Recently, I’ve been on the manhunt for some good stories. But as I started to read more new stories, I’ve noticed that a good portion of them has this very disgusting plot device. There’s a lot of bad examples of this in many stories but there was one so bad I feel rage when I see it. It was romance/drama about the MC atoning for what they did to the person that they married which included a lot of things like blackmail, threats, manipulation, etc,.
So, I became interested and thought, “Ok, how is the author going to solve this?” because I know this can end up great or horrible (no in-between). Safe to say, it ended up horrible for a multitude of reasons. One of which was that the male lead and the female leads relationship made me feel like I was reading a fetish story of domestic abuse that never got better.
But the main reason was because the side couple (that took up the other 50% of the novel) was the disgusting trope of the victim falling in love with the *TRIGGER WARNING * guy that SA’d her! And the author tried to whitewash it! I can understand using it for an educational standpoint (like awareness, coping mechanisms) but NOT AS A ROMANTIC PLOT DEVICE. Unless you are writing a revenge story or for educational reasons do NOT use this as a plot device! There are other ways to push the plot of your story.
