Oh the mensur pull! Yeah me and Karami talked about that a good bit when we were developing the setting. Even calling it 'Academic Fencing' is a nod to that.
I wrote about this a bit in the design book.
The dueling culture of the University is designed to find strong willed people, desensitize them to fear, before desensitizing them to pain. The dream duels almost serve as Dune's Gomm Jabbar Test of Humanity, finding the humans among animals.
The waking Duel and it's slow style and strange rules is not only supposed to desensitize people, it's supposed to be a filter out people like Bao. The College Administration has no interest in finding 'The best sword fighter'. Sword fighting is being used as a test of character.
In a sense it has the same goals as mensur but with a different format. We don't want to scar up a bunch of rich kids, but we need instill the same type of stoicism... But before you can do that, you want to try and prevent too many Bao's from sneaking through -- animals without dignity, who will not learn the right things from the experience.
Interesting read about the ending too. I've been debating that, if I do more, what ending do I resume from. My natural inclination was the 'best' one (because in the worst one, obvious Jan sticks to her word), but I really agree with this case for the medium ending (though a friend had some weird dream based suggestions to make multiple endings 'true'). The "best" ending really just gives you NiceGuy Bao feeling bad without understanding why.
One thing that bothers me is Bao is inconsistently handed. The classic fighting game problem where it's hard to animate someone who positions their back to the camera. A common problem a lot of people have had to deal with BUT IT BUGS ME. I'd almost wanna say 'yeah she's left handed, but then she wears her sword on the wrong side 😭
Thank you, this was a fun comment to reply to covering a lot of stuff I haven't really gotten to talk much about!