Kingdom Hearts

And she did keep those memories, too. She even permanently deleted them from Jiminy's Journal. Everything else could be recovered from its psychometric Trash Bin, but she nuked Deep Jungle with extreme prejudice.

Critical Mode arrives tomorrow!

And just before I hope to beat Sekiro’s last boss.

I definitely will be interested in seeing how different critical mode is.

INTERMISSION

When last we left Team Sorcerer, Lea was offering to do a thing (probably go help Sora and Riku in the Sleeping Worlds) and Yen Sid had accepted, under the logic that trusting Axel of all people was exactly the kind of stupid idea they needed to break free from Xehanort's twelve-moves-ahead design. Xehanort had planned for every good idea they might come up with, so they needed to do something too stupid for him to have considered.

And, in this case, that something manifested in the form of going, "Yes, dangerously unreliable person who has frequently been opposed to us, abducted and endangered Kairi, and has at some point betrayed every single person who has ever trusted you in your entire life. I foolishly and recklessly accept your offer of help. Please pay no mind to the bullseye clearly printed upon my back."

Yen Sid has provided Lea with a Keyblade and the Three Faeries have whisked him away to teach him how to wield it. Not clear whether Flame Liberator was provided to him from Yen Sid or forged from his Heart. Either way, this is actually very different from what I thought I remembered.

I misremembered Lea as just showing up with Flame Liberator, but no. He was selected the normal way. It's still not entirely clear if Yen Sid is himself a Keyblade Master (I'm erring towards yes) but even if he's not, that just means Mickey performed the Inheritance Ceremony for Lea. Then either they forged his Keyblade if that's a thing they can do or they passed a Keyblade along to him.

Either way, this is a lot more standard than I thought Lea's ascension was. Honestly, of all the Keyblade Wielders post-BBS, Lea's the most normal of the lot. He's even receiving formal training as we speak in some kind of time bubble; the same time bubble we'll later see Kairi training in too.

So Mickey's like, "Okay, cool, but how does this help us find Sora and Riku?"

Yen Sid explains that in order for Xehanort to have slipped into the Sleeping Worlds with Sora and Riku, he would need to have planned this all out so far in advance taking their time travel into account that he managed to arrive in person, nine years after Terranort split into Xemnas and Ansem, at the exact moment they got there.

He needed to be standing on that beach waiting for them for the five minutes they were present on Destiny Islands a year before they left to go to Destiny Islands.

Mickey asks, "Wow, is Xehanort really brilliant enough to have predicted all of this so masterfully?"

And Yen Sid replies, "No. That is the stupidest f*cking thing I have ever heard, and I'm the one who proposed it. I only brought it up to point out how impossible it is. We must now work towards finding an explanation that is less f*ckstupid than Xehanort just somehow knowing every single action we would take years before he even knew this conflict would exist."

And then Goofy's just like, "Time travel."

And Yen Sid's all, "Come again?"

And Goofy's like, "You casually invoked time travel at the start of this story and then just wanked off about predictions and manipulations like that wasn't a thing. We sent Sora and Riku back in time and I still don't have the first clue how we did that. You keep saying Xehanort's all smart and stuff. Why are we all just dismissing the idea that he knows how to casually stick his dick in the timeline too?"

And Yen Sid's like, "Huh. You are a lot smarter than you look."

And Mickey's like, "Yeah, that's Goofy. We're all kinda weirded out by it." And Goofy just stands there picking his nose and being smarter than the rest of this room combined.

So Yen Sid's like, "Hmm. For Xehanort's dick to enter the timeline, there would need to be another version of him present on Destiny Islands to receive it. But what version of Xehanort could have been there to receive his dick?"

And Mickey's like, "Well, it's NOT Fake Ansem, that's for sure. He didn't have a body to possess in the first—HOLY POO ON A PLUTO, Fake Ansem didn't have a body! Do you think he could have traveled through time at some point?!"

And Yen Sid's like, "That's not particularly relevant to this conversation. Fake Ansem not having a body would indicate that he's a time-dick provider, not a time-dick receiver. However, it is certainly alarming. There is, indeed, a ludicrous amount of feces on your dog right now, blessed by holy spirits."

And my mind is blown because they seem to be implying that Fake Ansem, despite his total ignorance about all things Xehanort, took advantage of his incorporeal state to travel through time. I vaguely recall Blanket Hobo meeting Baby Nort but I thought I might just be misremembering or misinterpreting that. So many questions about this.

So Mickey's like, "Circling back to how Lea offered to help Sora and Riku and you banished him to the Tutorial Dimension instead, what if I just go help them myself?"

And Yen Sid's like, "What. How."

So Mickey's like, "Well, I mean, they aren't going to be in the Sleeping Worlds forever. If Xehanort's doing some horrible thing to them, eventually he'll leave the Sleep Bubble. If he didn't and decided to just stay in there for the rest of his life, why, we wouldn't really have a problem, would we?"

