#kh animated series

[paintsplash1712]

If we were to get a Kingdom Hearts Animated Series it would HAVE to be made by the team who made Rise of the TMNT! (Flying Dog Productions)

Like imagine these beautiful fight scenes with Sora and Riku fighting Xenmas!

[goldensunset]

when people refer to canon story-relevant kingdom hearts games as ‘spinoffs’ it makes me sad not only for the obvious reasons i always say but also bc like man i WISH this series had spinoffs. imagine what they could do if they had permission from nomura to truly go off the rails and ignore the greater canon for a second and just do some fun whimsical plotless thing in an alternate universe. imagine a fishing/boating game on destiny islands. kh fighting game. it is an injustice that we have been deprived of kingdom karts. can anyone hear me

[marcirose]

Nobody understands Kingdom Hearts that well cause everybody compares it to shonen anime when it's actually a magical girl anime because it has:

-A protagonist who is an ordinary lad who got given a special power that could save the universe

Teammates that the protagonist can lean on and who help the protagonist with said special power

A love interest heavily involved in the plot that both motivates the protagonist and is motivated by the protagonist

A monster of the week format that has its own standalone conflict that eventually leads to the next major plot point in the story

Overarching themes about love and friendships and connections and identity

[descendant-of-truth]

I'm so obsessed with the modern Twilight Town gang, you guys

[frie-ice]

This Disney Villains crossover collage is of Hades and Jafar, as part of my crossover collage series of Disney Villains, to mark the countdown to Halloween. The time of year when Disney gives their villains control of the rains.

[fisherrprince]

many people leaving incredibly good analysis on my post. however I have experienced many pieces of media, many of which have all the aspects of kingdom hearts. many of which have the formula down, the length, the mystery, the dedication, nostalgia, emotions, sincerity, goofiness. I just think Nomura accidentally put something highly radioactive in there without realizing and no other explanation will suffice to explain why it makes you go crazy insane

[sing-me-under]

I just spent like twenty minutes rambling about 80s-90s Booster Gold, and then I accidentally deleted the draft.

Anyway, to summarize, he’s such a fascinating and complex character who’s just constantly suffering. Please please please look into Booster Gold and his goddamn life support mech suit. He lost a whole arm and is constantly at the edge of the death. Even before, he’s just a ball of anxiousness and imposter syndrome buried in spades of Charisma.

Also, his characterization in Blue & Gold feels kind of flat, and I know it’s because it’s like sitcom and comedy and all that. I also know it’s a disservice to Ted Kord to kill him for the sake of Booster’s character development, but his death does renew my interest in Booster’s character. From the moment Booster embraces being the Greatest Hero You’ve Never Heard Of, he is my favorite.

[vxmpire-vxlle]

Naruto and Sasuke as keyblade wielders

[mythicalartistx]

LiVe AcTiOn KiNgDoM hEaRtS aDaPtAtIoN

Sora: Tom Holland

Riku: Chris Pratt

Kairi: Zendaya

Xehanort: Will Smith

Donald & Goofy & Mickey: Hideous hyper realistic CGI duck and Dog and mouse wearing clothes and walking on two feet

Enjoy and do what you want with this stupid thing I came up with

It's horrible but that's what it seems like what goes through company's minds with picks roles for remakes/adaptations

They need to stop picking A list Actors/Celebrities like do voice actors and not A list ones cause some of them can't really act and are just self inserts 😭

[djsherriff-responses]

Dolph laserhawk throws hands with Samurai Jack?

controversial opinion but genuinely believe captain laserhawk would have blown up like crazy if it wasn't released in the same batch as that samurai show on netflix

[happybunnykat]

And if you do play kh please rb and see what your non-kh followers think-

[lightandfellowship]

Here's my take on a Halloween Town Vidar. He's a gargoyle with a wolf skull mask.

Design notes under the read more:

I previously mentioned in my Halloween Town Vor post that when Nomura designed Sora, Donald, and Goofy's Halloween Town designs, he took inspiration from two different creatures for each of them. Sora is inspired by vampires and imps, Goofy is Frankenstein's monster mixed with a werewolf, and Donald is a mummy and invisible man. I once again took a similar approach here, though instead of using an even mix of motifs like I did with Vor's fairy + sphinx design, I went down more of a Sora route. IMO, if you look at Sora's Halloween Town design, it mostly reads as vampire despite lots of overlap between vampire and imp design elements, with the exclusively impish details really only being his imp/pumpkin mask and maybe his clawed gloves. For Vidar, he is mostly gargoyle with the wolf motif coming primarily from his wolf skull mask, but there's some overlap of creature motifs with the claws and fangs.

