Quote Originally Posted by 5a Violista View Post
Except he didn't drug her and he seemed to respect her boundaries and explicitly asked and waited for consent.

Sure, her friends don't like him and she probably doesn't even like him all that much (she was more concerned about losing her virginity than who it was with) but "the main character doesn't love him" and "the main character's friends don't like him" don't automatically make Zaid a bad guy.

He would make a pretty cool arch-enemy, though. He also makes an alright damsel-in-distress, so I can't decide which I would rather have him be.
It's worth pointing out that, by my recollection, the page where he offers to stop has changed slightly over time. In the original version, he still did it, but he had a sort of skeevy, knowing expression on his face as he looked away from her (so she couldn't see it), which made him seem a bit manipulative. In the current version he looks a bit frustrated and unsure himself.

(I mean that expression alone didn't make him a horrible person or anything, but my impression was that he definitely came off as a somewhat more skeevy guy in the original than in the redraw.)

I definitely don't know where they're getting the idea that he drugged her from, though. And the fact that I'm analyzing slight details of his expression as he says stuff to try and infer things about his portrayal shows just how little we know about him either way.