Thought experiment
Speaking of Steve, are the people who readily condemn Dad Maya willing to console Steve and essentially forgive him? Or do they reject him? Beyond being a douche to MC, Steve is guilty of sexual assault against Josy, but because he cries on the floor about mama and papa, he is now a person to be forgiven? It seems to me that Steve is just as guilty as Dad Maya, if not more. Dad Maya makes his daughter feel worthless, Steve sexually assaults his co-worker and tries to make MC feel worthless. One would think they are as least equally bad if not Steve more so. The CHICK choice is to console Steve even though he has done nothing to atone for his crime against Josy. Wouldn't the CHICK choice for Dad Maya haters be to forgive him as well at some point?
Being a DIK, I have the great pleasure of not having to forgive anyone and thus never having to worry about the hypocrisy.
Yes, but Steve isn't hitting rock bottom because he feels bad about his actions against Josy and MC. He simply feels bad for himself. He is thinking more of how his parents break up is affecting him than his parents. I don't think he had even a sliver of self reflection concerning his own behaviour over the summer. Now MC's olive branch may be the kindness he needs to change his ways, but we don't fully know that yet. The fact remains he is guilty of greater unrepentant crimes than Dad Maya yet he is a character people are more quick to forgive. Makes you wonder why that is.
I don't think the MC has forgiven Steve, and I wouldn't necessarily say that I would either in a similar situation. What it is for me is that it's simply seeing someone at a low point and extending that olive branch, being the bigger person and showing some human compassion to that person even if they perhaps don't deserve it. Yes, the reason why Steve is so upset does seem rather selfish, so that in itself doesn't exactly lend itself to feeling sorry for Steve or forgiving them for past actions, but by at least lending an ear and trying to console them, it could give them to pause to rethink their past actions and maybe they'll change and be apologetic if they meet again later.
With Maya's Dad, we haven't seen him at a low point and currently he seems very determined and set in his bigoted ways so it's easy and, I think, right to dislike him for this reason. At this point, he is like Steve from Ep 1; an entirely unpleasant character that you don't care to know or tolerate. If he too were to have such a moment of vulnerability, then perhaps an attempt could be made to talk with him, but the other key difference is that his issue stems from a deeply-rooted and ignorant intolerance based on flawed religious doctrine and that rises to a much higher level of dislike and disgust than someone just being a bit of a douche and a bully based on their own ego.
Fucking he'll how is this conversation still going on, it's just repetitive and boring now, new people jumping in and saying the same things that were said yesterday that lead to multiple posts getting deleted.
But to reiterate again because I love being dragged back in, Maya is a liar, and a manipulator. These are cold facts that not even her number one fans can deny.
And because of those character traits we don't know if she's telling the truth about dear old daddy.
There's a huge difference between lying in order to deliberately deceive, and omitting details in order to protect oneself and others from potential harm, be that physical or emotional.
The only true lie that Maya told was that she had a boyfriend, but as I've said numerous times, it's the same tactic women use all the time to rebuff the advances of men because they want to put them off being interested so they'll leave them alone. If they say it enough times it can become a reflex, and that's likely what happened here, but as Maya opens up to the MC, she starts to see him as someone she can trust and so she recants the lie as a likely first step to letting him in, but her walls are still up. She could have said she had a girlfriend, but at that point she didn't know if that was still true and she was still not at the stage where she could know for sure if he would accept her being gay, so this is the omission to protect herself from possible further rejection.
As for being a "manipulator", this word implies that she is purposefully manipulating others to do her her bidding, and that description seems to better fit Quinn than Maya. Maya can't "manipulate" the HOTs because she's not the one in control of this situation. That's like trying to say that someone is "manipulating" a bank by getting a loan from them to pay off their debts. In both situations, the person/group providing the assistance is a means to an end, but that is not a manipulative tactic on the side of the person seeking the assistance.
