There are two sides of the coin and two different ways to go about subverting expectations:
One way is to do to the vilain what goes on with Seymour: the guy treats Lena as his personal sex doll,
but all dolls have expiration dates on how much you indulge, as someone who can just command Lena or Axel,
yeeah - Axel the Lena cheater and abuser is just a tool for Seymour - to fkk in front of him just like that.
Such a powerful man with this kind of fetish - command the way people deliver his entertainment,
he has way more refined and lavish means of getting high- the rush of adrenaline to his heart,
other than simple sex or some broad performing sexual acts on him the way she knows how,
as opposed to the way he likes to see things get done.
I kinda expected he would done more after Lena declined him for a third time
I'm kinda surprised about that, since most powerful people I know don't take no for an answer and will do anything to make someone live even more miserable if they keep going against them.
This is the way many shows subvert expectations - stop the narrative flow of our minds filling the expectations
with our own opinions of how the story would continue or the plot would build and dissolve tension.
Good shows do not destroy the whole charcater arc of the protagonist or the antagonist, they
simply derail or detour their paths in order to show other novel activities or ideas that animate them,
different than what the audience would expect based on those charcaters track records.
I would disagree with that last bit, i.e. in a superhero or action movie you expect the hero to defeat the evildoers, the excitement comes from seeing how it happens, not in seeing it subverted. In a romcom, the expectation is for the would-be lovers to get together in the end, not for the counterpart to prevail over the protagonist and get the girl.
A super hero could win even if the vilain escapes capture but the activity gets stopped or disrupted or the victims get
saved - the hero is still on top if any of those conditions meet in the end, it does not have to be all of them.
A vilain could finish the story arc quiting in the middle of the deed and be shown either go about starting another
con in a different area, leave it all behind and just get a normal boring job, without the final confrontation being
a defeat or a retribution for the bad deeds.
In this game, Karma could be just as swift as Seymour finding another hobby,
Axxel getting axxed by Seymour as retaliation because he broke Lena and he cannot use her any more,
many things can be the solution dev be finding to steer clear of what we would see ourselves
in the continuation of this game.