>>4435016
>saying it's meant to be purely romantic interest is a bit disingenuous
For what it's worth, I would much prefer Kris caring deeply for Susie platonically rather than being into her romantically. But there do seem to be a lot of ship bait moments between them in the new chapters that can be easily seen as romantic.
I think the strongest single point for Kris having specifically romantic feelings for Susie is the scene in chapter 4 where they hold out their knife for her and blush when she puts her hand on it. Besides the obvious Freudian symbolism, I really can't think of any non-romantic reason that Kris would be embarrassed by this action (The sprites for this scene also specifically have "kris blush" in their names, as opposed to the scene where Kris blushes when overhearing Noelle and Susie talk about them where the sprites are called "kris cringe")
I agree about the chapter 3 scene on Kris's part, but the way Susie lowers her head to let Kris taste her shampoo and blushes is definitely supposed to be ship bait-y.
>and that just turns around to being /u/-related again with girl-kris, but hey
My problem with Kris x Susie from a "might become canon" perspective is that it's been the flagship for the hetero side of the fandom, specifically against the possibility of Susie ending up in a lesbian relationship with Noelle, since 2018.
I know Kris is not canonically male and not all the shippers see Kris as male, that the ship is not canonically hetero and can be viewed as yuri and all this (mostly) isn't the game's fault.
But... it's still an ambiguous ship at best, shipped popularly as het, being set directly against an unambiguously lesbian ship involving two girls.
I can't help but think it would end up like what happened with Bayonetta 3, where some people tried to claim it was positive bisexual rep while all the lesbophobes were doing victory laps in the streets.
