The villain white lotus used his attraction halo (bought from his system) to blindside them and only see that MC is the black lotus.

We spend so much time witnessing the amount of time and care our MC puts into reassuring our ML that his looks don't matter and that he doesn't have to change his appearance but the story becomes so cheap when you realize everyone ends up conventionally beautiful in the end. Even when ML's true face is exposed to the public, the public is okay with it because they can tell that without the scars on his face ML is still attractive. And then ML decides to get scar reduction so he doesn't "scare his future kids"...

I think also the use of the Villain system was ill handled. When stories like these are built on villains with no choice but to mistreat the MC, I'm always less interested in the plot. And I also had an issue with the fact that both of the main villains turned out to be illegitimate children from poor, abusive beginnings who got "too greedy".

What is the purpose of villains like these in a story that values seeing beyond appearances and how someone was born? It cheapens the words MC tries to encourage ML with because the narrative reinforces negative stereotypes about mistresses, illegitimate kids, orphans, and poor people. These people are also "ugly" to society but they are only shown in this story as cannon fodder to be face slapped, assualted, or used as pawns in plots against MC.

I'd love it if a story was daring enough to actually subvert the typical tropes and I think I got a little of that in one of the side stories about Austen's second in command. I can't accurately translate his name but I'll call him G.

G is an alpha who is a military man and for the past 6 six years of his marriage, he has been abusing and neglecting his omega husband. It isn't until his omega decides to divorce him, that he is given a wake-up call but then it's too late and his omega moves on to find true happiness. This side story was so great for dog blood but also it satisfied my wish for trope subversion. No scum gong that keeps getting forgiven! This shou stood up for himself really well. The only weird thing was how the narrative wanted to blame everyone involved when G is clearly the only one to blame for everything.

I also didn't like the romance between Ruan Yang and Ryan that much. It just felt really forced to me. Yang acted like an adoptive father more than a husband.

s*xual assault between married couple (both are victims because this is omegaverse but one has worse injuries than the other and it's treated lightly in canon), multiple miscarriages (by side character), child ab*se, discussion of abortion, domestic violence, non-consensual drugging, fathers selling their adult children for money, postmortem child birth

"Every time I notice Ruan Xi's name in the story, I feel so disgusted like my guts falling apart. 🤢🤮 But everytime I see the Duke Alston with Ruan Yang, I feel flower blooming in my heart. 🌹 🌹 This contradiction make me suffer for a long time until I finally finish the novel. 🤦🤦 Good read 👍👍"

There is a heart-wrenching extra but it's not about the main couple or side couple. (I didn't read it cause it's so sad, I hate angst)

The MC was meant to be the blessed protagonist of this world, overcoming adversity to become beloved by all and earn his happy ending. His place is usurped by one of the nastiest transmigrators I've ever read. Armed with a system which syphons off the MC's protagonist halo, this false main character has ensured the MC has been betrayed on all sides and become a wretched, hated, person people openly mock. The MC's faith in humanity is destroyed and his kindness calloused over after his father's affections are stolen and twisted, his mother and older siblings wrecked and abandoned, and his love interests pe*verted into reviling him.

The false lead is unable to kill him directly, but needs him to die so the false lead can finally and fully step into his protagonist role. With his white lotus powers, he maneuvers their dad into arranging a match between the MC and the ML, fully expecting the MC to be skinned alive without the protection of his original harem, who have all been stolen by the transmigrator.

Unfortunately for this uppity transmigrator, the MC is a main character for a reason. All the sh*t the MC had to endure (the neglect, the crazy mom and sister, the horribly disabled brother, the complete disenchantment with handsome, powerful alphas) has made him the ideal match for a psycho freak like the ML, and the fake is going to regret this.

The ML had a similar downward trajectory. The eldest, and once the most favored and golden of all the Emperor's children, the ML had been Crown Prince at one time. But, he was kidnapped at age 10 and suffered catastrophic injuries. These injuries could have been fixed, but the Emperor, finally seeing how powerful the Empress and her family are as they razed organizations to the ground to regain the ML, decided to hobble his wife by leaving their shared son ruined. Power hungry and brilliant, the Empress does a 180 and abandons her once favorite child as useless. She eventually manages to have a second son, who became the new favorite Crown Prince, and never gives her oldest a second glance. Meanwhile, crippled, abandoned, and in tremendous physical and emotional pain, the ML begins to twist. His own father, the Emperor uses him as a boogey man, letting him take all the bad reputation for removing the Emperor's enemies, leaving the Emperor's hands clean.

But, in a twist of fate, his younger brother dies, and the ML is the Empress's heir once more. She's going to have to support him, if she doesn't want one of her husband's illegitimate bastards becoming the next Emperor. So she finds her son a spouse, with the intention of taking any resulting children as her new heir.

The ML may be a twisted, violent, and a psycho, but he is, at his heart, very lonely. With the MC able to speak the language of his insanity-driven logic, his crazy calms enough to acknowledge the ML as his. Their relationship may be unconventional, but it works for them.

Ml: used mc's pheromone to heal his illness.

Mc: use the marriage to escape from his father and climb society ladder.

The MC fell in love first, spent about 20 chapters trying to convince the ML to sleep with him or mark him, the MC is an omega and naturally has an estrus period, and the ML and MC have 95 percent match, and in addition they are married which means that according to the normal ABO way of doing things the ML had a "right" to sleep with the MC when he wanted to do so. But in this book, despite all of those things the ML asks again and again before they finally do the deed. In addition, one of the reasons the ML resisted in the first place- apart from not being sure the MC really liked him or just saw him as a first hope out of darkness and was thus grateful to him- was that he didn't like the idea of being a beast because the pheromones matching usually made alphas lose control. And even when he had confirmed the MC truly liked him, he still had this whole talk with him about the losing control part where the MC assured him that since MC liked him he would be okay with the out of control aspect. Like this is just a breath of fresh air, and it's an example of what people mean when they say consent. Just because I like you or I'm attracted to you or we are in a relationship does not mean you own me, a lack of consent implies that you are claiming ownership of the other person's body or rather denying that the aspect of the other individual's rationality or humanity since every human is a free being