I’m rewatching inuyasha and have no one to talk to about the fact that Kagura should have lived and by doing so the entire Sessh/Rin weirdness could have been completely avoided. Like I have trouble picturing Kagura pregnant but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen and half the time in fairy tales of all locales the kids pop out of the dad’s migraine or some shit and honestly they’d also make amazing godparents (or whatever the equivalent is) to a half dozen adopted mortals and their bloodlines. I’m mad about it and commenting on ao3 fics for this fandom is like screaming into the void.
The show also hits viewers over the head that there are morals that the crew won’t cross, like stealing medicine from that town. It is also in the opening song that, because of the war and his service, Mal can’t exactly settle down and be a good law abiding citizen, so he takes jobs of dubious legality since they pay better.
Mal is the same kind of bad that Han Solo was painted as in Star Wars. He’s not a nice guy, but more neutral than evil and will perform good acts at times.
The show also played up the Alliance as being more absolutely evil because it had to in order to justify Mal.
There is an unreliable narrator happening here. The source of most of the information about the Alliance is from the crew. Notably, Shepard and Inara do not share those views. Zoe and Mal have very strong opinions about the alliance and the Doctor and River help feed that narrative. But the things they don’t say out loud paint a very different picture. I think had the show gone on, the brown coats would gradually have become another villain and Mal would have had to contend with the reality of who he was fighting for.