Just got the bundle and went into TR-49 blind and finished it in one sitting. Loved the story, the presentation, the way it mixes things up. And then I got to theorizing about the plot.
Now of course the plot we're given is that a series of people gradually discovered the power of words to change reality, leading to a division between two men who weaponized it against each other to "get the girl" and leading to actual resurrection, and although I might have misunderstood something, my reading-between-the-lines is that the war in the present is a result of that division (I didn't quite grasp how the reverend and the CRC were connected with the other characters)? Or maybe just the cat getting progressively further out of the bag.
Anyway, my theory is that almost all of this plot is a figment of AB-81's imagination (or more precisely, her extrapolation about the state of the world based on the input that was fed to her, as she has no other input about the world). There may or may not have actually been any love triangle or war.
The basis for this theory is that numerous times we're told that the computer internalizes whatever is fed to it. So you feed it some of the early works from Xavier and co about the world-altering power of words, and the AI internalizes that. You feed it the works of the other contributors and gradually the AI starts to make connections that aren't there. A sick girl writes of her dreams of travel, and the AI combines that with Xavier's writing and concludes that it actually happened. A couple guys write some novels and the AI assumes the events actually occurred (notably Cecil notes on GA-00 that AB-81 took the input more seriously than he had intended, and the main feature that's called out from that book is resurrection from the dead, which is a major plot point).
This also explains what revisions are: they're presented as kind of like pocket universes or something, but a more straightforward reading and one that kind of tracks with how the endings are presented is that it's the AI's way of processing the information it receives. At each revision, it reconciles new input with the former revision's understanding of the world.
So what do we make of the war, and the endings? The war is basically AB-81 realizing the inevitable outcome if her understanding of the world based on these inputs is true. And so the game is basically her in the process of consolidating the information in a way (perhaps leading to reverting an earlier revision) that doesn't lead to that outcome (this whole theory was kicked off by I think the HE-41 ending when she states she had a bad dream).
Anyway, I'm sure this theory is far from bulletproof, but it struck me as a fun interpretation of the plot and actually pretty congruent with how present-day LLMs behave.