Now, why did I choose to make Vidar a gargoyle? Here are my reasons:

Made of stone. References how Vidar tries to harden his heart to the harm he's potentially causing the worlds. The cracks in the stone represent his slowly crumbling will and the eventual abandonment of his plans. As well, I think him being a living statue well represents his somewhat stoic demeanor and the mythological Vidar's title as the "silent god".

Gargoyles serve as guardians of the buildings they adorn. Throughout the game Vidar was trying his best to protect people and prevent anyone else from dying, especially Baldr.

Water spout gargoyles collect rain water and divert it from the walls and rooftops of buildings to prevent damage to those buildings. Water is sometimes symbolic of darkness in the KH series (for example, the KH1 opening where Riku offers his hand to Sora and gets enveloped by the darkness the waves). So, in my mind, this function of gargoyles represents Vidar's attempts to preserve Baldr by removing the darkness from Baldr's heart.

Gargoyles are commonly found on cathedrals and churches, and I think that religious aspect of them fits Scala society and Vidar's commitment to Light fairly well.

If Vidar were to visit Christmas Town via Halloween Town, I imagine his gargoyle form would change into a sort of "guardian angel" form, but keeping some of the more demonic elements such as the horns for a more Lucifer-esque angel. Sort of like how Christmas Town Sora still keeps many of his Halloween Town elements despite donning a Santa outfit.

Reason why I chose the wolf skull mask:

Probably the most well-known event in the Norse god Vidar's mythology is his battle with the great wolf Fenrir, who he kills by ripping its jaws apart. Thus Vidar wears the top jaw of a wolf skull as a mask, as a sort of "trophy" and reference to this mythology. Of course the "real" Fenrir would be much larger than a normal wolf, but the mask is just a representation.

Now, I'll explain all of my individual design choices from top to bottom:

Gargoyle Horns: There's many styles of gargoyle horns, but I decided to give him more realistic-looking animal horns to add more detail.

Gargoyle Ears: I quite like this type of gargoyle ear with the multiple rounded segments even though I couldn't find many examples of it, and I think it nicely differentiates the ears from elf/demon ears. Vaguely Rochelle Goyle from Monster High inspired, as well.

Wolf Skull Mask: Already explained, but I tried to go semi-realistic here, once again to add more detail and make it more clear what kind of animal skull this is. If this design were to actually appear in a Kingdom Hearts game, I could potentially see this mask being stylized in a more cartoony way (especially if put into the chibi mobile game style.)

Gargoyle Wings (Feathered): I originally gave Vidar the more typical style of gargoyle wing which looks like a bat wing, but I felt that style of wing in conjunction with the horns, claws, and elongated skull mask made him look too much like a dragon, which wasn't what I was going for at all. So I changed it to the other common stye of gargoyle wing, a bird-like wing. I think this also better reflects his role in the game as someone sided with Light.

Stone Skin and Hair: As mentioned, he's made of stone and covered in cracks and nicks. He's pretty much all stone (except his eyes? I guess?)

Shoulder Pads? (Don't know what else to call them): I made them more pointy and curled up at the edges for that Nightmare Before Christmas look.

Shoulder Pad Design: I turned the square design on Vidar's shoulder pads into crosses. One, to reference gravestones, but also again to reference back to cathedrals and that religious aspect of gargoyles. Also, it's a subtle detail, but I added a stitched seam to the side of Vidar's coat as well.

Bandages: Vidar's original design features bandage-like cloth underneath one of his gloves, so I took that detail and just put it all around his arm. Weathered and torn for the creepy look.

Wrist Bands: In Vidar's original design, he sports two asymmetrical gloves. Here, the bandages take the place of the more complicated glove, while these two black bands take the place of the simpler glove, which was just a black, fingerless glove comprised of a main glove and two straps above it.

Gargoyle Claws: Not much to say here. Can sort of double as wolf claws, but obviously without the fur.

Scala Emblem Chain: I changed the chain from a bead chain to a more grungy link chain for that Halloween look. Also, I wasn't able to depict this in a way that satisfied me, but I imagine the metal of the charm and chain being a little tarnished and scratched up.

Dirtied Sash and Coat Edge: It's not blood, just grime. Grime, tearing, and weathering for more creepy factor. His coat is pretty long anyway so I could see it getting dirty in the streets of Halloween Town pretty easily.

