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The main character takes slaves in the first fucking episode, and it just goes downhill from there. She even forces an entire orphanage to do unpaid labor for her. I ended up hating that bitch. Also, "if you don't work, you don't eat" philosophy for children.
Disclaimer: I fully agree with what you're saying. I think child labour, slavery, etc, is bad. I just wanted to present a counterpoint.
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The only good things about Myne's actions is that she's better than the Church is, and her primitive industrialisation will advance the dialectic forward. It's important to note though, that Myne honestly doesn't have much of a choice. I've been told by people in the discord that Xi Jinping doesn't have a magic implement communism button. Neither does Myne. Her options are 1), leave the kids to die like the church was, or 2) get the kids to produce stuff for her so she's not losing money taking care of them. And remember that this isn't a capitalist world yet. Capitalists are not the dominant class in Myne's world, and the only thing keeping her from being completely crushed by the aristocracy is her money. We aren't looking at the Koch brother here, in terms of wealth and power. We're looking at a random peasant with some good ideas that happens to have a connection to a relatively successful merchant. Any failure on her part means being separated from her family and being used as a child sex slave by the nobility. I might be making a thermian argument here, but I think there is a place in the world for stories with (heavily) flawed protagonists.