hi! different anon here! So in regards to the togami spinoff manga, and this is me going off of memory because i refuse to touch it again, but wasn't the whole story basically just byakuya going through a simulation, and literally everyone in that simulation, from his father to his siblings, were confirmed to be fake and also implied to not be their names anyway?
meaning every relationship byakuya had in there, every action he took, all the events that happened that was initially posited as what actually happened to him for him to beat his siblings and become heir, it was all revealed to have not been real? so everything ended up being pointless in addition to being badly written?
like i said, im going off memory here and i refuse to reread dr:t ever again, but that was what i got from it at least. if nothing else it pushed me to write better fanfiction because i felt like i could write a better backstory for byakuya than that slop and i was a kid when it came out!
disclaimer: i have yet to read the novels at the time of posting this lol
as far as i could tell from the wiki and from the snippets i've read, it's not byakuya going through a simulation but rather it is a presentation of the memories of his sister shinobu being presented to the reader, but the memories being presented to us are augmented to some extent
based on the dr:t wiki several events in the novels were confirmed to have actually happened in the dr universe (and i didn't find anything in the wiki that stated any of the characters are fake or made up) so i assume the goal was to give the reader a ratio of real and fake events that make it difficult to pin down whether the events of the book are mostly fake or mostly real so you have to think dig for yourself what you think is most likely to be real and what you think is most likely to be fake
but again i haven't actually read it so take what i've said with a grain of salt. my people who have actually read the novel comment or reblog or send me some mail if you know what the actual deal is