He was an actor, what happened to that?? Why are we in some mafia shit?? Did the author ch...

That is the main fucking problem with authors nowadays. They write these scenarios without even considering how human behaviour actually works. I'm not saying that only people who display obvious sexual tendencies can commit rape, but there is a difference between writing a character who has established predatory tendencies and suddenly making a character who has never shown such behaviour commit sexual assault without properly developing or addressing that change.

People don't just magically turn into completely different characters whenever the plot demands it. Sexual assault is a serious violation of someone's boundaries, not some fucking plot device that authors can throw in to create drama or force a romantic development. If a character who has consistently been portrayed a certain way suddenly violates someone's consent, the author needs to consider what that action reveals about him and how it fits into his characterization. Not every character needs a traumatic backstory or some psychological explanation to become an abuser, but the author still needs to take the character's choices and actions seriously instead of treating such a drastic shift as though it means nothing.

And that's precisely what frustrates me. They establish a character with one personality, make him commit an act that fundamentally contradicts how he has been portrayed, and then expect readers to accept it without any meaningful examination of the change. You cannot just flip a character's personality 180 degrees for the sake of a plot point and expect the writing to remain convincing. If you're going to write sexual assault, at least understand the gravity of what you're writing instead of using it as a convenient device and brushing it aside when it's time to move the romance forward.

And the thing is, these are the same authors who have been repeatedly normalizing the idea of turning characters who have never been established as sexually predatory into rapists simply because the story is supposed to be toxic. And now, when people point it out, others act as though it's the most natural thing in the world. You'll literally see people saying, "Why are you surprised? The story was toxic from the beginning." NO. THAT IS EXACTLY THE FUCKING PROBLEM.

Toxicity does not automatically mean rape. An unhealthy relationship does not automatically mean sexual assault. Yet authors have repeatedly used rape and violations of consent as convenient additions to toxic romances, to the point that readers have started treating them as expected milestones in these stories. It's become this ridiculous formula where, if the ML is already toxic, apparently the next logical step is for him to rape his own partner. Since when the fuck did those things become interchangeable?

And the irony is that people now use the story's toxicity to justify why the sexual assault happened, as though that somehow makes the writing more believable. But the authors themselves have contributed to creating this expectation by repeatedly using sexual violence as a shortcut to portray toxicity, obsession, possessiveness, or an extreme form of romantic tension.

I'm not saying that a character must display obvious predatory tendencies beforehand to be capable of sexual assault. That's not the point. The point is that authors keep using sexual assault as a predictable plot device in toxic romances, regardless of whether the character's development supports it, and readers have become so accustomed to this pattern that they defend it as an inevitable part of the genre.

The fact that readers have come to expect rape in a toxic romance doesn't prove that it was a natural or necessary progression of the story. It shows how thoroughly this trope has been normalized in the first place. And instead of questioning why authors keep relying on it, people turn around and question why readers are surprised when it happens. That's what genuinely pisses me off.

Yeah, that's literally what happened here, I think. I don't think the author really thought about her characters when she made the decision to make this whole plotline happen. It's like she thought "okay, he runaway, he was gone etc. so obviously the other one will be really mad and things could go ugly between them", but i don't see any moment where it had to become some sexual assault shit.
And I don't know, maybe I'm just already being too much or something but I genuinely don't think that we need so many rape scenes showed so vividly (?). I understand if one scene was important for the author to be really physical and for us to see every little detail, because for example it had soms important dialogue but in some scenes it's basically just aaron being like "oh you won't have the strength to leave me, you will never leave" and I think there was no reason for us to always read scenes like that. To the point, and here comes the "hot take", I feel like the author wants us to see the rape scenes in the same way as normal sex scenes. Like it's nothing, just a normal sex but with violence and no consent and where one side obviously doesn't want it and is hurt. It just feels like the author doesn't want us to forget that "hey they have some relationship and they liked to fuck" but in the same moment they are mad at each other, so she just went with sexual assault so that the readers won't forget that she was good at making sex scenes. Shame that instead of making them talk and then using her skills, she had to use her skills to make rape some sexual fantasy because the rapist is a "hot" guy.