For a character so into the legendary adventures of a certain witch, she doesn't actually try to have any legendary adventures of her own. One might argue her goal is to travel and see as many places as possible, yet even then, one would say a true traveler would, if it were in their ability, to leave the places they travel to as close to the way they found them, yet she does nothing to ever help.
Is it simply a matter of her being confident? Well, she certainly is optimistic about her abilities and how talented she is. Still, at the end of the day, she's above all of that, of ever helping, breaking one of the rules her mother put forth, to never think of herself as above others. Yet, one can see hints of this, such as when she arrives in the city of mages, her hope and goal being to be praised because she is one of the lucky few to rise to the rank of being a witch, to the point she thinks she might get a free stay at a hotel somewhere, and at the end does because things work out her way.
There are other issues, such as the use of specific subject matter for shock value or trivializing real-world events such as the Berlin Wall with a story line about a city that similarly divided itself just because one side was unrealistically competitive with the other side, or a village that was two villages across the street from each other because the town (what it really is in the first place) had two vineyards. The creator tries to present Elaina as a protagonist who understands that being kind to someone may instead be the most hurtful thing one can do only to paint all acts of kindness in such broad strokes, by pretending that an ill wife whose husband brought her home views of places she couldn't see would only become more depressed because she couldn't herself visit them and thus commit suicide.
Which--
To say that the show trivializes subjects such as suicide and abuse would be an understatement, as there is an all to clear message that those who are abused become psychopaths without understanding that one doesn't have to be abused to become a psychopath, let alone that a child psychopath isn't someone one should trust the word of, that the so-called abuse they suffered may simply be a fabrication, to Elaina siding with the idea that psychopath who is destined to become a serial killer (the narrative makes that quite clear) should be spared from death, and that the person who took her out is in effect, just another murderer, both when said person executed the chilld at an older age after she'd killed at least three people, maybe more, just as same person is a murder for killing the same child before she got the chance of becoming a serial killter.
At the end of the day, it's not as if the audience is asking much of Elaina either. For example, the simplest of tasks, the one involving the slave girl, didn't mean she had to go and insist the slave girl be freed, or push modern moralities on her, but she certainly could set the village head's son straight, perhaps even set him on the path of changing things for the better once he became village head, to which I also have to ask - is the Slave girl really unhappy about seeing others happiness, or is she crying in joy from someone taking the time to do that for her? I know that the narrative wants us to believe it's the latter, because - gasp - modern moralities say slavery is bad, but if this is true, it makes Elaina's not stepping in even worse. If it's not based on modern understanding of slavery, then the slave shouldn't be having that reaction, instead looking for any hope they could snatch up.
But then, at the end of the day, the series tries to be way too pessimistic about everything. If Elaina's not helping, she's causing trouble for others or she's being someone who's lost her temper and over exaggerating the crime, such as with the Ripper who went around cutting woman's hair which is played off as being as awful as Jack the Ripper, let alone played off as being as bad as actual sexual assault. And maybe the writer wanted to try and say something about those subjects while keeping it PC, but in doing so they just ended up mangling the whole thing with a protagonist who either does nothing or blows things way out of proportion or only does something because not doing so is as I said more of hassle to her than not helping.
Even the ending is part of her full-blow narcissism at play, and ends up being rather cringe at the end of things.
I get the charm of wanting a protagonist with a personality that isn't likable on the surface like your typical protagonist, but there's honestly a right way to approach such a character and a wrong way—Elaina is the wrong way to go about it. As she's of such a personality, there are no hidden depths to fall into. She is a narcissist who thinks first of herself and calls someone who executed a serial killer not once, but twice, a twice-over murderer, because who cares about who else that girl goes on to kill, because we're supposed to be like, "well, her abs deserved it." Not everyone abused her, but I'd argue that one has even to question whether or not she was abused, simply because we're told this is true without being shown to be true. Aka, it's heresy from the serial killer.
