With certain elections, there will be a scenario where the wife treats the MC with more understanding, but either way it will be pretty hard.
That would be fine by me, but perhaps the problem (?!) is the quality of the writing... You can actually like the characters, because it is possible to see how much thought was put into them. So when we get to the 'fast forward' scenes, things become hard to swallow not because they aren't pleasant in themselves, but because the expectations you build for the characters are kinda frustrated.
Don't get me wrong -- I LIKE "pretty hard." But it feels to me that you spent so much time building Maria up to be a sympathetic character (that scene with her crying over her father's death comes to mind) that suddenly seeing her proposing total control of John's life as "well-deserved punishment"... just doesn't feel like something she'd do.
Considering her previous interactions with John and with other characters, I'd expect her to have at least one, and possibly several, conversations with John about his (and her) kinks. The whole scene with the laptop, in which they openly discussed their interest, makes it seem like a natural development -- they should have been talking a lot more about what they like or don't like, since they managed to open the subject once. Yet this never happens.
I understand that the kink here is non-consensuality: it's fun to watch Maria take control despite John's wishes. Buuut... after all our previous experiences with Maria, this ends up being difficult to buy. It may seem paradoxical, but it would have been easier to accept IF Maria had started out as your usual 2D fantasy-fulfillment dream Domme; but she started out as a real human being, and one who is (was) in love with MC, so seeing her jump into the role of a wicked wife who doesn't think about her husband's needs anymore sounds like it comes out of nowhere. And that, in a game that is VERY well paced overall!
Maybe Maria's character (and John's) just need a little more thinking. You decided to introduce John's service as a househusband as a sort of punishment for the fight with Maria's mother -- but the situation is such that it is hard to believe that someone like Maria would not see her husband's viewpoint (since he supported her artistic endeavors for over a year, gave her full freedom to accept or refuse Deborah's job offer, and was more than willing to accommodate her kinks after the laptop scene -- someone like Maria would not miss any of these things when thinking about what to do...). So maybe, instead of that, the first introduction of the idea could have come as a consensual division of labor -- since Maria has to work longer irregular hours, it would be natural for the house chores to become John's duty, and he could agree with that. Then you could slowly increase her level of cruelty -- at first as play, with John's consent, then transitioning to non-sollicited but implicit consent on the way towards non-consensuality. They could have a few more honest open-heart conversations, but those could be slowly phased out (he might say in one of these conversations 'I love it when you make decisions' and then you could slowly build up from decisions he'd almost certainly be OK with to others that would irk him or not please him at all, for instance).
In this way you'd have the build-up in which Maria would have the time to transition from someone who cares about MC's feelings to someone who doesn't via slow steps of "when I pretend I don't care about him he likes it, so I am caring about him" to "mmm...mmm... I'm enjoying this too much, I'll think of him later" to "it's all about me". You glossed over this whole development in one pussy-licking scene in which you just said she went from praising him to becoming more and more demanding and often giving him just a pat on the head in one paragraph... that could have been a whole week worth of dialogues
Let me finish by saying I don't dislike the idea -- by all means, go "pretty hard"! But since you took enough time to make me care about characters like Maria and their internal turmoils... give her more humanity. She's not just a VN character, she has feelings, too, y'know?
