The theory to end all theories

[drumstickwielder]

Recently I’ve been watching Everglow’s rather fantastic Kingdom Hearts Timeline, which puts the events of the entire series in chronological order. If nothing else, it gives a better idea of what’s going on in KH x/unchained/Union x and makes a lot of the series more cinematic. After watching this and considering many pieces of evidence, I’ve come up with what I think encompasses the entire saga and gives a hint as to how KHIII might be ending. Putting this in spoilers just in case.

For starters, one of the big questions I have going into KHIII is how the thirteen Xehanorts exist there. From my understanding, they only showed up in DDD because time travel was involved, but time travel only takes place in dreams. And most of the Kingdom Hearts games have been in the “real world”, right? Very peculiar.

So from this it stands to reason that the “real world” of Kingdom Hearts must be a dream. Or in other words, the entire series has always been a dream.
Now, before you begin hurling things at your computer and rushing to your keyboard to spew vulgarities at me, here’s a few pieces of evidence to support this.

The intro cinematic to the first game, that we all know and love, is fairly surreal and very dream-like. The dialogue or words on screen talk about dreams (“like is any of this for real, or not”, “a scattered dream that’s like a far-off memory, a far-off memory that’s like a scattered dream”, etc...). Admittedly, this is a very strange start to the series and to this day it still doesn’t make much sense besides having some metaphors for the events of the first game. I believe it's meant to be our big clue at what's going on without giving it away too early.

A few more pieces of evidence: the appearance of the brown cloaked figure in the first game and Mysterious Figure (Young Xehanort) in BBS. The brown cloaked figure was revealed in DDD to be Xehanort’s time traveling self. And Young Xehanort must be time traveling to appear at Land of Departure. Factoring in the appearance of the 13 Xehanorts in KHIII, all of these characters' appearance in reality can only be explained by the fact that the "World" is a dream.

Now that we are armed with this piece of knowledge, the question arises, “what”, exactly, is having this dream.

And my answer is: the true World.

Xehanort’s goal is to ignite another Keyblade war. In doing so, he can rewrite all of reality and see what’s “on the other side”. This is the condensed version of the things he talks about in the BBS secret reports.


If one keyblade war rewrote all of reality, surely the original one did the same?

What exactly am I getting at? Before we go there, one last piece of evidence: Kingdom Heart’s creation story.

Long ago, people lived in peace, bathed in the warmth of light. Everyone loved the light. Then people began to fight over it. They wanted to keep it for themselves. And darkness was born in their hearts. The darkness spread, swallowing the light and many people's hearts. It covered everything, and the world disappeared. But small fragments of light survived... in the hearts of children. With these fragments of light, children rebuilt the lost world. It's the world we live in now. But the true light sleeps deep within the darkness. That's why the worlds are still scattered, divided from each other. But someday, a door to the innermost darkness will open. And the true light will return. So listen, child. Even in the deepest darkness, there will always be a light to guide you. Believe in the light, and the darkness will never defeat you. Your heart will shine with its power and push the darkness away.

So, here’s the premise of the entire series. The World used to be one big happy place, unseparated and full of light. The keyblade war happened, and the World essentially died, or in KH terms, went to sleep. The whole “children rebuilt the world” thing didn’t take place in reality. It took place is the World’s dream. This dream is what we consider Kingdom Heart’s main reality, the one we just assumed was the real world all of these years. So, going off of Xehanort’s master plan and what I put in bold above, KHIII will have one of two endings. The “world” gets destroyed, and we get another dream reality, OR our heroes find the way to the innermost darkness, and restore the true World as it once was. Personally I'm hoping for the happy ending.

Feel free to poke holes in my theory, I love talking about this stuff.

 

[JustSnilloc]

While this is certainly interesting, the entire theory seems to be built upon a misunderstanding. Time travel has only ever happened in the real worlds, not at all in the sleeping ones.

 

[Nayru's Love]

I agree with Snills. I think there is incredible merit to the idea of the Realm of Light being merely a sleeping realm beneath the "one true realm." I would even go so far as to imagine the Realm of Light somewhere in between sleep and waking, similar to TWTNW in DDD.

Granted, I don't quite agree with your reasoning. Snilloc already addressed the issue with time travel; it can happen irrelevant of the realm, as we see in DDD and KH3. What the Xehanorts had issues with in the beginning was intercepting Sora's dreams. As for KH1's opening, I would sooner relate that to artistic freedom at the time of development, as the development team clearly had no idea of the eventual scope of the series.

With that said, the theory itself does pose some interesting thoughts, such as the possible similarities between the Realm of Sleep/Light relationship and the Realm of Light/True World relationship. I'd say it's worth exploring more.