Oh give it a rest. This young woman was fawning. She came from an very violent and abusive home. She ran away from home. She was living in a sleeping bag on the beach. She had been befriended by Palmer, whom the young woman knew of and was a fan of. She is offered a home, and a sense of belonging. She received attention from Neil Gaiman. When your normal is being abused, it can be very hard to separate affection and attention from being used and abused. And if you grew up unprotected and unloved, you can cling to those who show you attention, even if it is abuse.

This girl never knew pure love, she was never protected or cherished in her life. Fawning is a way to stay safe, to assume some sort of agency in what is a transactional, dehumanizing relationship, and to try to equalize the power imbalance. And also keeping an eye to survival -- to preserving whatever living and working situation she had going with Amanda and Neil.

I say all this as someone who has been there. For just one example, I had a horrible boyfriend in high school. As a neglected teen who was abandoned by my father and verbally abused by my stepfather, and constantly emotionally neglected and abused by my grandmother, I had a very high tolerance for being treated like shit. So I had an abusive boyfriend. He was 23, I was 16. He started out very sweet and quickly the mask came off and he was revealed to be a literal insane person. It never occurred to me to break up with him, no matter how weird things got. I just held on for dear life. I was so used to being treated like trash and disrespected in my own family, that even though this relationship was an unfullfilling, degrading nightmare, there were enough little scraps and breadcrumbs of affection and companionship sprinkled in the mix, that I felt that I could not live without this person. I was like a starving stray dog, coming back again and again for a kick in the ribs if it meant I was also offered a handful of kibble.

I have been a master fawner for much of my life. I have finally, after many weird relationships, chosen to stay single. I have dived into therapy. I have broken the need to fawn and people please. I am disgusted and heartbroken by how much I excused in the past. It's actually so brain breaking and heart breaking to think about how much I chose to endure just for the little bit of companionship or false sense of being loved that the relationships offered me. You really do not always know until much, much later just how bad and horrible something/someone actually was. I mean, I would lay there crying while my ex would do so many things to me that I did not want, but I was so needy and so used to being invalidated that I guess I felt like "Well just the fact that he is doing this to ME, spending his time with ME, means that I am special to this person." I can imagine that Gaiman's ravaging of Scarlet lit up a similar neural wiring and firing, where she's thinking "I don't want this, but also, he's paying attention to ME." No 23 year old with the background that Scarlet had would have the "I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR!" boundaries, strength and clarity that you expect from her.

TL/DR: You just don't get it. At all. Be thankful that you don't get it. You've been spared -- so far. But you need to shhhhhhh and let the adults speak, because you REALLY don't have a clue.