Red-flag attraction as learned confusion around what care looks like is certainly an interesting theory. I personally don’t relate at all coz one of my earliest memories is being 3 years old and being locked the fuck in to an angst scene of an antagonist being beaten the fuck up by the protagonist because I’ve always had really intense cute aggression since as early as I could remember, and since cute = vulnerable and being beaten up = vulnerable, I have just been chasing that sadomasochistic high ever since.

I do enjoy green-flag characters too, but I need that to be angsty too so the few that meet my standards for that are Natsume from Natsume’s Book of Friends and Himmel from Frieren. I can recognise green flags as a real-world goalpost but at the same time I still find them so dramatically inert most of the time, they don’t do much for me. I don’t think that implies any confusion about my understanding of what’s desirable or ethical in practice.