Markup View

Author: SisterDizzy

May 30th 2010 at 8:45:16 PM

I think Cinderella, in it's Disney incarnation, at any rate, has a classic subversion of this, with animals such as song birds and mice filling in as handmaids for the girl who's treated as a maid herself.

Another Disney version of this trope would be in BeautyAndTheBeast in which the servants have all been enchanted into animate inanimate objects.

TheBoondocks has yet another subversion. It's implied APimpNamedSlickback uses his "hoes" for this purpose.

Of course, you'd be hard pressed not to find examples of this in spades through out history. Most leaders of a national scale, and their lords under them, have a huge number of retainers. Kings, Queens, Barons, Dukes, Presidents, Emperors, Empresses, Pharoahs, Daimyos, Sheiks, Sultans, Rajahs, so on and so forth.

In MemoirsOfAGeisha the heroine was part of a small version of this, but it is also possible that a much more lucrative place might have even more.

Any large hotel or resort is going to have a huge staff such as this. As are cruise ships.

Any large enough business retain cleaners for their office buildings. There are also house cleaning services, some of which are actually fairly large themselves.