The Aqua Aside
This piece is an aside made as a companion piece to Kingdom Hearts and the Interminable Surface.
Trapped within the wake of a story that often gets in the way of itself, I’ve come across the realization that some characters are far more shackled to metaphysics and the needs of twistmongering than others. I’ve discussed Xion’s varied amalgamate parts, voiced my displeasure with Ventus’s sole role as a MacGuffin, and left Terra’s entire deal alone because there’s not really much going on with him either. That guy in particular held the idiot ball for a whole game, and then gave Xehanort some backstory. Two thirds of Birth by Sleep exist only to serve prior and later games.
But as I alluded to in the piece itself, I have thoughts on Aqua. Partially, I have Doc Burford to thank for how I started to articulate those feelings throughout his play-through of the Kingdom Hearts series on Twitch. You see, his stated goal with the marathon of game after game is to take his trained Game Designer-ly eyes and ears and see for himself the love people have for this series.
While those thoughts are probably best labored by him, I will use some of his experiences as a springboard for some of my own points. One of which being: Many characters, for which, many fans’ hearts bleed, passed right through Doc as their arcs played out in scattered fashion before him. Roxas, Namine, Xion, Ventus, Terra, and Riku left little impression on him, and that partially laid the groundwork for The Interminable Surface.
One character who he responded to suddenly and with great aplomb was, within common Kingdom Hearts fan reception, was a relative dark horse.
—Donika Kelly
If I am to take this as a strong indication of the outsider perspective on Kingdom Hearts, one in which the experience of playing the games is absent the years of anticipation and the subsequent formation of one’s tastes: Aqua is one of the characters with some of the least buy-in needed to understand her journey and her perspective. Very little of what she does is inherently tied down to some aspect of metaphysics or backstory that needs to be established.
Aqua, in Birth by Sleep, is essentially an older sister to two brothers, and everything in her journey is about looking after them. The reason it’s not so simple is because she was just allowed to graduate from Keyblade school by Dad, who isn’t exactly doing one of her brothers their due diligence. Derided for being The Favorite, her genuine endeavors are met with lashing out. Hurt, she still resolves to see her brothers safely home. Things spiral out of her control, but she soldiers on like the adult she’s shown herself to be and cushions tragedy with sacrifice.
The one time she’s used to create a twist, to involve her in the tapestry of the world, it’s genuinely cool! She is the one who created Castle Oblivion, and it’s no wonder that the castle just Does That to people. It’s meant to keep people out of the core, where her younger brother sleeps until she can come back. Then, to save her older brother, she casts herself into eternal darkness, where she has to devote years of her life fighting the Heartless in the hopes she can come back and set things right.
Frankly, if Birth by Sleep wasn’t a handheld game and got a full console budget with one campaign, I’d want Aqua to be the sole protagonist. She’s a really nice balance of cool and human that I wish she could absorb the other two play-throughs and build on the story she was given.
Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep: A fragmentary passage was the game that I saw Doc have the most consistently favorable opinion of. As well as being a tightly constructed 2 hour tech demo, it’s a decent portrait of Aqua and her endeavor to stave off despair. It’s a bold decision to have a game’s premise be about a lone woman contending with child friendly hell. She’s driven because she has to be, the shade of Doom Guy shimmering where she stands if you squint enough.
Kingdom Hearts 3 does not make good on this.
She is at the same state we leave her off at in the end of 0.2, where Mickey and Riku are just a hair’s breadth too late to save her after ten years. She tries to fist fight Xehanort’s Heartless and his Stand and then gets thrown in the ocean, where she just… Gets Norted.
The words of scorn that come at the Anti-Aqua boss fight just don’t have the build-up that makes her turn seem natural. The moment seems designed for the trailers and the trailers alone. Sora heals her despair with the incredible power of violence, and then that’s that. Her arc is over! She fights Vanitas, blocks a fireball with her body, then gets knocked around by Terra-Xehanort. She’s reunited with her friends thanks to Sora, and then she’s just a background extra. Another one of the many Lights that need to battle the many Darknesses.
A lot of characters in Kingdom Hearts III have their interiority diminished, and Aqua is no exception. Too much tried to be done in not a lot of time. I wish things didn’t have to be so back-loaded. Too many characters were just… waiting, sitting on that bus until the Disney worlds deigned to run out of movies to regurgitate.
