Zsenitan wrote:

we have a detailed picture of our personal smallness and irrelevance. All first-worlders are encouraged to feel a grief that was formerly the province only of aristocracy: that we have failed to make the most of our potential, that we will not succeed even as far as our parents did.

This is a grief that I feel permeates the 60s and 70s, a grief written into your story here.

We would be mystified if some long-standing regular suddenly demonstrated that he thought that this was a wrongly done forum - not just that he felt personally unwelcome or failed to hack it, but that the way that the forum itself is structured, the rules it has and the traditions it rests upon... that these things were inherently incorrect.

Victor and Julia and Edward all built lives based on certain assumptions, which they held in spite of evidence to the contrary, or even because they would rather hold the assumption than grasp a worthlessly ugly reality. When it was no longer possible to stay deluded, they were overcome by grief and committed suicide. That some of the suicides in the story are witnesses to others is just standard-issue Lynchian unreliable narrator stuff. Ann, their child - biologically in two out of three cases, culturally in two out of three cases - will enter into the same world of potentially lethal irrelevancy. The results are left unreported.