You really just handwaved the "consent" issue?
In one instance a consenting adult was indulging a fetishistic roleplay in a simulation. In the other a literal child - unable by our standards to meaningfully consent - was coerced into ritual sex with her father, in the real world. It's disturbing that you consider different reactions to these as "inconsistent".
But also I think there is a thematic squick that runs a lot deeper. The torture stuff at the beginning is portrayed as a sickness, a reaction to meaninglessness and inauthenticity. Caroline's relationship to it is a kind of masochistic expression of unhappiness with the ephemerality of experiences in the simulation. Permanence is forbidden, and so she is drawn to the permanence of death and trauma. It is Bad.
The final chapter is - as you say - explicitly pitched as a counterpoint to all that. Experiences in the real world are described with the warm glow of meaningful authenticity, as though portraying the ideal state of humanity. Permanence is held up as the source of all meaning. It is Good. The incest scene is framed as normal, and natural, and wholesome, maybe even innocent, and especially permanent and significant - a antipode to the beginning scenes. There's even a line about how the father unexpectedly "finds his body responding", as though activating some biological heritage.
In short - the squick comes not just from the explicit depiction, but from the subtextual framing that incest is right and proper.
> In the other a literal child - unable by our standards to meaningfully consent - was coerced into ritual sex with her father, in the real world.
Really? I recall that event occurring in a science fiction novel, and if you are going to fuss that I suggest you're unclear on the distinction, then I will require you to explain why I seem to be the only one here not genuinely, hot-bloodedly angry over things that happen in a story that is not real.
That's why you don't, but I do, remember Caroline talking to Lawrence about how she would have killed Fred or Palmer without a first thought, much less a second. Caroline is the only post-singularity murderer! Sometimes I wonder if anyone here has read the book, or indeed is meaningfully literate, ie capable of scoring >1 on the high school AP English exam: when an author shows us at length that a protagonist has vengefully seduced her former abuser in order to carry out murder in cold blood, you are not meant to take this person as morally immaculate! Reading is participatory, damn it. You do it with your brain switched on, and ideally also without the extremely evident assumption that everything is and should be propaganda designed to change your opinion on something. But that you're angry is also why you don't and I do recall that, if anyone's consent is portrayed in the scene as approximately coerced, it is not Nugget but Lawrence.
For that and a handful of less relevant reasons, and in a context of such ruthless necessity and matriarchal leadership as by this point the narrative has worked very hard and at considerable length to establish, a reading so false to fact as yours must indict at least one of motivation and reading comprehension. It simply is not possible to produce so erroneous a reading both competently and innocently. It is foolish at best to equate "counterpoint" with "moral inverse!" Like if I say I prefer something the same way I'd rather have herpes than cancer, no one would take me to mean I think either of those was good. Or no one so far, at any rate. The way this thread has gone, it might just be a matter of time before even the joke asks too much of its audience.
It's pretty cool of you to tell a chronic childhood rape victim that he's "handwaved the 'consent' issue," though. I mean, obviously that's an issue anyone would sensibly assume they've put more thought into than me. You certainly had much better reason and a lot more experience to draw on, of course! But this is why the "victim" label is bullshit. It exists to give people like you an easier time talking over people like me. I don't play on easy mode that way. You will need to try harder. I wonder if you're really up to it.
If you want to advocate censorship, fine. Do so honestly and I might even agree with you; my opinions on certain diffusion models and adapters, for example, which I have discussed here in recent months, are a good case in point. When I catch you trying to advocate censorship by deceit and in my name, I'm not going to stop calling you on it. You can keep going down this road if you want, but fair warning if you do: over such an incoherent and insubstantial reading as yours, I'll all but have to discuss your motivations, for want of anything else capable of supporting any conversation at all. Neither of us wants that, but you will enjoy it less.