From my point of view she's constantly dragging MC around, even when he says no.
Yeah, but again, that's not her fault. Depending on your perspective, it's either MC's fault for being a spineless pushover, or the dev's fault for not allowing you to say no/leave.
Those scenes are basically like this:
"Help me!"
"No."
"Aww, come on!"
"Okay."
That pretty much makes it 100% MC's fault.
In this case Danielle is indeed trying to get along with Damon and she does use everything she can to achieve that goal, even people close to Damon.
Which makes perfect sense. Her boyfriend of a long period has just broke up with her without explaining why, and refuses to talk to her. Going to
his best friend and trying to get help figuring things out makes perfect sense and is completely justified. She did nothing wrong there.
(For fun, think about how much of a miserable mess you are over breaking up with Naomi. Do you think MC would hesitate to do ridiculous stunts to get Naomi back, especially when he's at his worst early in the game/before the game starts? If he wasn't so self-loathing and believing he
deserves to be alone, he'd probably be worse than Danielle. And at least in his case he
knew why Naomi was gone - Danielle didn't even have that.)
Again, in this instance, it's not really her fault as much as it is Damon's. He doesn't even have the balls to come up with a believable reason why he wants to break up, and then goes out of his way to avoid her because he's too much of a coward to clean up his own mess. Which he dumps directly into your lap.
Then in Kent's building she really oversteped her boundaries when searching in office for some documents and stuff, hoping to help Damon's dad reelection.
That was a terrible plan, yes, but there's still a huge amount of responsibility on both the MC's and Damon's part there.
Again, Damon's too much of a coward to deal with her, so he passes her off to you. And you're emotionally incapable of dealing with her issues so you crap out a lame lie about Damon just being too stressed over the election, which is what opens the door to her trying to make a grand gesture to help. If either you or Damon had just manned up, none of that would have happened.
And when two of them got caught she acts like "Hey it's all on me, i agree to go on date with you Kent".
To be fair, that's the first selfless thing she's done up to that point, and the first sign that she may care about you (either as a friend or potential love interest) as more than just a tool to get Damon back.
Because in that scene, you're probably going to prison for breaking and entering and theft. She essentially sacrifices herself so that Kent won't press charges against you. As presented, it's kind of clear that she's agreeing more to help protect you (especially if you didn't want to be there in the first place) than she is to protect herself.
And anyone not romancing her probably pays her back by not getting involved and letting Kent do whatever he wants to her on the date. Whee! Moral high ground!
Even if MC is romancing her, she doesn't see it that way but more of a way to achieve her goal.
But again, you are the one choosing to romance someone who is already actively chasing after someone else, and who is doing everything in her power to get him back. At no point does she lie about her motives - if anything, you're the one lying about yours.
Until she actively says that she's willing to give up on Damon and try to be with you instead, and then
still keeps trying to get Damon back, she's not really being all that manipulative. She's very open about what she wants and why she wants your help. You're the one who's trying to turn it into something it isn't.
And to me it more looks like that she's just offering sexual favors, convince MC to help her.
It's entirely possible. She could also just be trying to make Damon jealous by having sex with his best friend. It's also possible that it was a moment where she lost control a bit because her hormones are raging and you're literally the only one who's been there for her when she needed you most (because in the flashbacks we've already seen how she really, really wanted to have sex with Damon and he wouldn't, so she's likely extremely pent up).
By the end of the current story, she's likely in a very confused place. Intellectually she still thinks she wants to be with Damon, but she's potentially starting to fall for you and doesn't really understand how to reconcile those two things. Finding out that Damon is gay is likely going to strip a lot of those questions away for her, but she might choose you over him even before she finds out.
Again, I'm not even defending her because I'm romancing her (I've been rejecting her outright from the very beginning), but I do feel like a lot of people here are judging her way more harshly than the story is trying to present her. She's a confused teenage girl who has been used and manipulated by her boyfriend for years, who is feeling rejected and has no idea what she did wrong, and is pretty clearly desperate to be loved. And she only ever shows interest in you at all if
you are the one initiating things.
You have to be the one acting protective and supportive of her before she starts to see you as anything more than "Damon's best friend" at all.
She's not really a villain. The only villain in this story is Damon.