u/Kythones

Because my  memes of FMDF are popular, I think I’ll have to actually explain my problem with this fuckass story.  Let me warn you right that this is my attempt to explain my actual issues with the story but you’re not dumb or stupid for liking this story.

My problem with FMDF isn't that the author presents Diana as someone who was abused and mistreated by the Orchus family. My problem is that the author chose to depict abuse, victimhood, and power dynamics in a way that I find deeply suspicious and misogynistic.

So first things first: Diana isn't actually responsible for the narrative role she is forced into. She is not a real person who is following real lines of emotional logic. The author chose to make her act and react in specific ways. If you're rolling your eyes right now that's fine because it is annoying to re-iterate this, but I'm kind of tired of people straight up ignoring the real criticisms you can make of FMDF's writing by just saying “but Diana did x bad things!!!”

My point isn't whether Diana was right or wrong to react negatively to Cael after he murdered the Orchus family. The point is that the author wanted to depict a situation where a woman is abused by a powerful family and then wanted us to sympathize more with the man who slaughtered them than with the actual victim of the abuse. To do that, the story bends over backwards to make Diana’s victimhood secondary to Cael’s emotions and Hestia’s resentment.

If you're not interested in examining the text by those standards and just want to look at raw facts through a lens that has no care for how narratives frame sympathy, lets get that out of the way quick:

If this wasn't a story, Diana’s abuse would matter independently of Cael. Being abused and kidnapped by a powerful family would realistically shape her worldview, behavior, relationships, emotional reactions, and ability to trust others. And on top of that, Diana was literally raised by a corrupt church institution that clearly shaped her morality, beliefs, and black-and-white worldview. There is no universe where a woman raised inside a corrupt religious system and abused by nobles would come out emotionally untouched. There is nothing Cael can do afterwards that suddenly makes her trauma revolve around him. Even if he killed people who hurt her, that does not erase the fact that she was still the victim in that situation. If we are to judge these characters as real-world stand ins, Diana’s abuse and upbringing should center Diana first and foremost.

But it is a story, a fictional telling of events that is designed by the author in order to make you feel how she wants you to feel. And the way we're supposed to feel is that Cael is tragic, Hestia is justified, and Diana should be grateful.

Now you'll notice that even though the entire situation starts with Diana getting abused and kidnapped by the Orchus family and being raised under a corrupt church, there is almost no exploration of how any of that shaped her. While the story constantly revisits Cael’s guilt, pain, depression, suicide attempts, and emotional suffering, Diana’s own victimhood gets flattened into background information. You're just lying if you claim the story centers what she went through in any meaningful way. The initial emotional response the author wants you to feel is not “this poor woman was raised inside a corrupt institution and then abused by powerful nobles,” it is “look at what Cael sacrificed and suffered for her.”

But Cael needs to be the tragic sympathetic party in this story. It is in part a revenge fantasy that asks, “what if the saintly FL rejected the man who destroyed himself for her.” I do not actually against the story for wanting to approach that theme, and the implicit power dynamic between “tragic savior” Cael and “ungrateful saint” Diana presents a unique problem to the author.

My issue with the story is that the author relies on favoritism and lazy writing to ensure we never fully center Diana’s perspective. They could have explored how being raised by a corrupt church affected her sense of morality. They could have explored how abuse affected her emotionally. They could have explored how horrifying it would feel to learn someone massacred an entire family in her name. They could have explored how trauma, religion, and political pressure shaped her worldview. They could have explored how Hestia projects her instability onto Diana and dehumanizes her into a scapegoat for own issues. They could have done anything to seriously interrogate the emotional logic of framing Cael’s violence as romantic and Hestia’s treatment of Diana as justified.

