I can't tell due to my very narrow range of stories I actually know anything about, but what I'm getting is at is this:
Stories about enslaved humans rising up against their oppressors, which just so happen to be non-human entities of some kind (elves, aliens, lizardpeople, dragons, what the fuck ever): Cool, noble, inspiring and good.
Stories about enslaved non-humans rising up against their human oppressors: Not good, very bad. The heroes need to put a stop to this evil uprising.
So is this actually a common thing others have noticed or am I just making assumptions based on my very limited knowledge?
There’s even a historic ethnicity that was wholly enslaved to the point that the name of the ethnicity just meant “slave” afterwards
Oh I thought you where making a comment on Slavs in the first place. Yeah it is insane how literal the dehumanization of Slavs is
The elves, demons, and other sentient beasts in Indian mythology roughly correspond to Indo-Aryan clans vs other indigenous people of South Asia at the time.
as well as the indigenous peoples of Europe and Iran.
Sanskrit: Asura-Deva
Persian: Ahura-Daeva
Swedish: Aesir-VanirOutside of these three regions, the obliteration by the Indo-Europeans was total and complete (as evidenced by the near-uniform, 80%+ domination of Y-chromosome R1a/R1b in Western Europe, even though the maternal line is made up of indigenous foragers/farmers).
However in these three areas (arguably Italy also), that falls to more like 20-50%, meaning the indigenous people put up far more resistance (and thus something worth writing about)
Funnily enough, the Indo-Europeans in the north were enslaved to such an extent by the Uralic peoples, that the word for "slave" is literally "orja" (aka Arya or Aryan) in Finnish/Estonian. Google translate it now if you want
You can red Lord Of The Rings as Sauron trying to liberate the "evil" "subhuman" races of middle earth from the tyranny of men and elves, someone wrote a book about it. http://fan.lib.ru/img/e/eskov/last_ringbearer_engl/last_ring_bearer.pdf
Even the "good old days" of Warcraft had some of these :brainworms: . The Orcs rising up and breaking free of the Alliance's concentration camps (yes, that's what they were), killing the concentration camp guards, seizing the means to escape, and reasserting their ancestral heritage and founding a new nation had to be seen as a "pros and cons, both sides equally right and wrong" liberal thing instead of the big :JB-shining-aggro: moment it ought to have been, through and through.
i mean it's fiction writing 101 to make your heroes more familiar and your villains more alien.
It'd be great if more fiction tried to narratively sympathize with the unfamiliar and alienate the familiar. Arguably the Elder Scrolls series does that pretty well by having the Argonians be one of the least malevolent races in the setting and the aesthetically pretty and superficially "good" looking High Elves being the generally most villainy-prone culture in the setting's history.
