#2200 words long jfc

[starlitfaery]

ooc

The following post will contain KH3 spoilers, marked and sectioned off, that you may need to fully understand this theory on the Fae in Kingdom Hearts and where their fabled world, often called in our world, the Otherworld, is located, and how I was friggin right about how Maleficent truly sees Riku as one of her own.

no images will be used as Mun is too lazy to find appropriate sceenshots of every scene I will refer to.

ANYWHO!! Let’s get this show started, feel free to reblog this post, just remember to tag appropriately since some people still don’t know the game

First some background and history on the fae, just a bit.

Fae = Faerie = Fairy = Fayrie = The Good Folk = Little Helpers = People Under The Hill = basically any sort of nickname you can think of besides fairy or an alternate spelling of fairy, because if they heard you dissing them by daring to say they weren’t good and kind and just and shit, then they often chose to make you their next pranking target for a while. I tend to just use the word Fae to generalize and make things easier

The fae are said in some cultures to live under the hill, their world, because it is a whole other world in mythos, is hidden from human sight. Often, it has even been said that to travel to the Otherworld, is to see death.

Because animals can see the fae easily, animals also see ghosts

(In fact, many traits attributed to fae, are also attributed to ghosts, or vice versa, but that’s only partially important to this post)

It’s said that in the world of the fae, there is no such thing of time. Years can pass in the human world, or mere minutes, and the fae would barely even notice if at all. The funny thing is

Aqua says that about the Dark World too.

In her game, Fragmentary Passage, she makes a note of how she has no friggin idea what’s going on out there in the Realm of Light, how she can’t understand how long she’s been trapped, but she knows time has passed, she can’t tell though.

She cannot tell how long she’s been there. Because “there is no time in the realm of darkness.” 

We can assume from that, that she didn’t get hungry, she didn’t get exhausted. In fact she started the game as lvl 50, so it’s not like she started over just cause she basically died.

That’s another thing, there are 5 thousand million and one references to dying being equated to being lost to the darkness

Which brings us to the thought that the Realm of Darkness is where the dead go

The Sleeping Worlds are often said to be nestled in the Darkness

in her game, Aqua takes solace in the  fact that while she wandered Cinderella’s world, she never saw a person there trapped alongside her, so she assumed they were all safe and alive even though their world wasn’t

she didn’t take a moment to wonder if the heartless she was killing were the very villagers she was glad weren’t trapped with her, she should have, but she didn’t

so here’s the rub, whenever a person in our universe was said to be stolen by the fae, they were believed dead for as long as they were missing, sometimes they would return and they would either be the same age they were when they disappeared or older than they should be

time does not exist to the fae, not in such a way that we mere humans understand according to all the myths and fables and legends

so, all that said, let’s leave Aqua for a moment in the Darkness which is basically close af to Death and to the Fae, and see other characters affected

Maleficent is not merely a dark witch, she is a dark fairy. As a fae, she cannot actually lie, she can withhold truth, she can twist truth, but she cannot blatantly lie. she can say things that are truth to herself

she and The Three Good Fairies are kin, but the truth of the matter is, fae politics are strange and unusual, and a good large amount of fae would stab you in the toe if you dared say they weren’t good, so we honestly can’t take their title of Three Good Fairies seriously

Maleficent however admits she is dark, admits she can do great evil

she takes pure unadulterated pleasure in wreaking chaos across all worlds

in bringing the Realm of Light, notably full of humans, and covering it in Darkness, which, as we stated above, could very well be where the fae actually live

we only have a few fae we get to know in KH, Maleficent, Fauna, Flora, Merryweather, Tinkerbell, and Peter Pan (edit! and the Gullwings, whom are single minded the entire time and focused only on treasure)

however, Peter Pan is often likened to a changling more than a human or a fae, a child created or strengthened through fairy magic, through chaos magic. some versions of the tale have it that Tinkerbell stole a human babe and all that pixie dust eventually turned him into one of them, others tell of him being fae right from the start

unseen normally in kh and most modern depictions of Pan, is that he will legitimately kill people once they’re no longer of use to him, all he cares about is his enjoyment

and Tink? she does everything to make Pan happy, because she loves the chaos just as much as him, she’s his enabler in that regard, and dislikes when he chooses to allow something she doesn’t like (exhibit a: Wendy)

all fae the same, in that they seek out something that brings them joy, and then they tend to spend a large time of their life doing that over and over and over and over and over and over again

The Three Good Fairies hereby shortened to TGF have this thing, they like helping humans. They like to give humans magical things and see what happens afterwards. They like to make clothes too, and their chaotic nature shows in the way they interact with humans, unable to stop squabbling amongst themselves because obviously each separate fairy knows better than the other two

all of the KH fae have their respective territories, though Maleficent, as stated before, obviously wants to make her territory larger, for the most part, they don’t interact with each other

and none seem to call a single place home except for Pan and Tink, but then, they have a world to play with humans they’ve picked, and often grab new humans when eventually their humans grow to have no use to them

who is to say they didn’t all come from the fabled Otherworld, and simply spread out across the Realm of Light since, if the Otherworld is truly nestled in the Realm of Darkness and thereby void of humans and full of Heartless, all fae love to interact with humans?

