Where We’re Headed...

So Susie and The Knight are foils first of all.

The Knight (and co.) wants to create endless darkness. Dark worlds have been repeatedly likened to in-universe video games and stories; dark worlds are fantasy.

The Knight wants to make an eternal fantasy, a dream they never have to wake up from. (Also in my mind the Knight/etc want to include/implicate the player in this, because of course if the player stops playing then the dream can’t continue, but that’s another post)

Susie loves the dark world. She feels like a hero, she likes going on adventures, and she likes her newfound friendship with Kris and the Darkners.

Susie also explicitly states that she wishes she could always be in the Dark World. The strongest instance of this is her conversation with Gerson: she doesn’t want the story to end, she wants to pick up the pen.

The rest of this is assuming Dess is indeed the Knight, and I will not be explaining that in this post, but that’s to me the most solid and sensible assumption at the moment, and narratively it works very well for this foil dynamic.

So then we can get into how class might fit into this.

Dess is the daughter of the Mayor. She lived in the biggest house in town. She is from a privileged life.

Though not explicitly stated, it’s implied that Susie had the opposite life. She doesn’t mention her family, she doesn’t like when we (the player) go to the tenements at the edge of town, the start of Ch 3 features a very sparse room that is implied to be hers, and so on. Keeping it brief as possible, Susie and Dess live different lives.

From what little we know of Dess, she seemed to be the more rebel-type punk kid. Her (and Noelle’s) hobbies and style contrast against her mother’s high-maintenance image. This could be read as Dess’ attempt to be nonconforming to the expectations placed upon her

Susie, when we first meet her, acts in a comparable way as a rebel/troublemaker, but this is her *conforming to/playing into* an expected role rather than going against it. She’s the New Kid, the Rough Kid, why would she bother making anyone else see differently?

This changes with the Dark Worlds and with Kris’ friendship. Susie expresses herself more freely when she’s in the Dark World. It’s a healthy escape for her.

Can the same be said of Dess? Textually we don’t know (yet) the circumstances that drove Dess to become the Knight. We know that there was some incident in the Forest (“the poor children” following a “pointed tail”) and we can infer from Dess stockpiling food and such that she may have been paranoid about it. In the end, for Dess, it sounds like what could’ve been initially a healthy escape turned into a dangerous one.

It’s the double-edged sword of escapism (and specifically, I think, the escapism offered by games and the online world)— on the one hand, it can offer community and connection to those without support, but on the other hand, it can open up fantasies that lead to downward spirals if not kept in check.

I can’t wait for chapter 5 guys.