The Unpopular Opinions Thread

[Guernsey]

I remember how on a poster on Reddit made a point that we were supposed to question what the mentors say about well...everything. I think we took them all at face value and I think we just wanted to see what we wanted to seer,

 

[Zackarix]

I remember how on a poster on Reddit made a point that we were supposed to question what the mentors say about well...everything. I think we took them all at face value and I think we just wanted to see what we wanted to seer,

I see variations on this all the time when talking about KH's story. "Kingdom Hearts isn't full of retcons at all, just characters who are capable of lying, being wrong, or having amnesia!" I gotta say, I don't agree.

For example, one of the big "mentors bad" moments was in KH2, when the mentors said that Nobodies weren't real and didn't have hearts. As it turns out Nobodies do have hearts, so clearly this was intended as an example of showing that mentors can fail and mislead, right?

Well no. I think that writing emotionless characters was hard and fans were horrified by Roxas's fate, so the direction of the story was changed and the lore was altered to make it happen, making the mentors wrong retroactively. But at the time of writing they were supposed to be correct, which is why the ending of KH2 was so conclusive and happy.

It would be one thing if it was just Ansem the Wise who was wrong, but Mickey Mouse and Yen Sid back him up. And these three characters are still treated as trusted mentor figures! If we're supposed to be questioning them the characters shouldn't still be viewing them as the authorities.

The only mentor that I think we were supposed to question was Eraqus, and even he's not supposed to be as bad as fans make him out to be.

 

[Guernsey]

It just makes me wonder how much was planned and how much was made up?

 

[Phoenix]

That's the thing, I don't think there's a message there. Nomura legitimately changes the lore and themes of the games as he goes on.

That's why there's such a big focus on THE Keyblade in 1, and that becomes laughable really quick. Or why it's such a big deal that Riku uses the darkness in CoM, but that kinda becomes an afterthought later.

The reason Mickey doesn't talk about Aqua is because Aqua didn't exist as a character concept yet. It's a boring answer, but there it is.

 

[Chie]

It just makes me wonder how much was planned and how much was made up?

If you've ever done serial storytelling, you'll know that this is an unanswerable question, despite how many people fixate on it.

When you write a story that continues on for an indefinite amount of time, you are both thinking ahead and improvising at the same time. You can't plan everything out perfectly, because plans will change based on the real-world circumstances of creating the work; on the other hand, you are always thinking towards the future and building an idea of the bigger picture in the back of your head, even if it isn't set in stone until you write it into the game.

Take Xigbar for example. Nomura, from at least as early as 2FM, was writing Xigbar as someone who knew more than he let on and had a greater importance. Obviously it would be impossible for Nomura to know from the beginning that Xigbar was Luxu, because he wouldn't introduce Luxu + MoM for many years. But is that reveal really "made up", if the idea had always been for Xigbar to serve a greater purpose in the narrative? Perhaps Nomura did have a vague idea of what kind of purpose that was, but didn't iron out the details until later; but continued to write the story as leading towards something bigger regardless.

Again, this is how it always goes with writing like this. We can't separate things into "planned" or "unplanned", it's all one big thing known as creation. Sometimes, even, the story will surprise the writer, and things will accidentally connect in ways the writer didn't intend but that make complete sense.

 

[MATGSY]

If you've ever done serial storytelling, you'll know that this is an unanswerable question, despite how many people fixate on it.

When you write a story that continues on for an indefinite amount of time, you are both thinking ahead and improvising at the same time. You can't plan everything out perfectly, because plans will change based on the real-world circumstances of creating the work; on the other hand, you are always thinking towards the future and building an idea of the bigger picture in the back of your head, even if it isn't set in stone until you write it into the game.

My favorite example of this is probably Beast Wars. At the outset, the show wasn't intended to be a continuation of the original transformers cartoon. However as early as the first episode, the writers were planting seeds for possible future story developments, with each seed being able to grow more than 1 way.

1 such seed was the "Great War", mentioned in passing a couple of times but not elaborated on any further until the 2nd season. As the show was meant to be standalone, the great war was just some prior conflict between the maximals & predacons (the show's main factions). However fans on usenet groups speculated if it was referring to the war between autobots & decepticons from the original G1 show. The writers, upon reading these posts, basically went "eh, why not?" & went ahead with the fan theory. The result was Beast Wars got a hell of a lot more epic in its scope & elevated both itself & G1 in reverence.

Of course, it was still nonetheless a retcon that comes with a few notable hangups. The BW version of Megatron went from being the predacon the most obsessed with gathering energon in S1 to claiming the energon motive was merely a ruse to recruit a crew for his true goals. For that matter, "BW version of Megatron" was another continuity snag, there were multiple characters that shared names with G1 characters without any explanation. Makes sense in a reboot, not so much in a sequel series. & this one didn't get any real in-universe explanation either.

But because the writing was so damn good at this point, fans were more than willing to roll with the weirdness & embrace the retcon that defined BW.