yurinator

Wow this is an interesting interpretation but as someone who read the original novel and read the interviews about the show you completely misunderstood the show. All the things that happened before Jiushi woke up from coma in the last episode weren't his imagination or a dream, they all actually happened. The doors were an eldritch horror phenomenon in the book, it's only a computer game in the TV show because Chinese censhorship is against horror - in the book everyone forgets about Ruan's existence too because of the paranormal effect of the door but it doesn't make him less real (in the TV show it's because the game's code was overwritten) and Jiushi and Ruan reunite in real world, not in the game. I don't mean to attack you, you're allowed to have your own interpretation even if it's not the one intended by the show creators and I think it's still an interesting one. Actually a lot of people misunderstood the ending because of the poor quality of English translation but the TV show writer specified that the world was in VR but the time they spent together was real.

I agree with your interpretion so much, even the writer of the show confirmed you're right because he said that 'the world is in vr but the time they spent together was real'. There were a few things I didn't understand though but maybe you figured it out: since we know that after the reset everyone is alive and well, so in the game Jiushi made (the ending scene) is everyone who appears there (Zaozao, Dongyuan, Quanli etc.) just new NPCs made from scratch by Jiushi based on his memories of them or did the real them transport to the VR world just like Jiushi did (cuz he also got younger when he entered the game)? And is Lanzhu in Jiushi's game the same Lanzhu from the rest of the series? How? Cuz he got deleted from existence with the rest of the game and Jiushi didn't have his files downloaded anywhere (except his own brain) so he had to program him from scratch so it can't be the same Lanzhu? Just a newly created NPC programmed based on Jiushi's memories about Lanzhu. IDK if these are all loopholes or if I didn't understand something (I know Jiushi was saying something about reality vs virtuality when he was entering his own game but the translation was very clunky so I didn't really understand it) but I'm curious about what you think cuz I feel like if all these characters in Jiushi's game were just characters made from scratch by Jiushi and not the original characters we saw through the entire show then it kinda defeats the message and themes of the whole show.