- Joined
- Oct 13, 2007
- Messages
- 1,517
Something I find rather interesting about the Kingdom Hearts games past the first one - and something I'm sure a lot of you find frustrating - is the way the series deals with what we, as the players, know.
In one sense, it's a big mess of retcon. There's a blatant disregard for what we've been told in the past, leading to situations like the infamous "fake Ansem" mess that non-fans like to use as an example of something they just don't get.
But, taking a step back from that, you come to a realization - almost everything that's been retconned is something that was told to us by a character, rather than something we saw with our own eyes. But, most of what we know about the metaphysics that the game runs on comes from the characters... So, essentially, every source of information in the game is an unreliable narrator.
Kingdom Hearts, in a sense, has a really tenuous relationship with the truth - it's almost as if it doesn't think it's even possible to obtain the truth, so it just provides us with the characters' own efforts to reach it, warts and all. Even the Secret Reports, the very things that are meant to explain what's really happening, are impossible to take as truth, being written by characters who themselves are struggling to understand the concepts they're trying to explain and changing hypotheses left and right as they're given more exceptions to synthesize into their models.
Which seems a bit like the game is, rather bizarrely, embracing the scientific method of gathering information in the context of fiction.
But, it's actually a whole lot weirder than that.
Because, if you think about it, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge is the root of all evil in Kingdom Hearts. The desire to know what the result of a Keyblade War is drives Master Xehanort to destroy many lives (and risk the deaths of thousands). Curiosity about the source of the darkness of the heart leads to the creation of the Heartless and the destruction of countless worlds. Even the Keyblade War itself was caused by the desire to attain that which should never have been sought after in the first place.
Which makes me start to wonder - Nomura's said in the past that he wanted to create something that fans could discuss and theorize about, but it's still easy to assume that there's still meant to be a "right" answer under all of the confusion that can be reached with enough effort. But, if the series is so antagonistic to the truth in general... might it not be the case that it's intended that we can't (or shouldn't) ever understand it...? And what, exactly, does it mean to imply by having the cause of the most destructive events in the game be essentially the same questions that it leads us to argue over? XD
In one sense, it's a big mess of retcon. There's a blatant disregard for what we've been told in the past, leading to situations like the infamous "fake Ansem" mess that non-fans like to use as an example of something they just don't get.
But, taking a step back from that, you come to a realization - almost everything that's been retconned is something that was told to us by a character, rather than something we saw with our own eyes. But, most of what we know about the metaphysics that the game runs on comes from the characters... So, essentially, every source of information in the game is an unreliable narrator.
Kingdom Hearts, in a sense, has a really tenuous relationship with the truth - it's almost as if it doesn't think it's even possible to obtain the truth, so it just provides us with the characters' own efforts to reach it, warts and all. Even the Secret Reports, the very things that are meant to explain what's really happening, are impossible to take as truth, being written by characters who themselves are struggling to understand the concepts they're trying to explain and changing hypotheses left and right as they're given more exceptions to synthesize into their models.
Which seems a bit like the game is, rather bizarrely, embracing the scientific method of gathering information in the context of fiction.
But, it's actually a whole lot weirder than that.
Because, if you think about it, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge is the root of all evil in Kingdom Hearts. The desire to know what the result of a Keyblade War is drives Master Xehanort to destroy many lives (and risk the deaths of thousands). Curiosity about the source of the darkness of the heart leads to the creation of the Heartless and the destruction of countless worlds. Even the Keyblade War itself was caused by the desire to attain that which should never have been sought after in the first place.
Which makes me start to wonder - Nomura's said in the past that he wanted to create something that fans could discuss and theorize about, but it's still easy to assume that there's still meant to be a "right" answer under all of the confusion that can be reached with enough effort. But, if the series is so antagonistic to the truth in general... might it not be the case that it's intended that we can't (or shouldn't) ever understand it...? And what, exactly, does it mean to imply by having the cause of the most destructive events in the game be essentially the same questions that it leads us to argue over? XD