Gone for a few days and there's a shipping thread because there was contention about LeaIsa and Skuld--erm, Subject X. Of course Axel/Lea won't be as invested in a character that he had no idea he cared about -- she didn't exist. It was retconned in the most random way in KHIII. Guess Nomura thinks it's ingenious to keep doing that.
As for the answer, I don't care for SoRiku
or SoKai, they both don't do anything for me. So I just sit back and observe the discourse. Feels like I'm back in 2005. Do I believe SoKai is the intended romantic pairing and practically canon? Yes. Do I have to like them together? No. Do I think they've been lazily handled? In some respects. Do I hate them for it? No. It's just what it is.
I like the set up with Roxas and Naminè, and that they bonded over their similar, inevitable fates and found solace in each other because of that. She's also the one that treated Roxas as an equal and a person with agency enough to handle the answer he sought out, despite the possible averse reaction to it. Which Axel and Xion didn't do.
Do I think Nomura is capable of doing justice to the ship and build up from that basis in KHII? I wish I could say yes.
I'll just stick with Gula/Ava. Now
that was eyebrow raising. I mean...
If this is Nomura's idea of "friendship", then hell, let them be "friendly". I can't pull that stunt with any of my close guy friends without it looking like something else.
Where? If anything, she looked like she wanted to be hot in Axel's pants.
Been preaching this since forever. Always hated trios for this reason and it only caused nothing but detriments in interrelationships with characters. They are cliques, and never should have been a thing in the first place. You can tell by KHIII. Literally no one cared for or thought about/interacted with characters outside their trinity (if they did, it was shallow and quick with no payoff, like Roxas and Naminè, or Roxas and HPO, or Kairi and Naminè, or Roxas and Ventus...shit, did Roxas care about
anyone else or talked to any of the hero cast other than AX and Sora? The answer is no). It's like they didn't exist. You got Kairi being offed, and nothing is shown with anyone, even the supposed friendship that Axel had with her. Riku was angry for a total of five seconds. Mickey less, but did they ever even talk? This was obviously a point of contention with fans since Re: Mind tried to fix it in the cheapest, last minute damage control way possible by having quips between characters in a battle. Yet still persists to keep things the same outside of it with the same lack of giving a damn about anyone else that's not in their black hole trio.
So we get this supposed big, nakama ending where everyone is happy at the beach and no one cares about their previous issues (because it's water under a bridge), let alone see it addressed, and I think the intention was for me to feel something fuzzy but it came off empty when these characters didn't give a crap about each other literally an hour beforehand.
And yeah, this might be fixed in the future, but how are you going to convince anyone about any of the relationships when you had these characters act unbothered to such triggering situations in a previous game and somehow we have to buy that they always cared? It created dissonance in my opinion. No one even commented on the fact that with Kairi's Heart in pieces, Naminè RIPed with her, but who the fuck is Naminè right. How I am supposed to believe she'll be vibing with
any of these characters after this. Why would
she even want to.
Watch the next game though:
"I'm so happy living my life in this town with the friends that gave fuck all about me when I was gone and didn't notice I got murked but whatever, teehee, look how great friends we are, don't think too much about this horrible writing, you audience, you".
And people think Kairi is treated badly.
I still don't.