Too much not done, a lot of potential left to waste, ideas put on the edge of the table and left to teeter on the edge and then fall. There is not so much as a ‘thump’ to be heard. Or, in other words:
It’s a shame! I still love this series, but I feel like it’s my due diligence to speak frankly about the things that keep these stories from being as good as they could be.
Imagine if Aqua was afforded the respect and time her premise deserves, given something to do other than be one of the dozen other people waiting on that bus.
WHAT IF?
— Michael Ondaatje
Before I go off the deep end, a disclaimer: How-I-Woulda-Done-It in things like this is not exactly meaty rhetoric for criticism. Considering how lax this has all been in contrast to my Paradise Killer piece, we are squarely within the Recusant Whims Zone. This is a fun creative exercise for me and it’s also my proposal for just how one facet of Kingdom Hearts could have maybe resonated with people if each character was given their due.
So, what if Aqua was Doom Guy?
This involves revising the aforementioned 0.2, an experience that I previous hailed as “the most consistently good” with regard to later Kingdom Hearts nonsense. But considering that whole deal mostly functioned as a tech demo that explained why Michael Mouse was shirtless in the climax of Kingdom Hearts, I feel like I don’t have to change an insane amount to contrive the changes I want to enact to the broader story.
My first act as revisionist is to do away with the time compression in the world of darkness. Aqua bears the full weight of ten years trapped within kid friendly hell. During scenes in which she is taunted by darkness and is tempted to give in, she’s hardened to pierce straight through them coldly. After so long of the Darkness dangling the image of hope before her, she is unfazed by the hollow images. She cuts through images of her friends, cruelly reminded of her failure, unsure if this is as much falling into the Darkness’s trap as taking it at face value is.
The truth is, despair doesn’t work like that. Darkness doesn’t have a strategy, it just hurts.
Skip to Terranort. She knows it’s real this time, along with Ventus. She hesitates, it seems like it’s over, but something leaves Terra. In a flash, Master Eraqus’s Keyblade armor envelops Aqua, and she wears the conviction of her wayward master as a second skin. The Darkness cannot reach her, but neither can anything else.
Aqua’s resolve to protect her friends burns stronger than ever. The conviction that flows through her courses like fire in her veins. Saving Terra and Ven are the things that keep her going through hell. With her body and mind clad in steel, it seems like the Darkness has no way in.
Folly to think it’s that easy.
Darkness isn’t just a purple gunk that makes you feel bad things, it isn’t just a metaphysical entity that’s Out To Get You.
Solitude does shit to a person. The Bad Shit of the realm is sealed off by her borrowed armor, but that’s hardly the only source of Darkness in the world. With no one else but herself for company, her thoughts chain into a closed loop, a toxic cycle. It’s not that she has to save her friends, she’s the only one who can save her friends. She’s the only one who knows Darkness the way she does, that’s why it can only be her job. That’s what propels her through hell all by herself. There would be no point in clawing her way out if someone else could just magically solve this problem for her, right?
Right…?
How deep can a rut run in a person? How far until the tracks well with blood, gushing until it dries. Could you say that you would gaze in your reflection, caked in hardened black runoff, and recognize your own face?
I didn’t, not when I was alone like that.
That’s why she’s focused on leaving, above all else ,when Mickey shows up. Kingdom Key be damned, Ventus and Terra need her. It’s thrown into question, briefly, that she’d cooperate enough to ensure the ending of Kingdom Hearts comes to pass. But when we get to the end, she sees Riku trying to deal with the Demon Tower, and Mickey’s telling him to run away and that they can’t handle it.
That’s when Riku says that he can’t just abandon his friends, that he’d do anything to see that Sora and Kairi are safe. If he has to seal himself in the realm of darkness to do so, he’ll pay that price. It’s then that Aqua recognizes Riku as the boy that Terra trusted with the Keyblade bequeathing, and she shakes herself from her fervor, knowing that the impact of her friend’s actions has a ripple effect across the world. If she can trust Terra, to value his presence in the world such that she’d go to any lengths to bring him back, then she has to trust the legacy he leaves behind as well.
And that means making sure Riku can close the door.
The demon tower boss fight happens, then she plunges back into the Darkness while Riku and Mickey go do pre-KH2 nonsense.
