Still need to mull this over some more, but it's very intriguing how much player-defying Kris proves themselves physically capable of this chapter.
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.
I don't know. I'm definitely missing things, but I just love how much more Kris we have and are eventually going to get.
