Kingdom Hearts and the Interminable Surface

Or, what do we lose when the barrier to subtext is the text?

WE ARE AT ONCE FLUSH WITH KNOWLEDGE and kept deliberately at bay. We commit ourselves to pouring over hours of Lore™, sorting through universal scale detritus, and launching grand speculations in order to get a grasp of the material reality regarding events and character trajectories. And yet, we are no closer to a resolution. We are remarkably forward, but hardly inward.

This is the reality of talking about Kingdom Hearts online.

ALRIGHT, so, we all know the deal with this series, given the title of this article. It’s weird, it’s disorienting, and grasping basic story events can be challenging if you don’t voraciously consume lore from every entry. It’s one of the reasons Doc Burford streamed his reactions to most of the games on Twitch, and it’s the reason I was brought along as a co-pilot and resident Lore Guy. I know way too much about these video games, which is often a prerequisite to buying into its sprawling plot and kudzu-like universe and its underlying metaphysics.

The idea of a narrative designer going into the series completely fresh and watching the games unfold from his perspective was the intended draw for the streams; To witness one of the experts take on the challenge of combing through the absurd, untangling the obtuse, and uncovering the golden nuggets of appeal that die-hard Kingdom Hearts fans cherish lovingly.

I’m sure that our good buddy Doc will write his own findings somewhere on his own page within this site, so I won’t attempt to piggyback on too many of his own thoughts here. But the results of this stream series had me thinking on the things that I saw in Kingdom Hearts that he did not, and vice-versa. There are things later on that I couldn’t articulate then and that I have realized now, ideas and emotions I haven’t much seen expressed because a majority of discussion regarding Kingdom Hearts revolves so heavily on getting a grasp on the literal, linear events that take place in its story.

There’s a reason that lore explain-y videos dominate YouTube in that regard.

I mean, I do appreciate all the effort that goes into these videos, piecing together the entire narrative from several 20+ hour experiences into something digestible (so long as length is not an issue!). But The Algorithm™ hardly deigns worthy any looks into the series from anything other than explainers and speculative theory-crafters.

To avoid laboring the point, let’s take a look at some aspects of Kingdom Hearts that get somewhat lost in the shuffle. Particularly, characters and events that those in the know cherish while outsiders raise a quizzical brow.

I think of no better example than…

XION:

“You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.”
― Ocean Vuong

Xion is a frustration of mine.

From my experience, you either love her to death, or you barely process what her deal is. If you ask me, you kinda had to be there. And by ‘there’, I mean young enough to have the patience to play Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days for the Nintendo DS in the back of your parents’ car between trips to school. And I do mean for the Nintendo DS, because the cut-scene collection is sincerely so much not enough to convey what people found in Xion’s tragedy.

I grew up with this game, and Doc’s first time with 358/2 Days is a collection of cut-scenes he streamed over Discord to some of us. This disparity was clear, the collection is boring! Just as importantly, it wasn’t how the story impressed itself upon us.

See, the story of Days is about a collection of people doing a job they don’t really like all that much. Day after day, you follow Roxas, Xion, and Axel through roughly a year of navigating routine monotony, workplace drama, and the events that lead to their eventual and inevitable separation. You do some repetitive missions with your bros, you go chill at the clock tower and eat some sea salt ice cream, rinse and repeat. Each time, you learn a little more about your friends.

“We talk too much using big words about love for people. Sometimes just a bit of attention would be enough, noticing your neighbor with respect.”
— Anna Kamieńska

The camaraderie is something you slowly buy into because, hey, you — a teenager in high school — are also in a day-in-day-out routine in a place you probably don’t care for all that much, and nothing really hits more than a few people who you chill with at the end of the day.

Maybe you’re questioning what you’re doing in this system, maybe you don’t fully trust its intentions and you’re definitely not sure about the kind of person it wants you to be. Hell, you’re not even sure about the kind of person you want you to be. And yet, this is all you’ve known. This is normal, right? We’re all normal, here?

But even as you hold your friends close to you, there are just things going on internally that manifest in weird ways, and neither of you can articulate them. And then, one day, you all cross a threshold none of you knew was there. Questions of identity become a crisis, and none of you are sure of who you are, especially to each other. The systems that you’re trapped in seem to conspire to agitate things.

