Reader's Discretion Advised

You know, they make it sound horrible and dire and something they have to endure because they have to. What a horrible attitude to take towards love. I can't tell if I hate it or like it. On one hand, it seems like they become mindless and slavish after "succumbing to the vile effects of this horrid curse," but on the other...well...it is love, isn't it? I'm suddenly not so sure. Maybe it's just extreme infatuation and this "soulmate" business is something they tell themselves so they feel marginally less shitty about it all when actually, it's an extremelly shitty thing and none of them quite believe it.I get why the story's told over and over and over through the series, but it gets boring. And highly repetitive. Feels like there's a fair bit of copy+pasting going on in those sections.You know what? Maybe it's not love. I've been making assumptions all this series, but what if it's all just complex Stockholm and Lima?...Wow...it all seems so highly dysfunctional. All that bull-crap about submission not being a sign of weakness but of trust... So he's not forcing Kyle to submit to him. He's forcing him to - against his will - "trust" him. And poor little Kyle doesn't get that. oh, dear. And their religion scares me. They have such vengeful gods. Vengeful, jealous gods.Stupid Kyle is being coerced and even when Taz lampshaded it, poor little Kyle didn't realize.I actually think Nikolai and Jagger might be the only ones who have a semi-okay relationship. Nikolai seemed like the only not-that-big-a-jackass.Oh, God. This is horrible. Larsson and Tarr? Really? Really? How the hell is that going to work out? We've already got one dysfunctional Tygerian-Lyncan couple. You're throwing another one into the mix? And isn't Tarr some horrible criminal? Unless they're pulling the Ryan thing and "oh, it's all a big-ass misunderstanding and he's just misunderstood." Either way, wtf.And the way Taz treats Kyle...I mean, I get that no one is perfect, but calling him a whore? Really? I'm suffering from so much incredulity reading this. It made the sex really uncomfortable. I couldn't read it. I mean, I don't normally read sex scenes since they tend to be boring and repetitive, but this made my uncomfortable even thinking of the idea of them having sex. It's like bunches of stupid power plays and weird-ass need for power...They whole-heartedly believe in the "if you love me, you'd do anything for me" idea. There's no "I'll do anything for you." It's "I'll do anything for you...as long as it benefits me more than it does you."I don't even know how they concluded everything because it became so dissonant that none of the last part made sense. How did they reconcile? All I see is sex, and then cut to Epilogue.Which was the awkward and equally discomforting Larsson and Tarr thing.Welp. That was awkward and uncomfortable.