[musouka]

I'll respond to your previous message in the general spoilers thread.

EP7 wasn't entirely meaningless in the scope of EP8. The Tea Party of EP7 was entirely meaningless in the scope of EP8.

Think of it this way.

If EP7 had left off with Will and Lion quietly exiting the chapel, content in their knowledge of putting Beatrice to a beautiful, peaceful rest--the kind of rest she had longed for--and then cut to a crying six year old Ange to show that we still had some loose ends to wrap up, there would be absolutely no problem with how EP8 ended up.

Doing things like that allows for the following things that EP8 did:

1. The ending we saw for Will and Lion in EP7 was too cruel. If they had just exited the chapel, there wouldn't have been any sense of lost catharsis in their situation. We would have been able to fully accept them as honorable guests borrowed from another game board without that disconnect between how we were left with them in EP7 and how they're acting in EP8.

2. Bern's attitude. Before the Tea Party, we see Bern as sardonic, but pretty disinterested party. She mocks the entire proceedings, but isn't emotionally invested in it herself. The Tea Party shows how deep her loathing runs and how horrible her vengeance on Beatrice really is. Not only that, but she emerges from that utterly victorious. EP8 never addresses that and thus that's another level in which catharsis isn't reached by the reader.
Allowing her to exit the stage the way she did in EP7 without the Tea Party makes her role in EP8 as a "heartless but ultimately inconsequential" villain make more sense. She's doing these things for her own reason (Featherinne asking her to) and enjoys being mean, but it really is just a story to her.

3. There is a difference between leaving Beatrice dissolved into snow in a beautiful burial ceremony and leaving her on a lonely stage with her guts ripped out. Even if you think Beatrice is no longer around to witness that level of cruelty--and Bern's words do leave that in doubt--we, the readers witnessed all of it and want it to be addressed. There is satisfaction in Battler punching Bern in the face, but it doesn't allow catharsis for this situation, because that's not his motivation for doing it.
It's like watching a movie where the villain stabs a child in the heart and then escapes from the police, only to be hit by a car several weeks later in a completely unrelated incident. We want to see people punished for the crimes they commit, not just punished in general.