- Sep 18, 2021
- 768
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I'm not sure you can even "fix" one of them. No matter which path you choose, the love interest you're with still has all the same problems.
Mira is still projecting her fantasies on you and using you as a crutch. Danielle is still using you as a proxy for Damon. Rose is just using you as an escape hatch from a self-destructing relationship. Ada still has commitment issues and can't face up to the conflict between what others want her to be versus who she wants to be. Naomi simultaneously craves the approval of others while having abandoment issues so deep you could park a bus in them. You're distracting them from their problems, but you're not helping them. They're not improving. They're not facing their flaws and attempting to cope with them. They're the same people after the "big event" as they were when you first met them.
The MC himself is also a mess, and shows no real signs of growth either. Sure, it may superficially seem like he's maturing (as he stops angsting over Naomi), but his original relationship ended because he's prone to grand gestures, conforms to what his partner wants out of the perfect relationship (at least on the surface), and is utterly incapable of dealing with his own emotions. Fast-forward to the present and he's still making grand gestures, effectively conforming to what the other person wants more than having his own expectations, and he's still utterly unable to process any of his emotions in anything resembling a healthy way (and he's happily laying down and being a doormat to Damon and others). He hasn't changed in the slightest, and the flaws that have made his life hell in the past are going to continue to do so.
I've used the term Manic Pixie Dream Boy to describe the main character in the past, but he's almost a deconstruction of it - he's an example of what would realistically happen if that sort of person drifted into other people's lives and became their "muse". They don't walk away with a newfound appreciation for life having overcome all their flaws. They just stay broken, flawed people who are going to feel even worse when the Dream Boy drifts back out of their life again.
Basically, literally everyone in this story needs to go to therapy. But preferrably not with either of the two therapists we've seen so far because both of them are also messes and should probably have their licenses revoked for the multiple ethical violations they're guilty of.
Maybe the true moral of the story is that you need to fix yourself and learn to love and respect yourself before you can ever have a healthy relationship with anyone else. And that if you wait for someone else to come along and fix you, you're going to wind up worse off than you were when you started.
Or maybe the real moral of the story is that someone needs to build a time machine and travel back to the past and murder Damon as a baby, because he's caused 97% of the problems in the story. He's like a reverse Midas - everything he touches turns to shit.
