#for what I've seen the original japanese script makes the romantic interest-trope not so big part of her

[varpusvaras]

Its upsetting to live in a world where homosexuality is still scourned (and no one on earth can tell me that Sora isn't the apple of Riku's eye) but I knew to accept that Sokai would happen because that's being realistic. I'm angry that she didnt get personality and that Sokai is really just "they're in love and you'll like it because its straight". They never should have left her out so much in the side games and she shouldve been better... considering her importance (princess and wielder)

The heteronormative thinking really is that makes relationships happen in fiction without the writers having to put much effort in it; in the last ask (if I remember correctly) I linked the trope talk video about romantic subplots, and it really helps in understanding how this whole thing builds up. Because society automatically assumes that people are straight, it’s easy to use simple marks and codes to show and determine that two characters are in a romantic relationship. And in my opinion, because these tropes are so widely used, we automatically start reading even more into them and sometimes, even seeking them from where they do not exists, which happens a lot in real life when being nice and smiling etc. can easily be interpret as flirting or otherwise being interested. 

I remember Nomura saying once somewhere that he isn’t very good in writing romances (someone correct me if this isn’t true), but at least he and the writing team aren’t very good in writing romantic relationships in kh. I do feel like it boils down to the fact that kingdom hearts is foremost a story about a boy and his friends, and when the first games were being written, there were two bigger character plot lines going than Kairi: Sora himself and Riku. Kairi got benched even before she got an real opportunity to shine. I love complex stories where I can piece together lore and I love the characters we are given, but I also think that Nomura took maybe a bit little too big by adding and adding characters and making them important for their own storylines and for Sora’s story too. First it was Roxas, then it was Terra, Aqua and Ventus, then all the bad guys. He kept them coming and had to find both time to give them the basis and to keep the plot going that it was easy to leave Kairi be. She had already been given her role and basis for her (back then still existing) personality. But as the time and games went on and the focus stayed on other characters, she, unfortunately, became her given role: the girl, the princess of heart, the love interest. Unlike Riku, who got to grow from his set role and personality, Kairi stayed the same and was eventually reduced from character to traits.

And this is where the very unfortunate conclusion comes: we have a character who has become her given traits instead of being a character who has traits, and the (even more unfortunately) most prominent of those traits is being the love interest for the protagonist. Then we have the society who assumes heterosexuality and has been taught by both real life and fiction to seek for the few tropes that indicate romance and which still is highly unacceptable of non-straight relationships. Nomura and the writing team might not have realised this or maybe they did, but for many people regardless, Sora and Kairi having romantic feelings to each other felt natural, because they automatically fill in the missing pieces to the narrative from their actual everyday life. 

Kairi is a wonderful character to write because she has her basic traits. We can go wild with her, give her feelings and agencies how we feel like, make her fit our own narrative, mold her to be the female character we so craved for all those years ago when we were seeking for ourselves from the stories around us. She became our own character, someone who the fans had written instead of her original creators, and just like with Sora and Riku and everyone else, she became dear to us, and kingdom hearts 3 was a cold awakening to the reality. 

I really want to like Kairi in canon, but it’s just not possible. There just isn’t anything to like in her. Not in a way that she has traits that are bad, not at all. She just wasn’t given enough for me to see who she actually is outside of my own imagination, and I don’t have anything to grasp for outside of those few set traits she has, and they are just those. Traits. A bullet-point list of boxes she goes in, but where she can’t get out. 

SoKai had all the makings to be a good, actually satisfying relationship, because in the first game, they were all equal in that they were still characters in making, waiting to become something more than their check list, but in the end, Sora shone and grew, and Kairi was the one who never got to change.