A Juneteenth Treatise: or, Thoughts on Isekai’s Slavery Problem

Content Warning: Discussion of sexual violence, misogyny, racism, chattel slavery

I was in graduate school when I really got into isekai novels—before, I had been almost strictly a fantasy reader, but not a portal fiction reader, not a “fantasy in another world” reader. But then I came across One Peace Books, and by proxy, the first volume of The Rising of a Shield Hero. At 356 print pages, I tore through it, reading between three-hour grad courses in my car. The prose went down easy: Naofumi Iwatani mirrored a lot of my own feelings about my awkwardness and nerdy nature, and his initial struggles to “get gud” felt like my own growing difficulties within academia. 

At the time, I had not developed my current feminist views, and I’ll admit, I probably had no problem with the false rape accusation that kickstarts the novel. In 2026, I feel a reflexive embarrassment, which to me, means I’ve grown; but a decade ago, I don’t think I’d have even known to feel otherwise, even as a survivor of rape myself. I was a product of a society that said that because I was Fat, because I was Black, and because I was Fat and Black, I was closer to being a youthful Mammy than I’d ever be a sinful Sapphire or Jezebel. 

My body was a vessel for sex, but not sexually appealing: society said that if I lost two hundred pounds, if I found a way to slim myself down as close to a single digit as possible, then maybe I’d be worthwhile. I should be grateful, I was told, because no one would ever assault me like Malty claimed in volume one—even though that categorically had not been my body’s experience. But I was twenty-two and was so tired and was coming apart at the seams. Being a woman was all I had: I clung to the fact that even though I moved through my final year of graduate school in a traumatized fog, I was still connected to girlhood and by proxy, I was cool because I was a girl who read dark fantasy that had serious edge and gave a middle finger to soft sighs and romance.

Now, I’ll fully admit that a part of me wants to be ashamed that I read up through volume thirteen of this series and thought I was cool for it, but at thirty-three…well, why should I when I’ve grown so much? After all, my entire body of work has been informed by every piece of media that I’ve engaged with: that includes my time with Shield Hero. 

So instead of sinking into shame, I’d rather do what I do best: write a bunch of very thoughts about it. Very Black thoughts, mind you, and not really analytical: think of this as your brief invitation to the cookout. This is less academic class room and more seven in the evening thoughts. Imagine that glass of red drink, muffled 90s house music, and a full plate. That’s the vibe.

I have never known a life where slavery didn’t affect me directly. My grandmother, born in December 1924, had a grandmother born as an enslaved individual, reaping what hatred sowed in East Texas. The rich red earth that birthed my great-grandmother birthed her daughter, who birthed my grandmother, who birthed my father, who, in combination with my mother, birthed me. Born in 1992, I am the first generation to be born with full civil rights: no segregation, Affirmative Action, socioeconomic advantages, and beautiful Black skin that should have commanded respect. I am my ancestors’ dream in fat, queer motion: I am the daughter-son-child—breathing, being, believing—that they dreamed into existence.

All my life, I have breathed in that red earth, inhaled the fumes of Dallas and the petrichor sweetness of the pitch-black earth that gave life to my salt and pepper hair. I have existed as the direct descendant of East Texas slaves, first born as a mustard seed of potential in the Ivory Coast carried to East Texas and Alabama, only to find fruition when, on one day in January’s cold grip, science gave will to nine months of gestation that created me.

Yet Juneteenth, the day this op-ed will come out, was elusive to me as a child: I knew the oral histories, but Juneteenth was a mourning holiday, almost inexplicably linked to shame. After all, White enslavers, well aware of federal law, kept my ancestors in willful bondage, squeezing every bit of whip-driven work out of skin the sun loved, but America hated. 

As a Texan, I grew up in the shadow of a history that was forced to cakewalk with Gone with the Wind, the Emancipation Proclamation, and a shattered Reconstruction that, in 2026, shows the canyon-deep cracks in America’s final grasps at the Grand Plan as an eco-fascist superpower. In my adulthood, I would uncover the horrors untold to me in a traditional classroom: that they used to eat us, used to stitch us into books, made us into soups and stews and chairs and shoes. Knowledge in mind my body knew the score; understanding in my soul came from my diasporic community teaching me a complex history. My parents reinforced it, my grandmother’s life enhanced it, and with my ancestor’s hands at the small of my wide back and the generous rise of my hips, I remembered and remembered and learned and came to understand why Juneteenth mattered solely as a day of bitter remembrance.

But on June 17th, 2021, when President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. declared Juneteenth to be a federal holiday, I confronted my Blackness through a specific, familiar lens: anime.

