Why is Leopold considered an abusive husband? As far as I could see he was an entitled king who was often rendered clueless and blind to other people's suffering because he was so privileged, but that doesn't make him abusive. In 1x11 he came off as a husband who couldn't understand why his wife was so unhappy. I think reading her diary was just a way to figure it out.
You don’t think reading her diary was abusive? Doing so regularly that her plan could count on him doing so? You don’t think ignoring your wife and praising your late wife while setting your daughter down in your wife’s place says something about their dynamic? You don’t think a man who marries a girl whose mother he once tried to marry and whose reaction to the proposal was this is abusive?
You don’t think a man who knows his wife is profoundly unhappy and when presented with a genie says this is abusive?
After all if he was just trying to find out why his wife was unhappy he could have asked the genie for that as one of his wishes. But let’s go back to the diary readying–seriously you don’t see how that’s a violation?–because he finds out a man has given her hope and his reaction is to have this man hunted down and likely killed. Nothing in that diary entry suggested anything improper had happened.
But most of all… 40 years after his death this is his wife’s reaction to the mere mention of that marriage.
That is not a woman reliving simple neglect. Regina did not consent to that marriage. She said it to at least two people. It would have been impossible for Leopold not to know she did not want to marry him. Regina before the wedding was not being subtle about it.
A forced marriage to a teenage girl who certainly would not have consented to sexual contact with him. If you can’t understand why people read Leopold, a man who married a teenager a third his age, as abusive I’m not really sure what to say.
