He has done everything to MC that a person could hate. He slapped her, r*ped her repeatedly, abused her verbally, confining her. This is not angst for me. Just a tr*shy dude and his wife's sufferings. And he also brings a pregnant girl to the house without explanation. The ending was not to my satisfaction either.

There was a lot of reviews about how much they hated him.

And he did all that because of a misunderstanding?

That's so cruel of him. I don't think I will stab a man cuz I thought he was my stalker. But he wasn't. Now I can't just apologise to his corpse. Can I ? That's won't change what I did. So as what the male lead (more like a villain) did too.

I read this from the spoiler forum btw so basically the ending is that after Herace killed herself, Ezekiel made a deal with the demon to save her in exchange for a curse be placed on him (idk if its a curse but yea), Herace was revived with no prior memories of the sh*tty things he'd done which is kinda not fair for her I think bcuz she deserves to know what he did

Also the curse is that whenever Ezekiel touches Herace his flesh would feel as if they're melting from his body. And that whenever she whisper to him or him hearing her voice it'd feel as if his ears are one fire. (Im not sure much abt these curses cuz I be forgetting things but I know it has something to do with physical pain so kinda same)

Also that later Herace will be pregnant again and she said she wanna name him Erzen which will forever torment Ezekiel with guilt till the end of his life knowing that he's the only one who remembered he killed Erzen before (which is why I kinda went 'eh ok' yk compromise with the ending since a lifetime of real physical pain and guilt that used to send him spiralling into madness, will slowly eat him up alive, is one of the worst punishment someone could go through and tbh its the only thing that keeps my grudge for him going fr)

The fact that Ezekiel r*pes Herace several times, absolutely humiliates her in public, and doesn't recognize Herace's child as his son (which is a whole other clusterf*ck of an issue, makes me absolutely loathe him.

You could argue that Ezekiel's punishment is completely suitable, especially given the physical and s*xual abuse that he commits towards the FL. Yet the fact that this b*stard STILL ends up with Herace in the end AND she loses all memory of her abuse just doesn't sit well with me.

And while you'd expect the turnaround to come after he "finds" her, the abuse only ramps up from there. He was already beyond redemption to most readers, and even when he has YEARS to reflect and change himself, he decides the problem was he didn't control her ENOUGH? Bruh.

The author's motivations become clear when Erzen dies. We still think with disbelief, somehow, things will turn out ok, even though they shouldn't and realistically cannot. But the mu*der of a child cannot be redeemed. "Miguel" spells it out for us- this was never meant to end well. We thought we were reading a dark angsty love story, but we were really reading a greek tragedy. We're reading a man destroy himself and his world because he fell prey to his own evil desires.

In some ways, this is brilliant. When a webnovel can be compared to Faust and the Decameron, something is being done right. The author led us to believe Ezekiel was a good guy deep down somewhere, but he never was. His motivations were wrong from the start, and then the consequences came back in a poetic way.

However, defying expectations is a double-edged sword. Many come to webnovels for escapism. When the aforementioned safe trajectory (status quo-angst-regret-happy ending) is broken, some readers will be disturbed. The abuse of Herace is gratuitous- scenes are more detailed than they need to be, and it keeps going on for more chapters than it needs to. As art, it's effective at conveying Ezekiel's evil. But harm to innocent characters can also cause real harm to readers. I saw this in the comments of chapters, reviews, even translators dropping the story because it got too distressing.