With 0.2 done, we’ve established Aqua as a vigilant Doom Guy figure, culling the Darkness until one day she might find her way to her friends.
As a bonus little flourish, she’s a secret superboss of Dream Drop Distance, The Weakest Game. When Sora is pitched into the deepest depths of sleep, submersed in dark nightmare, you get the option to do a sequence in which the edges of Darkness and Sleep may touch. Sora washes up at the Death Stranding beach in the realm of darkness, and finds himself staring down a person in a suit of armor. She asks who he is. and why his form is starting to burgeon with Darkness. When he answers, she tells him that she’s heard of him, that she was told that he was everyone’s hope.
Seeing him become weaker, watching him slowly lose conviction, she raises the Master Keeper in his direction, and challenges him. If this Sora would be everyone’s hope, he would have to prove more capable than she, who feels she has much more at stake than he does. He must prove that she is not needed. The objective bar flashes, telling you to “Hold off the Twilight Zealot’a assault!”.
The secret boss fight ensues, and at one HP, there’s a QTE or something as Aqua brings all to bear in a single magical attack. Sora tries to hold it off, while Aqua insists that he does not yet know how to bear the weight and pain of those who are lost. His beliefs, however inviolate, are not tempered against suffering.
Sora, realizing his limited perspective on the world is not enough to refute her, loses this contest. He’s blown back, felled, and left to doubt himself. Darkness creeps along the edges of his form. Even so, Aqua offers some condolence, that this lapse does not make his beliefs any less invincible, that she seeks to restore people who had fallen to much lower depths. She tells him she will bear his burden too.
Sora like, cries, and as the tides of the beach rise to claim him in this vulnerable moment, a light flashes. He becomes surrounded by a familiar suit of armor as he’s drawn into the depths of the sea. Aqua is stunned, and she tries to pull him back, but the force is too much. He sinks, and Aqua is left to ask herself what the fuck just happened.
Ultimately, she’s resolved. If Ventus, wherever he is, trusts this boy as Terra trusted Riku, that she can find a way to help put the pieces back together, and that they’re inextricably tied with these kids from the Destiny Islands. All that needs must be done is to endure the endless expanse of the Darkness until she claws her way out.
In III, she finds Some Way to bust out of the Darkness, idk. The important thing is that she finds her way to Castle Oblivion and finds she still doesn’t have the means to restore what missing inside Ventus. It becomes her mission to seek it out. She sets out to traverse the worlds until she finds the answer.
The problem? She was being watched, and now Vanitas has found the means to slip into the cracks she knows how to navigate and finds himself at the seat of Ventus’s sleeping body. He reaches inside, and takes control. He remarks that without Ven’s heart, he can’t reforge the X-Blade, but it’s more than enough to overwhelm the one who keeps it from him.
We zoom forward. Aqua travels from world to world looking for Ventus’s heart. She runs into Sora at Tangled World and reasserts the question of whether Sora is really equipped for their trauma. She questions if he has the fortitude, because she notices that he uses people like a crutch. Why reflect, why become the person that you need tobe when you can just ask someone else to do it for you? He acts confused and Aqua leaves, warning Sora that Xehanort intends to do to Xehanort what he did to her.
She’s not comfortable with how easily he can ask for help, not when she’s been deprived of it for so long.
Frozen World is the biggest change I make. Frozen gets the regurgitation treatment in this game and it’s boring. In this section, while Sora and Anna’s clique look for Elsa…
Aqua wanders the frozen wastes, only to find Elsa being pursued by Larxene while Sora’s in the filler tower sequence. When things come to a fever pitch… the camera swings in behind her, and you start playing Aqua with Elsa as your party member. There’s like, cool ice combination attacks. Aqua gains insight into Organization XIII’s plans while protecting a princess of Light. More importantly, as they journey, Elsa and Aqua bond and stuff. Aqua explains she’s looking for someone important, and that she’s seen no one else who has what it takes to save them, and that she must do this on her own. Elsa explains the plight with her powers, explaining that this is her fault and that she’s becoming a monster that not even her sister can help.
You can guess where this is going. As things go on, Elsa and Aqua spin their rhetorical wheels until they stumble into asking each other if this is really the only way. By the end of the world, where Aqua, Sora, and the gang bonk Hans’s heartless on the head, Elsa feels a lot better about trusting people. Aqua barely acknowledges Sora, and tells Elsa that she’s given her a lot to think about.