But they didn't. Diana just kinda exists to absorb the consequences of everyone else’s actions. Meanwhile Cael massacres an entire noble family, and the narrative treats him with endless sympathy. He gets emotional depth. He gets psychological exploration. He gets to be tragic. He gets a suicide attempt framed as heartbreaking because he “lost his friends” and thought life wasn’t worth living anymore.
Diana HAS to be emotionally distant, HAS to be “wrong,” HAS to be unsympathetic, and she has to do all of that whilst somehow remaining less humanized than the man who slaughtered an entire household and the woman who spends dozens of chapters reducing her to an object of revenge. The story isn't really interested in talking about how abuse affects women psychologically. That Diana’s actions, fears, emotional distance, religious rigidity, and moral absolutism could all be shaped by years of institutional conditioning and mistreatment is barely considered. We're never meant to question why the actual victim of abuse receives less narrative sympathy than the people reacting to her abuse.

And this is where the deconstruction completely fails.

FMDF wants credit for “deconstructing” the saintly FL archetype through Diana, but a deconstruction requires interrogation. It requires the story to critically examine the archetype and the systems around it. Instead, the story just replaces the saintly FL with Hestia while using Diana as a punching bag. Diana is not treated like a complicated former protagonist whose worldview collapses under pressure. She is treated like an obstacle that exists to validate Hestia’s superiority.
And Hestia’s entire arc depends on dehumanizing Diana.

Hestia cannot cope with the fact that this “fictional world” contains real people with autonomy, contradictions, and emotions outside of the narrative she read. Instead of confronting that existential instability, she redirects all of it onto Diana. Diana becomes the embodiment of everything wrong with the world in Hestia’s mind. She stops being a person and becomes “the fake saint,” “the woman who ruined Cael,” the thing that needs to be punished so Hestia can emotionally stabilize herself.

And the story validates that mentality constantly.

Hestia humiliates Diana socially. Undermines her politically. Frames her as incompetent. Treats her like an object rather than a person. And the narrative almost never pauses to seriously acknowledge that this is dehumanization. Even when she decides to move on, she doesn’t move on because she sees Diana as a real human being. There is no sustained reckoning where Hestia has to confront the fact that she projected her instability onto another woman and emotionally destroyed her. Instead, Diana gets flattened more and more until she barely exists outside of her function in Hestia’s revenge fantasy.
And like- that's fine, right? Most revenge romances simplify morality and prioritize catharsis over realism. That was the point of my exercise earlier, it's okay for a revenge fantasy to exist without deeply interrogating every moral implication. But what the story can't ALSO do is claim to be a deconstruction while refusing to engage with the actual implications of its premise.

If FMDF wants to deconstruct the “saintly FL,” then Diana’s trauma, upbringing, perspective, and humanity should matter. If it wants Hestia’s revenge to be morally messy, then the story needs to acknowledge the ugliness of reducing another woman into a narrative scapegoat. If it wants Cael’s violence to feel tragic, then the story should probably care about the actual victim more than the man reacting to her abuse.

But it doesn't.

Why does Diana NEED be abused if the story is too afraid to allow it to be more than a footnote in her writing? Why does Diana NEED to be raised by a corrupt church if the story refuses to meaningfully explore how that shaped her worldview? Why does Hestia NEED to dehumanize Diana if the narrative refuses to acknowledge that dehumanization as harmful? Why does the story NEED to place an emphasize on how Hestia’s dehumanization being bad if it doesn’t matter when it comes to the woman in which she dehumanizes the most? Why does Cael murdering an entire family receive more emotional focus than Diana being victimized by them in the first place?

The answer to these questions is usually just “But Cael loved her!” or “Well Diana hurt him!” or “Hestia was defending him!” Things that don't super matter to me when it comes to the themes presented. Diana is the emotional center of a story and yet the narrative consistently redirects emotional sympathy away from her and toward the people who resent her. The unspoken implication is that Diana’s character only matters as far as it creates tragedy for Cael and emotional catharsis for Hestia. It bends over backwards to redirect the emotional weight of what happened away from the woman herself.