And Yen Sid's like, "Mmm, fair point. I had failed to consider that Xehanort will want to return to existing for realsies at some point."

And Mickey's all, "So I'll just be standing there, ready to gank him in the ribs as soon as he emerges!"

And Yen Sid's all, "Okay. How are you going to know the right place?"

And Mickey's like, "By trusting my heart! That kind of thing always works! Also, it's the Keyblade Graveyard. You know it's the Keyblade Graveyard. It's always the Keyblade Graveyard. Well, either that or Nobody HQ, anyways. Either way, it's not like we're going to have this dramatic showdown in Beast's royal toilet or something. There aren't really as many options as you think there are."

And Yen Sid's just like, "Mrph." This is not a good day for Yen Sid. Everyone's showing him up. The only thing keeping him from being the dumbest person in the room right now is that Donald's barely said two words. The only thing he really contributed was the idea that by his own admission was too stupid to even consider for more than five seconds.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 22nd 2019 at 10:49:48 AM

I just realised why Ansem practically dropped the entire plan he had built up.

Because he had to wait on that teeny tiny island for DECADES, the same island young him compared to a prison, and he knows that until the moment he can meet up with time travelling Sora and Riku he's doing absolutely fuck all besides being creepy.

Being fucked over that hard by the plan, while past-you's growing old and researching the world and generally not being in a prison, he probably slowly came to resent the plan (despite technically being the one who came up with it), and eventually went "fuck it, I'm going to get Kingdom Hearts for myself."

...I don't think the time dick statement was necessary.

Though it does make the post stand out I'll admit.

So Sora arrives at The World That Never Was and he immediately gets that he's been had. He sees the big tower that the Nobodies used as a base and is like, "What. No. Do not EVEN with this shit. The World That Desperately Needs A Nickname did NOT fall to Darkness in KHI. I was here like three months ago! It was fine!"

"ALSO I CAN MATH", he points out, continuing his entirely justified tantrum over how the plot is shaking out. "Traverse Town. Notre Dame. Tron: Legacy. Pinocchio. Traverse Town again for some reason! Three Musketeers. Fantasia. That's SEVEN SLEEPING KEYHOLES. If you count Riku doing all this alongside me, that makes fourteen! WE'RE AT 200% COMPLETION ON THIS SHIT. Don't you goddamn @ me, Nocity!"

But Luxu, who I'm no longer spoiler-texting because the game's been out long enough that we've been openly discussing his identity in this thread in recent weeks, @'s him anyway.

So Luxu starts explaining the plot to Sora and I'm trying to follow along with this. Sora and Riku were able to leave their bodies in the present and send their dicks through time because Destiny Islands Sora and Riku, way back at the start of the game, were available to act as time-dick receptacles. So when we saw them take the raft, those were Sora and Riku's past bodies being puppeted around by their future selves?

When did their past selves have time to do that?! Obviously not after Riku was pulled into the Realm of Darkness and Sora accidentally forged Riku's Keyblade. But that happened immediately after Sora arrived at the island.

Unless he's saying that you can take your body back in time as long as a past version of you exists there. Then it makes sense that Sora and Riku were physically present on the beach and took the raft out.

Or maybe this happened after Sora received Kairi's Heart? If Sora and Riku bodyjacked themselves then, Riku could have just used his expertise to drag his past self's stupid ass out of the Darkness quicksand. Then he and Sora took their bodies out to sea. Their Hearts descended into the Sleeping Worlds while their dumbf*ck bodies were unceremoniously dumped into space, to arrive at Traverse Town and Hollow Bastion respectively.

I don't know. This one plot point is very confusing.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 22nd 2019 at 11:17:07 AM

KH 3 fixed this plot-hole (which I must commend you for working a solution without the retcon!) by just straight up saying that Merlin can ignore the standard rules for time travel, which also happens to resolve the minor plot-hole involving the previous time travel incident.

We've seen how Merlin does it, he just poofs a door into existence and you literally travel into the past. It even changed how Sora looks so there's some justification towards the duo looking like their KH 1 selves rather than their KH 2 selves. Besides, "a Merlin did it" is good enough for me!

Edited by Numbuh1234 on Apr 22nd 2019 at 10:23:46 AM

It's frankly a half-ass answer since it's never explained why he can ignore the rules. Just that he does.

From what I've seen on Kingdom Hearts Encyclopedia on the Web, that is the explanation.

I mean, they arrived in the Sleeping version of Destiny Islands, right? So I think they body-jacked the dream versions of themselves, which are real enough to serve as vessels but not real enough to be beholden to the established timeline. Like how Maleficent was able to take active control of the Data version of herself in KHUX.