It might be easy to dismiss slavery’s entanglement in the broader isekai genre as a quirk—that is, if you don’t understand that anti-black sentiments were a direct export to Japan under Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who introduced the cruel art of minstrelsy directly to Japan. That was in 1853, decades before Japan would utilize sexual slavery from Korea to East Timor to satisfy the carnal desires of Japanese soldiers. While Hitler took directly from chattel slavery and America’s thorough breaking of a singular racial group, the Japanese Empire mirrored much the same through its sexual domination and enslavement of Korean women—vessels to heap pain upon until their bodies, just like my ancestor’s own, were deemed perishable and shattered.

In modern day, Japan remains deeply entangled in what fans of the “land of the rising sun” (and I use that term specifically, as do they) often dismiss as engaging in Black culture purely out of curiosity. When comedian Hamada appeared in shoepolish black in 2018, two years into my life in Japan, there was little backlash. Even my coworkers said that he was doing a respectful send-off to Eddie Murphy’s role in Beverly Hills Cop. Yet when I was in Japan, I saw plenty of biracial Black-Japanese people around me and on TV. Why not impersonate Eddie Murphy with someone who’s skin tone isn’t “shoe polish”, a shade that simply doesn’t exist because Blackface puppeteers my skin, sliding inside blackness as a cultural concept only to kick Black bodies in the back of the knees for shock value.

Even now, in 2026, online denizens are quick to forgive Japan, as well as China and Korea, for not knowing better. But I have always been Black. I have always had to know. I’ve never had the grace of cultural obliviousness. Even as a child, I was always a young woman—never a little girl, never a girl period. After all, was I not innocent when I was called nigger for the first time at age nine? Was I not innocent when praised for “being good enough” in middle school, for being called an “oreo” by my best friends in high school for my “white” voice, my “proper” behavior, my interior mind palace cloaked in Black skin? If I must know, then so must others, especially when we all have the benefit of the internet. 

Perhaps, when we were disconnected digital islands in a binary sea, that was the case. But when you have a history of blackface that goes back to the 1800s, you lose that excuse: there has always been better. Blackness becomes the vehicle for comedy, but at what cost? We all know the answer because anti-blackness unites us from sea to sea to shining sea.

When I was a child, I thought like a child, but you see, being a Black child in the Deep South in a city where there’s no buses because they don’t want “that element” (i.e. Mexico and her diaspora) in your city limits means that you don’t get to be a child in truth. It means when your crack open a textbook in eighth grade to learn about the Antebellum South, when your high school plays its annual showing of Roots, when you do your first big chop and free yourself from chemical burns, that you have to start looking critically at the world around you and your place in it. You can either turn away from Omelas’ heart, or you can walk into its very core and destroy the injustice at its core for the potential of change, even if it means you don’t get to ignore the rot at the root anymore.

Even now, in 2026, online denizens are quick to forgive Japan, as well as China and Korea, for not knowing better. But I have always been Black. I have always had to know. I’ve never had the grace of cultural obliviousness. 

Once I stepped into my Blackness as an adult and critically examined who I was, the genre lost its appeal because of the frequent inclusion of slavery. It’s hard to like seeing diluted forms of chattel slavery in what could be a completely mundane fantasy romp. It’s like eating a cake and finding out it’s frosted with sweetened shit: doesn’t matter how fantastic the interior is, you still don’t want a cake made with fecal matter.

And while slavery isn’t unique to America, chattel slavery is, and it’s often the form of slavery I see mirrored in series like Shield Hero—characters kept in magical bondage, awaiting a benevolent, lighter skinned savior who will be a good master. In the case of Naofumi’s punishment of the crown princess Malty S. Melromarc, he performs being a “good master” by gripping the tools of his house firmly in hand and delivering a “forced” punishment while genuinely enjoying the act. Malty, a prettier, paler mirror of a Sapphire, loses her name and becomes Bitch. Naofumi, a “benevolent” slave owner, gloats with evident glee both in the novel and the anime adaptation. 

This act, of course, leads to Malty being horrifically and graphically sexually abused as an enslaved wife. Her resulting death is supposed to be a victory that readers and viewers cheer for, but for me, the resolution felt hollow and pyrrhic. Even now, I wonder if Malty were darker skinned, if she were more a caricature than she already is, if perhaps her name might have become Jezebel. It seems cruelly fitting within a genre that has no problem with getting in bed with replicating real world trauma.