And then one day, one of those people you care about says they have to leave. And none of you get a say in it, not really. There’s nothing left but to lash out. Then, it’s like they never existed at all. Over years in life, you forget, but you also never really do. It leaves a permanent rift between those who remain.

And then, Kingdom Hearts II happens.

“Life must go on; I forget just why.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

That’s 358/2 Days, without the metaphysics and proper nouns. A bunch of kids, not sure who they really are. They were torn apart by life, by the systems they were under, and by the things that they could never articulate about themselves.

And you see it, that is, if you buy into the metaphysics of Kingdom Hearts! Which is famously difficult! This is all conveyed through the vague, almost fluid terms relating to the heart, memories, being a nobody, all things that I’ve witnessed taking someone out of the story. Kingdom Hearts often has to spend its time explaining the nebulous, material circumstances of the Heart while having to also tell a story about the people that have them.

World-building is a subject that a lot of people have very conflicting opinions on, but mine is that world-building’s primary purpose is to get the audience to trust the author. The story is dictated by the author, and the way they describe the world is evidence that things work the way the author says they do. When matters of the Heart are explained so fuzzily, when Xion’s very existence feels not very well communicated… well.

It’s hard to feel like these kids had to be torn apart.

The Xion die-hards aren’t… like, wrong, or weird, for seeing and feeling all the things I explained. I didn’t extract this from thin air, I saw this when I was a teenager! I was just sort of absorbing Kingdom Hearts as a whole based purely on vibes, filling in spots left threadbare by wonky storytelling because I believed these cool images and sad words had to be happening for a reason.

I just wish Xion was someone more than the girl Roxas had to say goodbye to, and more than the jumble of world-building knots. Girls have it rough in the Kingdom Hearts series, and their interiority often comes second to the male characters they’re attached to.

But, hey. Kingdom Hearts III should have been a lot of things.

Now, I’ve given an example of a potentially strong story diluted by convoluted world-building. But I have to talk about when it just wastes space in a story, because Kingdom Hearts III’s story structure buckles under a lot of dead narrative weight.

Which brings me to…

VENTUS:

“I wonder what of me there is in you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar

Ventus — or as some know him, “That’s not Roxas?” — is one of the protagonists of Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. He’s also one of several people squatting in Sora’s heart, waiting dormant for years while everyone waits for the characters to find out what they knew already.

His whole deal, however, is corrupted from the DNA by needless twistmongering. You see, he has to look like Roxas because that has to explain why Sora’s nobody looked so different. Oh, well, you see, Sora gets to have two keyblades because Ventus’s heart was letting him do that. Ah, well, Vanitas looks like Sora because that’s the boy his heart had the bond with when Ventus’s heart was shattered.

But aside from being a mildly rambunctious and impulsive kid brother figure… there’s not much to him. So many metaphysics converge upon this guy that the story seldom has room for much else. I mean, you have to talk about him as the guy who can forge the X-Blade, how his darkness was sundered from him, and the connection with Sora before you can leave Birth by Sleep.

(I wanted to connect Aqua and her strengths to this, but I have no way to make it fit here naturally, so check out THE AQUA ASIDE to see me bloviate on her.)

AND THEN WE REACH THE END OF KINGDOM HEARTS III.

“Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do”
― Thomas Pynchon

I mean, how do you even process this part of the Kingdom Hearts 3 epilogue sequence only playing the games that are available on the consoles? I had to google this! What do you MEAN Ventus was a character in the mobile game, an entry that I had understood to be set in the ancient past? “Was there some sort of vital character development going on there?” I thought, wondering why this supposed adventure still left him nothing to chew on within 3’s story. He’s still just the same guy from Birth by Sleep, because I noticed nothing missing until this moment.

Needless to say, it took me out of the emotions I was supposed to be feeling during the ending of III! If your emotional catharsis sequence makes me stop what I’m doing to google something, that’s a point of failure in your story! Why! Is this! Like this!

For the record, I did eventually absorb all that lore. Ventus does not gain much depth, seeing as he writes it all off as a weird dream and just acts like the same guy as before.

He just has the same set of wants as most of the other characters. He just wants to be with his friends, and everything else is him reacting to outside events. You know, when he gets to react at all.

Because he just sleeps in Sora’s heart for most of the series. He’s not even deigned influence within that realm, as Kingdom Hearts III established that each person inside Sora just occupies their cleanly divided box until it comes time for the plot to pluck them out.

