Book 4, Chapter 8: Bonds Of Many Forms
Another less salutary aspect of both human and draconic societies was that both of them made use of forced labor by members of their own species as a direct result of social stratification. While humanity’s more intricate social structures allowed for more sophistication in the forms of unfree labor they used, ranging from direct chattel slavery to bonded labor, serfdom, forced marriage, and more across the vast majority of historical human civilizations in every inhabited region, dragons likewise made use of unwilling labor by their fellows. Thengills routinely required significant ‘rents’ in the form of food and other services to allow access to nesting sites, such as forcing dragons with significant adaptations towards tunneling and digging to expand the volume of the nest, despite the personal risks of entombment or asphyxiation, along with other abuses such as forced matings and brood parasitism.
Resultingly, it is generally seen as an inevitability that, following the Norse alliance with dragons as equal partners backing an ideological opposition to exploited labor, oppositional groups quickly arose based around humans exploiting dragons and, in mirror, dragons exploiting humans. After all, they were already used to exploiting their own species and extending that exploitation was a natural outgrowth.
—The Dragon Millennium, Manna-hata University Press Ltd.
Tropes that appear in this chapter:
- Content Warnings:Chapter Trigger Warnings: Explicit Mention of Past Rape, Explicit Depiction of Family Conflict, Explicit Depictions of Slavery
- Double-Meaning Title: The chapter title Bonds Of Many Forms has several different meanings. One meaning is emotional bonds such as family bonds like that between Esther and her family, and the other is literal physical bonds on human slaves owned by other humans, as well as metaphorical bonds on human slaves owned by dragons.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Not evil but a Ghanaian warrior doesn’t believe that Berk are using dragons for trade.“The traders were speaking of stories from the north, beyond the desert, that some great warriors tamed the beasts, and have been going around starting trade.”“Wishful thinking, say I,” said another man—a warrior, carrying a spear and shield. “Who would waste such an advantage?”
- Loophole Abuse: When Isioma asks Tuffnut why he wants her to teach him the languages she knows, he explains that, aside from it being useful for his job as Magnus' herald, The Bet he made with Ruffnut never said the languages they learn had to be from where they're from.
- Made a Slave: Furious' Dragons have begun capturing humans to be slaves for them.
- Rape as Backstory: Cwen used to be a prostitute and the brothel owner would as she put it “sample his own goods” with no regard of the women's consent.
- Slave Liberation: Hiccup frees the slaves that the King of Ghana gifts to him.
- Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: The epigraph makes clear that humans and dragons both practicing slavery, regardless of the forms it took, is a huge black mark on both species.
- Tears of Joy: The slaves Hiccup frees cry happy tears upon their freedom.
- Unwanted Spouse: Esther did not want any spouse, so her seeing the marriage contract her father drafted without her consent prompts her to invoke the Bog Burglar sanctuary laws to make absolutely clear to him that any marriage is unwanted.
