#the sora donald goofy trio are most obviously the choice for these ones but i think riku and mickey should be able to tap into this also

[fooligandan]

kingdom hearts would benefit from even more what i'm going to refer to as "toontown bullshit" like some meteor-like spell/limit that's one big anvil and things of this nature . someone needs to run into a painted tunnel on a wall thinking it's real in this series

[iwoulddieforienzo]

An incredibly self-indulgent au that I would like to see someone else write:

au where Leon goes with Sora instead of Donald and Goofy 

yeah that’s just an au I love a lot and I want to see something of (I’m too lazy to do it myself though..) but the real self indulgence is below the cut!

Alright, here’s the real juicy stuff. I’ve been referring to it as the I love my son au for hopefully obvious reasons

Because its me, obviously, I want Ienzo to travel with them. Let’s say he escaped Xemnas and has been living in Traverse Town for pretty much his entire life, probably as a street rat. Does he know Leon? Maybe. Maybe Leon found him in Radiant Garden and took him in, or maybe they only know each other in passing. Point is, he’s a really powerful magic user and easily fills Donald’s role as the magician. (Something I think could be interesting is if Ienzo doesn’t have his heart. He escaped Xemnas, sure, but he’s still a Nobody, even if he doesn’t know the term for it. Cue some confusion from Sora and Leon over why Ienzo is like this, why heartless don’t chase him, what he means by “I don’t have a heart” etc. And hey! It could give Sora some insight into the Org that he wouldn’t have otherwise... just a thought.)

So, why would Ienzo, Nobody or not, go with Leon and Sora? I mean, obviously Leon is going because ma’am that is a CHILD, why are you giving him a SWORD- but Ienzo? He just wants his family back. Or, at the very least, find out what happened to them and why. 

Pretty much everything is the same in kh1 except 1) Leon helps find the puppies (and actively derails the adventure to do so) 2) Leon gives as much emotional support as he can and 3) the trio isn’t split up by choice. (when they ARE however... the drama. Ienzo, in his childhood home that he destroyed with hints of what could have happened to his family up against worried dad!Leon who knows Sora is out there with only a wooden sword and Sora being terrified on his own with no way to heal himself and no backup and he wants his dad, dammit!) I also think it would be funny if Ienzo got an admirer in the form of Demyx, who has been following them around. He was supposed to report what they were doing to the Superior but he got... distracted.

I would think, since Zexion isn’t in the Organization, Saix wouldn’t send Axel to Oblivion, since the whole point was getting rid of VI and everyone else was an afterthought. However, with Ienzo being a rather valuable asset even when he was a baby, I would like to think that no one is rank VI; Xemnas saved it for Ienzo and was just waiting for an opportunity to get him back. So Zoey would get kidnapped at some point during COM. (much to Leon’s distress) Bonus points for drama involving the three (technically 4 if you count Heartless!Ansem) dad conundrum.

Also during COM, Repliku stays alive because I love him very much and he deserves it. Leon doesn’t get sealed away though... the whole ‘turning into cards’ thing is weird and takes away from Luxord’s power set so we’re gonna throw that whole thing away and instead have Leon get yeeted back to Traverse Town because the Org was getting sick of him interfering with fights and also, you know, having a damn braincell. Plus, angst for when he realizes he forgot his kid for a year.

In kh2, since Ienzo is kidnapped, Kairi is the magician and can, in fact, heal. Zexion is part of the Org but really doesn’t want to be, Cloud and Leon get married offscreen after getting separated from the kids, Sorikai feels, Zexion kills Saix because I said so (and because saix killed vexen), significantly more murder because most of the org is alive (although Leon stops them initially from killing anyone because child soldiers and murder is bad), it’s revealed that Roxas was in a weirdly close friend group with Zexion, Demyx, Axel and Her, all that good stuff. Hey, maybe after fighting Xemnas, Sorikai hang out in the Relm of Darkness and find Aqua. I dunno.

I would also like to mention, that in this theoretical au, healing spells aren’t a easily accessible thing, and magic itself isn’t widely accessible either. Generally, humans have a pretty low amount of magic, and while keyblades can boost and channel magic, they only really allow for basic offensive and defensive spells that can be improved upon. And though it can boost ‘magicka’ to a point, it’s not like you can just keep using magic forever. Why you ask? Well, making magic less accessible is just fun because it makes fights more grounded with higher stakes, as compared to “blow the bad guy away with magic wind powers and then fly to safety.” Plus, it means that not as many characters can use magic, making magic teachers a valuable resource. As for why healing spells aren’t really a thing? Well, I just personally think healing spells are kinda cheap narratively, especially since potions are a thing but my main two reasons are a) it solidifies Ienzo as a valuable asset both to the Gang and the Organization and b) angst. Like... oh I don’t know... Leon takes a bad hit for Sora while they’re separated from Ienzo and out of elixirs/potions? Hmm...

And as a final act of total self indulgence, maybe throw some half-awake Ventus in there. As a treat.

(when I started writing this out like 4 hours ago, I barely had anything other than a concept. And then I overthought it, so now I have a whole timeline up until DDD. I will never do anything with it, but that’s why everything got weirdly specific in some sections. I’m sorry, I have no self control. Also it’s 1 am and I am not cleaning this up)

[dukeofriven]

Wither Tinkerbell? Part 3: This Episode Was Badly Written (KH Liveblog)

PART 1, PART 3

Let’s look at Sora’s three options one more time: A) He can depart for Hollow Bastion, and in doing so leave Tinkerbell in captivity. B) He can surrender the Keyblade, at which point Hook won’t kill him. (Will he let Tink go? Unclear) C) Sora can walk the plank and die.

