I mean, you know, one of the things I love about romance is that any other genre would treat the story of abuse survival as a) focused on the abuse and b) make it much more dramatic.
And romance is just like "yep, previous partner was evil, time to heal" and in some ways it's...more complicated, but out of all the promises that romances make, the one that says you'll be okay even if horrible things happened to you is pretty good.
There's a balance between taking evil seriously and giving it too much power and I'm not entirely sure how well romance walks that line, but I would say the same about any genre.
Anyway, this series begins explaining some of the gender stuff at this point, although it's already been make clear that this is already a very queer culture and the way Derr handles that is pretty good.
And, also, every single book is about two people who think they are not good enough for the other one (although one of them thinks that much more strongly)