Of course, The Rising of the Shield Hero is just one of many in a long line of popular series that eagerly lean into this trope, and in many ways, it’s not even the most egregious around, just the most memorable (pejorative) for me personally. And that’s not to say that I don’t like my fair share of isekai, trashy and otherwise: I’m a huge fan of JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World. Its exploration of sexual enslavement with raw realism and discomfort is a much better match for where my mind is: that being sent to another world with a vulva and vagina but no sainted weaponry yields not a power fantasy but a regurgitation of the cruel reality of our own iteration of Earth.

JK Haru, at base, doesn’t elide slavery, though it’s not chattel: rather, slavery functions as an extension of misogyny and fetish fulfillment in a crapsack world that, like Shield Hero, is a blend of European fantasy elements with a culture—isekai—twist. It’s not without its faults, even though I really like it: it replicates real-world systems of abuse, and while the titular Haru is incredibly witty and the novel is packed with pop culture deep cuts, at the end of the day, it’s still a story about a teenager having to find a way to survive forced sexual bondage.

And yet, even with my blatant love-to-love and love-to-criticize feelings about JK Haru, I still must ask: why do we feel the need to replicate real-world systems? Isn’t fantasy an escape, a chance to rebuke bondage and slavery and just…literally do anything else? True, it’s an escape from actual harm, a break from witnessing a relentless news cycle. In the case of dark fantasy and romantasy, slavery can transcend into being sensual and sexual. I don’t begrudge anyone, especially not as someone who’s currently in their cannibalistic horror era and loving it, a safe space to explore the allure of losing their agency. Fictional preferences rarely reflect true intent: my reading preferences have very little to do with who I am. But I do think it’s worth considering the “why” behind being okay with demi-humans and teenage girls enduring for the sake of plots influenced by one of the world’s most expensive flesh trades is unquestionable art just because it’s non-Black bodies but deeply diasporic histories–and especially those stories where the fantasy is about being the enslaver, and about putting marginalized bodies in their place.

It would be easy to come to the conclusion that I hate isekai, but like I said, a novel like JK Haru demonstrates that isekai can have incredibly deep nuance. Even in a grimdark medieval world where a teenage girl can only find work through her body and sexual captivity, JK Haru doesn’t shy away from examining the stark difference between a superhuman visitor from Japan versus a woman bound to society’s expectations of the feminine form when it cannot produce children or be suited to women’s work. I wish more isekai were like JK Haru, taking a critical lens to male-power fantasies by completely inverting them. I know those series are out there, because I’ve read Magic Knight Rayearth, have watched Ascendance of a Bookworm, know that there’s an almost endless list of shows that understand they don’t need slavery to have edge to be engaging. For example, while I’ve only just started my journey with Twelve Kingdoms, I know it’s well known to dismantle systems of oppression and show how, with a skilled writer and exploration, those very systems can change. It’s not an impossible task to ask for the bar to not be on the floor, especially in an industry that supports dozens of new shows per season, though mileage may vary on perceived quality.

Isekai has a slavery problem, but I am not its sole solution: the entirety of a community is, and it’s high time we call it out as a global community because we all deserve better. Slavery is cheap tricks, painful reminders, and the Black body’s burden in its current iteration: it’s high time isekai remembers that it can be much more complex than its use of feminine bodies as fodder for men to step on in their rise to glory. There’s an abundance of stories waiting to be told, waiting to leap from Narou to novel to localized media. Slavery should no longer be the standard: I should be able to look back at Omelas and know that while it may no longer flourish in its same way, it’s no longer reliant on a history of adapting suffering. That’s a small sacrifice in a medium that has given me the ability to pen pieces like this.

It is, in so many ways, bittersweet to celebrate Juneteenth in an era of fascism—or so I thought it would be. But I am here, my ancestors’ past, present, and glorious future, Fat and Black and Trans and Disabled, their kindness realized, their resistance actively dismantling systems. I am a hymn sung a hundred thousand strong, all the voices of the Lone Star State unified into a wave of sound. I am a prayer whispered under the drinking gourd and sickle moon, the manifestation of a would-be Black god with open, yearning arms. 

And so I find it easy to dance in the wake of fascism, to pop my ass, shake the invisible waist beads around my hip—it’s as simple as watchin’ that waistline, movin’ that waistline, and rockin’ it until my hands slide to my knees, my feet go flat, and I’m doin’ it on a handstand. It’s a call back to the hips that might have held me while we watched an equatorial sunset, if America had not claimed me. It’s a call forward to my own hips, changing and shrinking and reshaping themselves under the administration of pumps of ice-cold testosterone gel.

Yet I am Juneteenth’s victory, Fat and Trans and gloriously Black, and I’m proud and I’ll keep on carrying on my ring shout until we, as a global community, force a better, more dynamic mediascape for anime’s future.