some kriselle thoughts
whenever I see art or text about kriselle in princess/knight roles or how the festival showed they're a perfect match by completing all the activites as intended, i can't help but think that this is the exact societal expectation thrust upon kriselle for being childhood neighbors that toby is deconstructing in the weird route (and the normal route to an extent too)
imo kriselle has the most fanon-taken-canon interpretations out of all the ships in the cast, purely due to their childhood neighbors status. i'm not saying this is bad, by the way, but that this shows how we as a society see 'childhood neighbors' and attach all sorts of expectations to them.
they must have been each other's first loves, they must have been each other's first kiss, they must have done x y and z as expected of childhood neighbors who mean a lot to each other
and considering dessriel is canon and the whole 'let's fit ourselves into the king/queen box despite one of us being nonbinary', i can't help but wonder if kris and noelle also both felt like they had boxes they had to check off if they were truly 'childhood friends'.
like there are a lot of things in the game and in society that point to 'kris and noelle should get together and have a perfectly normal romance that's expected of them as childhood neighbors'. as mentioned, there's the festival, their color scheme (or at least i've seen this one get pointed out), the weird route only being possible because of noelle's trust in kris (which the player takes advantage of), spamton insinuating something, susie thinking kris and noelle were a thing, et cetera
and it's such a common story, isn't it?
the type of suburban american story where you and the girl next door fall in love over time, get married, have two and a half kids, and live in a house with a white picket fence. typical, traditional, and conventional.
but:
that's pointedly not what they want
after all, there's a reason the weird route relies so heavily on marriage-related imagery and symbolism. and these queer teens being shoved into these roles leads to them committing basically a murder-suicide.
kris and noelle both want to be free of being themselves, trapped in their roles and societal expectations.
kris succeeds technically, by having the player - a foreign entity - take on the task of being kris dreemurr through the soul.
noelle wants to 'run away' and 'do something crazy' because she has lost all control of her life, lost to the 'noelle she must be' and not the noelle she wants to be
when noelle talks about 'only kris knows how weird i am', (imo) she's talking about this desire to stop being herself, something that she's sure kris shares. noelle glitch hunts and breaks games because it gives her a sense of control. it's just a game which has a predestined ending, but you can choose to do so much and those choices mean so much to her because it alleviates how entrapped she feels in real life.
kris likely played video games for a similar reason, though perhaps not as machiavellian as noelle was. in both cases, they play games to be someone else
and that is why susie is so important to them
when kris is with susie, we get:
and when noelle is with susie, we get:
they are both okay with who they are because of susie.
and vice versa as well, mind you. susie's presence is the agent of change to both of them, but in a healthy way that embraces and forgives yourself for being who you are. because what kris and noelle might WANT is to stop being themselves, but what they NEED is to learn that they can be themselves *and* also become who they want to be with the support of friends
it's such a core part of growing up, you know? in real life, you can't just become someone else. you are who you are and freedom is being able to define yourself and realize who you are and what you want in life, regardless of what society demands of you (this is especially true if you're queer)
and to bring this back to kriselle, their tragedy for me is in the mundane, that they'll never be enough of what the other wants. a life with each other is living within the box, behind the bars, slotting neatly into who they're supposed to be. the princess to the knight. the girl next door to the weird kid. the king to the queen.
people expect things out of their relationship, just as society does
yet, they know each other's specific darkness the best and there's a morbid camaraderie in validating each other's darkness.
it's being trapped in an expected marriage in a small american town where everyone knows each other and you can't do anything against the status quo even though you're itching under the skin to be free, to be yourself, to be weird.
kriselle, but in that kind of way, you know?
