borne out of a very interesting question posed by @maraudertimes which ate my brain: what's the appeal of a morally grey love interest (as opposed to a golden retriever love interest)? with the disclaimers that I might actually be more here for the golden retrievers, that this is the generalisation of a spectrum, & that i'm a weird little gremlin probably not represetative of a real audience, here is my attempt to answer that:

• Nice to Me and Me Alone. I get this appeal. this villain who sucks and hates everyone is into me?? that makes me pretty special. love that. It’s like a billionare/broke romance except you swap out the appeal of untold riches for “half-nice sometimes”. hell yeah
• relatedly, I And I Alone Know This Person. It’s very intimate to know someone imho. wouldn’t be healthy IRL to be this codependent but there’s an iddy appeal to being like, this horrible gremlin and all their soft spots is all mine, mine alone, (commence Gollum routine)
• when a morally grey, extremely shielded asshole is forced to feel emotions? That’s pretty cool. I do like that. Even in a non romantic context I'm very fond of this (cough, The Scholomance series, cough). there’s a fundamental appeal to watching an asshole be miserable about having to acknowledge they have a heart. I always feel very, ha ha suffer with the rest of us for a bit, about it
• when someone’s love language is “dead bodies”, I guess that’s pretty neat. Very illustrative. Maybe less flexible than a flower dictionary but alternatively maybe you could start assigning body parts qualities like "purity" and "affection" I think that would be pretty funny
• when a morally grey villain Humbles themselves to a love interest? That could be arresting. I use the hypothetical because off the top of my head I can only recall reading one instance of this and I thought it failed, but you know, the idea is still good
• Dangerous. I think this one explains itself really, it's a bit sexy to be a bit dangerous. (For posterity and because on Discord this one came last, it is last on this list too even though it is in hindsight one of the most obvious reasons to be drawn to a villain. All the weird emotion stuff came first and tbh that's pretty representative of my reading priorities)

feel free to try and change my mind in the comments, it's a free web site. i'll warn you in advance you have a very low chance of making me think that weird dreadful emotion-feeling isn't the best part of a book. or you could list out your own reasons you like morally grey love interests but make it this exact list in bad paraphrase to validate me in my likes. or list out why you like golden retrievers specifically to invalidate my likes, that would be very funny. or recommend me something! I don't know do whatever you want, I'm just here because the discord egged me on to make my list a blog post and I'm now finding that I don't know what a blogs is. this is indeed hell