Isekai and the adjacent genres are all about power fantasy wish fulfillment (or its negation for comedic value, or both), but of a very specific kind where the protagonist is externally different from the reader and at the same time, internally a normal person/a sad loser, just like the reader. A main form this wish fulfillment takes is getting to spend time with attractive women. It is more compelling if they like the protagonist for who they are internally rather than externally, but why would a woman like the reader?

The world needs to be such that the reader would be special in it, and a natural ways to do this include having the main character not be racist towards catgirls or whatever, and not be cruel to their slaves, unlike the general population. We have arrived at weird slave fiction.

Then finally, the way the manga industry works, where the most realistic way to actually make money as an artist is to produce a lot of beginnings of stories that would catch people's attention, causes popular concepts to be iterated endlessly and distilled. Add some misogyny and a lot of horniness, and you have slaveslop.

I’d probably click on some of this cuz I’m a sub

Probably bdsm shit mixed with weebs inability to interface with a woman so much that even in their fantasies they have to purchase the woman to have any interaction.

Presumably cishet men expressing their sense of entitlement to women's bodies, at least primarily. I'm not very familiar with the genre so I'm just going off of vibes.

I wish you said Slavslop...that would have been fun instead. Just quirky little eastern europe stories

further note: I'm not talking about isekai here with this term, by the way. Isekai is a separate though similarly apologetic genre. I'm talking about manga with entire premises that center specifically around 'fixing' a slave and nothing else. No fights, no stakes, barely any world-building besides "fantasy races exist." Hyper-domestic, clearly framed by the author to be wholesome. A lot of the time it's also POVslop, with the main character not being shown to further indulge the escapism. Can also encompass people with diminished social agency (e.g. trafficking victims, lower caste races that are not explicitly enslaved, etc.) being taken under wing by protag and being 'elevated' to domestic living conditions. Outer ends of this overlap with 'fixing abuse victims' slop.

People who idealize Japan love slavery

If this was limited to fansubs, but just now new anime for this season: “you need to buy slave for perfectly understandable reasons” “XY is most trusted slaver in there city”. Now I love my overpowered OP slop as I never got mature person, but hate slave-isekai with a passion.

I think it's just the current micro-trend. Shield Hero did it and was edgy in the laziest ways possible, but that got popular so here come the copycats. Japanese light fiction has a glut of authors so any given "genre" will very quickly get overrun by as many hyper-specific versions of the same thing as you can possibly imagine. It also makes the stories easy to write and easy to produce merch for (which is where the real money comes from) - I mean, imagine having to write a backstory for each of your characters when you can just give them all the same one?

I misread this as "save slop" and thought there might be some form of elitism (by redditors, to be clear) about saving/downloading mangas.

Then I re-read it.

Anyway, the fantasy genre and its consequences...

i would say it's a kink thing but it doesn't really appear to be that at all

Isn't it just a product of most isekai sucking ass and being marketed specifically at shitty people? Seems like more than half that genre is making the main character a former (in a past life) pedo-chronic masturbator-loser-creep to make the character more relatable (?) to the apparently loathsome audience most of the shows are seemingly intended for.