What are the worlds in KH

[AdrianXXII]

This isn’t really just tied to KH3, but the series as a whole. However the talks about which world can appear made me think of this again.

So over the years i’ve always kind of wondered what the worlds in KH actually were. At first when i was little i believed the worlds were just more or less what we saw, small little places making up their own planet/world. This works really well for the original worlds such as Destiny Island and Traverse Town, but in quite a few of the disney worlds it kind of doesn't hold up so well.

In ones based off of old fairy tales, like Agrabah it’s kind of easy to think the whole world is just Agrabah and the desert around it.
However in worlds like Neverland or Deep Jungle where they show London and make references to all of Afrika. These are all clear signs that the worlds are bigger than just the jungle or the neverland island and more like our own.
The fact that Sora could claim their from a far off ocean and it not seeming odd to Ariel, would also support that the worlds are vaster then one might think at first glance.

On the other hand the fact that Sora, Riku and Kairi thought they could leave their world via ocean, implies that there aren’t other islands or continents in their world. There’s also that Kairi’s bottle somehow ended up in the Realm of Darkness.

My original understanding of the world also always made it hard to imagine how stories set in space or with a space component such as Lilo and Stitch or Treasure Planet could work. Even now I’m not really sure how to view the Lilo and Stitch world Deep Space, was it a spaceship flying through the Ocean between Worlds or did VAT enter another world’s space?

Birth By Sleep really put a lot of thing in question for me, not just with Deep Space, but also with the Cinderella world, Castle of Dreams. I find it interesting that Aqua and Terra entered it normal sized, yet Ven enters the world mouse sized. The same goes for SDG who enter the toy story world the size of toys, despite there being regular people in that world.

These two insidence have lead me to belief that there are probably multiple entrances to a world and depending on which one you take you enter fitting to one of the world's populations, the magical clothes or Donald taking over to make sure Sora and Co. fit in properly.

I'm also starting to think of these worlds less as planets and more as universes/dimensions of their own with the worlds we see in the overview within the Ocean between Worlds just being the parts of them we’re entering.

With this I think it be easier to have one place reappear in two worlds, incase they want to have two movies set in the same city appear in the series at some point.

Still this does make it harder to imagine them all having been one world at one point in time.

In the end this might just be something not meant to be questioned too much, but what do you guys think?

 

[Michael Mario]

The Worlds being dimensions is my line of thinking- being planet-shaped simply being an easy way of representing them on a world map. The fact that there are walls blocking them off from normal travel before Apprentice Xehanort unleashed the Heartless kind of solidified that for me... That being said, not all of them are the same size and are pretty much just as big as they need to be for the plot.

As for Ventus being mouse-sized in Castle of Dreams... There is no explicit explanation for it like there is for SDG appearing in different forms being the result of Donald's magic, but if I had to hazard a guess, the Fairy Godmother did it without Ventus knowing since we see her shrink Aqua down in her story.

 

[Tempo]

it was my belief for a while that since the worlds were once "connected" but then "split apart", kh3 would bring them back together and certain worlds would rejoin with each other. for example, jane and tarzan would be able to return to london (in neverland), and beast's castle would rejoin with castle of dreams and la cite des cloches as they're all in france, perhaps even atlantica could be the ocean of another world like olympus. my biggest dream for kh3 was to see disney film characters interacting with each other and different franchises getting all tangled together.


but after the khux plot point of the worlds the keykids visit being simulations created by the book of prophecies, and the world being destroyed and then rebuilt from the fragments of memories the dandelions had, resulting in the worlds being apart from one another, it's my understanding that each world is literally its own contained world with its own contained fairy tale esque story. there isn't really a clear answer for whether certain worlds actually have more to them than we can see or not, because they're *supposed* to be stories. storybooks. movies. fairy tales. that's how i'm interpreting it, at least.

the citizens of each world might *talk* about other locations on their world that we haven't seen, but until we actually see them and/or go there, there's no reason to believe they actually exist. the characters may simply believe there to be more to their own worlds than what we've seen, because that's what they were created to believe when their world was dreamt up by the children so long ago. they're just following a script. hell, this might even mean the keyblade war didn't even happen a very long time ago. it might have only happened a handful of years before eraqus and xehanort were born, who knows?

maybe worlds gain and lose different locations depending on what the world's "story" necessitates at any given moment. joshua said that Traverse Town is a world that is "as many things as people need it to be". Maybe it's not the only world to behave like that.

