I'm so conflicted on this. on one hand, daniel was very clearly being abused and manipulated by the weens. on the other hand, I'm convinced that the person underneath the mental illnesses is a piece of shit. I've dealt with people who've had horrible mental illnesses, such as dementia/alzheimers and schizophrenia. All of the meltdowns and mental breakdowns he's had are real, BUT, he puts himself in situations where the meltdowns happen. He wants to do whatever the hell he wants without any fallout. this lolcow just really gets on my nerves
BUT, AT THE SAME TIME, he could have another mental illness that wasn't caught and could solve all of his behavioral issues with one pill specifically for it. ugh
The best way to understand Dan is that he's a retard. Yes, yes, of course he's a retard, but he's a retard in a more scientific sense - "retarded" means "late" or "behind", and it used to have a technical meaning for people who had stunted mental ages. True and Honest retards simply stop getting older mentally at some point. Cyrax will always be mentally and emotionally about 11 or 12. Cobes is forever 14. And Dan is a 6-year-old child, at best. However old his body gets (and it already looks about 90), his mind will always be 6. That's different from being an idiot. Lucas Werner is an idiot, but he's mentally an adult. Russell Greer is a moron, but he's an adult moron. A retard is something different.
Think what a 6-year-old child is like, add functioning testes, and you have Dan. He will believe anything people tell him. He will throw violent tantrums when he doesn't get his way. He will scream impotent threats when frustrated. He can't really understand the adult world. He can't plan ahead. He won't wash himself. He is dominated by base, physical desires.
And, importantly, he has a 6-year-old's understanding of right and wrong. A 6-year-old doesn't have the brain development to really understand
why something might be wrong if it doesn't have immediate consequences for them. A 6-year-old can learn not to put their hand on the stove, because that hurts, but they can't learn why, say, threatening to kill someone is wrong, they just don't have the theory of mind or the understanding of the concept of society to comprehend something like that. A 6-year-old doesn't learn
morals, they learn
consequences. A 6-year-old doesn't understand "don't hit your sister because it will put her in fear and pain", but the do understand "if you hit your sister I will put YOU in fear and pain".
Dan doesn't really know right and wrong in an adult way. He understands that he will get in trouble if he does certain things - he has learned, for example, that he gets in BIG trouble if he talks back to cops, so he doesn't unless he's having a tantrum and has lost control. Look at his paedo tendencies as well. Why is paedophilia wrong? Whatever answer is inside your head right now, it is FAR more complex than anything Dan can grasp. But he knows that if he is caught whacking off to children he will get in really big trouble. He doesn't understand
why that is. To him, whacking off to little girls on Pinterest is just another physical pleasure he can indulge in, like eating or scratching an itch. It's even more complex when you realise that Dan is a child who has testosterone pumping through his brain. Children's brains aren't designed for testosterone, they're designed for pretending to be an aeroplane and rolling down hills. So is it a surprise that when you add horny to a child's mind, that mind is attracted to "other" children like them? This creates a big problem for society, because we need to keep kids save from horny retards like Dan - but whether Dan is morally responsible for it? For anything else he does?
Children are little shits. They lie, they manipulate people, they are totally self-interested and self-centred. They won't do anything that isn't fun unless you make them, and even then they might throw an hour-long, screaming tantrum. Those are all behaviours we tolerate in them, because they're children, their brains are still developing and they'll grow out of it. But Dan's brain stopped developing 2 decades ago. He'll
always be a shitty little kid - a shitty little kid wandering around on his own unsupervised in a big city and an adult world he doesn't understand, with a device that links him to unlimited pornography and an army of Reddit cunts tricking him into committing crimes for their amusement.
When you think about whether Dan is a "bad person", consider that you're talking about a child. Is he a bad child? Yeah. Do we send bad children to prison for 60 years? No. What do with do with Dan? Good question. Dunno.