the silence

Let’s talk for a bit about how Peter Lukas’ attempted ritual makes no sense whatsoever.

• “Deceptively spacious” apartments with no rooms large enough for “a decent-sized sofa”: You know what doesn’t take up much space? A loveseat. You are encouraging people to buy loveseats.
• “Cooking facilities that seemed adequate until you tried to do more than microwave”: Supposing the stove is broken, it takes only a tiny bit of counter space to use an induction hob, air fryer, and/or rice cooker. (There must be at least one power outlet for the microwave.) More importantly, even if Lukas uses SCP powers to magically break every non-microwave appliance, I don’t see how microwaving meals equates to loneliness. I’m most likely to go for a microwave meal on days when I’m socially occupied and don’t have time to cook. Raid in the afternoon, board game night in the evening, looks like it’s ramen for dinner.
• Corridors full of false doors: This is kinda neat/spooky from a Spiral perspective, but I don’t see any relation to loneliness.
• Floor layouts designed to minimize the chance of residents encountering each other, small elevators, soundproofed walls: Meh. None of my social life involves my neighbors anyway. Soundproofed walls enhance my social life by letting me be loud with my friends at 1 am without getting noise complaints.

The only sensible thing Lukas did was to select tenants who were pre-lonely and pre-miserable, but I don’t see how the apartment design contributes anything. Maybe that’s the point, like, Lukas is way out of touch with how humans function? He should know loneliness, though. That’s his field.

As an aside, I recently discovered people ship Lukas and Elias. Really? They have like three minutes of screentime together. It is a good three minutes though.

I imagine Elias would come into Lukas’ bedroom (of course they have separate bedrooms) to watch him sleep, but he would know when Lukas was about to wake up and leave so that Lukas would always wake up alone.