Ok so while i do hate season 3, i do like the idea of D'jok being the one being manipulated by the seasons' main villain instead of Sinedd for once (not counting how it was done in s3, the rest of the post is gonna be completely detached from that. Actually now that i think about it after i wrote it, it's barely even about the first sentence in the post. I got carried away ok)
While it also serves as a parallel between Sinedd and D'jok(you tend to be open to being manipulated when you've lost your friends for one reason or another), it also kind of makes sense when you think about it in the context of the universe.
Like, why DID we need D'jok to relearn the "don't let the fame get to your head and don't be an asshole to your friends" thing again and again? The obvious, out of universe answer would be that the writers didn't know what to do with his character arc so they just repeated it, but that's the boring answer(though i do think it's the correct one).
Why DOES D'jok go through these constant relapses of character(which allow him to be vulnerable to manipulation in the first place)? i think an interesting concept would be that he's coping with the fact that he's unsatisfied with his life, at least later on, in season 2.
Maybe at the start, it was really just about fame getting to his head, which led to him damaging the relationship he had between him and his best friend, which led to Micro-ice running away, which snapped Djok out of it and made him rethink his values. If even his childhood friend couldn't stand his behavior anymore,so much that he'd RUN AWAY, then surely he was doing something horribly wrong. But everything turns out fine in the end and goes back to normal. Better than ever, even. His belief in fate and that he was destined to be something great is surely proven right. He's famous and rich now, he knows what happened to his biological parents, he's got a great friend group and a girlfriend who loves him. He couldn't have expected or wanted anything more.
Could he have, though? Him becoming the team captain after Rocket's disappearance in s2 was more stressful than he'd ever imagined it'd be, and he sees things in a different light while he cracks under the pressure. After four years of what seemed to be perfection, he's slipped back into his old habits again as a defense mechanism. Maybe he wasn't really that happy anymore. His friends sure weren't, and his outbursts didn't help. Not to mention his father getting framed for terrorism, and his friend becoming a completely different person than the one he once knew. But everything goes back to relative normalcy, through all the pressure, and his near death experience,the Snow Kids manage to barely get a win against the Xenons in the finale. Everyone's happy.
Except him, maybe. I imagine you tend to rethink your life when you almost die. Was all this trauma and pressure him and his friends were going through really worth it in the end? Surely it was, it had to be. He now had an adopted family, biological family, fame and money, it's all he could have dreamed of as a kid who believed in destiny on Akilian. So why wasn't he content with it? Why did he slip back into his old habits even though he logically shouldn't have, if he was happy?
Was it because what he thought to be fate wasn't as great as it once seemed? He knew this couldn't last forever. The Snow Kids were bound to lose their title eventually. If that was the case, then did it all really lead up to this? Did he really hit his peak so early? At the age of 21, or 16 even? Did he really go through all of this just to be remembered as someone who was a famous footballer at 16? Did he treat all of his friends like shit, go through all of the trauma he did, just for that? It couldn't be like that.
So he relapses to his old behavior to cope with such thoughts, which leads to tension between him and his friends and leaves him open to being a target of manipulation, especially by people who seem like they have his and his careers' best interest in mind. So instead of leaving his friends because of simple arguments, he leaves because of what was essentially a culmination of years' worth of insecurities. He eventually realizes though, hopefully for the last time, that his friends are more important to him than any idea of fame. Even though this wouldn't last forever, he's still got his friends who went through it with him together.