Monster’s Inc is where we skip to next and it’s mostly unchanged. When Vanitas pops up to toy with Sora, he also shifts into Ventus’s body. Ventus’s fear seizes Sora’s heart, his trauma leaking into Sora and paralyzing him while Goofy and Donald barely hold him back. Aqua swoops in, some fight stuff happens, and then Mike and Sully ambush Vanitas and Aqua follows through that same door, presumably to fight some more.
Sora ends up questioning himself then, desperately trying to reach inside of himself and find these people trapped in his own being. He desperately wants to tell Ventus that it’s okay, that he might not know all that’s happened to him, but that he’s gotten them this far, hasn’t he? It’s got to be worth something, that Ventus and Roxas have Sora, and by proxy every person that has Sora’s back. Everything’s going to be okay simply not because Sora says so, but because knows he can rely upon a community and that they can rely on him back.
Then, when all the worlds are completed, Sora feels something terrible in his heart coming from Ventus, and he uses that feeling to find his way into the dark world.
But first, Aqua and Vanitas had been duking it out, and when Aqua starts to get the upper hand… Vanitas switches to Ventus. He starts to convincingly act out Ventus and psyche her out. Unable to raise her Keylbade against one of the people she’s been doing everything for, she hesitates and starts to get taunted. Even after doing everything to become stronger, to weather all that the Darkness had to bear upon her, she didn’t have what it took. He takes her helmet off, and her face is revealed. Her blue hair is now nearly white, eyes flecked with gold. Darkness leaves her helmet, and exclaims that she’d been sealed off from it.
Vanitas explains that Darkness can be black as pitch given the right conviction, a phenomenon that the Light has no monopoly on.
Accepting that she’d failed, Aqua becomes Anti-Aqua instead of lamely getting yeeted into some goop.
Sora comes in. Vanitas delights at the thought of infighting, and Sora goes to intervene. But as the fight starts, and the Kingdom Hearts pre-fight camera sweeps happen, Sora clutches his chest, a bit of light spilling from his form as Ventus’s voice pounds in Sora’s mind: “Don’t!”
Sora is unable to attack. Instead, that Light activates a Formchange that lasts the duration of the fight, Desperate Aegis. When Sora tries to attack, he flinches. But blocking and casting defensive magics are greatly enhanced, with generous timing windows. Sora’s objective is to survive until he can convince Aqua to stand down.
What breaks through to Aqua, eventually, is that Sora tells her that he wants to to right by Ventus, by Terra, and by her. That he’s come across so many people in pain and that he can’t stand idly by and do nothing. He’s held Ventus safe for most of his life, and now he wants to know this person now that he’s felt his pain.
Then, Ventus breaks through, telling Aqua that he’s sorry that he ran off. He’s sorry for not trusting Aqua at Radiant Garden. He wants to make things right so badly, and that he trusts Sora to help him do it. A small bit of Ventus’s light shines into Aqua, giving back some of the blue that was in her hair, and the fight ends with Vanitas crashing in.
He tells them that he’ll meet them at Ventus’s true resting place, and that he’s not afraid to dispose of Ventus’s body for good if they don’t come to challenge him with Ventus’s heart. Sora and the Jailer of Castle Oblivion only. He vanishes, and the gang gets a breather to welcome Aqua to the team in earnest.
After some making up and resolves, Sora and Aqua make their way to Castle Oblivion, where she transforms it back into The Land of Departure and all that. They make their way inside, and find Ventus’s body sitting on his chair like a throne, leg crossed over his lap and leaning on an arm. Vanitas taunts Aqua by asking if he thought this was how they’d meet again. She dispenses with formalities and leaps in to fight.
At this point, you do the re:Mind thing and choose between Sora or Aqua, and you pick Aqua because you have taste. You do the first fight, beat it ,and then Vanitas sweeps Aqua aside to plunge into Sora’s heart with his keyblade. While Darkness starts to swallow the room up, Aqua leaps to jump into the growing Darkness and into Sora’s heart.
