Step Servant

Your father has remarried, and you hope you will have it as good as Abraham Lincoln and have a just and caring new stepmother. Sadly, that ends up not being the case and instead you have become an out-and-out servant, if not an out-and-out slave, to your stepmother and any "relatives" she deems better than you. You have become a Step Servant.

When this trope is used in the context of a Cinderella Plot, it can overlap with Rich Sibling, Poor Sibling, with the impoverished people's situation making them the Poor Sibling, while their sibling or step-sibling is spoiled and pampered by the cruel parent. While this is usually due to having a Wicked Stepmother, simply being unfairly made a serf to the rest of the family fulfills the requirements to be this trope.

Sister Trope to Made a Slave, when characters are sold in the black market, and Kids Hate Chores. Compare with Riches to Rags, a more specific example for when a character who was once rich becomes poor. Their identity as family can be part of The Reveal in many a murder mystery when it's revealed that a member of the household staff is the illegitimate child of the head of the household.

Compare Scullery Maid, Guess Who I'm Marrying?. See also Saved to Enslave and Defeat Means Menial Labor. Also see Indentured Servitude and Adopt-a-Servant.

---

Examples

Anime & Manga

• Grey from Black Clover was mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters, who made her do all the housework which left her covered in ash. After she used her magic to look like her stepsisters, they attacked her and she was forced to leave her home. The chapter on her backstory is even called "Cinderella Grey".
• Candy♡Candy: At age 12, Candy is "adopted" by the Leagan family to be a companion to eldest daughter Eliza and later ends up as a maid. The children, Eliza and Neal, tease her and order her about, and their mother isn't any nicer.
  • It later crosses into Rags to Royalty. When Candy gets adopted for real, it's by the Andrees... a clan that's far richer and more uptown than the Legans. In fact, the Legan family is a branch clan to the Andrees and they owe respect to their leaders, Aunt Elroy and Grandfather William, and since William is the one who gave the order to adopt Candy they can't question it. (But they can be still assholes to Candy behind William's back.)
• In Honey Hunt, if the maid is not at home, Yura is often made to wait on her mother and her clients when she comes home after being away at work for so long. Sometimes her mother is even gone for months at a time.
• This is Hana Morenos' situation at the start of Michiko & Hatchin, a.k.a. Finding Paradiso. She lives with a foster family who are nothing but assholes to her, and not only has to endure bullying from both her foster brother and her foster sister but is also made to do all the chores by the parents, including one asshole moment where Joanna, the foster mother, dumps the omelette that Hana cooked for her on the floor with the rest of her plate because she'd burned the underside of it and orders her not only to cook another one but also to clean up the mess the mother just made! Joanna also forces the poor girl to “take out the trash” which turns out to be a bag tied up with the family’s pet cat, then blames her when the brother worriedly searches for the cat. And when Michiko, who becomes one half of the Badass and Child Duo of the series, kidnaps Hana, the father decides to try to out and out murder her for the insurance money.
• One Piece: Nico Robin's childhood was dominated by being forced to work by her Aunt, cleaning the house for reward of little food and even less warmth. She was even excluded from family outings...then things got worse.
• In one story in Pet Shop of Horrors: Tokyo, a young woman who was formerly a hostess from the Philippines ends up Happily Married to a much older man and has a child with him. For some time, she and her son enjoy a life of blissful luxury, until her husband has a stroke and is unable to remember any of his family or care for himself. His other children (who are all as old as the woman is) nearly turn her and her son out, but ultimately keep her as a servant, while considering her child to be inferior because of his mixed nationality. Even when offered a chance to leave though, the woman refuses to abandon her husband. In the end, her husband dies and leaves a note in his will that his dementia was faked and, impressed by the woman's devotion to him, he leaves her one half of his vast estate, with the other half to be divided amongst his other squabbling children.
• In Tokyo Ghoul:re, Battle Butler Sobriquet Sex Switch Kanae von Rosewald (Karren) went from the youngest child of an extremely wealthy German family... to a servant in the household of her own uncle. Unlike most examples of the trope, she's treated well by everyone there... but there's still something troubling about making your orphaned ten-year-old niece a servant to her only surviving relatives.

Comic Books

• Bunty: Many of the heroines suffer this, either from Abusive Parents or guardians, or people who are holding them and several other children prisoner and forcing them to slave away.
• Usagi Yojimbo: Kitsune's backstory. After her mom who really ran the family business died, her "jellyfish" of a father married a mean and shrewish woman (note: not an actual shrew) who spent all their money and eventually convinced him to sell their daughter to an inn.

