Thank you for your thoughts, everyone, it’s really helpful! I think I’ll go for a hybrid system as various people have suggested. I don’t foresee this being something that’ll come up a lot, but I think it’d be good to have a toggleable system set up in case I want to do this sort of thing again. And I’ll have a note on the scene itself that makes it skippable if desired, without any ingame bad consequences for doing so. (I’m someone who when playing is less likely to toggle-off content, but may be startled ingame depending on context, so it’s useful to understand what a scene might involve when deciding whether to play or not.)
