I'm quite familiar with this game, so I will try my best!

Soooo, there’s one specific point where the stories tie together (during the climax), but a lot of it is definitely up to the player to interpret. The space sections are so brief and infrequent the little nods and references can be tricky to tie it together. It would be nice to maybe make some of this more explicit at some point, but it is all there.

So! Rough overview: Cassiopeia is in space when she discovers the black hole and far from being something pretty/awe inspiring, she realises it is on a course to swing towards earth. She’s hopeless but Mac makes contact and encourages her to return. With a reason to try Cassiopeia has new hope and, ignores his advice at first and instead goes closer to the blackhole to find a solution. She finds a signal/message from it that she thinks might hold the key and sends it to Mac.

As Cassiopeia makes the journey back, Mac follows the signal and it leads to Achill Island, specifically Kasio’s home, but a few days in the future. She arrives just in time and they take the bus for the last leg. On the bus he tells her when he decoded the signal there was an image, he shares it and it’s a kids drawing, showing a character very much like Cassiopeia (an astronaut) in space. This could be seen as a drawing by Kasio.

As Kasio’s home (the location written on the back of the image), Kasio's Mom is there and Cassiopeia and Mac pass the drawing through the letterbox. All they know to do is that the message needs to be delivered, and whatever is going to stop the black hole destroying everything and everything that was, is in Bríd’s hands (kasio’s mum). Cassiopeia asks Mac if he wants to come with her if there ever is a future. We return to Kasio’s detoriation and we don’t see Bríd until the end, but Bríd seeing this drawing is potentially the turning point for her in realising her kid is just the same person and whatever else she loves her as always.

How did Kasio’s Mom actually get the drawing? Was it Cassiopeia & Mac? Did she just find it? Or did Kasio come back and put it through the letterbox?

Just before the credits we see Mac and Cassiopeia again and Cassiopeia asking Mac if he wants to come with her, but he’s just not ready. But she’s waiting for when he is. One less often noticed detail is that Mac shares Kasio’s surname, and in the dialogue it seems he at least recognises Kasio’s Mom, before he doesn’t have the courage to say anything.

There are three other sections with Cassiopeia in the future diary bits, another with Kasio’s Mom, one with a character very much like Shans/Anu and one with a charcater like Maggy (and her space pirate partner in crime).

For me (at least right now) Cassiopeia and Mac are real, but so is Kasio. They’re all characters. Mac could be a version of Kasio too. Maybe a version her Mom wanted her to be at one point, an accountant. Cassiopeia is alone in space (no family), and Mac is alone in Mayo (family but an empty life and no connection). When the two parts worked together, Kasio gets to live the rest of her life and fill it with her own stories. Less space than Cassiopeia, but maybe more fun and unexpected and real!

Thanks for sharing your interpretation. From your Steam name, I thought you were the developer of the game.

It's difficult for me to piece these space bits of story together, and I find it simpler to imagine this as a disconnected metaphor, but that doesn't necessarily make complete sense either. Overall I find it detracts from the main story somewhat, though they brought some interesting images and sounds.

I think Cassiopeia and Mac are from a novel written by Kasio, in reality the drawing she did was found by a stranger and delivered to her mam from there. Then Kasio would write the drawing into the story as an explanation to herself as to how it got to her mam.

This synopsis made me remember that at Mac said something like "That's my mo-" and it cut off (if I'm remembering correctly); I was also sort of confused but my final interpretation is that it's a metaphor for Kasio finding herself. Since Kasio and Cassiopeia are very similar names. Also, in the extra diary entries post credits, the people that save Cassiopeia look are very similar in name and looks to the people that save Kasio after getting sick.

Here's how I see it, and I'm pretty confident in my reading:

First, note that both Cassiopeia and Mac share names with Kasio. Notably, Cassiopeia is an elongated form of Kasio, and Mac has the same last name as Kasio

Also, note that in Cassiopeia's continued adventures – the 199x chapters – she has adventures with:

Anu – who we later find to be Shan's new name – who Cassiopeia goes about saving

Brid – who she is helping on a recovering-earth

Maggy – who is now a space pirate, accompanied by her partner Captain Hildegard, who is clearly modeled on the German woman Hilde whom Maggy reminsicined not so subtly of her crush on from long before she was ready to confront her sexuality

And note that there is mention made, in the 2010s, of Kasio writing a book, that her mother Brid may or may not have read

So, here's basically the conclusion:

The space story is a novel that Kasio goes on to write, sometime in the 2010s.

She doesn't end up becoming an astronomer; she ends up becoming a science fiction author

In these novels, she's written herself in, in two forms:

Mac: Possibly her deadname, the person who she felt she would become if she remained closeted and followed the life Brid wanted her to live – that of an accountant

Cassiopeia: The idealized form of who she could imagine herself becoming, a space-hero astronaut using science to save the world from blackholes and etc.

The journals, meanwhile, are documentation of her lived life. She really did almost die in that house. And she was saved, because her mother – while processing her child going missing, looking through old photos, etc. – found her space-drawings Kasio had made as a child, bringing her to the emotional-break of recognizing: her child always *was* Kasio, and was in crisis, and needed her to accept and save her.

So in her very first novels of Cassiopeia & Mac, she tapped into these lived experiences, and dramatized this: that her near-death-experience was a black-hole-causing anomaly, and that her mother's rediscovery of her childhood drawings was brought about by this ficitonalized versions of herself delivering the drawings to her

Meanwhile, in the continuing adventures of Cassiopeia, she wrote in people she cared about. She wrote in a happy ending for Maggy, where she gets to travel the stars happily-ever-after with the woman she might have ended up with if she had come out of the closet earlier in life. She wrote in Anu, as someone she saves and brings along on her journey – a reference to her role in inspiring Anu's hatching & journey in-real-life. Etc.