No Boots: To show off his gargoyle feet. In his original design his pants tuck into his boots, so I don't really know what the bottom of his pants are supposed to look like. I just cinched them at the bottom to maintain that puffed-out look. Is it weird that his feet only have three toes but his hand has three fingers and a thumb? Yeah. But I couldn't get four toes to look right. Just assume he's supposed to have four.

I decided to draw this Halloween Town design in black and white this time, but if I had colored it, you can imagine the color scheme of his clothes being darker and less saturated than his original design to better match Halloween Town.

Also, this was just a coincidence, but both Vor and Vidar's Halloween Town designs feature wings, claws, and fangs, and have a sort of cat (sphinx) and dog (wolf) theme. Which I think is cute and makes them feel more like a duo. :)

That's it. Thanks for reading.

[goldensunset]

i love darkness and edginess in kh absolutely and i think the deeply philosophical introspective examinations on what it means to be human aka existential dread and all that lends itself to a bit of horror easily and i love seeing it utilized to its fullest potential. ultimately though what i want is something comforting and reassuring at the end of the day- like what nomura said about the series reflecting his belief that ‘the heart is never truly gone’. how you might lose people but they’re always a part of you. i will be happy no matter where the series goes as long as it fundamentally comes back to love and human connection. it’s really beautiful the way the story gets so incredibly dark but it always manages to come back to the light somehow- whether it’s a classic disney happily ever after, or something more akin to other storytellers where something is absolutely lost but it’s still a good ending, y’know? instead of everything being saccharine you get hurt and you grow because of it and new beauty blooms. kh really delivers on that front and i want it to stay that way forever

[marcirose]

If anyone wants to know why the kingdom hearts fandom has a lot of bad takes and everything in that regard just know it's all kh2's fault

Kh2 is the reason why everyone thinks the disney worlds are filler, why people think Sora "fell off" after kh2, why people think the series is just cool anime stuff but with disney characters, and why people think Kairi still has relevance all cause she has a keyblade (/hj about the Kairi point but also not really)

The games that came after kh2 aren't held in as high of a regard cause everyone expected the future games to be like kh2 when they're very clearly not. Most of the kh3 criticism I saw basically boiled down to "this should have happened like it did in kh2"

Every game after kh2 is doomed to be compared to kh2 like how every final fantasy game after ff7 is doomed to be compared to ff7 cause of how it popped off the way it did

Imo kh2 more or less essentially ruined everyone's perception of what kh is and is also one of the biggest examples of showing the dissonance between what the fans want to see vs the story Nomura wants to tell and that dissonance gets stronger with each game

Kh2 was the turning point in the series that basically told everyone that the story wasn't going the way they think it would go and it completely went over everyone's heads and I think that needs to be talked about

Anyway moral of the story is stop skipping kh cutscenes. That's why y'all confused and why y'all don't know things. If I see any kh4 criticism that sounds like "it should be like kh2" I'll bitchslap you to the moon I've had enough of the comparisons

[descendant-of-truth]

I think the reputation Kingdom Hearts has is a prime example of something I've been thinking about recently, which is: if you go into a piece of media without taking it seriously from the get-go, any of its attempts to be serious will come across as funny.

Let's be real, KH is viewed by the general public as a bit silly, right? Like, you're telling me there's an RPG series where you play as an anime boy but your party members are Goofy and Donald Freakin' Duck? And it's filled with complicated plotlines about clones and hearts and time travel?

The crux of what makes people not take the game seriously is the fact that it's a Disney game that wants to be taken seriously. Those two things combined instinctively make people want to laugh at it; after all, Disney is just kids' stuff, it's not meant to be taken that seriously. Even if you're a fan of Disney, it's so inherently different from something like Final Fantasy that the tonal clash alone creates a certain expectation.

That expectation being: this is going to be stupid, and funny because it's stupid. The same level of joke as making cute characters swear or use guns, I think.

Kingdom Hearts is, of course, a lot more sincere than that. But if you're not willing to meet it halfway, then its sincerity becomes the joke.

Of course, even KH fans like to laugh at how the dialogue reads when it's taken out of context, which takes me to something I've actually wanted to talk about for a bit:

Data Sora: Mickey! It's Riku. They put bugs in him!

Make no mistake, I'm not saying people are wrong to joke about stuff like this. But the whiplash I felt at seeing this moment become a meme was kind of insane, because it genuinely never struck me as a funny thing to hear Sora say.

Using the term "bug" to refer to a computer bug felt completely natural, and it's a much more tangible term than "glitch" which brings to mind more like, environmental or physics-based glitches. Similar deal with the word "virus," even if that would've sounded cooler.

