Amen. Also, all the parents there have issues. The biological of both MCs, the adoprive ones... Haiyaaaa
The so-called "biological parent" of the MC is not a bad parent. Because you have to have kids first to be bad parents to. He is not the MC's parent, just someone who shares more genetic material with him, than an average person. There are easily more than 500 people in my dad's hometown with whom I share an ancestor or more within the last 10 generations. Forget being family, most of them wouldn't even be considered relatives by any metric.
That guy is just a shit person who shouldn't be around young people or anyone, for that matter, over whom he has the upper hand, in general. Once again, the responsibility falls on the kid's actual parents, for shipping him off to live with a dangerous person who lacks the physical and mental resources to be responsible for a child. As for the love interest's folks, haven't gotten that far into the story to meet them yet. But, I am gonna trust you on this.
The reason I don't get as furious over evil biological parents that romance stories come up with for drama purposes is because they are so ridiculous and such caricatures that most of us will be able to identify them as such, because the overwhelming majority of us have parents who are also our genetic progenitors. We know what genetically related families are like. We see them at home, we see them everywhere.
But we rarely see adoptive families. That is why we don't have personal experience of what they are like. We never got to see for ourselves that they are exactly like our own families and so when biased, uninformed, bigoted but authoritative sources tell us that they are weaker, we end up believing it.
That's why I get angry about bad adoptive parents being depicted as normal. Because adoption is rare and heavily stigmatized as it is. Cultural bigotry has already raised most people to be biased against adoption and treat it as the last option and inferior to having genetically related kids. Even adopted kids are fed this insecurity that their parents have done a favour unto them, that they don't naturally and primarily belong with their family and that they need to know their genetic material donors. It's absurd and nonsensical but it hurts so many people everyday.
Dysfunctional families where all family members are genetically related is depicted as an individual problem. But, dysfunctional families where all family members are not genetically related to each other keep harkening back to adoption as if that is the general point of pain. This not only reflects the already prevalent bigotry that a lot of culture hold against adoptive families but also reaffirms it. That's why I got more agitated over the bad adoptive parents in this story than the bad biological parents that are supposed to come up later in the plot.
Just started the story, but I needed a little breather because of how horrendous the MC's parents are. That disgusting woman commits two unforgivable sins in quick succession. She treats her husband as more important than her child. And then both of them reveal their bigotry towards adoption. Both of behave so verbally and emotionally abusive towards their kid in those panels. I don't know if that behaviour will be revealed to be a norm or just that one instance was it. But, even if it was the only time that they acted like that, it was still far too gross and unforgivable to treat your child that way. If they even intend to repent and have their child, they'd have so much to apologise for, so much to compensate for, so much to repair that even, if they get their child back, it might still be a herculean task to reverse the damage that they did. This is just fiction, but if there are any parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, older siblings/cousins in the comments, please actively take care to never treat a child that you're responsible for the way these two parents, who don't deserve to be parents, have treated their son.
These f**kers! When you have raised a child for so many years, spent so much of your time and effort into them, and have your future and legacy invested into them, and all they have ever known is you, what difference does it make anymore whether the child is genetically related to you or not! If these pieces of shit are that incapable of loving a child that genetically unrelated to them, why the fuck are they so obsessed with each other then that the wife would crucify her child if she thought that she was doing it for the husband's sake! I mean, the husband isn't genetically related to her either and he doesn't even, technically, count as her family. So, why does she love him but she is incapable of loving her own goddamn child! God, what horrendous people!
I wish people never had to experience parental neglect and parental abandonment in real life. It has to be one of the worst traumatic experience that a person can go through. Even though parental abandonment is thankfully not the norm, but the exceptions that do exist are still too many. Even if only one child is made to feel unimportant by the very people that it derives its identity from, the people that it recognises as the beginning and end of its world, the people that it loves and trusts unquestioningly, that's still a child too many. Every child deserves to be treated as precious, as the topmost priority by their guardians. Every person deserves to grow up with the sense of security that, no matter what, they'll always have their family, the people that raised them, the people that they grew up with, the people who are invested in them and that they are invested in, the people that they've relied on all their lives, those people, at the very least, will be in their corner loving them unconditionally, supporting them and ready to take on the world for their sake if need be.