kieran

look, ships have not and will never be about canonicity. ship wars are extensions of ego, not the work

shipping at its core is about the dynamic and relationship between characters. it is a way to celebrate, dissect, and comprehend the ways in which characters affect each other, reveal things about themselves that wouldn't be possible alone, and ultimately, how that reflects the themes of the story. people ship non-canon ships because the canonicity isn't the point: the dynamic is

what does suselle's happiness mean for both susie and noelle? what does it reveal about kris and noelle? what does it imply about kris and susie?

i understand the desire to not engage in something painful, but the one-sided nature of kris' crush is a beautiful added layer to kris' character because it highlights their otheredness and repressed self so well while also showing how much they also want their friends to be happy. it illustrates their struggles as a character who is their own person with their own needs and wants, yet is so enigmatic to the general player base that nearly none of them clock how kris feels in chapter 5.

kris has spent their entire life being the second choice, the afterthought, the one left out if the azzy dess thing is anything to go by. and now they have to stand silently as their favorite person chooses someone else while contending with the player choosing to thirdwheel them (and also how they want susie to be happy with noelle because they're a backstabbing little enby). this unrequited crush is a reminder of that in the form of a knife that twists in our heart.

meanwhile weird route reveals to us that the 'only kris knows how weird i am' is this unsaid connection between kris and noelle who both desire to 'leave' and find something new and freeing in their constrained, powerless lives. the irony is that they are video game characters who use, well, video games to achieve this feeling through things like evil routes, glitches, and clipping out of bounds (which is then actuated when the veneer of noelle's reality is forcibly shattered by the player). just as kris had always been 'heading nowhere', so too was noelle similarly trapped and 'heading nowhere' until susie came along

the happiness susie brings to noelle is an echo of the happiness we've seen kris experience due to susie. because kris and noelle are similar, we can deduce that the ways in which noelle feels about susie is similar to how kris feels about susie (such as the locker scene in ch5) and vice versa. similarly, the joy that susie feels with noelle is a romantic mirror of the comfort she feels with kris. she doesn't understand love, but she also has so much love in her heart to give. it's implied that noelle is partly why susie is 'still here' and this moment of their two hearts beating as one is why their love is so pure. susie needs a presence like noelle just as noelle needs a presence like susie and suselle advances both their character arc wonderfully

all this to say that shipping is so much more fun once you think of it as character exploration. free yourself from 'my ship has to be canon' and use canon as fuel for you to explore what makes these characters tick and what about their dynamic you find fun

a ship being one-sided (and staying one-sided) is evocative precisely because it is tragic. explore that!! dive into the many layers that I didn't get to describe!

Pride month ended like a week ago.