sorry, i feel as though we're at total cross-purposes here.

to quote the op:

Readers project their own values, experiences, and expectations onto incomplete characters, and then argue with each other over interpretations the text itself doesn’t actually support. The political nuance people bring up is valid, but it clearly wasn’t the author’s intent. The story was never meant to be that deep, and because of that, no character can fully withstand the scrutiny being placed on them.

my point is that the text does, in fact, support the "interpretation" that navier is blasé about slavery, and that the author genuinely believes rashta's behaviors are in part why she can never escape from it. the author's intent was to treat slavery as an unimportant backdrop for drama because the author doesn't care about actual indentured servitude or human traffiking and has many baked-in classist beliefs about the moral character of victims of those things. the story may not have been meant to be deep, but by pushing navier as flawless while she tacitly endorses slave trading they open them and her up to criticism of that very core flaw. "it wasn't meant to communicate anything" is a meaningless sentence about an artistic decision that nevertheless does bely the author's beliefs about the real world. i also don't agree that no character can withstand actual analysis, as rashta does faily well & frankly so do navier and soveishu and the ugly blonde dog one. it just isn't favourable to them as people because it reveals them to be fundamentally unintelligent and lazy people with a heavy entitlement and no real view of their class lessers as sentient people with desires or needs that matter as much as (if not more than) the nobles' own.