His highness’s Allure

The most divisive thing about His Highness's Allure is not the cruelty of its male lead but the fact that the novel's own translator ended up writing a review that calls the male lead an "abusive asshole" and admits her opinion "deteriorated over time." The work is a Chinese BL web novel (danmei) by 风荷举哦, serialized on Shubl from 2019, later adapted into a Bilibili manhua that ran 132 chapters from 2022 to 2025. On NovelUpdates, its 70 votes produce a 3.1/5 average - but that average masks a schism: 31% gave it five stars and 23% gave it one star, with another 23% giving it two. Almost nobody is neutral.

The engine is the "wife-chasing crematorium" (追妻火葬场), a formula where an abusive male lead torments a naive partner until the partner leaves, then spends the second half of the story in desperate regret and pursuit. Here, the ninth prince Qi Changyi is beautiful, mentally slow, and treated as a possession by Prime Minister Pei Zheng. The manhua tagline is "天真赤忱小皇子x疯批报社黑丞相" - a naive sincere little prince paired with a crazy black-hearted prime minister. The first arc features non-consensual sex, torture (branding with a hot iron, knee-breaking), forced tattooing, and the MC being locked in a dungeon. He attempts suicide by jumping off a cliff. The ML has an eight-year age advantage over a partner who is described as smelling like milk and who cannot function without being told what to do.

The strongest pushback from readers who finished the novel is not about the darkness but about the shallowness. Multiple NovelUpdates reviews argue that the MC exists only to be pitied, that his suffering is "unreasonable" and "shallow," and that the plot uses time jumps to skip the hard work of making the trauma feel earned. Even the translator, Merchie, who completed all 216 chapters plus 44 extras, wrote that the MC is "heavily infantilized" and that the ML is "forgiven way too easily." The comparison that keeps surfacing is to Paper Flower, another danmei with a similar power imbalance - except readers who disliked that one reliably dislike this one too.

The real implication is that His Highness's Allure is a litmus test for how much melodramatic suffering a reader can absorb before the redemption arc stops mattering. The fan translation is fully complete. The manhua is finished. The raw novel sits on Shubl. The only question a new reader needs to answer is whether they find the mechanism cathartic or exhausting - and the reviews make clear that both answers are valid.