The Scenario: A set of highly skilled people have been conjured from Earth to a fantasy universe, to save the world from an evil sorcerer. They successfully accomplish this task, saving all of the Elves, Humans, mer-people, and other races from a tyrannical dictatorship.
The woman who conjured them into this realm messes up the incantation to send them back to Earth, however. As a result, the spell has fractured into some number of parts that have spread across the face of the fantasy realm, stamped like tattoos on the skin of female Elves. The only way for our group of saviors to return home is to search down and collect the fragments of the spell.
The catch, however, is that female Elves are amazingly private when it comes to any physical imperfections. They would never reveal that they had such markings on their person to anyone. They certainly wouldn’t volunteer the information to a group of people they don’t know, heroes or not.
The only way for our group of saviors to return to Earth is to hunt down and forcedly strip every Elven woman that they come across. They will never cause that person any real physical harm in doing this, nor do they gain any personal satisfaction from making women strip.
Morally, as saviors of the planet, do they have the right to strip any Elven woman they come across? Does it help that they perform further heroic acts as they go along searching the planet? And does it help that out of their group of 4, 3 are women?
Everyone involved was a moron. Aside from the fact that the travelers were stupid enough to never, ever explain what they were doing (they just apologized as they stripped the elves), the elves both knew the situation from the start, and took forever to get around to realizing that they merely needed to get off their duffs and find the marked elves themselves, using less tactless means.
When they did get around to it, they found the last two marked elves in, apparently, a matter of days.
I’m not sure that they have any better options in the Those Who Hunt Elves universe. The guardians of the elven world know what’s happened, but don’t seem to have any better ideas on what to do.
Technically, it’s a manga that had its jokes imported into an anime that abridged some of the story and character development. The differences are very subtle, but whereas the anime get a few chuckles, the manga is actually quite endearing.
Oh, I dunno about that. If nothing else they could have had the women do the stripping, rather than having the one man to do pretty much all of it. (Yes, he was a bit hard to control when he got moving. No, the others didn’t even try.)
The series is pretty much built from the foundation up on “this is unjustifiable”.
I’d say no, they don’t have the right. They aren’t faced with imminent death, and realistically running around assaulting women one by one is more likely to get you mobbed and hacked to tiny pieces long before you find what you are looking for. Which means you are sexually harassing elves and aren’t even accomplishing anything in the process. Well, except for possibly improving the gene pool by killing yourself off…
Yeah, but this is anime/manga - that’s pretty much par for the course.
The morality of the scenario is shot completely to hell, in my personal opinion. Though, as noted, that’s not entirely due to the scenario itself - it is in large part based on the fact that none of the participarts seem to notice the many other varyingly-less-immoral courses of action they could pursue.
They had certain advantages against being mobbed and hacked up, including but not limited to having both high-powered magic and high powered weaponry in a mideval setting, including a tank.
See post 2. In the anime, at least, the elves exercised a faster and more moral route…when they were getting close to the end of season 1 and needed to wrap things up.
I will put on my Evil Overlord hat to answer this question:
The most likely reason the runes or whatnot are on the bodies of the Elvenwomen is to provoke mortal Men into doing something stupid like stripping them for this information. That’s why I would do it.