Responses

There are a lot of reasons.
The idea of obsessive love is appealing from a distance to people with low self-esteem who just want to feel special.
Ilay is there to be someone hot that you want to "fix" and teach to be better.
Like a lot of men, Ilay is emotionally stunted and violent, which is scary but not unusual. The emotionally stuntedness lets people infantilize him ("boys will be boys") and excuse his behavior. People want to believe that bad men can be good.
Ilay is so confusing to me (⊙…⊙ )