#Like I thought we'd grown past the impulse to write the girls out of their own stories and make them about the hot boys instead

[isan0rt]

-steps up to microphone-

Namine creates the memory of Sora protecting her from the meteor shower because Kairi came to Destiny Islands during a meteor shower. Kairi was found on the beach during the shower because she arrived with the shattered pieces of the barrier around Destiny Islands, in the same way Apprenticenort breaking the barrier around Radiant Garden caused a meteor shower that was followed by Mickey’s arrival there. Sora has such a strong association between meteor showers and meeting Kairi that the only way for Namine to prevent meteor showers from triggering memories of Kairi in Sora’s heart is to recontextualize the concept so that he thinks of her first. 

She does this not by exactly replacing Kairi, but instead by indulging her own fantasy of being a person worthy of protection and devotion. Namine in Chain of Memories does not do any literal one-to-one replacing of people in Sora’s memories, instead she makes her own personal fantasies into Sora’s memories whole cloth. Kairi is a person who resents having to be saved and protected, but Namine craves being valued in that way. She truly does see Sora as a hero, and so she invents a memory in which he’s her hero, specifically, because she truly wants him to save her from her circumstances, circumstances that are unique to her.

Thanks for coming to my ‘Namine has her own motivations that are about her own personal fantasies about having unique experiences with Sora and not about literally exactly replacing other people in memories of things that literally happened previously” TED talk.