idonotlikepeas posted:

Ah, an answer I've been waiting to give ever since someone let slip early on that there's be a choice near the end of the game. I mean, wasn't it obvious what the choice would ultimately be, even if the wording is a little different than we expected?

We've talked a lot about love here in this thread, and the game talks about it quite frequently as well. But to love someone doesn't mean you have to delude yourself about the nature of the person or the nature of the world. Mysteries are all about love; you have to trust that the author has created a world that is a puzzle you can solve; they have to love the reader and the story and you have to love what they've created if you want to really get to the heart of it. It's easy to imagine a mystery as a battle between the reader and the author, but that isn't how stories work; you and the author are working together, just playing different roles. After all, you can just read right through a mystery without solving anything, without even TRYING to solve anything, and still enjoy it for its storytelling or craft or both. You could read the last page first, if you like; the book and its author are powerless before you. The only winning or losing is in your own head! The real opponent in a mystery is yourself, and how much of a challenge you want.

We know that mystery writers trick us. But like stage magicians, they do it for us, to entertain us and make us happy, and to make us wonder... if it is a trick, how was it performed? What's behind all the tricks? A trick demands that we think about the world more deeply, and that we care about what happens in it. People reread mysteries, after all, just to appreciate them, even when they already know the answer. And each time, the characters are alive again, even if they get shot on page twenty. It's up to you to decide if they had a miraculous escape later, too; I mean, isn't that also a kind of trick?

And if that's how it is, I guess it would make sense to look into that ending first, wouldn't it?