Frankly, it's concerning that there's very little sympathy for Maggie on one hand, and a lot of talk about her father as a sympathetic character. No amount of abuse endured excuses abusing others, especially one's own children. He is a dipshit who abandoned his daughter because she "shamed him" by being gay. Her parents removed all her pictures. They erased her.
You're misconstruing my intention. Absolutely, Oscar was in the wrong. That's a given. I'm just saying it's an interesting bit of writing that they made him wrong for something other than the obvious reasons.
Our culture seems to have gotten to this place where any disagreement with another person requires damning them utterly as irredeemable and unworthy of any attempt to relate to them or understand them. That's a terrible mindset, because it just creates impenetrable divides and keeps us from reaching out to learn from each other and find common ground. People don't always do terrible things because they're one-note evil monsters. Sometimes they mean well but they just have toxic ideas that they don't understand are wrong. Sometimes they're just flawed or selfish. Sometimes they're deeply torn between conflicting ideas and priorities and make the wrong choice. And that means that sometimes people who do terrible things can learn better, can admit their mistakes and atone for them and make amends with those they wronged. That's surely a better outcome to aspire to than just staying enemies forever. If Kara could forgive her Aunt Astra for all the evil she did, if Kara could forgive Mon-El for being part of a cruel and unjust monarchy, then surely it's not wrong for Maggie to hope she could forgive her father and reach him and heal their broken relationship. That doesn't mean what he did wasn't terrible -- it means that redemption is possible for even the worst wrongs.
For that matter, we're talking about fictional characters. Getting your audience to understand and sympathize with characters they disagree with, getting them to understand
why those characters make their choices and believe they're right or necessary, is just good writing. You don't have to agree with someone's thinking to understand why they think that way. As a writer myself, I
have to be able to get into the heads of characters whose values I disagree with -- otherwise I wouldn't be able to write believable, nuanced antagonists, or protagonists with a diverse range of personalities and values. The ability to empathize with all characters, even the ones who do awful things, is a necessary skill in my line of work. So it should not be taken to mean that I approve of what a character does or wish to excuse their actions. It's just part of the skill of creating well-drawn characters, and as a writer, I appreciate the skill that
Supergirl's writers applied in making Oscar a multidimensional antagonist rather than a cardboard one.
Kryptonian minds can't be read by Martian telepathy, so M'yrinn didn't scan Kara's mind to find out she was a Kryptonian; he just 'reached out' to her mentally, and I was confused as to why he didn't do the same thing with J'onn, which, as evidenced by how little it took for him to discern Kara's nature, would've been easy for him to do.
It would've been incredibly hard to do emotionally. He'd resigned himself to his son's death. He couldn't let himself believe it was possible that J'onn was still alive, because it would just hurt too much if he let himself hope and it turned out to be untrue. He was trapped by his fear, just as Oscar was trapped by his fear of what Maggie was and what might happen to her. The difference is that M'yrnn was more successful at transcending that fear. Perhaps because he was telepathic, so once he did find the courage to reach out, he simply
knew the truth. Oscar found the courage to reach out to Maggie, but he couldn't really open his mind enough to understand or experience the happiness of Maggie's life. So he remained trapped by his fears.
