#lucanderie

Compare this to a similar scene with Asriel's room in Queen's mansion, where they simply close their eyes as we do the motion of opening the door- here they change what the actual motion is based on the command's wording.

Earlier, they cover their mouth before they can be cruel to Ralsei:

Kris stops themselves from completing their own sentence- they don't have any evidence to just predict what the player will say next, so this confirms they are aware of the whole sentence they have to say before they say it. Kris isn't just being forced through physical actions by the Red Soul, they can actually hear the entire command.

We, as the player, have no input in this scene at all. If you try to play the long sequence right, they'll just mess it up, prompting the dialogue anyway. There's no command from us that they twist in order to be "allowed" to play, no nudge from us in the right direction- they just snatch control, because Susie wants to hear them.

This is such a complete stab through the gut, not just because of their passion and the fluid animation and sheer expressiveness, but because Kris can just do that! It isn't that they physically can't play piano with the soul in the driver's seat, they just won't, until Susie empowers them to. No matter how badly they want the freedom to express themselves on their own terms, they restrain themselves. They let us take the reins and try to just submit, and they can't keep it up.

The interpretation this strikes me with, coupled with their "knighting" and their "promise" to the mysterious caller and their unspecified egg trauma... We know they know how we work, and that their plans with us are premeditated and calculated, at the behest of (maybe multiple) adults who have significant power over them. At least the Mayor is directing them to let themselves be turned into a vessel. We know this would have to have started before they went to the first Dark World, when Susie was still a bully, Noelle estranged and Ralsei not even in the picture.

We know that by the opening of the third fountain, by the time they're spinning prompts to get into banter with Susie and blocking us from being mean to Ralsei and drawing messages on windows and sneaking in as much of themselves into their relationships as possible, they've been turning themselves into our tool to be ultimately pitted against the group since day one. That no matter how much they can be coaxed out, at the end of the day, they have to be shoved back in their place, if not by us, by the Knight/mayor/etc who've facilitated this entire thing. That their choices don't matter.

They maliciously comply with our exact wording when asked to turn a doorknob. They cover their mouth midway through a sentence. When asked to say Berdly's name, they repeat themselves loudly in shock. They do PLENTY of physical actions or gestures unprompted, such as kneeling down and touching Ralsei when only prompted to talk, pushing Susie out of harm's way for the second time, giving her their knife with a flourish, laughing or nodding to clarify a statement... as well as their unprompted hijinks at the church. They act by themselves both in the spur of the moment and premeditated, in both low-stakes interactions and highly emotional, instinctive reactions. It seems like they're capable of doing any emoting, physical gesturing, or creative prompt interpretations they so desire apart from a) speaking, b) when directly commanded to do something else and c) in many weird route sequences (will circle back to this). They know entire commands word for word before they execute them, and they are aware enough of the fact that we have goals and what those goals may be to actively conspire against us. Kris knows our "rules".

This is extremely interesting because we saw very little of this in the previous chapters- leading us to believe Kris had basically zero input on Dark-World happenings, and had less understanding of their own situation then say, Ralsei did. But here, Kris isn't just getting more clever about or more accustomed to defying us- they're proving progressively more capable of just doing things of their own volition that any possessed kid who was randomly dropped into this situation with no warning or context would not wait two days to try.

Combined with the fact that from the beginning, they defy us to limit what we see long before they defy what we actually force them to do, (even when they clearly don't like doing it!), and that there's precedent for a character's mindset determining the player's level of control with Susie, it's seeming more and more like Kris is purposefully limiting themselves in earlier chapters. They have a vested interest in "playing the part", coming across to either us or someone else like they have less agency than they do, and they get progressively more open about the amount of defiance that they are capable of.

This is just, a fascinating jump in Kris's amount of agency! At the very least, they may know a similar amount of meta-info to even Ralsei. It changes some of their earlier actions from purely-forced to compliant. And there's a lot of (non-evil, you guys) reasons they would do this- they're probably at least, (at this point), afraid of some kind of retribution from us or their co-conspirators. They want to stay ahead of us by hiding their agency, they may not be comfortable enough with themselves to show express in certain instances... And this changes their defiant actions from things that they are allowed to do into things they are willing to risk doing- saving Susie twice, not hurting Ralsei's feelings, comforting Noelle, slorking down those juice cups like they're NOTHING- all little risks they're willing to take.

This just leaves the weird route- which may either be a route where the player simply gains more control over Kris, or maybe the "proceed" commands could be more general and therefore more inclusive. Or Kris could be initially, willing to play along with freezing the Darkners in order to achieve their goal, to bide their time, and once they realize how fucked up we can get it's too late.

But while I understand that, on a purely emotional level, framing the act of controlling the player character as something harmful would inevitably make some players very uncomfortable, making you uncomfortable isn't the point (at least from what I interpret at this point in the game etc). That isn't what makes it "good". This level of meta is so compelling because it turns the fact that "no matter how deeply you're invested in Kris as a three-dimensional-human being, by nature of the medium, you will spend this experience treating them as 'yourself' to some extent and over-riding their agency"- and turns it right in front of your eyes from something you have to suspend your disbelief to sidestep, into something completely canon. It makes this mental dissonance a feature, not a bug. All sorts of functional details of Kris being a player character aren't things we have to look over, but part of the actual narrative. You are playing the game right if you make a decision Kris doesn't like and get blindsided when they try to defy you! That's an intentional plot point in the story!

Not to mention, the limitation of Kris's agency forces their characterization to be so unique and compelling, since the writing has to find creative ways to squeeze it through the layer of the player influence. Because we can't just be directly shown what Kris is like, we get subtle, deeply compelling snippets of who they are, with what does and doesn't shine through our involvement being a level of characterization over top of the characterization.