing. Now slavery is, as we all know, abhorrent, but so are plenty of other fic tropes. What is it about this particular theme that makes it taboo these days, when other gross themes are encouraged? Drop some wisdom on us!

i assume that we’re talking about plotty fic and not PWP here. i’m not interested in discussing why people fetishize or what is or is not appropriate on here, but i AM interested in why plots/stories/conflicts work the way that they do.
so short answer:

if your main character is the master, then you are enjoying a power fantasy, which is fine. for historical reasons, however, a little distasteful based on that slavery is really fucking bad. but this is a boring answer. let’s talk about a longer answer: considering the story of the enslaved. i don’t think the oppressed class gets as much attention in other AUs as it does in slavery AUs, which is why slavery AUs may be particullary frowned-upon.

a character in a “taboo” AU has huge obstacles created by their enslavement they need to overcome to accomplish almost any goal. obstacles create tension and tension makes a good story. i also think, by the way, that this is particularly notable/pertinent in hamilton fandom, where slavery has visibility in canon and canon resource, and it would apply to any canon with a similar example. (ie: a canon with a particularly horrific arranged marriage custom would shun arranged marriage fic.)
slavery AUs are frowned up on particularly because:

1. slavery is REALLY fucking bad. if you’re from a culture where slavery had shaped the lives of people (both who benefited and who suffered), the culture may be disinterested/disapproving in you using their cultural keystone in a way that could be seen as flippant or excessively literary. like the hamilton/slavery example, i think this could apply differently to other cultures.(for example, are mafia AU fics particullarly frowned about in cultures where organized crime is more prevalent? or hooker AUs more horrible depending on your personal/cultural experience with prostitution?

2. slavery/enslavement has a HUGE effect on your/your character’s life (duh) in terms of adding tension. and if you were writing fic that wasn’t first and foremost ABOUT slavery, i can imagine it would be REALLY difficult for slavery to not overwhelm the key conflict of your story (the romance, i imagine, in most fics.) you might WANT your story to be a love story about slaves, but it would be hard to make that story “feel right.”. either it would be come a slavery story with romance, or your readers would be like ‘this story isn’t impacted enough or is impacted too much by slavery.” alternately: you might disagree with your readership of ‘how much’ the story should be impacted, or ‘how much’ slavery should be in the story... etc.

very, very VERY long answer below.

this answer is about semi-long stories that are actually plotty. if we’re talking about PWPs, i think that’s really more into ‘why do people fetishize what they do?’ and that’s not a question i know how to answer, nor am i really interested in answering.

i think that the particular revulsion for slavery AUs vs other generally disgusting AUs is particularly notable/pertinent in hamilton fandom, where slavery has some point/visibility in canon and canon resource. even if you wanted to make the HUGE leap (that i don’t necessarily approve of) and say hamilton!washington may or may not be a slaveowner based on how this is never referenced IN the play, certainly hamilton, laurens & eliza all reference to it. so i think that a slavery fic is more offensive in a canon where slavery plays a part. i think this would apply to any canon where there’s a canon ill that also is a popular AU. for example, if your canon had a horrible mafia, mafia AUs might be discouraged. or if your canon had a horrible oppressive custom of arranged marriage, then arranged marriage AUs might not be “in.”

so, as you ASKED ME MY OPINION, allow me to pontificate AT LENGTH.

so why do we like AUs which have all these negative connotations? for me, i like power dynamics, so when i write AUs i like them to have power dynamics threaded into the story. And this is such a broad thing to say that it can sort of mean anything - although i think my interest dynamics does fuel my interest in my ships, and in particular with the washingharem.

the reason i and i imagine many other people like power dynamics is that it creates tension. tension is good for stories. drives plots forward. for example, a huge part of greenhouses is washington trying to figure out how to deal with his social power in relation to hamilton because they’re so disparate. this is like the first 30,000 words of the story: washington misunderstanding his privledge and how to interact with regards to it and hamilton. the story would be very different if hamilton didn’t have such a bone to pick with washington and his (misuse) of his power (that he doesn’t really acknowledge but that hamilton feels keenly) because of privledge.

so power dynamics - tension - makes a good story. (obviously this doesn’t apply to ALL stories.. but let’s assume we’re all adults and when i say ‘this is good’ you know i mean ‘for a set number of reasons and in a set number of circumstances and often combined with these other things, it is good.)