 

[Tempo]

oh, and i believe Deep Space is the same as Monstro, in that it's not a legitimate world of its own. It's an entity that travels through the Lanes Between and happens to be large enough to be considered a "world", gameplay-wise. We can presume it came from another world of its own. As for Castle of Dreams, I agree with Michael Mario. I believe Ven entered it pre-shrunk due to the Fairy Godmother's magic, as evidenced by when she does the same thing to Aqua. Ven was right where he needed to be to help Cinderella.

 

[AdrianXXII]

As for Ventus being mouse-sized in Castle of Dreams... There is no explicit explanation for it like there is for SDG appearing in different forms being the result of Donald's magic, but if I had to hazard a guess, the Fairy Godmother did it without Ventus knowing since we see her shrink Aqua down in her story.

Hm.. I guess she could have done that, but I don't see why the Fairy Godmother would want to shrink him down like that, at least not without asking him to help Cinderella directly instead of just hoping he would. Also wouldn't Ven have noticed himself shrinking? If he shrank upon entering the world, he'd probably see stuff getting bigger and the Fairy Godmother's magic isn't exactly unnoticeable, it's a kind of flashy and sparkly type of magic.

Still I can't ruled it out as a possible explenation.

it was my belief for a while that since the worlds were once "connected" but then "split apart", kh3 would bring them back together and certain worlds would rejoin with each other. for example, jane and tarzan would be able to return to london (in neverland), and beast's castle would rejoin with castle of dreams and la cite des cloches as they're all in france, perhaps even atlantica could be the ocean of another world like olympus. my biggest dream for kh3 was to see disney film characters interacting with each other and different franchises getting all tangled together.


but after the khux plot point of the worlds the keykids visit being simulations created by the book of prophecies, and the world being destroyed and then rebuilt from the fragments of memories the dandelions had, resulting in the worlds being apart from one another, it's my understanding that each world is literally its own contained world with its own contained fairy tale esque story. there isn't really a clear answer for whether certain worlds actually have more to them than we can see or not, because they're *supposed* to be stories. storybooks. movies. fairy tales. that's how i'm interpreting it, at least.

the citizens of each world might *talk* about other locations on their world that we haven't seen, but until we actually see them and/or go there, there's no reason to believe they actually exist. the characters may simply believe there to be more to their own worlds than what we've seen, because that's what they were created to believe when their world was dreamt up by the children so long ago. they're just following a script. hell, this might even mean the keyblade war didn't even happen a very long time ago. it might have only happened a handful of years before eraqus and xehanort were born, who knows?

maybe worlds gain and lose different locations depending on what the world's "story" necessitates at any given moment. joshua said that Traverse Town is a world that is "as many things as people need it to be". Maybe it's not the only world to behave like that.

I haven't played X[Chi] too far into it's story yet, but that's a really depressing interpretation of the worlds.

So in this interpretation they're just limited to the small parts of a story that the Dandelions remember and everything else would be fake memories to make sense of the events the Dandelions remember? I feel like this interpretation renders the worlds less vibrant and "full" than their movie counterparts and less like actual worlds and more like sets. Gameplay-wise they are just sets, but story-wise, I always figured, they should be actual worlds and not memories or scripts being played out. It also kind of removes the agency off all the characters, after all some of their memories and world views would just be fake.

This interpretation also raises the question, if England doesn't exist in the Tarzan world, where did Jane come from? Did she just suddenly puff into existence once the story of the world required her to?
Also what does this mean for the worlds flow of time? Would the worlds be trapped in an internal cycle of repeating themselves or would things just unfold more naturally as soon as the story is completed?

Yeah, Joshua did state that about Traverse Town and it wouldn't be hard to imagine that other worlds do adjust to a degree, after all it's been implied they have their own hearts and wills. Still Traverse Town does seem special as it's the home to the people who lost their world or need a home and it was in the realm of sleep at the time so it was probably even more malleable then usual.

Hope I'm not being to harsh, while trying to understand and question your interpretation. I'm just curious as to how these things would work with this interpretation.

oh, and i believe Deep Space is the same as Monstro, in that it's not a legitimate world of its own. It's an entity that travels through the Lanes Between and happens to be large enough to be considered a "world", gameplay-wise. We can presume it came from another world of its own.

I initially though similarly, but at this point in the KH universe no one, but the keyblade wielders and maybe powerful magic users were suppose to be able to travel though the Lanes Between/ Ocean Between Worlds. Also this would indicate that world set in space would take place in the Ocean Between Worlds/Lanes Between, making an adaption of Treasure Planet pretty hard. Still this is very much possible.