Fairy Tales

• Cinderella, including such variants as Yeh-Shen, The Story of Tam and Cam, The Sharp Grey Sheep, and Rushen Coatie. All these stories are about a girl who is forced into servitude by her family. Most stories about people becoming servants to their family will usually be references to Cinderella, and many are covered in Cinderella Plot.
  • In Finette Cendron, and Fair, Brown, and Trembling, the heroine's sisters do the same thing.
• In The Three Little Men in the Wood, the Wicked Stepmother oppresses her stepdaughter until she sends her into the woods on an Impossible Task to kill her.
• In The Well of the World's End, heavy housework again culminated in an Impossible Task.
• In Vasilissa the Beautiful, the heroine has to do all the housework, managing only with her magical doll, until her stepsisters send her to get fire from Baba Yaga.
• In The Green Knight, Cenerentola, and The Hearth Cat, the stepmother had actually persuaded the stepdaughter to ask her father to marry her, but proceeded to oppress her as soon as she was married.
• In Katie Woodencloak, the stepmother turned Katie out to tend the cows. When she finds that a dun cow is magically helping her, she sets out to have the cow killed. Katie ran away and found a job working in the kitchen.
• In Mother Holle, the main character is left to her stepmother's mercy after her father's death. She is mistreated and forced to work as a slave on a daily basis while her stepsister is favored and pampered. She is compared to Cinderella in-story.
  A widow had two daughters, the one was beautiful and industrious, the other ugly and lazy. She greatly favored the ugly, lazy girl, because she was her own daughter. And the other one had to do all the work, and be the Cinderella of the house.
• In One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes, a witch has 3 daughters, each having one more eye than the other. Because the middle child was common as others, as she had two eyes, she was mistreated, only given food scraps to eat, and forced to walk the goat every day.
• European Folk and Fairy Tales: In Cinder-Maid (a reconstruction of Cinderella), Cinder-Maid's father marries another woman with her own two daughters. The woman makes her step-daughter do "all the drudgery of the house".

Fan Works

• Fanfics for The Loud House:
  • In Put a Bid on It, Lincoln wants money so he can win an auction. His sisters exploit this by having him do all their chores and wait on them in exchange for money.
  • In Whipped, all of Lincoln's sisters except for Leni, Luna, and Lily make him their slave as revenge for his bossing them around in the canon episode "In Tents Debate".
• A sidestory of Pokémon Reset Bloodlines relating reveals that Team Galactic's Mars had this as a child. After her parents died, she was taken in by his uncle and aunt, who were not happy, and treated her like a servant, often throwing her out of the house and beating her up for things such as forgetting to take out the trash.
• whose woods these are (I think I know.) is a "Cinderella" AU, so of course, this trope applies. Adrien's mother died but his father is still alive during the story. In fact, he's even worse than Adrien's Wicked Stepmother, in a sense. Shortly after remarrying to Audrey, Gabriel disowned Adrien and promised his inheritance to his stepsister instead, and actually watches and allows Audrey to abuse Adrien and treat him like a servant. It's a rare example where the biological parent is the one directly responsible for the child's misery instead of the Wicked Stepmother figure.

Films — Animated

• Angelica, in Titanic: The Legend Goes On, is basically a Cinderella expy, complete with the evil stepfamily. It's not made entirely clear how they became her stepfamily since her father is never seen and her mother is still alive, but they definitely treat her like Cinderella; in one scene, one stepsister even deliberately smashes a teacup just to make her clean up the mess.

Films — Live-Action

• Beauty and the Beast (1946): Even before their father becomes poor, Belle is shown slaving away while her sisters and brother do nothing, without explanation. After Belle comes back from Beast's castle, her sisters initially treat her fairly out of self-serving interest, but after they convince her to stay they start abusing her verbally again and pushing back on her the chores they were forced to do in her absence.
• Blancanieves: Carmen is raised by her loving grandmother after her father shunned her out of grief because her mother died at childbirth. After he becomes quadriplegic in a bullfighting accident, he marries his nurse Encarna, but the woman is revealed to be a sadistic monster. When Carmen has to live with them because her grandmother died, Encarna crops her shoulder-length locks, turns her into a slave and forbids her from seeing her father. When she discovers that the little girl is disobeying her, she has Carmen's rooster pet killed and served as dinner.
• Descendants: The treatment Dizzy receives from her grandmother; a.k.a., Cinderella's Wicked Stepmother. She's seen cleaning up in the shop when Evie visits, but nonetheless she keeps her spirits up.
• Ever After starring Drew Barrymore, situates the story of Cinderella in medieval France and gives her Leonardo da Vinci instead of a Fairy Godmother.
• In Faithful Heart, Marie's foster parents force her to work as a barmaid at the tavern they own.
• Mickey: Mickey is forced to work as a servant at her aunt's mansion after the Drakes find out that Mickey is broke.
• Rags: While Charlie isn't shown waiting on his stepfamily, he is expected to work the family's restaurant and do a variety of chores every day for no pay. His stepfather, Arthur, clearly sees him as little more than an employee because he constantly threatens to dock his pay (which Charlie has to remind him doesn't exist) and taunts him about things like getting a "promotion" when he has to run karaoke, or how he'll be the one cleaning out his stepbrother's dressing rooms when they make it big.

