Ok let me break things down a little on why I am torn, and then you all can rip me a new one afterwards. Ok we know like the MC, Damien is trying to do whatever possible to keep his family safe. Is it the best choice no, but he decided protecting the ones he loves was more important than his dumb actions. Hmmm sounds familiar to me I wonder why that is. Oh yeah the MC did the same thing he decided to protect the ones he loves and cares about by jumping into a fight where the odds are stacked against him. Now you can argue this is not the same thing, as what Damien did but both actions were dumb. MC admitted it to Skye and she forgave him, why can't Damien do the same thing?
The difference for me
is the MC did something stupid but didn't hurt anyone besides those attacking. Damien betrayed the MC by pretending to be his friend. Hell he even said he was going for the best friend spot on day 1. The MC would need to betray someone like Rachel for his actions to be equal to Damien's. You can't compare the two.
Edit.
All this talk about Damien getting a second third fourth chance and he didn't do anything make me wonder. I find it similar to a lot of writing in games here with so called friends that end up backstabbing the MC's in some way or in NTR games steal the LI's. All this makes me wonder if some of these people, posters and dev's have ever really had a true friend.
This is not an indictment on anyone specifically or anything like that, just my thoughts that run away from me. Honestly I've been very lucky with people in my life and I'm actually fairly quick to trust and give people the benefit of doubt, but if I was ever betrayed in real life like this, that person would be cut out without any chance of redemption. Sure I'd forgive them and probably pretty quickly, but I'd never forget and never give them another chance, they'd be forgiven but out my life.
By friends I mean the kind of friends that will answer the phone at 22:00 and drop everything, no questions asked, because your brother is missing and will spend the next 5 hours running around with you to his place, the police station, hospital and morgue, sitting with you in the parking lot in the worse part of town for 2 hours at 2am waiting for the morgue attendants to return from a collection on the off chance you brother is there and when they finally show up, bribe, threaten, beg and persuade them to give you a chance to look at the one guy who might match that description and when they wheel him out onto the pavement because they won't let you in to look and you discover it is your brother, they are there to comfort you even though no words can at the moment. So when your world comes crashing down at 3:30am in a dirty parking lot, in a scummy part of town in the armpit of the city looking the corpse of your brother being treated without any dignity or concern by callous porters they are there for you without any thought or regard for whatever shit they have going on it there lives or the fact they have to be at work in 4 hours and didn't get any sleep or ... (this is a true story, not my brother, I was one of the 3 supporting my friend)
So when you have friends like that, and you see these pathetic examples in the games and they way people defend the shitty examples of friends I makes me wonder if people have real friends. Skye and Aiden are way better friends than anyone else on the team has been. It almost makes me feel bad because I've all but ignored both of them as much as possible, yet always gone with friendlier options with Damien.
Edit 2. Don't know where all that came from or how strongly I felt about it, it just kinda kept flowing for a bit.