[SPOILER] Who’s who? Penumbra narrative puzzle

[Nycticorax]

I totally agree with the facts you rehearse concerning Overture and Black Plague, which are compatible with and offer a welcome complement to my rehearsal in the opening post. Yet I have worries about your interpretation of Requiem, namely on the one hand your understanding of the Player's role, on the other hand your account of the relationship between Red and the Tuurngait. Let me tackle these points in the reverse order for your theory's sake.

In particular, according to your Overture (2), "Red" refers to a genuine human caught in the furnace. According to your Requiem (4), "Red" refers to a proper part of Philip's consciousness, Philip not being identical to the Player and having been in turn caught in the furnace. So my question is: when is Philip supposed to having been caught in the furnace, since as you yourself imply, the only time Philip reaches the furnace, it doesn't get into it?

More generally, your Requiem (1-4) imply an endorsement of what I've called hypothesis (ii) – that Philip ≠ the Player, see above. Yet you do not join (ii) to any of my other hypotheses; in fact you deny both my (1) and (2) since you claim not only that Philip is NOT dead, but also that Philip is NOT unconscious but in the furnace. Call the conjunction of (ii) and this last hypothesis 3-ii. I've given an argument against your 3 in the last paragraph and against (ii) in my 1-ii and 2-ii paragraphs above. So I conclude you'd better rally my flag and accept that the puzzle can't possibly be solved without committing to inconsistency or excruciating assumptions. The story is indeterminate and this indeterminacy cannot be possibly overcome, for overcoming the indeterminacy would require that something or something else were the case, yet neither the something nor the something else can possibly be true.