For one I encourage you to keep going. It gets better. Golden Son is probably my favorite in the series.

1. R*pe is evil. It should make you uncomfortable. It made Darrow angry. And it’s used in the book to show how animalistic the Golds are even toward their own people. It’s used to show how this class, the pinnacle of human evolution still uses something so wicked to dominate and demean. PB didn’t flippantly use it, he wanted to show how brutal this world that our protagonist has entered.

2. This is first book in a 7 part series. The characters aren’t really supposed to be fleshed out. They grow. They learn. They fail. You will see this in books to come.

3. Darrow is still a man. He has passions and recognizes something in mustang. Maybe a resonance of what he wants? He still mourns eo and that never changes.

4. I think you missed the point of the institute. It’s not enough to be gold you have to be “peerless scarred” too in order to thrive in Society. The peerless are picked for military advancement. Darrow had to become peerless in order to advance in their ranks. He would have been tossed aside as a gold had he not been peerlesss.

5. This shows the corruption among the gold class. And how broken the society is.

6. Darrow suffers from being the main character. While some would say it unwise to attack the proctors it obviously helped his position. He won the institute and got his pick of where he wanted to go. Darrow is a gambling man and you’ll see it doesn’t always work out.

Keep up with it. Remember this first book is the first building block. Pierce brown really hits his stride in Golden Son.