I think these interpretations work. I don't think the writers did a lot of this intentionally, but I wouldn't be surprised if the writers would accept these interpretations or, at the least, these probably explain why people still care so much about Chrono Trigger.
Reading a bit of your articles, there, specifically the thing about the campfire scene in SUBJECTIVITY/OBJECTIVITY AND TIME.
I tend to think, now, that that scene's really pivotal to the game as a whole. It changes the... context of the story?
The Planet dreams, but the people in the game are the ones that change history, and I tend to think that, maybe, the only thing the Planet wanted was just to relive its past, or tell someone its story so it didn't have to die so alone. Or something like that. Lavos getting defeated just sort of happened as a result of what the characters saw. Or not.
It's also a pretty weird scene because, while plenty of SNES games had moments you could call "dark," I can't really think of many others where the characters sit around and ask "What do you think'll happen to us when we die?" It's not just dark and moody storytelling or some misguided attempt at being deep and edgy or something. It's emotional directness.
Also, something else you reminded me of with: "On one level, this is a fantasy element that is irreconcilable with any kind of realistic existentialist philosophy, and even counter to existentialism's focus on the inevitable triumph of death and time."
A lot of people complained about Chrono and co. being dead in Cross, but I think it fits here and really points out something kind of ironic about a lot of RPGs. Even if you save the world from the Big Bad Guy, everyone's still going to die eventually. And as a result, though, people say Cross is cynical, because it kills off the main characters from the original -- I think I read a forum post where someone said this was just Kato getting revenge at his former coworkers and the Trigger fans (or something insane like that).
Maybe it WOULD be a case of Cross being cynical, except Trigger does this to itself already. Frog's from 600 AD, Ayla's from 65000000 BC, they're both dead by the time 1000 AD rolls around, and, ultimately, there's no way that Crono and co. would've even lived to see the end of the world had they lived normal lives, unaffected by finding timegates and things.
Two scenes from Dragon Warrior 7 remind me of this, a lot. I'm new and don't know how to make spoiler text invisible, so I guess this is a spoiler warning.
In one quest in the game, you travel back in time, and one of your party members leaves to defend a tribe of... gypsies, I guess you could call them. You never see him again, and later, in your own time, you're able to find his grave somewhere.
In another case, you travel back in time and meet a scientist who builds robots, one of which is named after a woman and is acting as his caretaker, sort of. In your home time, you can visit his house, and find the same robot trying to nurse the scientist back to health. Except by that point he's long dead, so you just see this robot puttering back and forth between a pot of soup in the kitchen and a pile of bones in the bedroom, talking about how it wants Zebo to get better.
As a result, I sort of do wonder whether some of these headier things were from Kato or Horii. Or if they were from Kato, if his work on CT had an effect on Horii going into DW7, because there are quite a few other odd, odd scenes in that game that dwell heavily on mortality.
