You hit the nail on the head in so many of the points, I gotta add to it.
The double outline was certainly "a choice", probably the wrong one.
I wanted the narration in the center, and didn't want to darken the background so the pictures were visible.
One outline didn't look right for me, as it would blend with the pictures, and transparent ones created these weird artifacts.
Also, thicker outlines were out of the question, because of the way Renpy Renders text.
This is a thing I spent a lot of time testing, and in the end I chose the double-outline as a short-sighted compromise.
The center text for the main character's thoughts was important to me, because I wanted to make it clear when something is actually being heard vs when it is only thought or described.
Kinda like the way they do it in the 999 DS version, where narration is in one screen, and dialogue is in the other.
Of course, here they benefited from having two screens, and the narration's background wasn't important so it could be obscured.
Different case, but it explains the intention.
The missing ending period was a deliberate choice, 100% a wrong one.
When I started writing I DID have a period at the end of every sentence, but I thought it looked weird with the red arrow, and thought it could replace it.
I also added them when a character would stop speaking and a different character would start speaking.
This choice was unfortunately not the correct one, and I may have missed some.
I'm adding the periods in an update.
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You got me on the story.
As it is pretty rare, cases of double connections are even rarer, but not impossible.
So I had two options here:
1- There were no records of a second string ever happening before.
2- There were records of it happening, but it happened long ago and/or in secluded areas so it is considered a myth.
Either way would be a news-worthy event.
Since Nadir is from a different city, the general public doesn't necessarily know he had a connection before, so the only ones in the know would be him and Roberto. And with Roberto not liking the general idea of the Red string and him being very private, the only ones who could make it public would be Nadir, Amira, and potentially people who have known him and recognized him in the video.
However, exploring this would have made the story considerably longer and when I got to this point I was on the last days of writing. So I did not address it.
The idea of the red string is that it connects people in a visible way, and people gave it their own interpretation. And I made it so it is handled the way the Catholic marriage is handled.
With regular marriage you can get divorced.
With Catholic marriage it is handled as a union by God and is unbreakable, so divorce is not allowed (annulment is possible under very specific circumstances, but that's another story).
Because it was based on this, the general population has an idealization of the red-string, such that bad cases are not usually reported, like bad marriages that stay together to keep appearances.
Or so was my mental justification, which was not necessarily implied in the story. My bad
As for Nadir, you are correct.
He did not love-LOVE his fiancée, and he doesn't love-LOVE Roberto (not yet at least).
That sounds harsher than it is, but it was the intention.
Since the first connection happened when he was very young, he went with the regular expectations. And since it kinda worked out for him, he had no reason to believe it was fake if confronted by potential people who did not believe so.
He did not choose his fiancée and she did not choose him. But they did get along, and grew to care for each other. But they weren't IN LOVE.
They were expected to be together, and they didn't have a reason not to.
The whole red-thread idealization.
The separation was a kinda-attempt for each to live their lives a bit before getting together. And the loss did hurt him, because he did care for her.
A big part of the depression is meant to come not only from the loss, but from the prospect of losing their only "TRUE" connection (The one-true-soulmate belief)
For all of the above, it is hard for him to understand that someone who also has the connection rejects it.
In the end, many of these things probably did not make it to the final script. Either because my time ran out, they weren't implied clearly, or weren't there at all and I thought they were because they're in my head (hehe)
Thank you so much for your review!