Where Krishna is loved for breaking rules, Rama is revered for keeping them, and the title the tradition gives him states it: Maryada Purushottam, the supreme person who observes the bounds, the ideal of dharma embodied as a man.
In the Ramayana Rama is the perfect son, who accepts fourteen years of forest exile without protest to keep his father's word; the perfect brother and husband; and, above all, the perfect king. His reign, Ram Rajya, became the enduring Indian image of just and righteous government, a realm without want or injustice, invoked far beyond religion; Gandhi used Ram Rajya to name the ideal social order he sought, detaching it from any sectarian sense.
But the ideal is not presented without cost, and the tradition knows it. To answer his subjects' doubts about Sita's purity after her captivity, Rama subjects her to an ordeal by fire, and later, when suspicion persists, banishes her, pregnant and innocent, to the forest. That a story about the perfect man contains his treatment of a faultless wife has troubled readers for centuries: it is debated within the tradition, dramatised differently in different retellings, and pressed hard by modern feminist critics, for whom Sita's ordeal is the crux rather than a detail.
The figure therefore carries a tension that devotion does not dissolve. He is held up as the standard of conduct in a bind where every choice costs something, and the maryada he never breaks is exactly what exacts the price, which may be part of why the ideal has held so long.