I said this under another comment thread, but I'll share it here to add to what that user said (I did not mean for that to rhyme, lol):
I'm going to preface this by saying that I do not care what sort of hate my criticisms will generate. I'll continue criticizing the story as, despite my obvious issues with it, it clearly holds a special place in my heart, lol. So stay angry, girlies, because *I* won't stay silent. I've stuck around for this long because I've admittedly enjoyed following Maxi's journey through self-discovery and working her way through her trauma. As a victim of abuse myself, her character and upbringing hit very close to home, especially when the circumstances of her childhood line up with mine, and her personality also holds parallels to mine. With that said, you can now at least somewhat understand the gripes I have regarding her relationship with Riftan.
Maxi and Riftan’s relationship is fundamentally imbalanced. That’s not at all a "nuanced" reading—it’s literally baked into how both characters interact from the start. What really miffs me is how some fans interpret Maxi’s developing sexuality, especially into Book 2. Many readers point to it as proof that she had “always been just as horny as Riftan,” when that completely ignores the context the story itself establishes.
First of all, Maxi grew up abused, sheltered, and grossly uninformed about sex and relationships in general. She doesn’t enter the relationship with a healthy understanding of intimacy, desire, or consent. Her early sexual encounters with Riftan are marked by hesitation, confusion, and discomfort. For fuck's sake, their wedding night ended in martial rape (it did, read the novel). That is *not* mutual passion by any means, instead, it's someone trying to navigate something they were never given the tools to understand in the first place.
Second, Maxi does not discover her sexuality. Instead, she adapts to *Riftan's*; there's a clear difference there. She doesn't do it because the dynamic she has with him is healthy, but because she’s been *conditioned* to. She internalizes the idea that as a wife, she is expected to endure whatever her husband demands, even at the cost of her own comfort. That is *not* empowerment. That’s survival behavior shaped by a misogynistic framework she was raised into. And with Riftan being her only sexual experience, of course, she eventually starts to respond differently. When your entire understanding of “love” and intimacy is filtered through one person, especially one who is intense, possessive, overwhelming, and borderline abusive, your baseline shifts. What looks like “growing desire” on the surface can just as easily be adaptation to pressure and normalization of that intensity. That’s why calling their relationship “romantic” feels so off to me. There isn’t a healthy, mutual foundation there. What you have instead is two people trying to fill emotional voids through each other:
Riftan channels his insecurities, trauma, and need for control into possessiveness and sexual intensity. Maxi then interprets that intensity as "affection" because it makes her feel seen and wanted in a way she’s never experienced before.
The reality is they’re not meeting each other as whole people. They’re responding to what the other represents—objects to use for when they need to feel validated. When they finally *do* see each other without illusion, what they find only drives them further apart, and rather than healing them, that clarity exposes the cracks, leaving them in constant conflict by Book 2. By the end of the story, their “romance” feels fragile and diminished, as if all the passion had been sucked out of it. The narrative intent was to portray two broken people growing into something healthy through love and mutual understanding, but that transformation never truly happens. Riftan doesn’t meaningfully evolve, and while Maxi grows stronger, she never fully reckons with or challenges the damage he’s done to her.
At best, that’s codependency. More realistically, though, it reads as trauma bonding, where attachment is built through emotional imbalance, dependency, and distorted perceptions of care. You can find that dynamic compelling from a narrative standpoint, sure. But pretending it’s healthy, mutual love without acknowledging all of this context? That’s where the analysis falls apart.
I said this under another comment thread, but I'll share it here to add to what that user said (I did not mean for that to rhyme, lol):
I'm going to preface this by saying that I do not care what sort of hate my criticisms will generate. I'll continue criticizing the story as, despite my obvious issues with it, it clearly holds a special place in my heart, lol. So stay angry, girlies, because *I* won't stay silent. I've stuck around for this long because I've admittedly enjoyed following Maxi's journey through self-discovery and working her way through her trauma. As a victim of abuse myself, her character and upbringing hit very close to home, especially when the circumstances of her childhood line up with mine, and her personality also holds parallels to mine. With that said, you can now at least somewhat understand the gripes I have regarding her relationship with Riftan.
Maxi and Riftan’s relationship is fundamentally imbalanced. That’s not at all a "nuanced" reading—it’s literally baked into how both characters interact from the start. What really miffs me is how some fans interpret Maxi’s developing sexuality, especially into Book 2. Many readers point to it as proof that she had “always been just as horny as Riftan,” when that completely ignores the context the story itself establishes.
First of all, Maxi grew up abused, sheltered, and grossly uninformed about sex and relationships in general. She doesn’t enter the relationship with a healthy understanding of intimacy, desire, or consent. Her early sexual encounters with Riftan are marked by hesitation, confusion, and discomfort. For fuck's sake, their wedding night ended in martial rape (it did, read the novel). That is *not* mutual passion by any means, instead, it's someone trying to navigate something they were never given the tools to understand in the first place.
Second, Maxi does not discover her sexuality. Instead, she adapts to *Riftan's*; there's a clear difference there. She doesn't do it because the dynamic she has with him is healthy, but because she’s been *conditioned* to. She internalizes the idea that as a wife, she is expected to endure whatever her husband demands, even at the cost of her own comfort. That is *not* empowerment. That’s survival behavior shaped by a misogynistic framework she was raised into. And with Riftan being her only sexual experience, of course, she eventually starts to respond differently. When your entire understanding of “love” and intimacy is filtered through one person, especially one who is intense, possessive, overwhelming, and borderline abusive, your baseline shifts. What looks like “growing desire” on the surface can just as easily be adaptation to pressure and normalization of that intensity. That’s why calling their relationship “romantic” feels so off to me. There isn’t a healthy, mutual foundation there. What you have instead is two people trying to fill emotional voids through each other:
Riftan channels his insecurities, trauma, and need for control into possessiveness and sexual intensity. Maxi then interprets that intensity as "affection" because it makes her feel seen and wanted in a way she’s never experienced before.
The reality is they’re not meeting each other as whole people. They’re responding to what the other represents—objects to use for when they need to feel validated. When they finally *do* see each other without illusion, what they find only drives them further apart, and rather than healing them, that clarity exposes the cracks, leaving them in constant conflict by Book 2. By the end of the story, their “romance” feels fragile and diminished, as if all the passion had been sucked out of it. The narrative intent was to portray two broken people growing into something healthy through love and mutual understanding, but that transformation never truly happens. Riftan doesn’t meaningfully evolve, and while Maxi grows stronger, she never fully reckons with or challenges the damage he’s done to her.
At best, that’s codependency. More realistically, though, it reads as trauma bonding, where attachment is built through emotional imbalance, dependency, and distorted perceptions of care. You can find that dynamic compelling from a narrative standpoint, sure. But pretending it’s healthy, mutual love without acknowledging all of this context? That’s where the analysis falls apart.