We cut to a similar set of shots as Ventus waking up inside his own Station of Awakening, except with Sora and Vanitas opposite another. Vanitas explains that Sora needs to be subdued before he can access the locked boxes inside Sora that contain his prize. They fight some more, except Vanitas has a huge advantage and the objective is to survive. After a while, Vanitas sweeps sora aside and unlocks the first box, which contains Ventus’s heart. It’s at this point Aqua meteor dives in and transfers her armor to the exposed heart, protecting it for the moment.
Then you fight as Aqua, your objective still to survive. After a while, it seems as if Sora and Aqua aren’t enough to stand up to Vanitas’s pressure, and Sora’s heart starts to grow dark, and Sora tries to steel himself against doubt. When Vanitas comes to finally strike Sora down, Ventus crashes into Vanitas with Aqua’s armor, and takes Sora’s keyblade. He unlocks the other box, and in a beam of light crashes down a figure wrapped in the Organization XIII coat, armed with Oblivion and Oathkeeper. The Station becomes aglow with the light of everyone’s resolve.
At this juncture, you play as Ventus in the armor, berating Vanitas for forgetting all the people that Sora’s kept safe, for bearing Ventus and Roxas’s burdens without a second thought. Roxas fires off that the validation of those experiences, to accepted with nothing denied could make even a Nobody like him real.
Vanitas launches one, big, desperate attack to try and stave off the tide of light. Everyone launches like, a beam of light from their keyblade or something. With Sora, figments of Donald, goofy, Riku, and Kairi stand with him. With Roxas, it’s Axel and Xion. With Ventus and Aqua, it’s Terra.
But to attentive viewers, they might see that Ventus has some shadowed figures that represent his fellow leaders from Union Cross lending him his aid from his time in the Unchained realm.
With that, Vanitas is driven off and Ventus’s heart follow, whileAqua flies off after him. Roxas faces Sora, and before Sora can gush, Roxas stops him. He acknowledges that Sora’s doing everything he can to do right by Roxas, and that he trusts him.
“Don’t you say anything final, Sora. Save it. I’ll see you on the other side.”
Sora nods, and leaves. Cut to Vanitas being gone, and Ventus waking Sora up. They share a little funny quip about how he always imagined that their positions would be reversed. Aqua thanks Sora, and tells him that years of solitude has led her to lose sight of what friends were for. She vows to stand as strong as she did in the Darkness, and to let others do so with her at her side.
AND THAT’S WHERE I’M CUTTING IT OFF.
CONCLUSION…
—Ocean Vuong
Man, Kingdom Hearts III was kind of a structural nightmare, wasn’t it?
Sora goes to Disney World for 25 hours and then spend the last 5 actually engaging with all the plot threads he alone is supposed to wrap up. Imagine if the whole game were Disney worlds where the anime characters could bounce off the Disney ones, twine together and create cool parallels that inform the greater story.
Oh, you know, like the original Kingdom Hearts.
Also, yes, this was a pretty radical (edgy) interpretation of Aqua’s character post-Birth by Sleep, but I feel like a lot of characters could have been pushed to be more dynamic and express a bit more interiority (also an actual bridge to Anti-Aqua was sorta needed, huh?). By doing this and putting a bit more elbow-grease on the follow-through for previous plot setups, I really felt like Kingdom Hearts III could have been a much more dense game that had people getting as emotional as another recent Square release that had people weepy: Final Fantasy XIV.
But XIV’s best writing is characterized by its empathy and curiosity, and that’s one thing I feel like Kingdom Hearts doesn’t quite have for its side-characters. Bloviating all that I have during this, and not once did I find a way to address the thread between Aqua and Kairi, because the latter was stuck on a completely different bus. I was already straining to keep some semblance of III’s structure during this, and it really feels like a lot of characters were seen as too inconvenient to keep in the plot until it was time to hastily scramble them together.
Oh, also, before you ask: “What about [plot hole created by this]?” In my world, the circumstances would be different! I’d pave over it! What are Riku and Mickey doing instead of searching for Aqua, you ask??
GOD FORBID, SOMETHING INTERESTING.
I can only hope that , in the future, Kingdom Hearts can spare the time to give each of these beloved characters the due they deserve. But with the future of the story as in-definitive as ever, with the lore being even more mystery-box-y than before, we tread into the uneasy future of twists waiting to happen.
The Versus XIII stuff seems wacky, that’ll be funny I guess.
Until then, we’ll see what the future holds.
