Comadrin's manga / #Undeserving ML(94)

Dude was a complete putz. I liked everyone in the story except the ML and, of course, the middle-aged wannabe rapist.

Nice story and all that, but the ML was a real Jekyll and Hyde. A woman had her egg saved at a fertility center bank. Common sense would probably assume that she did it for a reason, like not being able be fertile after that. It's also her property, pure and simple. The egg is sold ILLEGALLY to a snot-nosed aristocrat from another country. He treats said mother's request as though she's a con-man trying to mooch his money. He loves his children but only sees them for an hour each day. He treats his great aunt like a child. He allows a poisonous bimbo of a "childhood friend" to run tame at his house. He acts like the perfect kindly gentleman one minute and then like the bouncer at Epstein Island the next. My conclusion is that he's a fruitcake with either Dissociative Identity Disorder or the worst case of Bipolar Disorder any psychiatrist has ever seen.

Dude was a complete moron and stuck up jerk. He "cared so much for his brother" that he never noticed that bro was living in a mansion with his lover for some years. He takes everything on the surface for gospel and never looks beneath or bothers to use his critical faculties (if he has any) to bear on the problems. AND... what in the hell is with these flaming, brain-damaged Harlequin MLs who can take a girl's virginity and yet still be absolutely convinced that she's a promiscuous slut. That's not just stupid, it's on par with fundamentalist "religious leaders" who publicly proclaim that immodest women are the cause of earthquakes. I mean, Holy Cow, if you're going to have fantasies, at least dream of elves and fairies instead of something that stupid and banal! Perhaps if the FL had slapped the snot out of him a few more times, it might have cleared his head a bit.

Title should have been "Entitled, Stupid, and Misogynistic." It's what the whole story was about.

New title, "Man-Babies are Hot!" What an immature twit.

Aaaannndd... It's another Julia James ML who should have been drowned at birth. The story also has bigoted overtones since it seems to be suggesting that Italians are too stupid to come in out of the rain.

Ah, the pleasures of living in a patriarchal society. If anything remotely illicit happens, it is always the woman's fault. That makes it alright to kidnap a woman and hold her incommunicado, and raising your hand to hit her is only a mild chastisement for being uppity (like a woman has any right to be upset over being kidnaped). Speaking as someone who understands cause and effect and has a rudimentary understanding of international politics, I'm curious how these "humane" kidnappers of foreign women, who just happen to be royalty, are going to keep her from ever talking about her ordeal. As a realist, or pragmatist, there are two ways. One is to keep her secretly incarcerated permanently, which is expensive and has a high probability of not working. The other and far more likely way is to murder her out of hand and dispose of the body, a very easy thing to do in your own country when you are the ruler and no one outside of your tight little royal coterie know that you've ever had contact with her. This disappearance would probably remain unsolved, as the FL didn't have the high profile of Jamal Khashoggi and the international community would probably never hear a whisper of it. Problem solved, family "honour" maintained.

It wasn't a completely terrible story, but there's no way I could warm up at all to the ML. He should have been kicked to the curb, preferably from a Bugatti Chiron traveling at max speed.

Well, he wasn’t a complete scumbag, but he was a sexist idiot to his core. He’s also the kind who will deny that fact with his dying breath, rather like the person who is sure that he doesn’t have a bigoted bone in his body but can’t understand why a person of color is offended by his demeaning ethnic “joke.” The way he was always laughing at her clumsiness and then had to tell others IN HER PRESENCE about how funny she was made me feel that empathy was pretty much foreign to his nature. People with that kind of sense of humor are high on my list of those I want to avoid. If she fell off a ladder and broke her neck, he would probably try to join her in the afterlife after dying of laughter.

Sorry to downgrade this, but he knew he was seducing her and that he wouldn't make a commitment from the start. He also knew that she was hurting from a previous trauma. In my book, this makes him a cad. When she said that he was attacking her because he felt guilty, I felt that she really hit the nail on the head. She deserved better.