[AuraTwilight]

Spoiler for Responses to GBH and Drifloon:

I'm operating from the premise that the narrative of 96 is something Walter created for the report based on compilations of research combined with his impression of what happened.

The narrative of 96 does not exist in-universe, nor does the Meta-narratives. Renall and I never cared about justifying things in the Prime world all that much considering the 4th wall is utterly fucked.

I don't like the implication that Andy wasn't written by Sarah in the meta-scenes where he is discussing with Battler, because if that's not part of the original work then one of the premises in Andy's Greek Tragedy interpretation falls apart. The meta-world scenes cannot be a chorus under the author's intent if the author didn't write them. I guess some of the in-game Fantasy scenes could be hammered into that description, but there's a lot of noise there and it's not as clearly 'about' the story as the meta-scenes are.

Whether or not Andy exists in the Forgery or not is irrelevant; who knows if the fantasy scenes even exist in the Forgery, in proper Umineko style? :P Still that's not a point either of us considered. Andy was talking about the work as a whole, including the Meta-narrative and his argument with Dlanor. By that point the 4th wall is almost entirely gone and he's critiquing and genre-defining Redaction As Written by Renall.

Anyway, as regards Sarah adopting the kid whose father got convicted, I guess that does make sense of a lot of things. I'll refrain from saying any more on that for now since I'm about to reread the whole thing in VN format, but I do feel like it's a little obscure to expect the reader to be able to infer that from the limited information that was presented.

In fairness, the details aren't very important; "Andy is a child that Sarah is caring for post-1996" is pretty well supported in the text though, and I'm honestly kind of surprised people got fixated on the David thing since David clearly represents her past of failure. David is one of the people that "She's trying to do right by at the expense of doing wrong by the people who are still here." Andy represents a NEW relationship that she HASN'T FUCKED UP YET, and he's also very clearly a child because she talks down to him like one and puts down his arguments with basically "I'm the mom stfu." By being able to forgive each other and repair their relationship, Sarah is able to seize the chance at a happy future with Andy.