Ever since I was little, I was fascinated by a certain type of slavery in fictional media (Wow! What a strange way to start a conversation hahaha but please bear with me). The casual, the unacknowledged, the almost ordinary incidence of scantily clad, beautiful female slaves in media that is not expressly about such slavery.
A big moment of 'awakening' for me was, of course, watching Return of the Jedi for the first time. But this is for all the ones who were not lucky enough to strangle their oppressor and escape within a few days. But for poor Oola, who was not even named on screen and who scarcely got even a glance of sympathy from our heroes before meeting one of the most gruesome fates imaginable! Or to Diva Shaliqua (can you guess I have a strange obsession with Star Wars slave characters haha), who got to languish standing around in boredom dressed in a humiliating slave bikini outfit, a horrible, unjust situation we only get a brief glimpse of in the movie before moving on. To all the Twi’lek slave girls appearing as a matter of course in every seedy, shady criminal underbelly of every Star Wars comic, novel or videogame. And to many more nameless dancing girls who appeared once in their titillatingly problematic orientalized belly dancing outfit as a spec in Conan's eye in some old Sword and Sorcery, hidden in the farther nook and cranny, the farthest corner of the comic, getting ogled at while the big important male characters discussed their big important business (or perhaps they were just joking around! Makes the contrast even more stark), never to appear again. Or when reading fantasy or historical fiction, to the girls women kidnapped to be taken and sold into slavery, to all the slave girls and dancing girls dangling before our male heroes (or our heroines who were lucky enough to escape such fate!) in one offhand line inside a single paragraph, this my letter of appreciation to you!
(Admittedly, this has been severely cut-back in more recent media. Perhaps for obvious and even understandable reasons. Still I hope they may find a home on this subreddit if nowhere else!)
When I was young, my heart ached at the blinding and obvious injustice of it all, with the fury only a girl who was perhaps a bit on the spectrum could amass. Why didn’t our heroes save them? Why don’t they get a happy ending? Another feeling, difficult to characterise at the time, was this strange tingling in my tummy. Was it morbid curiosity? Fascination? Or perhaps… desire? Now, dear reader, I have to stress I have no desire to have a leash clasped around my neck, put into a skimpy outfit and dance for some space monstrosity (I like dancing well enough, but I don’t think I would make for good entertainment for long. Beware any Human traffickers reading this post!) But hey, that’s what RP is for, is it not? To explore exactly these sorts of forbidden desires and curiosities.
So, to be clear, I am looking to play as a female slave in a setting where this is not a shocking or uncommon occurrence, and in fact goes largely unremarked upon. A group of heroes go on a quest to negotiate with an Ogre warlord or a Dragonic ruler or a galactic crimelord, and see he keeps a beautiful scantily clad girl chained to his throne, alongside a court collecting all sorts of other freaky pets, monsters, guests and curiosities. Now and this is critical so please listen, neither do I want you to overdo it. This is a world where ending up a scantily clad harem dancer is a plausible fate for un unfortunate woman who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, but I don’t want a porn-logic world where every facet of reality contorts to rape and humiliate every female character, where every male character spends his time grasping and drooling and dreaming about amassing as many slave girls as possible. It’s not like every Ogre warlord is expected to have a chained pet slave by his throne, perhaps our Ogre warlord is just eccentric! It’s not a well-known trope in universe, nor something people would commonly discuss in the streets (much like real life sexual trafficking is not usually casually discussed in polite company!)
Perhaps you would expect an Ogre warlord to have a couple of slaves to serve him, this is definitely the common and understood fate of captives, male and female, taken in war, but most people don’t get enslaved, don’t expect to and don’t fret about it (again just like the average girl in our world doesn’t walk around constantly thinking about getting sexually trafficked, unless they’re freaky like me). Of all the things a woman could be in the world - A wife, a mother, a heroine, a queen, a princess, an adventurer, she just happened to fall into the clutches of a brutish Orkish warlord who chained her to his throne and made her his slave. In any other story, she would be a disposable background piece of titillation, only briefly mentioned or flashed on the screen to prompt pity and arousal from the audience, but then the story moves on, and many such stories are occurring around her.
