The whole body count discussion is dodging the fact that Machu went through a heist, a pogrom, a few mobile suit battles that are more often than no fatal, and an enormous coup detat but was never genuinely put in a situation where she was actually forced to consider killing someone. The closest she ver came to that was when she pointed the revolver at the grandis bootleg character. According to the interviews Tsurumaki wanted to show Machu as a character capable of maintaining their innocence, and that well and good (Loran did that pretty well, for example) but trying write a protagonist with enduring pacifism rings hollow when Machu never really faced an actual test to that pacifism that ever caused her to reconsider it.