This plot would be unbearable from almost any other author and from LMM it is merely somewhat wearying, but still one likes to feel that there were other options.
Dean is in so many ways such a bad romantic choice and what he does to Emily is unforgivable and yet, all the same, I do always have a sneaking sympathy for him. It's that feeling in the last act of a tragedy where you hope that perhaps THIS TIME it will be different and the characters won't seal their own fates with their own fool choices, and of course Dean always makes the same awful choice... I think in some ways it would be an easier story to bear if his loss of Emily's love (or failure to ever win Emily's love) were a plain comeuppance for his lies about her book; if she found out and rejected him for it. But he only tells her that he lied about her book after she's already rejected him.
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Dean is in so many ways such a bad romantic choice and what he does to Emily is unforgivable and yet, all the same, I do always have a sneaking sympathy for him. It's that feeling in the last act of a tragedy where you hope that perhaps THIS TIME it will be different and the characters won't seal their own fates with their own fool choices, and of course Dean always makes the same awful choice... I think in some ways it would be an easier story to bear if his loss of Emily's love (or failure to ever win Emily's love) were a plain comeuppance for his lies about her book; if she found out and rejected him for it. But he only tells her that he lied about her book after she's already rejected him.