What kind of monster uses their middle finger for the scroll wheel?! Surely its a index finger maneuver!
I was about to make a kind of a masterful troll post to the tune of like
"Yeah, I'm kinda fucked up. I hear phantom sounds and talk to inanimate objects in my room. I beat someone up in daycare, too. Using my middle finger on the mousewheel is nothing to me."
Then it struck me that Selebus based Yumi beating someone up in daycare on a real event from his life. Nothing new there; that was an intuition I had a while ago, as well as the obligatory connections. But what's new is the potential humor value. What better troll and grand finale would it be for Selebus to reveal that every single heroine is actually himself? Like, I say this on two levels. First is the meta revelation that every author goes through that all characters are fragments of themselves. A famous quip is that you can't write a character smarter than yourself (though you can give the impression you have (see: Nodoka)), and on top of that, the process of modeling characters in your mind often ends up in a kind of ghost chorus of said characters taking on tulpa-like lives of their own in your mind. Writers talk about how characters 'wont shut up' until a scene is written. Basic stuff - I've touched on it before and it's something we all subconsciously accept. But it just so happens that this aligns incredibly well with the SECOND level, which is the narrative of Lessons in Love being self-insert fiction. What do we know? We know that the world was made for someone, we know that perception is dubious, we know that it's a 'game,' we know the purpose is to be happy, we know Sensei is being seemingly controlled by unknown force(s), we know we players were given Options so that we can Communicate with the Narrator and interface with the game, we know there are explicit/obvious hints of Sensei/others being American rather than Japanese... all of this has led me to think for some time that Selebus (most likely Pareidolia (and therefore the whole trinity) for obvious reasons) has been acting as that external force on Sensei and pushing himself into Sensei as the Game Developer. It's no surprise that Sensei would often be suffering the ailments Selebus complains about 1:1 (and after Selebus already wrote an explicit self-insert with Yuu in NiB who goes through the same shit again). Again, basic stuff. The problem I have had is where the students of LiL fit into this: are they really Sensei's students? Did they fall into the well with him? Are they unerring evidence of an external reality? How many of them are Subahibi ghosts? And so on.
(Selebus's refusal to acknowledge Himawari is as profound as people imagine it to be; I imagine it means she is a force outside of the Game Developer / Writer's awareness. I don't really want to speculate on this too much, though, since it gets out of the meta of the game to speculate on an external existence Selebus would let work on the game. I only ever speak of Lessons in Love Selebus, never of any real life being. And it may be nonsense anyway.)
The comedy intuition, which I just had, and which to share enthusiastically, is the moment where all of this could theoretically coalesce into the most hilarious narrative twist of all time. Conceive of a being of pure white. Then conceive of Molly popping out of existence and the White being turning more green. Conceive of Yumi popping out of existence and the Greenish-white thing turning more aggressive. Imagine Ayane popping out of existence and the thing suddenly having more of a moral backbone or something. Imagine Karin popping out of existence and the thing's thighs get thicker. And then, when EVERY SINGLE heroine has popped out of existence... the being turns into Selebus. And Selebus looks at the screen like "Thank you for putting me back together." Or something.
Basically. The absolute funniest interpretation I can think of, and I apologize for taking so long to set up the scene here, is the twist that every single heroine is actually Selebus. (Except Maya, who is Selebus's cat or something.*). And then like, imagine the seething. All the people who have busted loads to Sana were actually busting loads to Selebus in disguise. Everyone who wore a like Yumi avatar while dunking on Selebus were unwittingly singing his praises. Man, imagine. This is completely schizo but it's so funny I have to convey it.
*The only reason I'm hesitant about the 'heroine(s) are actually cats' theory is that I don't think Selebus wants to fuck his cats even if they are in anime girl form. However, it is a common anime trope for cats to take human shape and, as they say, to flock to their master when they are miserable to cheer them up. Perhaps Sensei is thinking 'a cat is fine too' at this point but even for LiL that would be extremely bizarre. I'm kind of convincing myself as I type this though... Sensei is probably fucking a desk or that fleshlight instead of the cat anyway.
(P.S.: All too easily forgotten is that LiL starts with a suicide. It would naturally follow from that that someone would be tied into bed/chair in a hospital room listening to the ticking of a clock. The question for me is whether that person, Sensei, is a wholly independent being, or if that person is an abstraction of Selebus. Is that where Sensei is being forced to observe this, or is that where Selebus is writing this? Whatever LiL is, it must follow from suicide.)
