(no subject)

[feotakahari]

Full disclosure: I lost the plot of Kingdom Hearts when they titled a game 358/2 Days, and never really got it back. I apologize if this was addressed three years ago in a phone game.

My biggest point of curiosity about the Kingdom Hearts setting is how it actually feels to have no Darkness in your heart.

KH is pretty vague about what exactly Darkness is, but in practice, Light vs. Darkness seems to mean embracing people vs. rejecting people. “I’ll fight you to protect my friends” is more Light, whereas “I’ll kill you to avenge my friends” is more Dark. Dark stands for anger and xenophobia, but also personal ambition, and it seems to be linked to fear of being hurt and sorrow at having lost others. Using the Darkness to empower yourself is incredibly risky, but at the same time, single-mindedly rejecting the Dark is ironically a Dark mindset that can make matters worse. Most characters need to recognize their own Darkness, and two of them actually manage to wield it while maintaining enough Light to keep their sanity and emotional balance.

And then you have the Princesses, who were straight-up born without Darkness.

This doesn’t automatically make you gullible, weak, or even forgiving. Princesses can push back against unjust authority, take up arms against evil, and feel some degree of pleasure in defeating someone who’s harmed them. They’re so stable, in fact, that it can be hard to remember “Oh, right, this person literally has no darkness in their heart.”

What does that actually feel like? To know from earliest childhood that some people hate each other, and simply not feel that? When you love easily and naturally, could that actually make it harder to relate to others? You can’t hate them for it, because you literally can’t, but you can’t understand them, either, and you don’t know why you’re so different . . .

I just realized I’m working through autism feels here.

Comments

[entanglingbriars]

This seems kind of similar to the Jewish notion of the yetzer tov and yezter ra. Basically the idea is that the yetzer tov is the inclination to do good and the yetzer ra the inclination to do bad, but there's a strong sense in the rabbinic literature that if humans didn't have the yetzer ra, we'd have no motivation to do anything but pray and study, so the fields would go untended, children would not be born, and humanity would die out.

[wingedcatgirl]

358/2 days has a coherent meaning. A dumb meaning, but a coherent one.

Birth by Sleep, on the other hand, I still don't know what the hell that means.

[zenolalia]

The games don't really have a consistent sense of what it is to be 100% light. We have a single character who is 100% dark, and Vanitas is very specifically defined by being extremely impulsive, extremely emotional, and extremely powerful. Whether this is because of his darkness or not is unclear, but given other characters like Terra are pretty impulsive and emotional, and that appears to tie to their darkness too, it seems likely.

As for the 100% light characters, the natural born ones (the first princesses), the naturally developed over time but notably NOT born wholly light ones (second princesses), and our one artificially created one all have intensely variable characterizations. One would expect placid acceptance or alienation to be the trait of extreme light, but we mostly only see that in nobodies (and other similar entities), and in the case of Aqua in particular, that acceptance and alienation from emotion marks her fall into darkness.

Based on (oh man, sorry about this) lore from the mobile game prequel, it's more likely that light and dark refer to two different kinds of goal.

Light is hope for the return to an earlier, perhaps more innocent, era of unity and peace. Darkness is the rejection of that old way, and the imposition of something new. What the new thing is might vary significantly from person to person.

This intense desire for new experiences is reflected well by Terra, Riku, and Vanitas. Less so by Xehanort, but his motivations at the end of KH3 are (awkwardly) shown to be seeking a return to the light anyway.

The pure lights that we see are also usually seeking a return to some kind of normalcy, whether it is Kairi's desire to be with Sora and Riku again, Ventus's desire to be with Terra and Aqua again, or the many princesses's desires to see their home worlds set back to rights.

This gets dubious with Belle and Ariel, however, as both have intense desires to fundamentally change their worlds. While one can argue that the changes being made would be returning those worlds to earlier status quo (eg, Ariel's desire to integrate herself with the surface would closely resemble the pre-fracture world where Atlantic was not barriered away from other realms), I feel that's a bit of a stretch.

One might be able to summarize light as "yearning" and dark as "taking," I suppose...

Honestly, being purely light is never adequately explored, and it's really tragic.

[feotakahari]

I’m not sure how to slot Master Eraqus into that. When he was going dark, he was stewing in his past failures as a teacher. It didn’t seem like he was going forwards towards anything.

[zenolalia]

No, in fact, he was very specifically going /back,/ to a time before Xehanort introduced the complexities of Ventus and Vanitas into his life. I would almost say that Eraqus never fell to darkness, but instead, showed us the dangers of unnaturally obsessing over lightness in the same way Zehanort showed us the dangers of unnatural obsessing over darkness.

Except, of course, that we are told multiple times and from multiple sources that is not the case.

However, given that light is equated to the "innocence of children's hearts," one could say that he makes an interesting example of how one cannot return to innocence once it has been lost: there is no going back to the past, only going into a future that models that past.

Honestly, though, I just don't think enough evidence was given to make a hard conclusion about Light (or even, in many ways Darkness). We know just enough to explain the motivations of the characters and give the audience as much freedom as we need to get ourselves invested in our own favourite interpretations.

I kind of like that about it.

Even if the lack of consistency over time did get..... grating.

[lb_lee]

I apologize if this was addressed three years ago in a phone game.

Man, I am shocked you even made it to 358/2 without losing your grip on Kingdom Hearts, I remember I was lost by the time of Kingdom Hearts 2. How could you NOT get lost when the games are sprawled over so many platforms and it's impossible to tell what ORDER they even fucking go in?

(Sorry I have nothing of substance to say about the actual content of your post.)

[feotakahari]

Chronologically speaking, 358/2 is actually before 2.

(I know the phone game takes place generations before anything else, then Birth By Sleep is one generation ago, then KH1, then Chain of Memories and 358/2 at the same time, then KH2, then Dream Drop Distance. I’d have to look up where Re:Coded fits in there.)

[lb_lee]

Uuuuuugh of COURSE it is.

...wait, is that why it has the /2 at the end? Is it actually meant to show its place in the line-up?

[feotakahari]

Apparently, the /2 has to do with the 2 . . . Sora-linked entities, I guess you’d say? One of the big points of confusion in Kingdom Hearts lore is when Sora got his soul ripped out of his body while he had multiple souls inside him. Three people went into that, and a total of six came back out. Two of them were connected to Sora’s memories in a way I don’t really understand since I didn’t play the game. They spent 358 days together as friends before one was tragically forced to kill the other, and someone decided that would make a good title for some reason.

I really wanted to play 358/2 Days, because Xion seems fascinating to me. She’s kind of a clone of Sora and Kairi at the same time, a gender-ambiguous entity that looks male or female to different people depending on what they expect to see, but with her own distinct personality and identity. But as far as I can tell, it’s never been rereleased in a playable form, only as a cutscene compilation packaged with other games, and it feels hollow and incomplete without the gameplay.

[lb_lee]

Huh. Man, a lot happened since Kingdom Hearts 1, didn't it?