Well, that's a very valid perspective. But certainly one can read it in a multitude of ways. The game does tell you to stop, but that same game has people telling you that trials are necessary for one to deserve heaven. Himawari tells you that things have to happen in a certain order, and that she'll try to minimize your suffering, but it is necessary to some extent. Also, who is telling you to stop? And why? Cause in that same game there are many that tell you to actively ignore these messages.
For the same reason nobody stops a play. It's a ritual. Everybody knows what's going to happen before they go in. If you think I'm negating that the trials are necessary, your 100% wrong. I believe the opposite, I believe there
will be a catharsis. And that Sel's promises of deep long happy endings for each of the characters is real. But for you to get it, you have to join in.
You have to participate in the act. You don't get to sit on the sidelines and justify the horror you partook in. You gotta understand the horror, and that you were willing to partake, so when you leave the theater, you know
never to do it IRL as that is not a "safe" space for such moral experimentation.
I guess I'm arguing that I believe, all pulled from the nararative, that 100% that people who may have chosen the "good" thing each time have wrecked saves. That they will
not get to experience the beatific endings, because they somehow thought themselves better than the actions the game
forces on you.
By that same token, what's the alternative? Does the game stop if the players turns it off? Or are you simply choosing not to see where it goes? Does another user take control? Are you not what little remains of Akira's will and without you he'd go back to being a puppet?
No it stops. It ends. At least if I'm using my theater crit lens. Because "The Theater" or "The Game" is only existent in the act of playing. It's a ritual, and the instructions
for the ritual are not the ritual, only The Ritual is the ritual. That's on our side of things. Based on game lore, and here I know you're more versed then me, I think it either just goes back to the endless loops that Maya Prime told us about. But I like to think that Akira gets to sleep.
If a game was something else I think it would be much rather be a book than theater. Your audience can indeed do whatever they want, and are only bound by what's expected of them as an audience. But a reader can only stop reading the story - as the gamer can only stop playing the game. The day Selebus harasses the people that pay him with "stop giving me money, you're responsible for this tragedy", then I'll probably agree with the culpability of his audience to such an extent.
Again, I think you misunderstood that it's all a Ritual. Selebus won't stop asking for money, because we're paying him for the experience. The game literally does not hide what it is from the top and what it's going to make us do. This isn't going to be the fun College Daze fucking your family. It's not going to sarcastically ask why you're fucking your family as something hot happens. It's going to really ask you that while bodies become grotesque as you are fucking them. It's only a trap and a trick if we didn't get our catharsis at the end.
And I think "players" have far more agency then book readers. Sel
has given us choices, that a novel never could. Sel has always warned us that choices, unlike most games, have
real (as in they brick your game) consequences. I compleatly understand players who say this isn't fun and a "dick move." But I think they are playing the wrong game, because this isn't supposed to be fun.
As it is, the culpability of "stop playing the game" is confetti. Obviously Selebus doesn't want you to stop playing. The story will go on with or without you, this is a hollow provocation. You're not responsible for any of this because this is not an rpg, no one here is Akira because there isn't enough leeway for him to differ that much from what choices there are. There is only one true path in LiL, and the few choices you can make are "I choose to miss events". Well, is someone better than the other for shielding their eyes with their hands during a play? How is one culpable for wanting to see what the author has written?
I recognize your vision as valid, but there are others imo.
I think I've covered most of this paragraph above. But there is one final point I think is really important to understanding this game: "How is one culpable for wanting to see what the author has written?"
This is the basic premises of every forbidden knowledge trope that has ever existed. This is why every single one of use would open up The King in Yellow if it was placed in our laps. Which is sort of the point of those stories.
