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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.

Inspired by a post by L.B. Lee

I was in primary school when I developed my dislike of the Hero's Journey. Unlike a lot of folks, I didn't focus in on sexism or racism. It was actually a form of ageism.

You see, there were two rules I internalized regarding mentors:

1): Mentors are people who used to be heroes once. They fought evil and defeated it.

2): Mentors die fighting the villain, who will then be defeated by the current hero.

I got to thinking, this doesn't end, does it? The heroes, I like, they'll become mentors. Then they'll die fighting the next villain, but not before training another hero. And that hero will also become a mentor, and also die fighting a villain . . . None of the heroes will ever get a "happily ever after." They'll never get to settle down, live peacefully, and die in their sleep. Every hero lives under a ticking clock.

Then I got to thinking, is this why so many villains are former heroes who went evil? There's this thing where if evil wins, it will rule the world forever, but it never wins, because there's always a hero who'll rise up to stop it. If stopping evil means sacrificing a mentor, generation after generation after generation, then what happens when evil wins? Does that mean no mentor will ever have to be sacrificed again? Did a hero grow old enough to become a mentor, realize he was supposed to choose another hero and doom them to a mentor's death, and refuse to have that blood on his conscience, even if it meant siding with evil?

Again, this was me in primary school. I've always been Like This.