#hi i’m soooo sorry it took me forever to answer this i got totally sidetracked

[goldensunset]

Hi! I really enjoyed your meta on Xehanort being the one to kill Baldr. What do you think of how Dark Road handled Xehanort's development and how it led into the future? The Wonderland was really surprisingly good in that favour, to me.

long story short dark road made me insane and i seriously hope we get to see xehanort in the future in some way shape or form. xehanort14, as some of us have been calling him. it just feels Hurtful to write the most despicable villain ever for like twenty years and then only after he’s finally dead do we get a real backstory on him that makes us all feel for him hardcore and appreciate him as a character. and i think dark road’s very existence even after kh3 is just proof that nomura is way too attached to xehanort to let him go like that. and nomura’s own comments seem to strongly imply the same. just because his saga is over does not necessarily guarantee we’ll never see him again…

oh wait by future you mean in-universe. like how that all shaped him lol. WELL. it’s all been said before by both me and others but i think xehanort’s main takeaway from the events of dark road wasn’t even anything specifically related to whether darkness is acceptable or not. he already felt an affinity for darkness even before getting to scala.

nah the lesson he learned from that whole entire nightmare is that Sometimes People Have To Make Hard Choices. sometimes ya gotta stand up and do the repulsive thing, the uncomfortable thing, the thing that makes you seem like the bad guy in order to serve a greater goal.

vidar couldn’t bring himself to kill baldr and he didn’t even personally know the guy. that idea was too awful for him. if vidar hadn’t been so merciful maybe baldr could’ve been stopped earlier and the remaining classmates could’ve survived. we see eraqus get angry at vidar about this while xehanort was calmer about it but i think internally xehanort was feeling it too. vidar was too weak to do what needed to be done. so then xehanort went and killed baldr even though he didn’t want to.

flash forward a lifetime later and xehanort is manipulating/possessing/killing anyone he needs to because he’s trying to make the world a better place right? those who are trying to stop him simply don’t understand. they’re too weak and sentimental.

dark road was such a masterpiece of writing fr fr it’s not at all what i think any of us honestly expected of a xehanort backstory