It's been a while since the mangas ended now. Why did nobody ever bring this up? Literal pdf-lia? Even if we give Mitsuharu the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's just manipulating these kids to get them to do his bidding and isn't actually attracted to them, it's still incredibly screwed up. Especially since... This is the exactly the thing that they're giving Shinpei shit for? Killing through a middleman is still murder, especially if these middle men are little girls.

 

It's just so comical to me how these girls are literally exactly the same as Shinpei. Poverty struck children forced into working as assassins. If you think about it, the way they get treated is eye opening because it shows us the actual morality of the people condemning Shinpei. Mind you, these kids are still murderers. I won't blame them since they're child soldiers. Blame Mistuharu, his family and the rest of the nobility instead. But if we're judging them according to the same measures they  judged Shinpei with, they're still killers deserving condemnation. Yet Mitsuharu lavishes them with praise and Satoko virtue signals by feigning concern for their well being (never mind the fact that only a few days after the wedding, she sent them out with Shinpei to attack adversaries of the Okumura family - while still recovering from traumatic injuries). But Shinpei is monstrous, according to them. Yet there is basically no difference in their acts. The triplets just get this praise because they only kill "approved targets". Not because what they do is morally any better. But I bet you my last cent, if these kids some day snap from all the trauma and go killing someone their overlords don't approve of - they'll get exactly the same treatment that Shinpei got. The same people that lavished them with praise and pretended to care about them will decry them as monsters that ought to be put down.

Here's a quote that resonates: "(The worker is) indeed the most wretched of commodities".

This applies to Shinpei so well because that's exactly what these nobles treated him as.  The main point is that Shinpei was only a tool with a role to fulfill for the aristocrats. But the second he had outlived his usefulness, the moment he snapped under all the pressure and commited crimes they didn't order him to commit, they threw him away like he was trash. Shinpei wasn't treated as human, he was treated as a defective product. They were only mad at him for not doing as they wanted him to do. Killing has nothing to do with it. And nobody cared about his mental and physical health in the first place. Satoko put up a front of concern, but expected him to act fine and happy for her as soon as "all was resolved". And as mentioned above, she sent him back to the front lines a few days after a nearly lethal battle. And in the end, what is Shinpeis redemption? His healing? His salvation? It is escaping the garbage heap for a few more decades of toil as the butchers knife in the hand of the nobility (isn't it interesting how, during the separation period, when Shinpei did "good deeds" to atone, he never freed prostitutes? He never fought the root causes of poverty? Instead he serves the Okumura family and protected the homes of people who already have something in a world where many have nothing).

This was so wrong on so many levels