Directly addressing the viewer is how selling typically works. I worked in sales, and sometimes, yes, you have to try and draw attention to yourself like that.
Could be compost yukkuri. A concept that seems to have been lost a few years ago -- buying yukkuri to eat your trash, since they'll just convert it to bean paste.
Like I said, could just be a hodgepodge family -- Patchy could be a park elder, while the rest could just be adopted abandoned pets. Remilia could have her own interesting story of maybe being abandoned? I dunno.
FYI, the rule was made due to someone you guys know "happened" to do that: kirairataa with his "True Happiness".
If I'm not mistaken, kirairataa wasn't the first to do this, but was definitely the most-famous of them. There were plenty of stories that could be classified as FF early-on, lead you into a false sense of security, then enter Mr Human, and we go from there.
I like that Eisei likes to give decent/good yukkuri good endings rather than just leaving them to die. There's enough apathy in the yuniverse -- empathy would be nice now and then.
From what I can gather, what was really going on was that they had an entire wall of replacement parts. So clearly, long-term abyuse was the idea. Some of the dreams could be from paste-mixing from replacement parts, and Marisa could be just mixing the dreams from the yukkuri that those parts belonged to.
Rather disgusting story of a long-term torture case of a koMarisa who couldn't distinguish reality from dreams. After a certain point, reality started to invade her dreams, and she couldn't sleep or be awake -- it was all pain, suffering, and torture.
It's a little different from the mold one -- the ants didn't take control, they just ate Marisa out from the inside, and when others came over at the smell of sweet-sweets (since the pain made Marisa smell sweeter), they simply got infected with the same ants.
Only inconsistency in this story?
The paste inside a yukkuri spins. Unless Marisa was already dead while they were building the colony, they'd simply get washed along and possibly digested.
Yeah, this is one of those things I was talking about -- that if they do home declaration, do you have to just always go nuclear?
Miss gave Reimu a bit more leniency and saw, 'maybe she's got some pet potential,' gave it a shot and... well, it ends a little early to see the long-term, but still, yay!