help get them back to their country??? get them out of slavery? Not use them as a child work force that you disguises as uwu wholesome because you gave them some soup and bread? or do i need to just pretend that its totally cool that the hero is just giving a metric shit tonne of money to feed into this slave system thats going to snatch and traffick more children so that mr. slave seller can sell the those displaced kids to the fucking insane perverts that we know are prevalent throughout the kingdom?
no matter how you approach the system, a legal market of slavery is fucking insane to have to interact with as a plot point or to even use as a gag, three seperate families decided to gamble their daughters lifes based on the fact that they know that sheild apperently loves slaves, not knowing if their children would get bought by their cult figure or again, if some creep with enough cash waltzed in.
"oh but shield hero told the slaver to send them home" why would we ever fucking trust this guy? he sells and trafficks children, he has no legal obligation to do shit except take in all the money the mc decides to dole out for the next batch of child slaves the manga wants to pretend hes saveing.
the slave stuff could have just been raph and filo and it would have been fine, a low point in the heros life that turned into a good thing, the orphans could have been from demi human settlements ABOUT to be sold into slavery and it would have worked JUST as well.
the slave stuff is fucking creepy.
He's literally buying back the slaves from a destroyed town to give them their freedom and lives and home back while singlehandedly altering the political stance of the entire fucking country in regards to racial relations. But yeah its just 'child labor uwu wholesome' loli bait. Totally.
It's not a 'gag' that those girls were sent to him as bridal candidates via the slave trader (not actually slaves, and they
are returned to the noble families they come frome) its setting up the intense, fanatical faith in the Shield Hero present in Siltvelt, which becomes important in the future. It's almost like the story is explicitly trying to build up how desperate the people in Siltvelt are to gain control of the Shield Hero, a massively important political pawn on the world stage.
"The slave stuff should've just been Raph and Filo" you do realize the continuation of the work he's doing with the slave trader is to
SAVE the people
ALREADY sold into slavery that he can reach? If he went and murdered the slave trader as some kinda white-knight paladin like you seemingly want, does that end the slave trade? Does that save the potentially hundreds of other displaced people he could save in the future? No. All it does is immediately save whatever slaves the slave trader has on hand (the same as purchasing them would've done) and MASSIVELY RESTRICT HIS ABILITY TO GATHER INFORMATION ON THE SLAVE-TRADE AND FIND LEADS AS TO DISPLACED VILLAGERS FROM RAPHTALIA'S HOMETOWN.
He's literally taking the most logical course of action in the framework of the world he's in to save as many people as possible and you're treating it as if its some kind of horrible evil. "But the money going into the slave tra-" money would go into the slave trade ANYWAYS. Each of those slaves would've been sold eventually ANYWAYS. To people like the 'insane perverts' you mentioned. Would that have been a better outcome? The mole people sold into menial slavery where they're beaten day and night, worked until they die? Fohl being sold to a rich noble who uses him as a bodyguard and status symbol after killing Atla, controlling Fohl with the slave crest? The myriad children from the town being sold to perverts who rape and beat them before killing them off when they're bored of them? Is that the happy better timeline you want the story to take place in?
Yes, slavery is a bad fucking thing. It's not a comfortable topic, its dark, its painful, and it comes with a lot of creep, feel bad vibes. But one person alone, even with the current political influence Naofumi has, cannot end fucking slavery. It takes a massive movement and cooperation between diverse countries to end the slave trade. Do you think if you became a prominent American senator you could stop the exploitation of the Uyghur people in China overnight? Bad fucking things happen, and people get exploited. Even outside the bonds of what we traditionally call slavery, exploitation continues, to this day, in our real world. Hell, human trafficking still occurs in America to some degree.
Even if Naofumi COULD end slavery then and there, that wouldn't immediately fix all the problems. You have to consider what happens next. What happens with all the penal slaves when you suddenly end slavery overnight? All the rapists and murderers who are suddenly freed? Do they turn over a new leaf and become good people? Or do they go right back to murdering and raping? Does the lack of a support system drive freed slaves in foreign lands with no homes and work to banditry? Do local villagers simply kill freed slaves to ensure they don't turn against their former cruel masters? W
I dislike the fact slavery is a thing Naofumi has to deal with too, but if you think about it logically, he's doing pretty fucking good for what he realistically can do at this point in the story. I hope it does reach a point where he can get nations across the isekai world to agree slavery is bad and start working towards emancipation, but at the current moment, this is the best we can hope for, and him interacting with the monster that is the slave trade does let him save people, regardless of the uncomfortable vibes around it. There's a reason the slave traders are made so despicable; they're not meant to be good people and we're not supposed to see slavery as a good thing contextually in the story, unlike in a lot of isekai trash manga where slavery is treated as a throwaway happy-go-lucky tool to supply the MC with loving bimbos for his harem.
