It's mind-boggling to me how many commenters are here to defend the honor of a serial adulterer who broke the hearts of the people most related to and dependent upon him. Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...

There are a number of comments here that read like "yes, but you have to understand those things benefitted the father". It's like people think if you're doing something that hurts other people, it's OK if that's for selfish reasons? I guess I'll try not to think of how this reflects on our industry as a whole.

Are people defending his honor, or just offering sympathy? Because I don't find sympathy strange at all. He betrayed the trust of a lot of people he claimed to care about, but also barely had any unfettered happiness in a too-short life. He was complicated, as we all are.

For all we know that entire account is fiction. None of us know the man or the author yet we feel content to pass judgement on his life from a few paragraphs of from a narrator who has made it clear they also didn't know him well.

>Truly can't understand where this sympathy comes from...

It's because they have no experience with have such a bad person in a supposed "caregiver" role in their life so their minds literally can't imagine it. They think he just MUST be misunderstood instead of just callous and uncaring.

Or they are a parent and can't imagine not carit about their own child, so they assume it must be a universal thing, and the father MUST have loved her, even if he didn't show it. Truth is, a fuck ton of people don't love, like, or give two shits about their own children. These people do exist.

It's a truly cruel cognitive dissonance.

That isn’t true at all so don’t speak to my experience. I grew up in an abusive household with an alcoholic who wasn’t an adulterer. It was total shit. If he had instead been closeted and cheating without ever disclosing it, as seems to be the case here, it would have been vastly preferable to have a distant father than what I actually lived with.

So respectfully stfu because you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I also grew up with abusive parents (plural). Poverty, substance abuse, mental illness, violence. The whole nine. You can check my comment history, I talk about it openly on here. Here's one previous comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400583

Others extend clearly bad people who do bad things more grace than they deserve if they are parents. You hear things like "I'm sure they love their children but are stressed and don't know how to express it. It's probably hard for them." (Ignoring how hard it is for the innocent CHILDREN!)

However, I know from experience there's no love there. No like. Only hate.

And there more to this story than a closeted gay man. The author made it clear he was also distant as a father and wasn't at all a caretaker to her either. All evidence from the post points to the fact the father was callous and uncaring to those around him. Using others for his own gain. The followup shows he was having affairs from his affair partner before he died. This is not someone who would have been a kind man if he was just allowed to come out.

The other thing that immediately stood out to me that nobody else is noticing - the father encouraged a man half his age to give up his entire life in China to come to Canada on a fucking student visa (which is inherently temporary) with the, most likely, promise (stated or unstated) that he'd marry him and sponsor him as a permanent resident and they'd build a new life together. All evidence points to deception here. He wasn't making moves to legally divorce his wife and was having affairs with other men on top of that. You can't legally work on a student visa, so the partner would have been entirely financially dependent on the father.

There's a follow up linked a few times in the thread, and unfortunately he looks to be pretty villanous

None of us here ever knew the man, and the only reports we have on his life are from a pseudo anon author who admits that they also did not know him very well. That any of us, including the author, are justified in calling him "villanous" is a big stretch in my opinion. It feels more likely that the author, and perhaps you, simply disagree with the decisions he made. Which is fine, but a far cry from villainy.

We don't have a 24/7/365 video feed of the man's life with which to throughly judge him on, this is true. So casting him as a villian based on this shadow caricature version of a story we've been told might be unfair to the actual person. We're not Michael at the heavenly gates or Osiris or Anubis though, we're just going off of what's been written. Do the actions of that man as described not qualify as villainous to you? It’s small, affecting only the lives of those in his immediate vicinity. But it’s still not good. Maybe little V villainy not big V villainy like Voldemort?

People are rarely anything less than complicated.

The person who ends up making decisions which underpin what actually happens, almost always does.

It’s easy to throw them under the bus, but the followers generally always know what’s going on - when they aren’t actively avoiding it anyway.