Literature

• In Anne of Green Gables, Anne lived with a few stern, bossy foster parents — who were alcoholics, and made her care for six children before she even turned twelve — and this is Anne's account downplaying how bad they were before she moved in with the kinder Marilla and Matthew, who are conservative and stern but also care for her well-being. In Avonlea, her talents and traits are allowed to blossom, which bring her rewards in addition to Matthew and (eventually) Marilla's love.
• Artemis Fowl: A rare Laser-Guided Karma example mixed with Black Comedy. In The Opal Deception, the villainess Opal is flying from the LEP when she crashes into the plantation of an old Italian woman, and manages to use the last of her remaining magic to hypnotize the woman into thinking that Opal is her daughter Belinda, a trick she'd once used on a rich man who spoiled her rotten. Instead, the old woman immediately treats Opal as her slave, forcing to do all the chores on the farm under the threat of locking her up without food, and telling her to not make faces because Misery Builds Character. When the LEP found Opal, her hands were completely ruined from working on the woman's vineyard, doing all the laundry, cleaning the pig pen and peeling uncountable piles of potatoes, and she was practically begging them to take her to jail.
• Marian's situation in Black Jewels before meeting the other main characters. She was the least favored daughter of her family and had to do all the housework.
• Ella Enchanted: It's basically a retelling of "Cinderella" in which Ella's stepmother becomes angry at her for living in her house like a lady when she is actually poor, so when Ella's father Sir Peter is away on business, she turns Ella into a servant.
• Played With in the Danielle Steel novel Fairytale is a Whole-Plot Reference to Cinderella, with the Gender Flip of two wicked stepbrothers. While she never has to become a servant to them and her Wicked Stepmother, the woman does banish her to the servants' quarters of her house after her father's death during the ensuing legal battle of who gets the property.
• The Flame and the Flower: Heather's parents are dead; she lives with her aunt, who abuses her, dresses her in rags, and treats her as an unpaid servant.
• In Harry Potter, the orphaned Harry was adopted by his aunt and uncle but is essentially treated like a servant rather than a son. While the Dursleys endlessly spoil their biological son, they force Harry to do endless chores, wear only hand-me-downs, eat substandard food, and live in a cupboard. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, for example, they force him to spend all day (on his birthday!) cleaning the house and mowing the lawn in preparation for a dinner party, only to lock him in his room during the actual party. Fortunately, the Dursleys suffered the karma for their actions, with the party ruined. Later in the series, the Dursleys lose their power over Harry as he gains guardians and friends who care for him. By book 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the Dursleys were threatened by Harry's new friends and family not to mistreat him, which they fearfully complied with. When Dumbledore pays them a visit in Book 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, he delivers a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the Dursleys outlining what terrible guardians they were.
• The Iron King: Titania puts Meghan to work in the Seelie Court's kitchens to get back at her husband for cheating on her. It only lasts until Elysium, when Meghan's expected to look like a princess.
• Downplayed in Jacky Ha Ha. While her parents largely weren't around, Jacky and most of her sisters did the housework. Unfortunately, being the middle child of the family, she was saddled with the most degrading tasks (i.e. cleaning the bathroom).
• James and the Giant Peach: After an escaped rhino eats James' parents, James goes to live with his two cruel aunts, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, who play this trope to its hilt.
• A Little Bush Maid: Tommy goes from living with her wealthy Aunt Margaret in Paris to being an unpaid governess and maid in her step-mother's home.
• Loskutik And The Cloud: By the beginning of the book, Loskutik has had several abusive guardians, who only wanted a Butt-Monkey servant.
• The Lunar Chronicles: Linh Cinder is a cyborg, meaning she is considered a second-class citizen. After her adoptive father died, his wife, Linh Adri, blamed Cinder for it and forced her to act as the breadwinner of the family by working as a mechanic, as well as doing all the work around the house.
• Fanny Price of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is, ironically, sent to live with her rich uncle and aunts because they could logically offer her a better life than her parents could. Her aunt Mrs. Norris turns out to be a Wicked Stepmother in all but name, and even though her uncle and other aunt show her kindness, Mrs. Norris never allows Fanny to forget that she is a charity case.
• In Mary, Bloody Mary, Mary goes from a princess and heir to the throne to a nursemaid to her own half-sister who wears ragged hand-me-downs.
• My Happy Marriage: Miyo, the oldest daughter of the Saimori family, is deemed to be worthless because she doesn't have a "gift", and is forced to work as a lowly servant for her father, stepmother, and half-sister. When she's old enough to marry Miyo's betrothed to Kiyoka Kudo, a powerful gifted military officer known for chasing away any fiancees, both to finally get her out of the Saimori household, and to keep the powerful Kudo family from gaining even more power.
• The Mug and Spoon: The princess was forced to work like a slave by her stepmother. Ultimately subverted. This is just a cover story to explain why the "princesses" are so skilled in household chores.
• A Song of Ice and Fire is set in a pseudo-medieval world where highborn men having acknowledged bastard children is a normal, if rocky, part of their society. If these children are brought into their fathers' homes after any fashion, it's usually in a servant role — particularly for bastard daughters.
  • Falia Flowers, the bastard daughter of Lord Humfrey Hewett, was raised in her father's castle but was made a servant while her legitimate half-sisters lived in luxury. When the Ironborn pirates conquer the Shield Islands, Falia sides with them and gets revenge on her stepmother and half-sisters by making them strip off their gowns and serve the pirates while naked.
  • Alys Rivers is the bastard daughter of House Strong, and she serves at their castle as a wet nurse for decades. In their world, wet nurses aren't just for orphans — highborn women sometimes elect to have lowborn women nurse their babies for them. This means there's a particularly acute class angle to Alys's role.

