⚠️ Warning: spoilers ahead
Now, I can get on board with people shitting on 50 Shades for representing problematic situations as romantic, but not CaPri, because (at least what I’ve read so far) the narrator doesn’t paint the problematic themes as romantic in any way. Instead, like you said, it presented exactly as problematic as it is.
Laurent is a total sadistic jackass at first, and they have no relationship other than the one forced on them. I include Laurent in on not choosing the master/slave relationship, because he’s expected to keep Damen as his pleasure slave (since he was gifted to him as such) even though he doesn’t want pleasure company. Plus, it’s a slap in the face to him to be gifted such a slave (Damen talks about how ironically sick it is at length in his interior monologues) from a country that caused his father and brothers’ deaths. Laurent almost kills Damon through the torture he orders, and he probably would have outright killed Damon had he not been ordered to keep him alive. And Damon has more than one instance where he fantasizes how he might kill Laurent. The only reason they both don’t kill each other in the first book is simply out of self-preservation, and there is nothing remotely disguised in that as being romantic.
It’s not until the second book that they even begin to build a relationship, not because Damen pities and romanticizes Laurent’s traumatic past (I can feel that building, something beyond his father and brother’s deaths, and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be screaming about it if I find out my theories are correct ;A;) but because they have to work together and defeat a common enemy, and through that, they’re learning (very slowly, yet, organically) that they actually kinda really like each other 😍
