So, I did not enjoy listening to this story. But it is not because it was a bad story. It's because it's a story about something really bad and sad (an emotionally abusive relationship) that accurately portrays the frustration I would feel with these characters in real life. The story did not have the cathartic happy ending that I really wanted. But, honestly, how many of these stories in real life have the happy ending that we all want. Emotional abuse and dependency suck.
At the risk of having another awkward experience that will keep me off the forums for another year... yes, I think this does make the story deeply flawed.
It's one thing to say "I'm going to write a story that takes on an awful situation, but I'm going to do it in an emotionally real way that takes in and deals with all the awfulness, acknowledging how awful and screwed up it all is."
It's something else to say "here's this situation - I think it's great and not awful at all," when actually the situation is terrible.
The former makes for an intense and challenging story; the latter leaves your audience cold, angry, and wondering what the hell is wrong with you.
Now, to be entirely fair, I don't know for sure if this story is actually in the latter category, because I can't actually see inside the author's mind. Maybe there was a failure of craft somewhere along the line that has left us all with some mistaken impression about the story. Was the end supposed to imply that Dog isn't actually getting back together with Meg, or is going to get back together with her but now maintain healthier boundaries? Was Meg supposed to seem like less of an awful person than we are all interpreting her? There are a number of places that narrative communication could have broken down that would have left some readers with unintended ideas about the story.
Anyway, the best example I have of this effect is Twilight (which yes, I did read). Is there anything wrong with telling a story about the sexual tension that grows between a lonely and alienated teen girl and the vampire who is stalking her? Absolutely not! That would be a pretty cool story, actually. What makes Twilight awful is that the author seems to think that she is telling the a sad and sweet story about a love that defies its circumstances, rather than the incredibly creepy horror story about a several-hundred-year-old predator stalking a naive, inexperienced, and lonely teenager and then eventually seducing her into joining his codependent vampire "family."
There's also this fantasy novel I tried to read once where the author thought that the main character was the good guy because of his special destiny, while the main villain was the bad guy because he cut down trees, even though he had, by far, the more sympathetic and pitiful backstory and his struggle to be a good and honorable man (by the customs of his people) was way more interesting (to me), but that example is much more personal, subjective, and less widely known.
So yeah... I don't know if I want to go out on a limb and say that it was a "bad story." However, the overwhelming reaction of "oh God, Meg was such a bad person, what the hell is wrong with this story!?" shows that the story is definitely
flawed.
Something went wrong
somewhere along the line such that we either see Meg, or the relationship, as more awful than the author intended. If you look at the comments on a Pseudopod story that uses an abusive relationship as the central metaphor, you don't (usually) see the commenters dwelling on how much they disliked the story because of the awful relationship, but that's because those stories know what they are doing.
This one? It didn't seem to.