Amazing summary and observations! As someone who can't stand maledom and avoided ever getting higher that K4 on any of my playthroughs, (got promoted to K5 in a previous episode, and I hated the new scenes so much I just went back on the save and purposely had Kane score an own goal and do worse,
football puns unintended) this has revealed several things I could've only found out at the price of my gastrointestinal stabilty, so thanks!
On a somewhat unrelated note, I just finished part 1 of chapter 8 and found these two lines by Otto particularly funny:
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You mean, like all those thousands of slaves both of you guys (DeKocks) and the Karlssons keep? It's kinda fun when characters in this dystopian universe suddenly decide to have a selective moral awakening for 1 person they're biased towards - why should Cole be more deserving of sympathy or freedom than all those K2s and K3s in the mines? "A man has been wrongfully imprisoned for decades" - try many thousands of men and women, (I'm not saying millions, because the populations in New Paris for example, which are mentioned by Charlotte in an evil Olivia femdom scene, seem to be very low) not "one man". Literally these few oligarch families are tyranising what's left of humanity worse than Genghis Khan did the Eurasian steppes, and yet they're still morally indignant at someone they like/value getting the lite version of the same treatment?
Neither him nor Kiyomi should really be moved by Cole's predicament, (unless Cole has some personal connection with Otto I'm not aware of?) as both of them have certainly brought far worse fates upon many others on behalf of their employers...
So yes, I would add Otto and Kiyomi to the list of somewhat inconsistent characters - all hail Mistress Juliette! She wins in both consistency and in kaning Kane the hardest of the whole cast!