@sakaay:
I mean, if we're going to talk about enlightened morals, the protagonist enslaving everything in sight is clearly crossing some big fat red lines... To speak of the right of every sentient being to live (...until that right is forfeited, I guess the argument goes?) is one thing, but what of their right to free will? (The fact that his appears to be a charm-type enslavement doesn't really make it better; that would be like force-feeding someone opium and then going, "look, they're happy, I haven't done anything bad to them!")
More fundamentally, though, the scene that unfolded, wherein the beloved sidekick was (temporarily) offed, would have looked very much to our now-zombie bloke like the monsters
were attacking the village (and indeed it was interpreted as such)—not just a matter of fantasy-world racism-judgement because they are normally in a state of perpetual war with each other or some such. It's really hard to say "they deserved it" (on that count, anyway) from an objective view of what they would have thought was going on, even if the end-result was tragic and enraging.