But either way, by this point in the story, they've been talking about bugs with complete seriousness for over an hour. They've been a corrupting force that you have to fight the whole game, and when Data Riku is injected with the stuff, he screams before freezing up and staring dead-eyed into space, as shown in that screenshot.

That's freaky! And a really scary thing for Sora to have to see happen to his best friend!

So him telling Mickey what happened in a panicked voice didn't even register as a line to take special note of, because why would it? What else was he supposed to say? I was way too invested and stressed out to care about what it would sound like out of context; I was IN the context! And the context had me on the edge of my seat!

This is the case with a lot of lines in this series that get paraded around as evidence that the writing in KH is sooo chaotic, so silly, so embarrassing, so cringe. I'm not saying that every line of dialogue comes across as totally natural, the series is capable of taking me out of the experience because of something being stilted or awkward. But rarely ever when it's trying to be sincere or dramatic.

Replica Riku: Because I'm you. Riku: No, I'M me. Replica Riku: "I'm me," he says.

This is another example. When I actually sit back and watch just that first bit of the cutscene, yeah, it sounds a little ridiculous. The back-and-forth happening here is just redundant enough to follow the "rule of threes" to comedy, so I get why people get a good chuckle out of it when it's isolated to just this.

It did not feel ridiculous after watching the series of harrowing events Replica Riku goes through before getting to that point. It certainly stops being ridiculous when he follows it up with this speech:

Replica Riku: Must be nice being real. A fake like me could never get away with saying that. That's right, I'm a phony, a fake! The way I look, the way I feel, everything I remember! And even this newfound power! I thought by finding some new strength, I could finally be someone - someone who's not at all you! But... nothing changes... I'm still just empty! Everything about me is borrowed. As long as you're around, I'll never be more than a shadow!

I bring this up to segue into another point: even KH's fans have a hard time moving past their perceptions of what it should be as a Respectable Video Game. Particularly whenever it does something that's just a little too weird, or lame, for the average mainstream.

Something like, oh I dunno... putting relevant story content on handhelds?

While this wasn't intentional, both of the examples I've used so far have come from games that were originally made for the Nintendo DS and GBA respectively. I just used screenshots from their Playstation versions because I like how their body language is animated in them.

(I also wasn't intending to make both examples about Riku, it just kind of happened)

But anyway, handheld games are also something that's generally considered to be "less legitimate" than their console counterparts. This isn't to say that handheld gaming isn't extremely popular in its own right, because it is! Series that stick to handhelds, like Pokemon, are loved for their portability.

But outside of some exceptions like Fire Emblem, if a series has games on both types of systems, the handheld ones will always be considered "less mainline" by default, regardless of what's actually in them. For an example of this, I would point to the Zelda series, and how little its handheld titles are talked about compared to its console releases. Furthermore, the Link's Awakening remake (while technically on a handheld-console hybrid) decided to ditch the pixel art in favor of going full 3D, which showcases a slightly different but related stigma.

So what happens when Kingdom Hearts, a game that debuted in 3D on a home console, starts putting the majority of its story onto handhelds?

Well, a massive chunk of the fanbase starts calling them "spinoffs," of course! Even though the ratio of console releases to handheld ones literally looks like this:

(That's a 6:8 ratio, for reference, counting KH4 and Missing Link which haven't been released yet. It's even more slanted in the handheld's favor when you consider the short length of 0.2 and especially Melody of Memory in terms of story content)

And now we still have people talking about how we waited 13+ years for KH3 after KH2, as if nothing really important happened in between those two games, or as if a game arbitrarily having a number 3 on it is going to make it more important than everything else. And this is said by people who DO CARE about the games that were released during that time! What is happening!!

People loooove to act like you can skip over games like Coded or Union Cross and they especially love to complain that a series like this would even consider putting story content on a phone. And in such a cute art style?? A cute 2D art style??? How in the wORLD am I supposed to take something sEriOUsLY when it's on... the most accessible gaming device out there??? For free?????

(I'm willing to bet that some people will be slightly more inclined to play Missing Link because it's in 3D, but most are definitely going to just be asking "why isn't this on consoles" as if the story isn't intertwined with the gameplay format they chose at all)

And so we run into the same problem as the people who haven't even played the games: dismissing something as not really worth investing their time into based on surface-level judgements. Because even if you're down with KH's brand of storytelling, there are other barriers you could have to the series that it will repeatedly ask you to lower, and you might not be willing to.

