The Astral Plane

[Darkspawn]

I’ve been working out this theory about the Astral Plane and the role it plays in the overarching saga. Note that there will be spoilers for the Missing Link beta. I know we don’t to have to spoiler tag the beta contents, but just a heads up. It’s a long one with some set up. Feel free to skip to where my current theory starts or the TL;DR.

Let’s start with some details that Freya explains about the Astral Plane:

• It connects existence and non-existence
• There are “corridors” leading from the city that allow travel to the Astral Plane. Astral Plane travel has replaced use of the lifts around Scala that were previously used to get around, suggesting it is used for traveling even relatively short distances within worlds.
• The corridors connecting to it are called “distortions.” These can also appear randomly and bring along objects, Heartless, or even people.
• It’s a world made up of mental energies. It looks real, but no one lives there and they don’t know much about it.
• The Heartless in ML invade worlds from the Astral Plane. In some of the distortion raids, we fight in the Realm of Darkness, specifically the Forest of Thorns area where Aqua fights Darkside from 0.2. (This could be how they are actually getting to the Astral Plane and then to other worlds.)
• You can find character pieces in the Astral Plane, which are fragments of memories from other worlds. There are pieces based on characters that aren’t living yet like Sora.
• There is a concept called Warp Worlds, which haven’t not been explained but are likely the actual Disney worlds we’ll visit.
• It looks like Scala due to the “layering effect”, so we don’t know what it actually looks like.

Previously, I assumed that the Astral Plane was the Final World. Mainly because on the Yozora fight, we see him change the environment from the Final World to Quadratum. My thinking was this was a version of the layering effect. You also go to the Astral Plane during the Dive to the Heart tutorial and we know that the Station of Awakening is in close proximity to the Final World. There’s also the fact that no one lives in the Astral Plane and it connects existence/non-existence. The FW seems to be the place where Reality and Unreality touch. This could still be the case, but there isn’t really a good explanation I can think of for why the Astral Plane would change from how we see it in ML to the Final World in KH3. Why wouldn’t people be encountering Stars like Sora did? So I started thinking of other options.

Another concept in the series that has been on my mind recently is the corridors of darkness. On the surface, this just seem like a plot device to make it easy for villains to jump into a scene and antagonize our heroes. There was never much need for a deeper explanation. But it caught my attention that there’s a lot of focus on them in Dark Road. Like they are the literal Dark Road. There are a few scenes with Xehanort at various points in his life traveling through the corridors where he talks about their nature and the effects they have on him. Maybe Nomura just wanted a set for Xehanort’s character development, but we also know how he likes to deepen the lore around established concepts like the lifeboat.

Interestingly, in at least one of these scenes where Odin has to save Xehanort and Eraqus, you can see a manifestation of Darkness in the shape of a person observing what is taking place. It makes the whole scene kind of eerie once you notice it. Xehanort also talks about how the darkness whispers to him and he feels the negative emotions that people feel towards him that he hasn’t even met yet. The darkness is also clearly much more volatile in comparison to the Realm of Darkness. Eraqus and Xehanort could barely last a few minutes even with their armor in the corridor plane while Aqua was able to survive a decade.

My first idea regarding the corridors was what if they are somehow the present day state of the cables where the four True Darkness were trapped in the UX finale? Those were passageways between worlds of data just like the corridors connect worlds. The exit of the cable we see in IX also appears to parallel that of the corridors shown in Dark Road:



We also see how the Darknesses start to swarm shown above. After centuries of trying to escape, maybe they had corrupted these passageways to the point of becoming what we see in Dark Road. They no longer have even independent will to escape or possess someone, but they can corrupt. Again, this is very much still on the table as a possibility. But they would need to explain how a cable connecting data worlds somehow connecting physical worlds. Barring an meta twist that everything in the series is actually data, I’m not sure how they explain that.

So that brings us to my current theory. This whole time, I’ve been asking “What is the Astral Plane?” and “What are the corridors of darkness?” But what if these questions are the answer to each other and the Astral Plane is or becomes the titular “Dark Road” we see within the corridors of darkness?

Let’s note some similarities:

• Both realms/planes are accessed via “corridors”. Note that term isn’t really used elsewhere. Normally, we travel using the Lanes Between or Gummi space which are both distinct concepts.
• Both allow travel between worlds or short distances. (Xehanort describes the corridors as bridges connecting every world.)
• Both contain emotions, memories, or mental energies from across time. (Xehanort even says the corridors are not meant to be traversed by the living, but by spirits and emotions.)
• While one is to a much greater extreme, both contain darkness and can be traversed by Heartless to reach worlds.
• Corridors of darkness can appear spontaneously like distortions.

So it seems these two planes have very similar qualities and functions. The only thing we don’t see with the corridors of darkness is travel to future worlds, which seems to be possible with the Astral Plane but isn’t outright confirmed. The Forest of Thorns appearing in the Realm of Darkness seems to suggest this, but could also be an oversight in the asset flip. With the Astral Plane, we don’t know if it can access data or sleeping worlds like corridors of darkness can, but it would make sense conceptually that it would be able to.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the Secret Ansem Reports from KH2 that talks about how corridors of darkness can appear spontaneously in the Realm Between and that this is how Sora got to Traverse Town. Notably, Player seems to end up in Scala in a similar way via the distortions.

This "realm between" is quite unstable with corridors of darkness appearing from time to time. Whenever a world disappears, some of its inhabitants must arrive through these corridors. Surely Sora traveled these same corridors of darkness when he first came to Traverse Town

It’s also worth noting that, due to the layering effect, we don’t know what the Astral Plane really looks like. What if this is covering up a huge secret that the Astral Plane is actually a darkness-infested hellscape so Keyblade wielders will be willing to go in and fight off the darkness? I think that will probably be the big twist. But the other option is we will see the Astral Plane overrun with darkness by the end of ML. That will leave it in the state we see within the CoDs in Dark Road.

I should also mention that the dark plane is where MoM finds and saves Xehanort the first time. He dodges the question when asked what he was doing there. But if the plane connects existence and non-existence the same way the Astral Plane does, maybe he has been using it to get back and forth from Quadratum or it ties into his plans some other way. This could also be why Xehanort is familiar with Unreality, seemingly. Maybe one of our characters in present day will figure out a way to use the corridors to get to Quadratum?

TL;DR: The Astral Plane is actually what we see in Dark Road as the literal “Dark Road” within the corridors of darkness. Either the layering effect is hiding this fact in ML or it will be transformed by the end of the game to become what we see it as in Dark Road.