There's not enough information from this one-sided description to so confidently declare what this woman's intentions were. As far as only throwing money at him, it does say she decorated a room for him. Maybe she only did it because she wanted it to look a certain way for her own reasons, maybe she did it to make him feel welcome because she loves and values him, but we don't know from this.

But you’re only getting his biased story here, painting himself in a good light & demonising his new wife, I don’t think he’s giving the whole story about the photos, she wasn’t editing his son out of them all , just some, & she kept all the originals with his son still in them . All she wanted was some photos with just the two of them looking at the camera, which can be difficult, out of my 200 wedding photos my husband & I were alone & looking at the same camera at the same time in maybe 10 of them ( the photographer lost the best roll of film.)

No, but I have been the kid is the situation of manipulative step spouses and I do like to read the full context before branding someone with that strong a term. It's a common thing for people to attach their own experiences to their opinion on outside situations, but that doesn't mean that they can't be wrong. Ultimately no one knows what the answer here is except for the wife. Reading the original post and comments does strongly hint that OP has massively over reacted though, and it sounds like he is very much '100% my kid 100% all the time' with him. That's nice for the parent/child relationship but that's a bit of a red flag itself for the husband/wife relationship.

You sound like you know these people. We don't know whether she cared for the boy when he was sick. The list of things she did for him were "examples" as the OP himself put it, not an exhaustive list. I have to say I got a bit of a weird vibe from "she tried to call her mother inlaw" - if she "tried," does that mean he stopped her? Why does he refer to his wife trying to call her mom as trying to call his mother inlaw? In any case, I just don't understand how, with this limited set of facts, either can be so confidently condemned.

In the original reddit post the father says "if she wanted photos with just the two of us or just one side she should have Said so" but then he DELETED this comment because it was leading to a lot of YTA votes since his son was literally in every picture that's why she had some edited. Also he would only answer comments that agreed with his "disney dad/evil stepmother" POV (stolen from a comment-good analogy) and refused to answer questions about how many photos had the son and how many did not.