Doing a cheeky repost cause I'm tired but I need to talk about how, Pewter bitch that I am, as much as I ride the "get Pewter out of jail, the way he's treated is such bullshit" train, I do think it does a massive disservice to the weight of his character to pretend as though he literally "did nothing wrong" overall, relatively speaking. The power of his love for Renju comes from the realisation of just how far he was willing to go for barely a chance of protecting him (despite the fact Renju is logically a prime suspect in the ongoing murder case). If we try to say that what Pewter did in right path wasn't even that bad, then the whole twist, the gutpunch of jupewter in aitsf, just is stripped of its impact. It also removes the weight of the confrontation with Pewter in the epilogue (one of the best written scenes I believe). The point is that Pewter is suffering and no one cares. We're supposed to be a bit uncomfortable with how his story ends, because it isn't fair, comparatively. It's because of that suffering, that isolation, the way everyone used him, so willing to throw him under the bus, that Pewter was driven to do stupid, morally wrong things in Reso and Iris route. Is Date being incredibly selfish in his admonishing of Pewter here? Of course. Date's selfishness when it comes to the select people he cares about is a constant point of contention. But Pewter has also been selfish. The tragedy of him is yes, he did do some unarguably bad shit, Pewter himself is very clear about admitting that. But also, what options was he left with? This is how he got to this low, low point. He’s been gradually rammed into this, not impossible, but certainly horrible situation, and he’s come to a crossroads. We’ve ended up in this almost absurd situation where two guys acting out of a benevolent love and desire to protect someone else somehow puts them on two opposing sides of a murder case. He had to make a choice and by his own admission he makes the bad choice. He does the clearly wrong, bad, selfish thing, that’s him asserting his own autonomy in what twisted kind of way he can. It’s so interesting. The way aini tried to "fix" this when it doesn't need fixing (Boss being like "I couldn't just let them lock up my precious colleague" is bollocks, like girl, you literally *did* let them do that, you chose Date over Pewter every time, that's the point), when it should've instead let that super compelling moral and practical conflict created by their broken friendship be is....certainly a choice, one that probably came for the sake of ease, but also takes the whole "Pewter did nothing wrong" line too literally to my eye