Basic Trope: A character is taken captive and sold as a slave.
- Straight:
- Alice is on shipboard when pirates take it; they sell her to a slave merchant, who brings her to market, where she is inspected as so much merchandise.
- Bob is captured among the losing army and sold with the rest of the defeated soldiers.
- King Edgar executes all adults captured on a pirate base but mercifully sentences the youngsters to slavery.
- Human Traffickers knock Charlie unconscious in an alley and bundle him onto a ship as human cargo.
- Exaggerated: The fabulously wealthy but militarily incompetent King Bob the Nth is captured while leading his troops in battle. Though his captors are aware of his identity and thus of how much of a valuable hostage he is, they still sell him as just another slave, for a minimal fraction of what they'd get for his ransom.
- Downplayed:
- At a port, Alice and everyone else on board must perform tasks for the governor for three days.
- Bob works without pay as a war prisoner.
- Alice pays for her passage by pawning her work as an indentured servant.
- Alice becomes Bob's "slave" for one day after losing a card game to him.
- Justified:
- Slaving is a major industry and the pirates' greatest profit.
- The army doesn't want their opponents to go free to attack them again, can't support them in idleness, and doesn't want to slaughter them all.
- Bob was captured by the navy while engaged in piracy and human trafficking. A judge ordered him sold to the family of one or more of his captives.
- Inverted:
- Alice and her master are on shipboard when pirates take it; they can get no ransom for her and so dump her off at some port.
- The losing army was mostly composed of slaves; the victors emancipate them.
- A free character voluntarily enters slavery, possibly to be released against their will later on.
- Alice is a slave on board a ship which is then captured by pirates. They offer her the chance to join as a free woman as part of their crew.
- Alice is a slave who is bought by Bob. Bob then destroys all documents which show him owning her, so he can make her free.
- The government abolishes slavery, making all slaves freedmen overnight.
- Subverted:
- The pirates threaten to enslave all their captives to ensure their letters home to beg for ransoms are imploring enough.
- Everyone sold to slave merchants by the pirates was already a slave.
- Double Subverted: The ransoms are pocketed, and the pirates sell them as slaves anyway.
- Parodied:
- Alice steals Bob's toaster and resells it. This is treated by the characters as a heinous violation of human rights.
- After being caught shoplifting, Upper-Class Twit Evan is sentenced to 12 days of community service in retail. He considers this akin to being enslaved and keeps telling others about how much he yearns for freedom and what a terrible breach of human rights this is.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice is captured to be enslaved; raiders on the market have no interest in her and let her go free; trying to get back home, she is captured by bandits, who proceed to sell her; she leads the other slaves to revolt; another slave, unscrupulous, overpowers her and sells her to buy himself passage home; the others among them find this out and break her free again.
- Bob is captured after the battle and enslaved; the king offers the enslaved soldiers their freedom if they fight for him; he sends them somewhere where he does not mind losing soldiers; they are captured and enslaved again; this king offers them their freedom and some farmland on his borders so they will take the brunt of any invasion.
- Averted: Slavery is not legal and so not profitable.
- Enforced: "They can't kill Alice, but we need some way to show how evil they are."
- Invoked: The pirate captain explains to his men that they enslave captives as part of psychological warfare.
- Exploited:
- Alice deliberately took the ship as she knew of the danger. She knows she can find her father's murderer in the cities the pirates will sell her and can't get there otherwise.
- The orphaned Bob offers himself a slave to the local lord, knowing that it will show off how rich the lord is, and the lord will have to feed him.
- Carol's parents sell her as a slave so they can buy enough food to survive.
- Defied: "They'll enslave us — but only if they take us alive."
- Discussed: "We're only alive so they can sell us, you'll see."
- Implied: Bob, who knew Alice years ago, finds her again, working at a tavern. Everything seems fine until he notices that she is wearing a thin iron collar around her neck and has a letter-shaped burn in her arm...
- Intended Audience Reaction: "The protagonist enters an auction block. Half-naked women stand next to the wall with affixed signs showing their age and price. Captured foreigners are tied together, and a palace messenger asks if they can make several of these barbarians into eunuchs and teach them basic commands in their civilized language. A slaver is about to whip a dark-skinned boy with a fierce look tied to a post who spat at a prospective client into unconsciousness. A corpulent middle-aged man inspects the teeth of a girl who can't be older than thirteen and desperately clings to her mother's arm. She is then promptly ripped away from her and led away while crying and begging. Her new owner kicks her to make her go faster. The protagonist frowns; his wrists still remember when he stood here in chains, people who wouldn't even look him in the eye inspecting him like cattle. It's decided… he grips the hilt of his weapon."
- Deconstructed:
- Pirates enslave their captives to do the manual labor they scorn until one night at the pirate port when the slaves drug the wine and massacre them.
- King Bob the Tyrant eases the life of his subjects by slave raids to get the necessary labor. Mad Scientist rivals in the raided countries automate many processes that Bob's subjects don't worry about since they have labor, until one day, the Mad Scientist Alice unleashes her War Machines and overruns them.
- Reconstructed: The captives enslaved by the pirates drugged their wine, but after several pirates fell asleep soon after each other, the unaffected rest of the port realized what's happening. They quickly overcame the inexperienced slaves armed with improvised weapons and brutally executed several slaves to deter future rebellions. For the fear for their lives, some slaves would then even feel compelled to report any slight disobedience to their masters to avoid any further bloody revenge.
- Logical Extreme: Slavery is a long, deeply-ingrained tradition blooming across the whole nation. Slaves are even used for hunting ew slaves, and eventually, their numbers surpass the number of full-fledged citizens. As such, most of the country's resources and manpower are used on micromanaging and guarding the slaves, and the nation slowly ceases to be productive. Eventually, the slave majority realizes they can lead an uprising against the weakened nation's citizens who, after so long of being used to delegating their less pleasant duties onto the slaves, cannot effectively live without them or defend themselves. The newly freed slaves enslave all their former masters as an act of revenge.
Now go back to Made a Slave. You don't control your fate anymore.
