I will say this much. When you, as a creator, use real world oppression as "inspiration" or a metaphor for fictional oppression in your fantasy world, that comes with a lot of responsibility.
It's not a la carte, you can't pick and choose the flavour you like best, while leaving the rest behind. You own the whole package *and* its implications. You can't use American chattel slavery of Black people as a metaphor, then check out of it when it's too heavy.
If you base your story on that, you own all the implications of that metaphor. Up to and including, "you all really liked this slave, so here's DLC to let you get her back." In the language *you chose to tell your story in*, that's monstrous.
And this goes to certain criticisms I've been developing about Dragon Age, because the more you think about the Elf storyline in DAI the worse it gets when you consider they're based on Jews and Native Americans.
You own the implications of your influences. "It's like Jewish Ghettos and the Trail of Tears... but they were all secretly descended from evil imperialist slave owners and are going to start an apocalyptic race war now!" You see why this...grates?
How it might leak out of the game and play into narratives that are actually deeply disturbing and have real world consequences for people?
At *best*, it makes you seem deeply reckless with long-abused histories that need nurturing rather than plundering. This is one of many reasons why hackneyed fantasy/sci-fi "metaphors" for race are just bad on an artistic level, never mind a moral one.
So why can't you pick and choose when using real world oppression as a metaphor in your story? Because symbols mean things, and that meaning is determined by collective forces well beyond your control. When you adopt the symbol, you adopt the *entirety* of its context.
"Slavery" means something, has a suite of associations, a history, intergenerational trauma. You can arbitrarily say, "okay the metaphor stops here." ...but it won't matter. The nature of the symbol overrides that.
(Bonus protip: this is why you can't singlehandedly reclaim slurs or bigoted language. What it "means" is determined collectively, through how most people use it, and in what situations it's used. Your feeble one-man show won't change that.)
