[Cyprene]

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That is impossible to work around?!?

It's certainly not impossible, but obviously "Demon Queen" is off the table.

One question: I've seen Onna Kishi (Female Knight) translated as "Paladin" in this thread and I think a few other places. Does anyone know where this comes from? It's certainly not implied by the Japanese, and I don't think she has any paladin-like attributes. I think she may use some kind of healing on Hero at some point (Though I can't remember if this actually happens or where). Her position at the church is a strictly administrative one.

For a show about economics, the Demon King's theory is predicated on a fallacy that's been known since the 19th Century.

You're correct in the long-term, but Demon King is correct in the short term. But Keynes's phrase, "In the long run we're all dead," is especially applicable here. You're correct that ideally, ending the war and stopping the transfer payments to the southern nations would allow the craftsmen and workers who are currently making swords, armor, etc. to repurpose their efforts towards making plowshares, furniture, and things that will increase the standard of living for the society as a whole. And in the long term, this is what would happen.
The problem is that the entire society is currently set up in a kind of stable equilibrium that consists of the following elements:

1. Deaths from the war (EIther from combat, or from Demons burning down villages) act as a check on population growth.
2. War funding from the central nations to the southern ones "employs" a large standing army of people who have no skills other than knowing how to kill things.
3. A large portion of the central nation industrial base is devoted to producing war materials.

End the war, and you've knocked out all three of these simultaneously. This means:

1. Without the war depleting the "surplus population", as Scrooge called them, you have a lot more mouths to feed and no good way to do it. The war is taking place far, far away from the major agricultural centers (It's in the south, where it's freaking cold and you can barely grow anything. The agricultural centers are in the central nations.) Those agricultural areas are running at peak efficiency now, and ending the war won't make them produce anymore food.
2. With no war, there's no need to maintain a large standing army, so the soldiers will be sent home. But they have no trade skills and there's no food, so it's going to take them about 5 minutes before they start burning and pillaging. Ideally, you could do some kind of training program, but...
3. You've shut down the defense industry and so you've also got huge numbers of unemployed. These people will have no means to support themselves until they can be retrained to do something useful. A lot of them are going to starve to death while they're waiting.

Any one of these could be solved on their own, but taken together you have a one-two-three punch of famines, brigands, and unemployment that threatens to destroy the society altogether. Even if it eventually did reach another stable equilibrium, during the process, as the Demon King says, "Millions of people are going to die."

Of course, a sophisticated enough economic policy could probably mitigate a lot of the damage, but this is a world where the only person who knows the word "Economics" is the Demon King. So a lot of the options that would be available to a modern government are going to be completely unknown to the human world, and also likely completely unfeasible in a mostly feudal system. (I'm sure you can easily envision the response of a feudal lord when asked to pay money to feed the hungry people. "You want me to pay tax money to FEED them? Just let them starve!")

So the Demon King's solution, while difficult and roundabout, is the correct and sensible one for her situation.