since humans can do what they can’t, they can lie

and fae are often noted to steal away their favored humans, to a place beyond time

in KH1, Riku asks Maleficent why she’s helping him, and she says, he’s like a son to her.

anyone that’s known me long enough knows that I strongly believe she was twisting the truth so that the other members of her Circle wouldn’t look down on her, because it appears that a fae’s inabillity to lie is NOT well known in KH, i never see it mentioned anywhere

and so her Circle overhears her saying to the young boy that threw his world into darkness (into chaos, into death, into her home) that may or may not be able to weild a keyblade, that he’s like a son to her, obviously she’s manipulating him, lying to him to gain his favor

but i don’t believe that, when i took a look at the japanese version, the way they spoke to each other, riku was rude af and Mal didn’t seem to mind at all, led me to believe that she truly held affection for Riku

in CoM it’s shown she gave him a huge fucking room with a gazillion books, he had always been given a choice in what he did, she gave him options, asked if he would join her plans or continue freeloading, because he was a freeloader

she found his friends, told him “hey that Sora friend of yours seems to have new friends”, let him see what was going on and take from it what he would, and did no more than offer him a place to crash, maybe do a few errands, hey kid wanna learn magic while you’re here, hey kid wanna go to Hook’s world I think your other friend is there

(it’s implied he’s the one that kidnapped Alice/Snow White depending on the order of you doing the words in KH1, but if that were completely true, he would have seen Sora while grabbing Alice)

he was given everything by her, everything he could want, because that’s how she and her kin work

they take the unwanted, the children the adults, they take the forlorn, the depressed, the anxious, they take all the ones that believe they would not be missed, and they give them everything they want in order to keep them among the fae

is that not what happened?

and, here’s where we get to kh3 spoilers, just a few but honestly, considering when it happens i’ll call it an endgame spoiler even though it has basically no bearing to the actual end of the game (as far as we know)

KH3 SPOILERS START HERE, I’M TRYING TO BE AS VAGUE AS POSSIBLE WHILE STILL GETTING THE IDEA OF THE SCENE ACROSS

in one world i’ll not name, Maleficent is wandering around all willy nilly with Pete, marveling at the world, when a corridor of darkness opens up behind her and out walks a Riku

he’s like “you better not be thinking of getting in my way”

and she’s like “i wouldn’t dream of it my child, play around to your heart’s content and let us both do whatever we want and not get in each other’s way”

and then Pete’s like “new phone who dis” as Riku is happy with her answer and smiles and walks away

and Mal is like “a friend, but i couldn’t begin to tell you from when”

KH3 SPOILERS END HERE

that scene reminds me heavily of the fact that the fae have a strange understanding of time

she knew instantly he was time displaced, and didn’t question it

if anything, she seemed outright proud of him traveling through time

like a mama birb watching her chick learn to fly

(again, very much of a “you’re like a son to me” vibe being more truth than fiction)

and we also see that her affection for him extends to anyone with his face, because she sees something in him that basically screams out to her Fae instincts to grab him, teach him, initiate him into her culture of darkness and timelessness

and riku

he took to darkness easily

it was intuitive to him, he was reckless yet strong

and she praised him for it

so yeah

Maleficent is a Fae, Riku is Fae-touched and Fae-Chosen, Repliku is basically a changeling, Mickey and Aqua basically died when they entered the Realm of Darkness

The Fae World is in the Realm of Darkness

.....did I mention the changeling bit? No? Okay Imma run through that real quick

so basically changeling can refer to one of two people, a human child stolen away from the humans, or the fae creation made in the child’s image and used to replace the child in the human’s crib

because normally it’s done to a small child or baby

and it is a fae creation used to replace the original

the human is taken in by the fae of that area, lives amongst them, slowly turning into one of them

and the creation, often created from whatever elements are around and a spell said over them, is meant to be tougher than the human child, able to withstand any cruelties that the human child would have received

(because often the changelings were said to happen to unhappy children suddenly changing)

(there’s also a few other things that normally denoted a changeling child but i’m not gonna get into that here cause it’s more of a socioeconomic politics things)

the creation would know everything the original knew

and they would believe themselves the original

some tales eventually had the changeling eventually leave their human homes to go join back with the fae, but honestly, anything past about 15 years old was free game in most tales, i think i remember one where the once-human and the creation tried to kill each other

but yeah, and Repliku is a changeling but created by Vexen instead of by a fae (but for all we know he was a science-leaning fae and that was his obsession)

aaand i think that’s everything??? i’ll edit if i realize i forgot something but yeah

Maleficent = mom figure of riku

Fae = darkness = death