What if Ami isn't real in the wider world? Himawari, yes, but what if Ami too? What if Kyoto? What if she exists now because of Sensei's belief in her, like in the gods' case?
I think there's pretty good evidence (one of the many things I need to find time to write up some day...) that Ami only exists in this world because of a wish from Sekai and/or Akira. I don't
think that makes her any less real, she's still their daughter, the wish just changed the past to allow her birth to happen.
I don't know what that means for the "real world", we just have far too little information about how it and the "simulation" are connected.
I have a question that I think hasn't been posed recently. Tbh I don't know if even Selebus knows. But how does the reset actually happens?
Edit: Furthermore there's also the question of if the reset was triggered because Akira
went into a state of shock by seeing Maya's head, or it was the sacrifice of Maya (same as the previous sacrifice of Ami) that summoned the reset (or rather broke the world, putting it into a state that needs a reset).
I see a few possibilities:
- Something teleported them to the roof. (We know that can happen in this world, especially when physical laws break down during a reset.)
- They walked to the roof while blacked out (like Sensei has done in previous resets).
- They're not really on the roof at all, that's just how their minds perceive some space between worlds they can't comprehend.
As for which one it is... I'm not sure it really matters. I think trying to find literal meaning in every little detail - especially during resets - is a mistake when Selebus is generally more concerned with symbolic meaning and themes. In some sense the roof is probably important because it had special meaning to Maya ("Baby Finches"), which then became special meaning to Sensei. It also works symbolically as high ground above the metaphorical flood destroying the world. Though there's probably more to it than that - I still wonder why Nodoka ended up there and what she was expecting to find.
My understanding is that there's no particular cause which starts a normal reset event. They happen because the world breaks down over time - apparently these artificial worlds have limited lifespans, which have become far shorter than they should be as the well fails. The reset itself (fixing the world or making a new one) is triggered by the gods (or maybe just Wires), traditionally after a wish from Maya Prime. (I don't think Ami's death triggered the sixth reset, it had already started before that happened.)
Factory resets are different; they're still triggered by gods, but only after something breaks so badly that the timeline can't be fixed, so everything needs to start over. From Maya Prime we know this often happened when Sensei was confronted with something he wasn't equipped to handle, like the return of suppressed memories. I imagine something similar was triggered when
he saw Maya's head, especially since it was a gift from Ami. Himawari specifically said the universe was undergoing a factory reset. They don't need to be directly linked to Sensei, though; Wires unsuccessfully tried to protect himself with a factory reset in "Pop Goes the Weasel".
