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The implications of Rudolf deciding to tell Battler and Kyrie alone at the conference about the baby switch and highly expecting to die as a result(could be read as a sort of assisted suicide) haunt me in how Kinzo-esque it is: are you thinking of the consequences of your actions on the people around you or just seeking personal atonement?

The person who he expects the most to kill him would be Kyrie. I don't think he has seen Battler's anger lean towards retributional violence the way it does in canon episodes after the first twilights, given his son walked out in 1980 instead of personally attacking him or Kyrie physically so Kyrie would be the most likely.

AND YET setting up the situation that way in the worst case scenario forces Battler to either stop from or watch the person he just learnt is his biological mom murder his father. The father who in spite of his sins was the one he had finally started reconciling with. (Or have Kyrie watch Battler - no Winnie, no Battler, no Winn- kill the man she obsessed over for more than 18 years and whom she weaved the illusion of a happy family around. Realize Rudolf chose to give her back her son after 18 years and make a murderer out of him)

Then there is a dead body on both of their hands and Battler has to pick between becoming his mom's accomplice or her possible next victim to hide her crime.

This doesn't even cover how Rudolf decided to have this conversation without any safeguard and to risk Ange losing both her brother, father and possibly mother(going on the run or getting arrested for murder) in one fell swoop.

This man says that he won't complain of Kyrie kills him on the spot for the baby switch news when Ange is either IN THE SAME ROOM(Visual novel) or PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK TO FIND THEM(manga) so she would stumbled onto her father's dead body or the murder in real time(they don't know yet she's been listening all the while)???

I understand he is constrained by the limits of the gameboard both from a doylist and watsonian pov but like again man if you choose to allow for the possibility of both of your children having to face the idea of their mother killing their father on what is supposed to be a happy day, that's also a deeply questionable afterlife ChoiceTM.

(Once again the possibility of Battler being forced to hide that the murder even occurred or think up of an excuse why Ange's parents are acting all weird suddenly?)

edit: I forgot to include that the manga has Rudolf saying explicitly to Kyrie 'I have... a feeling I'll be murdered tonight. by you...'

I love how in her module we get to see into her internal world and she's fundamentally engaging with these concepts in a different way than Theresa would, in her own unique way that nonetheless results in acting with just as much care for Amiya and Kal'tsit as Theresa had.

'Huh? How high are the access privileges for these logs? Can't I query them? What are they even about?' 'Some logged data, Amiya. Some stories. About me, and you.' And they are mine and mine only.

like, it's important to her that she's /not/ theresa, she wouldn't keep reminding people of it otherwise, but in a way it's also important to her that she /is/ theresa, that she is the sole arbiter of "theresa", that she is the one who gets to decide the line between civilight eterna and theresa.

civilight eterna, the personality that interacts with the world outside the crown, is comprised almost entirely of theresa's knowledge. what does that make her personality? what does that make her? she doesn't like telling people about theresa. the less other people know about theresa, the less equipped they are to draw that line between civilight eterna and theresa, and the firmer her own shaky grip on that line.

she actively adjusts her behaviour to be more theresa-like when interacting with amiya.

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

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