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Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

Human!Rocky wakes up from his coma to find his crewmates dead. He's an engineer. He is not equipped to solve this by himself. He's all alone and he's not a scientist but if he doesn't do something then his crew died in vain, and so will he, and then so will Earth. So he does the only thing he can do, and tries to teach himself microbiology from scratch, in a last ditch effort to make himself useful. Even with food for three he knows his time is limited, so he's under-eating. He's not sleeping. He's reading pirated textbooks he doesn't understand and all the while he knows this effort is in vain. He can't teach himself to become an expert in Astrophage in a handful of years all by himself. But if he doesn't try, then this has all been a waste. He has to try.

It's been years and he's still trying.

He knows he's going to die trying.

There's only enough food left for maybe another year, if that. There are suicide methods on the ship to use instead of starving, but if he kills himself when he runs out of food then he's admitting defeat. He's going to starve to death reading research papers that still go over his head, trying to brute force his way to a solution he knows is out of reach. He's programmed Mary to look for his life signs and launch the Beatles when he dies, so at least Earth will know. They just contain one message: I'm sorry that I failed you.

Meanwhile Eridian!Grace is a scientist. A scientist who was forced to go to space against his will, because Eridians make decisions by committee, and he got outvoted, his shy voice too quiet to sway the thrum. He doesn't get to make the choice for himself, and there was never any pretense that he would. He still feels betrayed. He tries to run, to hide, at least until launch. He'll take any punishment and social fallout this earns him over the alternative, being sent into the unknown in an untested vessel where any one of a million things can go wrong. They haven't even sent animals to space yet, there's been no testing on living beings, they're moving things far too quickly and it's going to kill them, he knows it will. But eventually he needs to sleep, and Carl, his friend, someone he thought was his friend, someone who knew he was hiding and said nothing, says he'll watch.

Grace settles in for sleep on Erid, and wakes up on a ship already in space. He knows instantly that he's been betrayed, in the worst sort of way, harmed in his sleep by the very person who promised to watch. He no longer wants to be watched in his sleep, and refuses to rest unless he's alone. And he is alone, often, confined to the lab and his quarters, not allowed to leave for fear of sabotage or lashing out, because he made it very clear that he never wanted to be here in the first place. In the end, this confinement saves his life. He's the only one constantly shielded by Astrophage from radiation.

He was right.

He hates that he was right.

They moved ahead too fast with too little testing, and they're paying for it. The ship is approaching it's destination with a crew of one, and Grace is resigning himself to dying too, maybe slower than the others, but there's no reason he should be spared where they weren't. Even if this doesn't kill him, he can't pilot the ship home, it was designed to be piloted by multiple Eridians at once, he's only able to finish the trip there because it was already plotted out and almost completed when the last pilot succumbed. He can't get home, so even if he managed to figure out how to save his star, he couldn't get the information to anyone that would be able to do anything with it, so what's the point? He's been murdered by his own people and their hubris, and so has the rest of the crew, and it will be a slow, lonely, terrifying death.

Rocky and Grace are both resigned to death and failure, both so sure that these ships will be their coffins, that their deaths will mean nothing.

And then Grace's ship comes into range of the Mary.