Yeah he's undeniably awful. But there's a reason he's ultimately the one training her and not any of the many other legit coaches. She has changed coaches several times and ended up at his "gym," refusing to go anywhere else...
He's the first and only one that's willing to blow smoke up her backside, unflinchingly incessantly, and in the massive industrial quantities she requires. He's the YES-MAN she ordered, refusing to tell her her faults and flaws-- just how she likes it. This is what she wants, needs, demands-- now that she's an adult. Adoration and affirmation, constantly. In pure, lethal doses.
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Luckily for her, she was not given what she wanted as a child, and as so was forced to actually acknowledge her weaknesses and work on them. Her early coaches and her own mom did not let her do as she felt like, she was given an honest appraisal of her skills and not allowed to give less than the effort and ability she was capable of. This brought her to develop an actual area of skill, to an impressively high level. That's the reason she was able to get this far.
After she became a legal adult, that quickly all dissolved. Her greatest desire erupted back from the shadows of Jr. Highschool, left legally uncheck-able by other adults or any possible peers, and brought her to quickly adopt a posse of artificial fawners and unrelenting ki$$ups. With her new rights as a grown person, together with a new impressive financial independence, she was able to purchase these people- and there's no shortage of them in California, of all places.
You blame Edmond, and he certainly is to blame. But he has long shown what he is, and this is not an isolated occurrence. Ronda is the one who makes the decision of who gets to influence and advise her, she has an easy time firing coaches who were instrumental in helping her succeed (including her own world champion mother). She discarded the advice of actual experts who cared about her, and purchased an obvious phoney, a plastic cheering father-figure to take that place, and all it took was a relatively small cut of her massive bank account. Too easy.
What she ACTUALLY thirsts for is the one thing she could not have when she was young: popularity-- not growth, reality or truth, and for that, she pays the inevitable looming, exorbitant charges when you take out such an incredibly gargantuan loan against reality for so long.
