1: Suselle. Holy cungadero what a forced ship.
A ship so badly written it gave me schizophrenia and made me think Susie is Streibough-ing Kris.
Or if you want to be more generous to the bitch that can summon up the "Your Best Nightmare" leitmotif at will, the prophecy is forcing this shit to happen, even if it clearly doesn't work.
I refuse to believe Toby would write all the Suselle shit to just not fucking work at all and then also write shit like Noelle and Kris having 100% compatibility and shit.
Giving Toby the benefit of the doubt, I'd say that the lake scene was meant to be just a little bit unsettling. Like, it doesn't really matter how you look at things, Noelle and Susie's date at the festival went
terribly. Susie bullied one of Noelle's friends, she fucked up the strength tester, and fuck, we don't even know how their ferris wheel date went because Kris refused to think about it. (Though trying to think about other things makes Kris recall the time him and Noelle were closer)
The reason it feels so bad is because somewhere, it
has to be that bad. Like, sure, Toby can't write romance when it's yuri for shit, but there wouldn't be any reason for him to have gone out of his way to make it so painfully clear how ill fitting Noelle and Susie are together, while also going out of his way to show off how well both Kris and Susie or Kris and Noelle work together.
It's one of the reasons I'm all in on "Fucked up Prophecy" theory. Because if the festival ended at the lake with Kris and Susie having a moment, or even Kris and Noelle, things would've made more sense to have taken place at
that point in the story. The climactic confession of love between the two heroes just before the story ramps up too much for any more quiet moments to feasibly happen. (Though the fact that they fought a TITAN and nobody gives a fuck is still weird.) Instead, Kris was basically just laying there half dead as his world started shattering to pieces around him, and then the hopeless little simp let his heart be torn to shreds again at the end of the chapter, too.