The thing is that Susie can be very perceptive, and with her rebellious and conformational attitude, she has been generally pretty damn good at sensing and calling out bullshit. Even if she’s generally the one least aware of the darker undertones of the plot, she can often notice something is Stupid or Doesn’t Make Sense and chafe and struggle and win against it.
But I think this Chapter has been really bringing to light the biggest limitation of this perceptiveness. And it’s one that has been there since nearly the beginning, but it’s now really brought to the foreground. Susie’s defiant optimism has been generally seen as a powerfully positive force, but it does have its darker side. It can lead to her to amazing acts of bravery and change, but it easily becomes a sort of Willful Ignorance.
It starts from her not noticing the basic concept of Darkners becoming inanimate objects in the Light World, until Ralsei actually explains it to her in no uncertain terms…
Which she herself admit was something she was fully capable of understanding before… she just didn’t want to accept it, because of what it would mean to the wonderful friendships and experiences she has only being able to have in the Dark World. Ever since she started her adventures, Susie has been trying to find the most hopeful lens on everything that happens to her, and the most hopeful and positive way that she could find to interpret the growing evidence that maybe the best things that have happened to her since she moved to Hometown might not be ‘Real’ on some level, is to pretend that it’s not there.
And you can see these same tendencies again and again, when she is confronted with the fact the Old Man is dead in the Light World, she at first convinces herself that resurrecting him must be easy. And when confronted with the fact that it’s not, she snaps at Ralsei at a way she never snapped at them before.
And I think this is especially what’s going on with Susie’s obliviousness of Kris’s shadiness and association with the Knight. She has had plenty of clues to notice something is up with them on that front…
The fact that when Flowery told her about the location of the Code and also said to not tell anyone, she also implicitly understood that Kris is to included in that list, implies she might have some suspicions already.
But actually admitting any of it, even to herself, would be heart-shattering to one of the most important relationships she made in the Light World. So she keeps turning a blind eye to it, and maybe she will continue to do so until the truth will be flopped right in front of her face once again.
This Chapter has been in many ways about both the power and limits of optimism and hope, the Flowers being able to make their dreams come true but being unable to survive for long in the Dark World, Rudy's attempts to downplay his illness backfiring on him, Flowery’s ultimately doomed confidence that he could beat the Knight and the foibles of Susie’s burning shining optimism being brought fully to the surface....
None of it means that optimism and hope are wrong, clearly the Narrative is highly critical of Ralsei’s deterministic pessimism and Weird Route Noelle’s depressed disdain for the world as well. And I don’t think Gerson’s belief that Susie’s hope is the power needed to rewrite this story would end up misplaced, it’s just… complicated. Hope is a powerful force, but it does have its rough edges, and one of them is absolutely Willful Ignorance.
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