Kingdom Hearts is a series that demands you get over your biases about what counts as real art to be taken seriously, or it WILL leave you behind in the narrative. Don't want to play a phone game? Don't want to even look up the story on YouTube? Too bad, it's required reading for the next ~Numbered Title~ that you respect so much. Good luck being confused the whole time.

Don't want to play a DS game? And you won't even watch the condensed movie version that we put in our Respectable Console Collection? Okay, but don't come crying to us when its recurring narrative themes seem like they came out of nowhere later on.

This is a series that does not have spinoffs, and trying to explain that to someone who hasn't played it makes it sound absurd. "The mobile games are important?" a non-fan asks, laughing at the concept. "Yeah, it's pretty stupid," the fan responds with a laugh of their own, because even after everything, how can they really engage with this story on its own terms when it makes such silly decisions? When it has such cringey titles? When it's so embarrassing to like?

I think I might've strayed a bit from the initial thesis statement of this post, but my point is that Kingdom Hearts exposes a lot of elitism in people regarding games and art. It pushes the limits of what it can expect its audience to take seriously, delivering purposeful, engaging storytelling no matter if it's 2D or 3D, a Triple-A Video Game on your Playstation console or a free-to-play phone game. Which makes it pretty darn neat, I'd say.

And also sometimes I get thrown off by what becomes a meme, because I get so invested in the story that I forget things can be funny out of context

[victimsofyaoipoll]

Round 3

Propaganda Under Cut

Kairi

kairi is the third protagonist of the kingdom hearts series and the third member of the destiny trio, alongside fan favorites sora and riku. sora/riku shippers HATE kairi, and will go out of their way to discount her at every turn. the hate for her ranges from typical "she's a boring bitch" to fans of soriku making five-hour long video essays reassuring their fellow shippers that the big bad kairi won't show up in the next installment – to quote one video, "she's in a box. she's on the shelf. four walls, no door." kairi is the greatest bogeyman the soriku fandom has ever known, to the point where most of said video essays and fanon meta posts focus not on why sora and riku should get together, but rather on why they don't like kairi.

Literally has a 100+ page Google doc fan theory writing her out of the narrative and putting all of her (few) canonical accomplishments onto half of the popular m/m ship (soriku). Don't even get me started on how her memory was completely written out of the canon plot of re:coded. KH is a nightmare to explain so dude trust me she is THE victim of yaoi

She is so fundamental to the plot and themes and narratives of game and yet it is near impossible to find anything about her thats not ship bashing pre-mlm with the other two characters. I dont even care if she ends up with one of the main characters i just want fans to see her as a cool character to love or like, anything other than “annoying comphet girl.” You can write your mlm but pleaae stop inventing comphet where it doesnt exist. She does not even get to spend time with sora ever?? Why does everyone see her as a threat and a thing to destroy?? Let her have friends so help me

Misa Amane

she gets treated in-canon the way fandoms treat female characters that Threaten an m/m ship. it's like, "oh why don't you go sit in the corner and be pretty, misa, while the Men have intelligent conversation and pretend they aren't ten seconds from fucking each other, doesn't that sound nice?" it's infuriating. and MAYBE it's better now but i remember her getting treated the same way in fanfiction too, like we all need to do just as badly by our female secondary characters as fucking tsugumi ohba, but with the added insult of making her be alternately oblivious of the relationship between light and L or actively trying to sabotage it—incompetently, of course, because god forbid misa be allowed dignity or moments of cleverness.

she's one of the first characters I think of when I consider old school fandom misogyny. The annoying bitch and clingy crazy gf allegations were AFTER HER ASS. She's also a lot more intelligent than people gave her credit for, but most seem inclined to take the Very Biased word of our unreliable, narcissistic narrator and his homoerotic arch nemesis and claim that just because she's bubbly and into romance that she's also a complete moron. Which is blatantly untrue. Everyone was afraid of Misa girlbossing too hard. Killing people and devoting yourself to the deranged twink of your dreams even though you know he'll never love you back??? Having a hardcore goth aesthetic and being so Hot even literal Death Gods are into you?? God forbid women do ANYTHING!

Not only is she the victim of yaoi culture, she is the victim of early 2000s misogyny by an author that wanted to introduce a girl character because he knew his male rivals were getting too homoerotic. She is a goth bimbo icon who portrays what I think is one of the few callouts for stan culture and what parasocial relationships can do to both the stan and the idol. The fact that she is a toxic fan of Kira and also hot, funny, sociable is tragic in its own way, which I think the author did try to touch on but was too misogynistic too really get through. Of course, she was reduced to villain status by the fandom and anime alike because she got in the way of the supposed romance in their psychological horror anime.