It’s at this point my brain broke. Sora is an agonizing cipher of a character - so opaque at times that he basically produces a homunculus later simply to store a personality in and save him the trouble of having one. (For those of you just joining us, I am playing-through (well, watching other people play through because I can’t afford these games) Kingdom Hearts largely for the first time. I have played the Destiny Island portion of KH 1, and the prologue of Kingdom Hearts 2 - everything with Roxas up to Sora coming back to life. THAT’S IT. No spoilers, please. #RoxasForProtagonist2019). Fifteen hours in, here’s what I know about Sora: He likes Kairi. He wants to hatesnog Riku He is super good at hitting dudes with sticks. He wants to help everybody instantly This sometimes causes tension with Donald Duck He wants to see other places And that’s it. I don’t have much of a sense of Sora’s interiority as a person. I can’t even tell if he has interiority. (You cannot tell me in good conscious that this boy:

Has anything going on in there that isn’t this song playing on a loop.

Playing on a loop, over and over and over. That’s why he so rarely interacts with conversations in this game: poor little kid, he’s got a bad case of audio processing disorder and most of the time he’s zoning out to the soothing sound of Tijuana Brass.) That lack of self quickly becomes a problem whenever Sora has to make something resembling a decision because there’s very little there in which to anchor motive. I mentioned Finn the Human earlier:  Finn would rescue Tinkerbell in a heartbeat because his motivation to be the good guy is very clear. Self sacrifice would make sense for him too if the cards were arranged properly: “jump off this plank or I’ll kill Jake!” the villain cries, and Finn chucks himself off screaming “anything for you buddy” - but Finn won’t embrace death so quickly for just anything. Finn would have already called Hook a buttface and launched himself at his face long before Hook finished monologuing. Sora, to all appearances, decides to let his quest to save Kairi go and die rather than... let Tinkerbell stay imprisoned in a lamp? There’s so many problems with this scene I am 2500 words in and feel like I still haven’t captured how bizarre it is. There’s the lack of peril: Tinkerbell doesn’t seem to be in any immediate danger, making Sora’s willingness to just up and die seem a serious overreaction. There’s a lack of intimacy: Sora’s near-ignorance of Tinkerbell doesn’t seem commensurate with the Christ-like willingness to perish on her behalf. There’s the Problem of Kairi: he sure drops her needs like a hot potato the moment some other random person is put in any state of inconvenience. There’s the problem of scale: four heartless and one dude with a sword stopped seeming like a threat before we’d beaten Traverse Town, why is it suddenly this big of an issue? Then there’s the problem of time: the whole scenario, from the moment Hook reveals that Tinkerbell is kidnapped to the moment Peter rescues her from Smee takes about 1 minute and 28 seconds with no interruptions. The player doesn’t even get to attempt to rescue Tink - we are shown she is kidnapped, Sora makes the baffling decision to die rather than punch Hook in the face, then Peter rescues Sora through the power of positive thinking and saves Tink by just grabbing her (this last part no more than 20 seconds). Then the game lets you fight the four heartless who were standing there anyways. You might be wondering “Why are you spending so much time on this moment that ultimately doesn’t mean much”? Because that’s sort of my point - Kingdom Hearts, a badly written game, is full of moments like this: tension call-de-sacs that are resolved quickly, without impact, and without player or even protagonist agency. Unless its ‘hitting things with his stick” Sora does very little in this game. He shows up to events, is told what he ought to do by other people, and then does them, sometimes with a pretence of agreement but never one that feels like he’s going to go his own way. It’s a little like Final Fantasy XII: Sora might be the viewpoint character, but he keeps finding himself in a story that isn’t really about him. He feel superfluous as a person - if you equipped a sexy lamp with a keyblade and the power to fight heartless, how much of the game would proceed unchanged? What impact does Sora have on his own story? The moments that Sora genuinely makes choices stand out precisely because of their rarity. Many of the choices he does make are guided almost entirely by non[diegetic need: he agrees to team up with Donald and Goofy because that’s the conceit of Kingdom Hearts and also he needs that gummy ship to do the gummy ship sequences: even now, though repeatedly called ‘friends’ by the script, the trio don’t seem to have much to do with one another. That’s why this scene baffles me: Sora gets a very rare multiple choice question and he picks the worst answer possible for no clear reason, motive, or purpose. Sora chooses to die so that Tinkerbell can... can what, exactly? Hook doesn’t threaten her beyond saying that she’ll stay imprisoned. Hook says Sora can either give up the Keyblade or die, and Sora chooses to die without a fight, despite having taken down far larger and more obviously threatening villains at this point. He just folds. And then Pan rescues him and Tink in seconds, and the whole scene goes by so fast it is breathtaking. Why am I spending so much time thinking about this scene? Because its obvious that nobody who worked on the game did. It’s a nothing moment - so forgettable you likely have no memory of it to begin with. And yet: SORA CHOSE TO DIE. This game is poorly written. And Tinkerbell deserves a better than to be Imprisoned Woman #380 in this game.