My keyboard saw fit to eat everything I said, to to summarize:
- This is ridiculous.
- My Social Anthropology advisor always warned me about bias. Incidentally, so did this story. When you approach from that angle, you shoulder a much harsher burden as the author to distinguish this.
- There are many more, and many more important, themes in the story than historical reconstruction, and the Rokkenjima incident doesn't really rise to the same level.
- People have remarkably selective memory about how we were all pretty much on the same page about story facts until like ep7, or how the "answers" people claim to have now are ones everybody had or, in a few cases, ones other people had and were mocked for. Nobody was 100% right and nobody deserves to declare themselves recipients of truth as though one simply extracted it whole-cloth from their reading and this thread had nothing to contribute to that understanding.
- Ryukishi is the one who declared his interplay to be a "game," then ran away with the ball at the buzzer. I'm not even mad at him for the ending (overdramatic and bungled as it may be, I always cared more about theme over revelation and in some respect that's exactly what we got), just that he clearly showed himself as unwilling to follow through on the same ambitions he talked up to interviewers and in extra TIPs and that he even went so far as to insult his own readers for wanting things he conditioned them to want.
- This is ridiculous.
And believe me, I'd rather argue this with him than anyone here, but I'm pretty sure he isn't going to be willing or able to talk to me directly. Would I call him a coward to his face? Sure, I'm just not in the position to.