AUs with negative connotations contain a lot of tension because the characters are suffering with a world they can’t control, and they are oppressed in whatever way you like, which means so many things are struggles. SO MUCH TENSION. for example! character A is ill. obiously being ill sucks. but being ill is so much worse when you can’t visit a doctor. or you can’t afford to visit a doctor. or you are only permitted to visit a doctor six months from now. or the doctor you are “allowed” to visit is an asshole. or the doctor who wants to treat you, who you want to be treated by, is on the other side of the world. or whatever. (this is really bad in real life. i am not saying it is cool when this happens in real life.) now you’ve created a massive issue for your character, which your story has to solve, or kill your character dramatically to further the plot somehow.

so when you’re imagining a post-apocalyptic AU (for example), you’re imagining this world with all these other complications. and despite whatever thing is happening between your characters - you also have just added in all this other shit. the prime fic example here is your characters trying to fall in love, despite that life is such a struggle. the greenhouses example, while not post-apocalyptic, is: the characters are trying to fall in love despite all the sociopolitical drama and washington’s devout duty to his country. it would be a much shorter story if there weren’t all these complications, and we would learn less about how characters interact with eachother, acknowledge their priorities, handle these various things going on - and so on.

so reviewing short answer into conclusion here:people like “bad” stories because they contain a lot of tension, and being that slavery is REALLY fucking bad, if you’re really into extremely tense stories, this would be a good place to start. obviously being a slave would be REALLY inconvenient for doing MANY things. that your character(s) are slaves would have a HUGE impact on the way your characters interacted with the world, each other, your enemies, and their own issues and selves.

so then why do people not prefer slavery AUs over other AUs that are bad themes?

the problem is, I think, is when you add in all these other tense obstacles, you may obscure the actual original plot of your story. For example, if you’re writing a love story about two slaves -and i think romance is a key element of *most* fic -- i would be worried that you’d overwhelm your love story with slavery things. and i think it would be HARD not to overwhelm a love story with slavery things. slavery is just such a persistent force in the life of a slave that it would be hard not fot to impact EVERY PART OF YOUR LIFE AT THE WHOLE TIME. you’d have to frame the story, the slavery, the characters, and the love story/conflict in just the right way. that would be REALLY challenging. and i have read some better fics than i’ve read books, but i think that it would be just be really hard to not overwhelm a slavery love story to to the point where it would be a slavery story with some romance in it. (maybe that’s what you want. in my experience, that isn’t the case with fic.)

and i think this slavery love story, if you didn’t weight all your things just right, it wouldn’t be a good story, or at least not the story you wanted it to be, or the story your readers wanted it to be. and it would be HARD to make the weights right. you don’t want your readers going “this is a slavery love story but these people are mostly concerned about XYZ and not their enslavement.” or maybe “this doesn’t FEEL like enslavement.” (that’s even TRICKIER given that you have to figure out what the story is supposed to feel like - and worse given the various socio/moral badness about slavery, especially depending on your culture?) and at the same time you don’t want literally everything in the whole story to be about slavery, because then it’s a story about slavery that also happens to have a love story in it, which is a totally different thing.

i again strongly recommend the fifth season by nk jeminsin. her story had A LOT of things. much tension. drama. and none of it overtakes anything else. it’s really excellent. a good lesson on how to make your story about oppression.

and i to think there’s a sociocultural element to it that makes slavery stories difficult to pull off because slavery is so fucking horrible. i think you could have a good story in which slavery is a theme, but the worse the thing is, the harder the story is to write. that would be a hard one to write. and i think it would be difference based on your culture. for example, maybe mafia au stories don’t do well in japan, because of the history of the yakuza.

i think that’s all my thoughts for tonight on this issue. thanks for your thoughtful and stimulating question!

now you should all read the fifth season. if you’re interested in other books that very brilliantly address slavery/oppression, i would also pick up an exchange of hostages by susan r matthews, and iron council by china mieville, which is extremely marxist. (all of these books have adult content warnings, so look up the trigger detail if that is relevant to you.)