Damon is jealous of the MC
Arguably not even that. To some extent it feels like 90% of Damon's bullshit boils down to "I have a huge crush on a straight dude and don't know how to process it."
For starters it's pretty obvious he's got a crush on the MC, and even his current boyfriend hints at it (but the MC is too dense to pick up even the most blatant of social cues from anyone, so it goes right over his head like everything else). There are multiple points in the story where it's kind of implied Damon is the one that hooked you up with your ex, and is very clearly trying to get you to hook up with someone else again, and there's an undercurrent of him trying to live vicariously through them.
A lot of Damon's manipulation comes across like "I want my beloved to be happy", with a lot of "I think with my heart and not my head" thrown in. Nearly everything that's going wrong boils down to Damon trying to do the "right thing" (as he sees it), without really understanding or foreseeing the catastrophic consequences of his piss-poor decisions. And then being completely crippled by guilt or massively overcompensating afterward.
Basically, he talked MC's mom into getting back with her crush because he was likely relating his own situation with hers, and was pushing a "you should do what your heart wants" mindset without thinking about how it was going to utterly destroy her family. Afterwards, knowing he was basically responsible, he's trying to "fix" things to help the MC recover from the losses, but because he's absolutely terrible at it he's really just making things worse.
He's
trying to do the right thing, but in the worst possible ways. And because he's too afraid to ever admit the truth (about what he did, about his homosexuality, about stringing Danielle along as a convenient beard and hardcore fucking her over in the process, about trying to get the MC a new girlfriend to pull him out of his depression, etc), every single thing he does just makes everything worse.
He's not an evil person, he's just a destructive idiot.
It feels like the intention of the story is that we're supposed to sympathize with him because he's a gay man who can't talk about his real feeling for fear of persecution and rejection, but utimately we're left feeling disgusted by him because of how utterly toxic his influence winds up being.
yeah we need answers i also bet it was Damon's plan to get MC and Dani together as well
It seems pretty obvious from his reactions that his plan was to hook MC up with Mira.
BUT - if he finds out you're getting friendly with Ada, he has a really happy reaction (because it means you're sort of doing what he wanted and finding someone new even if it isn't the one he picked for you). It's the same reason he arranges the meeting with your ex... he's clearly setting up a situation where you can either get back together with her or get closure, either of which helps heal the wound he's trying to fix.
With Danielle, it mostly starts out as him feeling too guilty to deal with her (because he knows just how much of a shit he's been to her), and when you start dealing with her he gets really happy about the idea of the two of you potentially hooking up because it solves two of his problems (ie, you get a girlfriend, she can stop chasing after him).
But again, the problem with Damon is that it doesn't really matter whether or not his intentions are good, he basically does
the worst possible thing in every single situation, making everything worse, and effectively destroying the lives of nearly everyone he interacts with.
He's not a villain, he's a walking curse.
Totally agree, we need an update so some sense can be made of this. It all seems just crazy, you can understand melodrama with the young'uns but there absolutely no explanation why the mom would disappear and not get in contact once the dad had left the scene. Pretty much the worst thing a parent can do to a child barring serious SA.
The implication I get is that she feels so terrible about leaving and abandoning her family (and how badly it messed up her son, which she almost certainly
knows because Damon would have told her) that she feels too guilty to try and reconnect. With a bit of fear that he won't ever want to see her/talk to her again anyway because he hates her now.
(Not that that's actually a realistic fear, because the MC is constantly presented as a doormat who would probably forgive her 30 seconds after seeing her again and start blaming himself for her leaving.)
"
Poor communication is the root of all sorrow" could probably be the underlying theme of this entire story. Nearly every problem, tragedy, and emotional wound could be completely avoided if people in this word were just willing to fucking talk about their issues for about 5 minutes. Instead everyone is keeping secrets, no one ever talks about their issues, and everything festers like an infection until everything explodes in a fiery mess.
Ex-gf did quite a few things wrong.
You could argue it wasn't her intention, and it was mostly the result of her own fucked up issues and broken psyche, but that excuse doesn't really justify it because it applies to nearly everyone else in the story. It doesn't really matter WHY you're being a shit, what matters is that you ARE being a shit.
If you look at the flashbacks it's pretty obvious that the MC and Naomi have almost nothing in common. They were hooked up by Damon (because of course they were), who knew Naomi because they were both athletes. MC seems to hate everything she likes (and vice-versa), and they've wound up in a co-dependent relationship where the only real connection they have is that they both like to have sex. They both idealized the relationship into something it wasn't.
Meanwhile Naomi is mostly in the relationship in the first place because she has HUGE abandonment issues, which are compounded by her own "abandon them before they can abandon you" tendencies (which we see in the story when she visits her foster parents). The moment she realizes your relationship is slightly less than perfect (when you have your
first fight), she
immediately self-destructs and flees. She makes zero effort to try and fix things, understand your postion, or even compromise - if we're going to pile on Damon for lacking awareness, we also have to judge Naomi for having what is essentially an incredibly self-centered and complete lack of empathy.
All of which
might be justifiable if the MC was being a complete asshole or had no real basis for being upset, but when the root of the problem is "I feel really emotionally shattered because my mother just ran off and destroyed our family" and her reaction is "BOO HOO, what about my problems?", it might make her one of the worst people in the entire story (second only to Damon and your mom).
None of this is helped by the fact that we get a scene where she explicitly says "Something is up with your mom, you should talk to her about it", but then the moment you attempt to bring it up she immediately cock-blocks you from discussing it with your mom. And since your mom abandons the family pretty much the very next day, it means what was essentially your first, last, and only opportunity to actually discuss things with your mom and potentially figure out what was going on was ruined because Naomi didn't want to kill the mood. It's
incredibly easy to be resentful about something like that.
The MC never stops seeing her as anything other than his magical princess who was his ONE TRUE LOVE that he'll never recover from (because of course he does), but from the context of the outside observer, their relationship was incredibly toxic, and she's as much part of that (if not more so) as he is.
In a realistic scenario, the only real hope the MC has of ever living a healthy life is to pretty much abandon all of these people for good, never talk to any of them ever again, and try to restart his life somewhere else, making new friends that actually respect him, and learning to stand up for himself rather than just letting every single person walk all over him and then blame himself for it.
It's kind of sad that the only person in the entire story you can really stand up to and criticize is your dad, and he's one of the most justifiable and understandable people in the entire story.