Rabbit ♠︎ Mage

0/10 ML, he’s fucking trash.

MILD SPOILER WARNING

You do understand that having media literacy requires you to be critical of the media you consume, right?

0/10 ML, he’s fucking trash.

Title: under the oak tree

isekai type: none

is it good?: no

chapter: 11

notes:

Im not just talking about the fact that the entire story revolves around her being abused and getting Stockholm syndrome. It's a case of the fandom

Shes the FL, everyone almost always gets on their knees for the FL but then they go and romanticize her abuse, they act like her getting assaulted by Matthias was hot, there is multiple tiktok and Instagram edits thay portray the relationship as "cute" and "protective" and "Layla just doesn't know how much she loves him." A 18 year old girl being coerced into doing what a nobleman wants isn't cute and it sure as hell isn't justified because they misuse the dark romance term A LOT.

And if she wasn't the main character and Claudine was? The amount of people that would rope her in with the typical white lotus mistress type would be insane. She'd be called a slut for getting in the way between Matthias and Claudine, she'd be made fun of for being a commoner who dared to even look at the Duke and they'd belittle her trauma and call her "another trashta"

Ayla was doing her best job to save the face of the whole family even in her fake kindness so it looks better for the twins if she did it. But Varkas was already breathing behind her neck like "What the fuck did you say?"

Fandom: Mr. Love Queen’s Choice

Pairing: Victor x Reader

Prompt: Vanilla | Aftercare

Warning: Angst | Makeup Sex | Vaginal Penetration | Smut! Minors DNI!!!🔞

Intended Audience: Female Audience

Word Count: 2,514

Ko-fi: Click here to support me on ko-fi!<3

Author’s Note: This took me way too long to get out, I know. On the bright side, I did catch up on a lot of school work so hopefully I’ll have more time in the coming days to finish this challenge. Hope you enjoy day 20 of @xxsycamore‘s Visions of Temptation event!<3

Tag list: @yesmarsx @nad-zeta @kisara-16 @cheese-ception @cailann @vespeshadowmoon @ravenarld @juminly @otomefoxystar @wonderwrench @toxiicmoron​ @minsuwu@arigallesi@tinyxhalo

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A lot of “dark romance” stories are not actually dark romance, not because of irresponsible framing or because they romanticize toxic and abusive relationships. But because they fail to fulfill what dark romance fundamentally is: an exploration of those unhealthy dynamics.

Meanwhile, there's Matthias, a man groomed since birth to be the perfect heir to his family's lineage, and that often means that everything single thing in his life is decided for him, including marriage. He's been raised to believe that genuine love and attraction are irrelevant in a relationship if you're only marrying for convenience. Clearly, someone who’s lived under that level of restriction would have a deeply distorted understanding of intimacy, autonomy, and emotional connection. That setup alone could have supported a far more psychologically grounded dark romance, one that actually examines how trauma and control distort a person’s understanding of love and relationships in general.

One of my favorite moments was in the latest chapter, when Matthias took care of Layla after she was hit by a car. He gave her a piece of candy—the same kind her mother used to give her as a child—and it triggered a flood of memories about everything she had lost since then, until she finally broke down in tears. Throughout it all, Matthias held her without demanding an explanation. He simply let her cry. It was, honestly, a genuinely strong emotional moment.

What undermines it, though, is knowing that nothing meaningful will ever come of it. Their toxic dynamic—Matthias' controlling, borderline predatory behavior toward Layla, and Layla's complicated, often dubious attraction to him—never really gets addressed in a substantial way. We already know where the story goes, and it doesn't meaningfully interrogate either of their backgrounds or how those experiences shape the way they relate to each other. That ends up making moments like this feel less like development and more like isolated emotional scenes, leaving you wondering why they were included if the relationship was never going to evolve in a more interesting or meaningful direction.

Instead of just presenting obsession and abuse as cheap plot devices, the story could have delved into how someone with a warped, conditional understanding of affection might project that onto another person in destructive ways, and how an abuse survivor might be vulnerable to that kind of dynamic being repeated or reframed as "affection." That kind of narrative would require directly engaging with emotional manipulation, conditioning, and the slow erosion of boundaries in a way that actually interrogates the trauma on both sides, rather than treating it as dramatic tension.

Okay, I know I haven't had the most positive opinions on The Forgotten Field, but I don't necessarily hate Talia as a character. I don't like the majority of her fanbase, and I find her to be awful as a person but those were very likely the intended feelings I was supposed to have because she's supposed to your traditional over the top "seductress" villainess, and instead of those negative traits being painted as a misunderstanding or a consequence-free memory after a regression, they are taken up several notches to the extremes.

Talia isn't just a heartbroken hopeless romantic, she's obsessive of Varkas to the point where she could almost be classified as a yandere, she isn't just envious of Ayla's popularity, she attempts to assassinate her multiple times, thus giving her half sister no reason to care when Talia suffers, she isn't just an older sister to Arthos, she takes out her unresolved trauma on him just as Gareth took out his trauma onto her.

Talia is enjoyable to me when there isn't someone yelling in my ear that she's just a misunderstood little baby girl who just needs tender love and care, her allure is that she is a horrible person, she has a childhood that explains why she's a horrible person, but it shouldn't exonerate her of all wrongdoing as an adult. For Christ's sake, she raped her husband, the excuse that she wasn't treated fairly as a kid can only go so far, and before anyone tries to tell me that Varkas eventually said yes, wearing someone down because they initially said no to sex until they eventually give up is NOT consensual! Manipulating and guilt tripping someone into sleeping with you is NOT consensual!

"But he was scared he would hurt her, that's the only reason he said-" A no is a no, it doesn't matter why he said no, that should have been the end of it.