Like being a Twi’lek in the Star Wars universe - You could be a mighty Jedi! A powerful Sith! A bounty hunter, a smuggler, a university student, a normal, regular citizen, or… or you could end up in some god-forsaken criminal hellhole chained to and doomed to please some slug to be forgotten about and never heard from again. That’s pretty rare though and not something that’s always on everyone’s mind. This should be a setting where powerful women exist as a matter of course without having every male villain constantly reminding them how sexy they would look in a golden slave bikini, but a few women do end up in the golden slave bikini and that’s just how it is. My purpose is to explore the lives of the unlucky ones, the ones that fell through the cracks, but a big part of the fantasy is exactly the tragedy of being ‘forgotten by the narrative’ the world moves on, it doesn’t care, the mighty heroes off to defeat the demon lord negotiate a passage with the Half-Ogre warlord while you dance for their entertainment, perhaps they give you a few glances of sympathy, and then leave you to your fate. That’s what makes for the real tragedy of the situation, my character is in this objectively terrifying, horrible situation, and nobody really cares? Her master gets angry during a negotiation and violently yanks her leash, pulling and choking her, making her fight to even catch a breath, and all everyone cares for is getting him calm enough again to continue the negotiation. She is the hero of our story, but the larger world is indifferent to her. She’s basically just furniture, or a piece of meat objectification in the truest sense of the world (related: But while my character will be considered reasonably attractive, I don’t intend to be a stunning beauty whose face will launch a thousand ships or who will instantly attract the attention of everyone when she enters the room, she should be… fine, a nice piece of titillation, a pleasing pair of breasts with a bit of embellishment, but not much more, forgettable, disposable, even her owner forgets he owns her half the time unless she draws his attention somehow - which will almost always have bad consequences for her).
Sexism and misogyny may be themes to explore, both in the structural sense of patriarchal control, and the more casual day-to-day "locker room talk" casual jokes etc. But neither should the entire setting be a cartoonishly exaggerated maledom fetish regime, nor should our heroine be taunted with rape or slavery by every minor scoundrel or bandit she encounters (even if the latter might occassionally happen). The most interesting sort of sexism (for me) is more subdued. Think of Star Wars - it is by no mean a setting where sexism is widespread - indeed women are found to be equal to men in nearly every position. Even Jabba, you get the sense he has a perfectly fine working relationship with female bounty hunters and fellow crime bosses. Yet when Leia and her friends are both captured she ends up with a slave bikini outfit and a chain around her neck, and her friends don't. It's never even spelled out explicitly, but it's there. This is the sort of sexism that I find most interesting to explore.
Lastly, based on what I described, I am looking for someone who is a competent worldbuilder and narrative crafter! From what I described I hope it’s clear that I would like my character to be at the backdrop of larger events, a drop in a bucket, the exploration of a fate of a single individual among tens of millions in a world that marches on. So there has to be some teeth to that! If you can prod my imagination, allude to a larger world, one of empires, city states, guilds, institutions, trade routes, diplomacy, cultures and religions. In short a functional, well-rounded, fantasy or sci-fi (as you can tell I am leaning towards fantasy atm, but don’t mind Sci-fi either, or for that matter an established universe, such as Star Wars) In short, there must be things happening in the larger world to which my puny tiny character has to scramble to react and survive. I want to play a cog in a larger machine, but for that we need to build the machine first! If you can convincingly write a scene of a couple of crack political players discussing complex trade-route patterns in a plot spanning several kingdoms, city states and imperial courts, while my character, the poor, put upon slave girl has to feverishly gyrate her hips for their entertainment or run around to serve them drink, while avoiding their groping and patronizing pats on the head, I might just fall in love with you! (Jk jk, purely platonically I am not actually looking for an irl relationship from this post! Sorry!)
Now, you might be saying to yourselves: “Dott, you have gone into a frankly worrying amount of detail about your desire to be enslaved and chained by an Ogre warlord, but what sort of story do you expect to get out of a character with such little mobility and agency? A story about a character that by your own admission has been ‘forgotten by the narrative.’ A slice of life story about a girl who just lies around chained and being groped by a monster will get pretty boring pretty quick.” And yeah I hear you! That’s part of the reason why I stress that I want this to be a well-rounded setting where things are happening for my character to react to, but I understand this doesn’t make it sound much better as that just turns the burden of carrying the story on you, basically writing a one-sided presentation for my character to react to. The best way for me to explain this is that even though I say my character has been ‘forgotten by the narrative’ for us it is still her story, it’s just that if anyone else were writing the story in this universe, it wouldn’t, while there are heroic quests and journeys and intrigues and wars in the wider world, we focus on none of those, at least not directly. So the story would be largely about all the petty druggery of daily slave life, the tiny palace intrigues, the evolving relationships between the master and his various slaves and minions, as well as an opportunity to influence the larger world narrative - a seductive smile here, a distraction there, a whisper in the master’s ear… perhaps my character could eventually become somewhat influential in harem politics! Additionally I expect the RP to be, for a lack of a better word very “physical” that is heavy on physical description - My character viscerally feels her masters scaly or slimy body or tail rubbing against her back when he’s excited or agitated, she feels the cold clench of her neck, all the little pulls and yanks and restrictions as her master’s mood changes, the sweaty exhaustion of having to dance and serve all night, the grasping and groping of all parts of her body, the sensation on her pierced swelled naked nipples, that sort of thing. In addition I expect the master to travel around at least a bit and take my character with him.
Anyway, I think that’s enough. Apologies for my at times incoherent rambling, I hope I got the message across!
As long as this is up, I am still looking, so don't be afraid to message me even if this is very old.
I hope you enjoyed the prompt even if you don't intend to reply!