I think it was that revelation which solidified that Ventus and Xion were total plot cul-de-sacs. The plot would be no more affected by a change that stated that they were just on a bus until Sora could drive them home.

Now, criticism that involves the critic saying, “now here’s how I would have written it” is… uh, more of a creative exercise for the critic rather than it being a salient expression of the work’s failings… but…

Wouldn’t it be better if Sora had to grapple with how their hearts bleed into his? In a series that often concerns itself with identity, which asks us to consider the connections that people make with each other, would it not be a worthwhile study into Sora’s character? If he had to try and sort out which parts of him were himself, or Ventus, or Xion? Would he try to exorcise himself of that, or would he accept that the connections he forges with others often reshapes parts of himself? From Re:Coded onward, the series tries to ask if Sora can handle bearing the pain of all these lost people.

But do we see Sora bear the burden of their trauma? Would knowing that their suffering had come to pass, taking it into his heart, might cause him to question facts about the world that he held as sacrosanct?

Otherwise, he just comes off as a little too aspirational, too flat of a shonen hero to really believe that his conviction was earned. There’s a token attempt at giving Sora’s character some texture within the confines of the tornado scene, but the idea that Sora might have had self-worth issues and used his belief in his friends as a crutch is something not at all built up to.

But, I get it. He’s Goku. He’s the litmus test to which all other characters compare his growth to. At most times, Sora wears a gigantic sign in the narrative that says “Be like this guy”.

I just think it could be more interesting than that. And it almost is, accidentally, veering into near-misses that threaten to become fun ripples in what we would normally assume would happen in the series.

In fact, there’s a couple things surrounding one particular faction that seem almost accidentally cool. Who else, but the enigmatic…

ORGANIZATION XIII:

“Time is what we’re doing, I’m falling into the flesh, into the sadness of the body that cannot give up its habits, habits of the hands and skin.”
― Margaret Atwood

I think the trouble all began with Nobodies.

They’re a fine concept. I think it’s a natural step to consider what happens to the bodies of those who become Heartless. The problem lies solely in the convolutions woven into them by their initial portrayal in Kingdom Hearts II. In the interest of keeping away from the easier comparison of, “Well if Heartless are the ghosts, Nobodies are the zombies” It is instead decided to inform the player that Nobodies are beings who technically don’t exist, who shouldn’t exist, and that their presence will fold wrinkles into any situation they’re a part of.

You see, Yen Sid explains that they do not possess a heart, and thus feel no emotions. Thus, any displays of such are to be considered a form of subterfuge. They are not people, the autonomy they possess stemming from the roots of memory left behind with their bodies. This is reinforced by almost every member of Organization XIII you come across. Also, Namine is a super extra special type of Nobody who doesn’t come from a Heartless, and has weird powers, and… and…

There isn’t much there. It’s all wrapping paper, no present. Not even particularly easy to open, either. That, and the inter-platform prequelitis that started with Chain of Memories, is the exact point where Kingdom Hearts starts seeming incomprehensible by outside viewers. All that just to give the Nobodies a vague motivation to be complete. Not much beyond the surface, however much surface there might be.

We skip all the way to Dream Drop Distance.

“Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves?”
― Ocean Vuong,

Xemnas and Xigbar confront Sora in the deepest pits of the dream to inform him that he’s been duped. They relentlessly exposit their plans, one of which is a particular revelation that re-frames everything we know about Organization XIII and the Nobodies:

They do have hearts. Or, at least, they eventually grow them again. But everything we knew was part of a ruse Xehanort set upon the Organization. You see, in order for Nobodies to be suitable vessels to become one of a billion Xehanorts, the heart as to take with the vessel. Pesky things like individuality, emotions, and everything that gives someone some sense of interiority get in the way. In order to become a Xehanort, you can’t have things in your life that might come to contradict him.

THAT’S ALMOST REALLY INTERESTING. That ploy is the exact sort of manipulation and clever use of metaphysics that Kingdom Hearts should have been doing the whole time. On its own, it’s a really clever re-imagining of emotional abuse. There’s a real story in there about a group of victims being manipulated into being your enemies.

It’s just not the story Kingdom Hearts was leading up to, and it’s not one that it plans to elaborate on. If it was, the Yen Sid exposition about it wouldn’t exist. If it was, Kingdom Hearts III would be about saving everyone. That’s what’s frustrating about this series! It’s always feeling like it’s one or two drafts away from being incredible storytelling!

