You may be right about the choice to delete the videos or not, but that would be kind of... boring? Doing that ending just to please overly sensitive players sounds like flushing a cliffhanger down the toilet.
It's not about coddling sensitive players (we've seen worse just getting to the choice), its about roleplaying the main character. When we first learned about the videos, the MC specifically mentioned his desire to delete them once he finally told Victoria that he knew about them and thanked her for what she had done. Well, the moment didn't play out at all the way he thought it would, but is has nonetheless arrived. So why wouldn't he delete the videos? What has changed?
It's a good question. The cheeky answer is that he's horny and doesn't want to give up the spank material now that push has come to show. But while there's some truth in that summary, I think it's a vast oversimplification that obscures a far more significant detail - namely that what intrigues the MC in this moment isn't the sex itself, but rather the 'relationship' between Victoria and Donovan. The MC has seen this tape before (or else he wouldn't have subconsciously recognized Donovan), but at the time it clearly wasn't particularly memorable because it was just one of many tapes his mom made. But now he has a direct, personal link to that tape. Moreover, the link is through Vicky's costar, a man praised by Andrea for looking out for the girls with whom he makes porn. The MC's interest in this tape is suddenly a much less about the images of his mom having sex and much more about peeping into her private life as a whole - which is definitely not the sort of thing a child should be obsessing over.
Granted, this is an AVN not the real world; this sort of incestuous voyeurism is fairly tame in this neck of the woods (even accounting for Patreon's gatekeeping). But I still think it's important to note the disconnect here for two main reasons. First, because any look into Victoria's professional sex life is going to beg questions about how much pleasure she got out of it. Personally, I don't really think that should matter to anyone but Victoria, but that's easy for me to say from the safety of my ivory tower. This is far closer to home for the MC, particularly since it could potentially disrupt the mental image of Victoria he's built upon the principle that she was willing to sacrifice
everything to give him the best childhood possible. That's not a knot one should unravel lightly.
But the second and more important reason is that Victoria's behavior makes it crystal clear she does
*NOT* want the MC to watch those tapes again. She's so ashamed of that period of her life that the mere thought of having to explain it to her son is enough to send the normally unflappable woman on a drunken bender. This illustrates that the MC's instinct to delete the tapes once the truth was revealed was the right one. The past has to be acknowledged to put Vicky's mind at ease and show that her son still loves her, but once that's done there's no need to revisit it - and certainly no need to go back and analyze the videos for clues about what she was experiencing at the time!
To me, this dilemma about what to do about the old videos ties directly into the longstanding question of whether the MC is a "good" person or not. There's nothing on those videos he needs to see again and it's clear his mom would be humiliated knowing he's continuing to watch them, so the conscientious thing to do would be to never watch them again and delete the files. There's plenty of other porn to watch, so it's not like this is a big sacrifice for the MC. Going back to rewatch those films to satisfy his own morbid curiosity is ultimately another opportunity for the MC to indulge his sadistic side, and given the importance of Victoria (both to the MC and to the story as a whole) subjecting her to his sadistic side - however indirectly - deserves to be treated as a big deal.
And even beyond the simple morality play, this also effectively mirrors the choice Killian is going to have to make now that he knows (or will soon learn, no doubt) that the one woman he still idolizes has far more in common with the sluts he's learned (or more like, been taught) to disrespect than his simplistic world view allows for. Can he learn to separate the two in his mind? Can he keep treating Victoria with respect even if she filmed scenes encouraging people to debase her, or will he get caught up in the images and focus only on the debasement? I suspect Ian will be much better equipped to maintain his respect for Victoria if the MC can keep a lid on his own darker impulses.
Now just to be clear, I'm not saying all this to shame anyone who wants to see the sexy Vicky vids. This is a game, after all, so all's fair for the player. But that's precisely why we get all those save slots - so we can play out different versions of the MC and see what changes. But part of selling those changes is giving us important choices that lead to significantly different outcomes, and to me the decision to delete or rewatch those old films is a crucial example.
The video stops being blurry probably because Edwin is approaching the stage where reality will come into contact with his beliefs. As for watching the videos, he has justified it more than once by saying that he doesn't want to look down on other people, because his mother did the same thing. At the end of the episode, before deciding whether to delete the videos or not, he wondered what prompted Vicky to confess to the past and this video popped up in his head
There's definitely nothing in the video that caused Victoria to finally confess the truth, not unless the MC downloaded it within the last week! As I said above, I think it popped into his head because he'd met Donovan the previous day and was wondering about how Victoria's view of him would compare to Andrea's. That's a private matter he really shouldn't dig into behind Vicky's back, particularly now that he's seen how raw a nerve the topic is for her.
That's why things have changed now that the truth is out. It's all well and good use her old videos as an empathy crutch, but it rather defeats the purpose if he has to ignore the distress it would cause his own mom to do it. IMHO, anyway.
Pretty sure the blurry thing is a hint of mental block/denial Edwin has for that particular video. He does it, (sub)consciously because the image of Victoria actually clearly enjoying that fuck doesn't match with the narrative he's built up in his head to deal with the fact his mom was doing porn. He tells himself it was just sacrifice she made to ensure his well-being, and not something she could possibly like in the slightest.
He probably also avoided watching that video again for this very reason, so his memory of it may be literally quite blurry after all the time has passed, especially with all the effort not to remember it.
I don't think the MC had any particular aversion to this particular video, otherwise he'd have remembered that aversion clearly once his brain made the connection. I think his memory is blurry because there were a bunch of videos and there was little to make this particular video stand out... until now.
That said, I actually complained about the convoluted metaphor of the blurry memories in my elephantine review of the update. It's not entirely clear what the blur represents, and it doesn't mesh well with the previous memories the MC has had of Victoria's videos. Perhaps we'll learn more when we see the rest of the story, but for now I think the blur could have been handled better with a little tweaking.
