She's 15 if I remember right but yea still a child. Sadly, when most adults are dead, children are force to join the army and fight.
It was common for children to go to war, probably still is. Though the legal age for recruitment was 18, due to propaganda which made war seem like a cool thing, a good majority of young adults and teens lied about their age and well the recruiters didn’t care because they desperately need soldiers. Just like demonstrated in the story, money gets sent over to the soldier's families, and in a time of war, people are desperate for money so children would leave home to become soldiers hoping they could help their families.
Though it’s an inaccurate depiction of war, it’s still does a pretty good job to not traumatize us while still trying to demonstrate what it was like. I personally like the fact that they chose to make the MC a teenager, because on a character design standpoint it makes sense if they want to show how powerless war makes a person, since as young soldiers, they would have no autonomy. I personally dislike stories that push the narrative that glorify war by subjecting the main character to little or no consequences at all.
Child soldiers are typically cannon fodder, thrown to the frontlines because they’re expendable. but our MC gets to be the personal punching bag of her superior AND be constantly on the verge of death from enemy attack AND have the opportunities to heal her compatriots but because it’s war, she watches them die. it looks like her ability to heal is *so* she can fail, heal some, but watch the others die to really hone in the fact that her compatriots/friends will die because she FAILED to heal them. she got a three for one special in terms of trauma-related character development, for “reasons.”
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Apparently in the webnovel, she had no choice and was conscripted. Not sure why they changed it in the manga. The commander also wanted a personal healer so ig the higher upside just threw a random one to him without checking anything and that's how she got there.
What’s the point? War is horrible, war is profitable only for those who never even touch the battlegrounds, why even have a CHILD MC on the battlegrounds being brutalized not only by her commanding officer (fye she totally would’ve died if it wasn’t for plot armor, being forced to watch her friends be blown to bits.. all for what? what plot is this? Of course stories about war are important, for us to understand how horrible it is, how intriguing the strategies behind them are, and to show how nations were built/destroyed but why is the author subjecting a CHILD to this? (╯°Д °)╯╧╧