Live-Action TV

• The Brittas Empire: Carole's stepmother forced her to give up her dreams of being a pianist, instead forcing her to go beauty school and to do domestic chores (installing a Stay in the Kitchen mindset into her, claiming that was all she was good for). Poor Carole hasn't managed to escape this fate even in adulthood, despite no longer living with her stepmother (and being homeless) as in "Mums and Dads" she forces her to clean her house, whilst taking her two daughters to a grand ball.
• Eerie, Indiana: In the episode "Who's Who", Sarah Bob was a virtual slave who had to cook and clean and mend the clothes of her brothers and father despite being about 12 years old.
• Open All Hours: It's all but stated that Arkwright adopting his nephew Granville following his sister's death was less out of familial love and more an excuse for a cheap source of labour, with him having Granville work for him in his corner shop since he was fourteen and Granville still working for him as an errand boy well into adulthood.
• The Tales from the Crypt episode "Fitting Punishment" is based around a homeless, orphaned teenager being sent to live with his Evil Uncle. The uncle uses the boy as slave labour in his mortuary, verbally and physically abuses him, cripples him during a beating, and then murders him because the boy is costing too much money to keep. Eventually the boy returns as a zombie and kills his uncle.

Theater

• In The Twelve Months, the heroine is forced to be a servant to her Wicked Stepmother and stepsister who keep her on bread and water and have no qualms about sending her to an Impossible Task of picking flowers in midwinter.

Video Games

• In the fifth installment of the Dark Parables series, the character Katherine has this as her backstory. A small side story within the game explains that after their parents' deaths, she and her stepsister Cyrilla were left in the care of an Evil Uncle who forced them to basically work as unpaid domestic servants. This is particularly fitting since Katherine is the title character of the game — The Final Cinderella.
• In Punishing: Gray Raven, Liv's father remarried, and her new step-family promptly began neglecting her and treating like a servant, until her fortunes turned around. Though in this case, Liv didn't meet a prince and marry into royalty: she enlisted in the army as a medic in lieu of her step-siblings, nearly died saving soldiers on the frontline, and was transformed into a combat cyborg lauded as a war hero, who is still fighting when the game begins.

Western Animation

• The Garfield Show: Played for Laughs in Farm Fresh Feline. Jon drags Garfield to go with him and Odie to help his brother with the farm. They ask Dr. Whipple to mesmerize Garfield into becoming enthusiastic about work, so he'll do all the chores while Jon, his brother, the doctor, and Odie have lunch and watch TV. The hypnosis effect ends when Garfield falls from a ladder and he gets revenge by hypnotizing the four into mimicking whatever happens on TV.
• The Loud House: In "A Tattler's Tale", Lola listens in on her siblings sharing their secrets, and threatens to rat them out to their parents. She blackmails them by making them do many things (like take the marshmallows out of her cereal so she can only eat them, and making them sing Old McDonald.)
• The Pied Piper: The children of Hamelin have to do all the housework that the adults were supposed to be doing. The Pied Piper lures them away, taking the kids to a magic place inside a mountain where they are free to play.
• The 1980s version of Pound Puppies has Holly, an orphan who is constantly abused/exploited by her aunt and cousin. By the end of the first season, it was implied she inherited their house and lived happily ever after. Then came the second season, where her aunt took over the pound and forced the puppies underground.
• In Steven Universe, this trope is the whole premise of the Show Within a Show Li'l Butler, a sitcom where a rich family finds a baby abandoned on their doorstep, so they adopt him to be their butler.

---