Bruh.

What else do you expect from a story whose sole purpose is to convince you that two people so different, so unequal can work in a close social relationship? You know, people from MC's background in real life don't hang out with people from ML's background if they can help it. Even when they must, they remain on the spectrum from discomfort/fear to hate and try to keep their interaction as formal, as measured and as limited as possible. They don't go planning their days expecting the more powerful guy to propose marriage to them and swoon at their every movement when there is literally no reason to do so.

MC is a complete outsider to ML's world in every way. He is pathetic for going gaga over a dangerous man who he barely knows, has a terribly disadvantageous power gradient against and who is always a threat to him even as they have to work together and then, expecting that the ML should treat him any differently just because he has the hots for him.

ML, when he is behaving the way he should given the characterization and history that's given for him instead of the romance male lead who must fall in love with the ML because the author said so, treats MC the way he treats everyone else around him. And I don't see anyone complaining. He's a perfectly excellent character, interesting one too, just in the wrong genre. That guy could be turned into a beloved villain or an anti-hero in a more serious literary genre, with a more seasoned, more sober author.

He just isn't a convincing romance fodder unlike the MC who has less of a brain and a backbone and more of entitled, bratty problematic dependency issues than child protagonists in other genres. Protagonists of children's cartoons are less of a diva than this MC, a fully grown adult who is supposedly a competent enough lawyer to be working with government corruption and mob issues, is. Obviously then, when you have to match two fundamentally unequal and incompatible people together in a way that makes zero logical sense, you have to rely on the kind of contrivances that this story is filled with.

It's really not a problem of "I don't like the story of the ML isn't the kind of person I'd like to hang out with IRL" but more of a "I don't like the story because it doesn't make any sense and its impossible to take it seriously." The character motivations don't make any sense, people are out of character in the canon story itself and nothing makes you feel invested because everything feels forced, convenient and MC-centric as if it's more of a self-insert fifty shades of grey that the MC dreamed about than a sequence of events being woven from the high stakes clash between multiple people with various histories and motivations, multiple pressures and multiple power centres.

Romance genre is the same kind of slop of soap operas. As long as things are written in a way that a reasonable reader is able to distinguish problematic interactions in spite of them being used as romantic plot devices, I don't particularly stress about criminal shit being romanticized or treated as part and parcel of life for story purposes.

Conventional rape and sa is, therefore, just a meh issue for me in yaoi because the story itself will have cues subtly disapproving that behaviour by showing the violence, the trauma on part of the victim, guilt on the part of the assaulter if they're intended to be the love interest and condemnation from side characters. Most importantly, the whole comment section is full of people advising any potential vulnerable gullible readers that this is criminal behaviour that you should find repugnant.

I have more of a problem with rape, sa and harrasment, general assault and overall criminal/immoral aggression when its committed by someone from a perceived underprivileged category against someone from a perceived privileged category so like straight woman against straight man, gay people against straight people, uke against seme, protagonist against everyone else and so on.

I also get really uncomfortable and worried about the prevalence and normalisation of pedophilia, problematic age gap, grooming and sexualization of pseudo-familial character histories across manga romance spectrum. Shit like one lead raised the other lead, or has known them since they were a baby because they were a friend of the parents or the siblings, was raised together with as pseudo-siblings because of parental circumstances and identified them as such at one point, one is a much older person and is expected to be almost like a mentor or a guardian to the other because of personal, social or professional nuances or just things like a mature person in their mid thirties with a teen or a young adult.

These are things that I don't give a pass just because it's written just for a cheap romance slop fiction because I have never seen any cues from the author that would suggest to you that these are reprehensive and disgusting actions, if you didn't already know beforehand, and the state of the comments under these stories is such that there are only ever a couple of comments calling out the romanticization among thousands of oblivious others who are just going about as if they've just been reading a little romance between high school kids.

Problematic things being treated as normal, even necessary in fiction is fine when the awareness that it is wrong is already pervasive and intrinsic through the general cultural fabric. That's why we don't balk about murder and murderers in fiction because everyone knows that murder is wrong and normal healthy young people won't easily go out killing and letting themselves be killed by their lover because they got the idea from romantic pop culture. But, 25 year olds grooming 15 year olds and 15 year olds letting themselves be groomed by them can be encouraged by pop culture if the 15 year old stumbles upon these stories with no prior education on this topic and then sees these stimulating stories and the apparent consensus among comments and is misled into believing that feeling admiration and/or affection for someone makes that it normal for you to seek them out romantically or to welcome sexual advances from them. Clearly, there is not enough awareness on these topics even among adults or else you'd see more pearl clutching in comment just like you do for conventional sexual assault.