Really I'm using smut as a vehicle for dark humor/romantic thriller. I'm more or less daring my audience to sympathize with a repugnantly awful MC (who isn't human btw, dark elf). Here's the bullet points:

• chapter one establishes the comically depraved society he lives and partakes in, as well as a rival figure
• chapter two coercive sex with a noble woman who is appalling racist to him as their in the act, conversation with his royal father about his missing mother
• chapter three participates in a slave raid only to discover his mother alive...and he kills her to spare her a worse fate. Though he does take the opportunity to escape with his mother's granddaughter
• chapter four through the rest of the book is them on the run under dire emotional stakes through gorgeous landscapes. His race feed off of the extreme pleasure and extreme pain of other sentient races. This is the basis for the dub-con initiation into the romantic couple's relationship