Aaaaaa!!!!!! Aaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!

The most frustrating part is that it’s hard to see these sorts of things articulated! Once again, when one needs a three hour explainer just to absorb the literal events as what they are, how likely is it that you end up here? Like, I got here because I’m weird and think too much about these sorts of things.

I don’t know. Kingdom Hearts is a one-of-a-kind story in which it has the chance to use universally recognized iconography, given the freedom to mix and remix childhood classics and infuse them with the anime, sometimes teenage-edgy cool of Final Fantasy. When the concept is realized in such a way where the Disney stuff is relegated to safe re-tellings for bland vertical integration, and the anime side isn’t well thought-out… it just feels like that once-in-a-lifetime chance was a little misused.

But what is it wasn’t necessarily the only shot we had…

What if there was another story where Hearts were also just actually Souls, where the universe and its underlying groundwork is subject to Machiavellian conspiracies by a learned scholar who conspires to transcend the bounds of knowledge and create something perfect. Where along the way, he fashions himself a numerically themed squad of personalities to usher in universe-spanning scheme, hurting young people along the way. One of which is someone whose soul houses another, and who desperately wants to see his friends free from the scheming scholar’s control. Along the way, they meet with the denizens of other familiar worlds and happen upon friends and foes.

Also, you need to know a LOT of fucking lore.

But what if the story supported all of this? What if they knew what they were doing with it?

THAT’S RIGHT, THE TWIST:

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
― Ocean Vuong

WHAT IF I FUCKING TOLD YOU SOMEONE DID THIS SHIT WITH UNDERTALE ALTERNATE UNIVERSES FROM ACROSS THE WEB AND KNOCKED IT OUT OF THE PARK?

Look, please don’t click away, I’m dead serious. Underverse (part of the XTale universe) is a series of web animations on YouTube by Jael Peñaloza.

And it fucking owns.

You know, once you play Undertale and read up on some of the AU’s and definitely watch some of the XTale stuff. You’re going to want to know what a Core!Frisk is, a word combination that I heretofore had never heard in that order. But, unlike Vanitas for instance, X-Event!Chara inside X!Sans (or Cross) has legitimate stakes set by their own story and you like, have a clear reason to one day want to see their development.

The guy-inside-your-soul beat holds more weight in Underverse than in anything regarding Roxas and Ventus’s stay inside Sora’s heart across several games, and it’s not even close. Sora’s entire thought process regarding them is just a vague sentiment that they deserve to be in their own bodies, which… cool, I guess! Me too!

Like Kingdom Hearts, XTale and Underverse are very, very concerned with identity. In a world where entire existences are an iteration of one known source, the concept of a “Sans” becomes a baseline to which to compare perspective and circumstance. Every reflection of any given “Toriel” is therefore an examination of every moment leading to her. The story attaches stakes and meaning to the questions that inspire AU’s in the first place. It becomes a story about storytelling, but not written by someone who thinks that “meta” as a playground to demonstrate one’s cleverness.

Which, to compare it to Kingdom Hearts, is a bit more meat to chew on than what the Disney worlds bring.

I’m being vague about plot stuff because, frankly, I want you to watch it yourself. It’s a blast, if you liked Undertale. It’s still ongoing, with now up to 20 to 30 minute episodes released at a time, for free! The art and animation is good, especially as it goes on!

“Look at it!”
― Patrick Star

Was this whole article a ploy to pill those within my meager circle of influence on Underverse?

I mean, probably not. But it’s a good companion watch.

In any case, it is my hope with this particular piece that, if you felt like how I did and didn’t know how to articulate it… well, found a way to articulate it! Or those who didn’t really “get” the series might have a better idea of why. Given that Kingdom Hearts has shown no indication of stopping the practice of convoluting their metaphysics and universe for the sake of twistmongering… well. There’s a whole new category of world now, Fictional, which apparently none of the other worlds were. They’ve shown no sign that there’s an idea they’re picking at with that one… so, uh.

We’ll see if this break away from the Xehanort Saga gives it the time and space it needs to make those twists mean something. But so long as things stay the way they are, the ideas Kingdom Hearts puts forth will remain as they always have been: Almost really interesting.