SPOILER WARNING STILL APPLIES MASSIVELY
- Alternate Character Interpretation
- Mitch, the Big Good, in accused in-story of having and using More than Mind Control abilities just like the Big Bad. He's also accused of using a memetic weapon to make Thomas Muoka an Unperson. The Loose Canon origin story for him indicates that he was lying to his allies. Canonically, he sacrificed our entire universe to imprison Oul in the chronologically first chapter of the story (higher-dimensional beings like Xio generally don't believe that life can exist in only 3+1 dimensions). He also personally ran a Dystopia (albeit to save humanity) and wiped out human civilization at least 20 times. And in the end, he got to go home alive, unlike every single other named character. Suffice it to say, he has a bit of a spotty record.
- Just before the end, Mitch/Xio angrily asks Ching what he should have done instead. Ching's answer, as is often the case in Fine Structure, comes by way of demonstration; the same decision Jason Chilton made: sacrificed himself.
- This series essentially asks, "What if Jesus, a fragment of the divine made flesh, couldn't/wouldn't/refused to sacrifice Himself for the world, so in the end some mortal(s) had to step up and do it for Him?"
- It's said several times that a year and a half of total sensory deprivation should have (and in a sense, did) utterly destroy Anne Poole's mind. "Marooned" reveals that being restricted to 3+1 dimensions has a similar effect on Xio, cutting off nearly all of its senses except Mitch's meager five. So why doesn't Xio go completely insane (by its own standards, if not humanity's)? Maybe it/he did.
- Word of God says Xio wasn't mentally affected because the subjective time was very short to him. All those millenia in our universe amount to only an eyeblink in terms of five-dimensional time.
- Mitch, the Big Good, in accused in-story of having and using More than Mind Control abilities just like the Big Bad. He's also accused of using a memetic weapon to make Thomas Muoka an Unperson. The Loose Canon origin story for him indicates that he was lying to his allies. Canonically, he sacrificed our entire universe to imprison Oul in the chronologically first chapter of the story (higher-dimensional beings like Xio generally don't believe that life can exist in only 3+1 dimensions). He also personally ran a Dystopia (albeit to save humanity) and wiped out human civilization at least 20 times. And in the end, he got to go home alive, unlike every single other named character. Suffice it to say, he has a bit of a spotty record.
- Fan-Disliked Explanation: A proportion of readers disagree with the Word of God answer of Xio not experiencing Go Mad from the Isolation on Earth, preferring to invoke Death of the Author as Xio becoming emotionally deadened by sensory deprivation forms a nice set of Book Ends with Anne.
