I don’t normally like to go, “this character would not do this”, because they’re fictional, I’m not the writer, etc… but Fates having Severa, of all people, dump her child in an alternate dimension to grow up is just horrific characterization
Japan has a word for being worked to death by your own job. It's called karoshi. The government recognizes it, counts it every year, and pays your family if it happens to you. Last year the count hit the highest number ever recorded.
There's a number that decides it: 80 hours of overtime in a single month. Labor officials call it the karoshi line. Cross it, then drop dead from a stroke or heart attack, or take your own life, and the state rules that the job did it. Your family gets paid. And 80 hours is two extra full work-weeks crammed into one month, on top of the normal forty.
In 2019 they passed a law to stop it. The headline says overtime is capped at 45 hours a month. Then comes the fine print. In a "busy" month, a company can legally run you up to almost 100 hours, and hold you at 80 a month for months on end. So the legal limit is the exact line the government uses to say your job killed you. The lawyers' association put it plainly. The law approves working people to death.
It only exists because of one death. In 2015 a 24-year-old fresh out of university landed a dream job at Dentsu, the biggest ad agency in the country. One month, the overtime crossed 100 hours. A manager reportedly said those hours were a waste for the company. Depression set in. Nine months into the job, on Christmas Day 2015, came the suicide that hit every front page and shamed the government into writing the law.
It didn't work. In its latest count, released in 2025, the government officially blamed work for 1,304 deaths and serious illnesses. For the first time ever, more than a thousand of those were mental, minds that broke under the job. 89 of those people killed themselves or tried to. Sixth record year in a row. The worst-hit field was healthcare and care work, the people whose whole job is keeping everyone else alive.
On paper, though, Japan doesn't even work the most hours anymore. The typical worker there puts in about 1,600 hours a year. The average American does more, about 1,800. The average is a lie. Strip out the part-timers, nearly four in ten workers, and full-time staff alone clock close to 2,000 hours a year. A big chunk of the rest is unpaid "service overtime", hours people work for free, off the books, in no statistic anywhere. The hours hide. The deaths don't.
And the law is full of holes. Researchers are left out of the overtime cap completely. Anyone earning enough can be put on a contract with no overtime pay, so the company has no reason to send them home.
They wrote a law to stop people dying at work. Then they set the legal limit at the exact number the government uses to decide that work is what killed them.