I feel like in attempts to 'save face' the school just made themselves look progressively more and more blatantly corrupt as they doubled-down in front of everyone.
Not that real universities have never done this.
@Mirara lol I looked back and you're totally right, I didn't register being called 'brother' would be something to get flustered by.
It is important to remember at times like these that there's an entire 35 year span in which no one in China (with some exceptions) was allowed more than one child. That ended in 2015. Pretty much no one over the age of 9 has any older siblings and no one under the age of 45 has any younger siblings, and the main age demographic for comics of this sort simply have no siblings at all.
So even before we get to anything else, both people's conception of what blood siblings are like in China, and their common uses of the terms 'brother' and 'sister', I feel are inevitably just a little bit different sometimes.