I keep wondering about why the realms split. Like.... going by the lore we know the RoD, RoI, and RoL didn’t exist when the world was one but instead came about after the world was reorganized. But does that really make sense? Like okay the world was destroyed but why did another realm separated by like an magical invisible dimension barrier appear with an ornate man made looking door being it’s only natural exit or entrance?
So like this little idea keeps popping up where I wonder if the realm of darkness is actually the original world. Covered in darkness by the war, the broken bits of land that used to connect the worlds still there, kingdom hearts still being there after it was called by the war, teeming with heartless perhaps born from the many people who were swallowed by the dark, etc...
So the realm of light could be the world of the dandelions. That after their datascape was destroyed they remade it from the book creating a self regenerating world system using the lux they gathered. Which going by DR seems at least partially right that the world and its people facsimiles as you explore some of the worlds where the location has been restored but not the people.
While in between worlds exist on the border of the original world and the dandelion’s world acting as connecting points. Daybreak Town which was destroyed by the war and then rebuilt into Scala being one of those locations.
Which would mean the realm of light is just the second world and all its contents except places like Scala or just recreations with lux and data. While realm of darkness is what is left of the original world. But that would mean the reality we know of didn’t really start out any different from the coded datascape. All the places, the people, etc... they were all fake and then they grew hearts of their own. Becoming real over time and then propagated/new beings were born in this datascape of sorts that didn’t exist in the original world at all like Xehanort and Sora. I.E. it be like if coded’s datascape kept going off screen and data Sora grew up and had a kid with Data Selphie who also grew up. Their data kid would be a brand new real life not from this world at all.
Time travel then wouldn’t actually be time travel if you think about it. It would just be characters who have access to the earlier data logs of the world jumping back to an earlier version of the world’s coding. Like essentially it just be diving in the world’s cache being able to see the records of what used to look like. While future... well if the whole world is actually some kind of system that is producing things based on an algorithm then to an extent everything would be somewhat predetermined. Because the system running is what creates everything and even RNG is often not actually random, it can usually be manipulated. Like in Pokémon the egg you get from breeding is predetermined by the system, and knowing that it means the future for that egg is set. But if you understand how other things effect the RNG you can manipulate to control your egg to an extent and change the outcome to what you want which is how the shiny egg breeding trick worked.
So like if you think of the world of KH being like that everything makes a lot of sense. Time travel is just diving an earlier version of the world and just like messing with the cache doesn’t mess with the modern day site messing with the past doesn’t change time. But if you were to reload the world and brought with you knowledge of how the system worked, rather than simply jump into its past recorded data.... well then just like reloading in Pokémon you could then manipulate events and actually alter the outcome essentially erasing and replacing the future. Which maybe that is what Sora did he reloaded the world, an earlier save state if you will rather than simply travel time. He saw his egg would be shiny magikarp (darkness prevails) but he wanted a shiny eevee (light prevails) so after he reset he altered the way he did things, this manipulated the rng to create a new outcome where he got what he wanted. Then you know maybe that’s why Sora got erased not as punishment but like it was the system cleaning up loose ends, he was a left over from a previous save and he got taken out so his leftover data wasn’t messing with the system’s current save.
Which would mean the realm of light as we know it isn’t really “real” in the traditional sense though it’s real in all the ways that matter, though it would make you think a second then about how the series opens up with Sora wondering if anything in his world is real. Still then it gets me thinking about how Yozora exists and how his world in unreality or fictional. Well going by the computer system RNG idea... perhaps the system that creates the world runs calculations based on events but that there isn’t just one outcome. Rather there are lots perhaps infinite ways the system could grow and develop, but in the end only one way things will actually go.
Using a video game for example KH3 is coded with lots of keyblades to earn right? But some are optional, they exist in the coding but you aren’t guaranteed to ever obtain them. You could play your entire game and never get ultima weapon. But just because you never got it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it’s there in the game code all ready made. So maybe Yozora’s fictional world is like that. It’s something that was inside the system’s coding as a potential thing that could exist if all the right conditions and events were triggered. But either they haven’t happened yet or they didn’t happen, ultimate it stayed stored away in the code as a possibility while the world we know of “reality” is the actual game file that occurred.
Yet in this reality where data is real, where you can go inside the system and code...that possibility still exists. Inaccessible and cut off from the main game. It’s data storage for things the system could create, but it’s a physical location to that you could potentially travel to. And so maybe that explains why Sora ends up there. Because that’s where Sora belongs, after he comes from a possible reality in which darkness prevailed, but that’s not how things ended up going so the world transfers Sora into its data storage where it places all the stuff that “could” exist. Our Sora is now a thing that only “could” exist so that’s where the system recognized and put him.
Which means maybe there is this data storage, this reality, of all kinds of the “possible” realties mishmashed into one location. A place where everything that could happen is stored. If so it be a world practically unimaginable. It could be anything, Yozora could be for all we know some form of Riku that was born somewhere else instead of Destiny Islands. Born to different parents or a different place or whatever. Like Riku said in KH1, how he wonders why they ended up being born on DI and if they couldn’t have just ended up existing somewhere else. extreme example I know but it’s just to get the idea across. Of course this would mean Quadratum is extra meta. Why? Because I would then bet anything Quadratum is FF VSXIII. Or rather FF XV is “reality” while the game nomura wanted to create ended up being “fictional” as it just exists inside his head. But in this scenario he can imagine a version of it still exists somewhere else.
Which means maybe Darkness is like a computer virus. It’s not part of the system that built and ran this world but it snuck in and never left. Like a computer virus it infects programs, corrupting them, changing them into something harmful and damaging. Maybe that’s what happened with Xehanort he was a program that got infected and corrupted. At the end of the game we managed to reload him back to last save state before he was corrupted, thus him turning into his Scala child self.
Speaking of Xehanort he is getting memories from the player which makes no sense. But it actually works really well in this theory because with the idea that everything is stored as data all you would need to do is create a link between the player’s data and YX’s. The through that link the data of the player’s memories becomes accessible to YX. Would be somewhat meta then seeing as DR was created as linked game to UX using our same profile information. This reverse could also be true as well the link might let the player access future data and thus why they were able to have a vague dream of the battle of 7 lights and 13 darknesses from KH3...at least I think it was KH3, accessing Xehanort's data.
Then you think about other oddities to like how Maliefcent could time travel into a digital version of herself that existed hundreds of years ago in another reality. But if this reality is actually just the dandelion’s recreated datascape and timee travel works like I said then it makes a lot of sense. Because the digital Maleficent from UX would be in this world’s cache, it’s part of ITS past not another reality, and Maleficent just mistakenly loaded into Maleficent_UX.exe instead of Maleficent_BBS.exe.
Ephemer and the dandelions helping out? Could be that Ephemer was literally pausing the computer program to speak to Sora. The dandelions helping being a program that Ephemer activated from the outside. Perhaps that’s why Ephemer hasn’t aged because in reality not much time passed outside. So like you could picture him sitting outside a computer watching everything happen on screen and he's looking at a later part of the program, since in a video game world time doesn't truly exist that's why we can replace the same period of time again and again, and he sees Sora needs help and is able to actually interact and run the program to help them.
Perhaps that explains what happened with Sora in KH3’s end. We definitely saw him lose to MX and yet then suddenly he didn’t. Either Sora hallucinated something fierce or perhaps like his coded counterpart Sora was rising above the system. His heart let him take control and reload the save file from within the game giving him a second chance.
Maybe that’s why Nomura was on such a computer kick post-KH2. Wanting his games to have computer based acronyms like BBS being bulletin board system.
But like I said it’s too crazy for me to entertain as truth.
Spoiler Show