@Darkwolfix "If you pay attention to most stories it is always the king/emperor loving the woman of his life and then years later or a decade later, they fall in love again? I don't really think that's possible. Then you lusted for the first one AND cared. Yes, most of the time many human beings confuse care for love and simple love for romantic love." What are you referring to this? I don't get it.
"A very visible love that many fail to notice is the love for the opposite sex......" This is often because they are heterosexual, the actions of the opposite sex are interpreted different when a friend does it, I personally enjoy more when they fall in love with the actions and not the gender like in "To be or not to be" or "Otome game no hametsu"
"The problem I have with that is that manhwas/mangas "romanticize" with the idea and many readers believe it" That is not a recent phenomenon, lots of literature works played a lot with romanticizing certain themes, like force marriage or forbidden love, etc, I am also aware that was the same with ancient times in asia, there are tons of folklore histories about romance with natural phenomenon the stars and the moon, the sea and the island, the flowers, etc, most of the time it ended in tragedy, but romantization was a huge part of the histories, the same happens with modern manhwas, I think people just like romance.
If I undertood you are against that idea of romance? girls buying that? Sorry, I'm really confused while reading that, it might be because I'm not english speaker tho.
Unless you give me a source like the novel saying he will have a harem and that he will bed that harem while having MC to his side, I will find hard to believe that, even if this kind of setting is on a harem time, he will not necessarily have one, since that is not the idea this manhwa is selling so far, because this is a romantization of that time, where he will be committed to just one woman.
I appreciate the suggestion but my interest in ancient asia is as far as watching documentary of how harems work or video essays of that time because I consume historical manhwas.
As you said, they had to attack their reputation before making a move, to have a reason, that's why they could not always do whatever they wanted, some concubinas will have lots of wealth and they would not always be able to cut them of in fear to lose economic support of those families, there were families that would lose economic power, political power or military so their representative concubines will lose their support and so the emperor could discard them pretty easily if he wanted to, it is a pretty complicated issue, which I don't know why we are talking about it haha, I enjoy it tho!
"that is not what you see happening in mangas/manhwas now do you? " I have seen a lot of everything to be fair, even matriarchal societies where the empress is the one that holds the power. The emperor making hell out of the empress life I have seeing it A LOT in revenge manhwas where she goes back in time and takes revenge on them, not really in normal setting of romance, and if that is the case the empress is portrayed as the bad guy to make it right for the emperor to choose the good pure concubine over her to the readers eyes.
" What is hilarious happening in mangs and mostly in manhwas, you can see a, now, princess after marrying a prince or queen/empress having a very supportive family but still remains with her abuser lol and change him into a better person. Let's be honest in reality that doesn't happen. Those who changed are just a few and that happened only in their second or third relationships. There needs to be a lot of trials for people to learn."
I have read one like "lady to queen" or "The abandoned empress" with that descriptions, but I don't think is very dominant in the gender, an abusive man is not that well received by the public, most men are "cold" "distant" "closed their hearts" "don't trust" "don't believe in love" "have traumas" "villain but not specially mean to women" "clueless to love" those are the kind of ML that are the most popular among the gender, girls want to see the guys changing, but not really someone who is actively abusive against women or someone who has abusive to FL, "lady to queen" "The abandoned empress" "Beatriz" "The queen is busy" are examples of that, the public does complain a lot about them and while it is a thing that exist, is not the most universally well receive, predominant or even representative of the gender.