Fans of Vicomte Raoul de Chagny

One weird thing about the characterisation of LND-Raoul -- he *knows* he is behaving badly, he despises himself for doing it, and yet it is *because* he despises himself that he does it; he is trapped in a very recognisably human vicious circle -- is that it is actually an echo of the original Raoul from Leroux's novel, who is a very different character, but shares this trait of finding himself behaving hurtfully towards Christine (usually out of his own wounded feelings), being painfully conscious of this and regretting it even as he is doing it, and yet being seemingly unable to stop.

This is almost certainly a complete coincidence, but maybe it's one reason why I didn't find the character entirely unrelatable...

"Love Never Dies" is a tragedy -- and that's not inherently wrong (although tough on the fans, not to mention the characters); a lot of operas are tragedies. "The Phantom of the Opera" can be seen as a tragedy if you're looking at it and weeping over the poor heartbroken deserted Phantom.

But as I've said elsewhere, the problem with the plot is not necessarily the fact that Christine dies. It's not that Raoul gets tricked into abandoning his wife in the clutches of her adulterous (and murderous) lover, an act which results more or less directly in her death -- in the hands of a Puccini or a Verdi, that could be the stuff of the most heart-rending grief and remorse -- but that this is presented as being an act so self-evidently right and inevitable that it gets taken for granted and nobody ever mentions it again.

It's a tragedy... but it's not a tragedy that the Phantom gets Christine killed and then takes her son. It's a tragedy that when he thrusts his way by force majeure into the middle of a marriage that neither of the couple shows any indication of wanting to leave, for all their unhappiness with its current state, he then messes up the attempt at reconciliation prompted by his actions.

Basically, he destroys Christine's family -- a family that we see her making considerable efforts to hold together. And then in his own selfishness he destroys her, leaving the rest of that family devastated. And then we're told that he is the one we ought to be feeling sorry for, and whom Gustave should magically love...