Edited by Gilphon on Apr 22nd 2019 at 1:33:07 PM

Merlin, and also Pete apparently.

I wouldn't call it "fixing" the plot-hole so much as just brushing it off with a Hand Wave. "Oh, we have these super-convoluted and limiting rules for time travel... that you can opt to not follow if you happen to be the right person."

I mean, as long as we're talking about weird time-travel bullshit, what the heck is the deal with Young Xehanort? Like, what body is he using when he shows up in BBS?

Like, he seems to get the idea of using Replicas from the Toy Story world, which implies that that's not what he's doing, and even if he was, there definitely weren't any Replicas hanging around a good decade before Vexen was even a thing.

...His own?

No, they arrived in the awoken version of Destiny Islands as it was plunging into Darkness. That was the plan: they rode Destiny Islands into the Realm of Sleep, then lingered in sleep until the present and began their journey through the Sleeping Worlds that failed to awaken after Fake Ansem was defeated.

I 100% believe that Pete's time-dick is bigger than Xehanort's.

I mean, they're brushing it off with a plot point that had been previously established and overlooked.

In essence, the time travel rules were themselves a plot hole 'cause of Timeless River, so when the time travel rules had their own plot hole, Nomura referenced the original plot hole as the solution.

It's not so much a retcon as it is reasserting the bit of continuity that was forgotten when writing the rules in the first place, which conveniently fixes the problem the rules created.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 22nd 2019 at 11:41:12 AM

Do you mean that he was able to take his body forward in time, despite none of the other Norts managing to do that, or do you mean that he landed in MX's recently vacated 80-year body which then rapidly unaged to match the younger heart?

Because, like, I'm not going to dismiss either of those possibilities out of hand, but I feel like they both raise questions that I don't have immediate answers to.

Ah, fair enough. I misremembered.

Edited by Gilphon on Apr 22nd 2019 at 1:45:33 PM

Oh, good, it's not just me. I remembered them saying Merlin could do it, but thought I'd just misremembered that since it's not at all what DDD is suggesting. Good to hear.

Okay, so. Ignoring the datapoint of Sora and Riku's journey flagrantly violating the rules set up here because it's been formally acknowledged by KHIII as a cock-up.

Luxu goes on to explain to Sora that Fake Ansem, in his guise as Blanket Hobo, was on Destiny Islands because he was waiting for Future Sora and Riku to arrive, whereupon he could hijack their descent into the Sleeping Worlds. This is somewhat at odds with the Ansem Report, which indicated that he was there to find the Keyblade.

But not entirely. Fake Ansem stopped writing the Ansem Report before he actually left Radiant Garden. He came up with the plan to send Kairi into space, but the rest of his reports are just wanking on the experience of being a bodiless Heart that fails to develop a Heartless form, wanking off about Darkness, and postulating the possibility that Nobodies may be a thing.

There are ten years of undefined history between Fake Ansem leaving Radiant Garden and Riku opening the Door to Darkness. There's plenty of room for him to have been doing other shit in that time period. The biggest point of contention with this plot point is just the idea that Fake Ansem, the stupidest member of Team Nort, the guy with the thinnest possible comprehension of Xehanort's philosophy, was "in" on some master game-plan from the beginning.

I remind you that Fake Ansem is exceptional among the Norts for not pursuing some ideal of Light/Dark balance but instead believing, "ALL THINGS ARE TRULY DARKNESS!!! DARKNESS FOREVER!!! BURY THE LIGHT!!!". He took that ideology to his grave. Nobody ever corrected him, which you'd think would come up if he was palling around with the other Norts.

Fake Ansem was basically winging it with the research that all the other Norts had completed. He was building a wild ideology from a Bachelor course in shit his counterparts all had PHDs in. It's weird to think that he had any contact with other Norts and was still so blindly, magnificently, unconscionably wrong about the basic assumptions required to make his plan work.

I don't know. I'm still working on how to incorporate this into my understanding of the series. Let's see what else dickface has to say.

I mean, that's not really any kind of explanation. If the plot-hole is : "Why can Merlin (and Pete) ignore all these time travel rules that Xehanort has to follow?", then KHIII doesn't offer an answer other than "Because he just can." When Repliku references the inconsistency in KHIII it's almost more of a Lampshade Hanging of it rather than a proper attempt to explain it. Acknowledging that something doesn't make sense isn't the same thing as explaining it.

Edited by DrDougsh on Apr 22nd 2019 at 10:53:26 AM

Here is my very limited understanding of time travel in Kingdom Hearts: you can go (in your own body) backwards and forwards in time if there's a version of you there. Is that not how Sora and Riku and Young Xehanort came back in time to the island as it was collapsing into darkness? Because Past Riku, Past Sora, and Ansem the Heartless were there?

And I guess Heartless count as a version of yourself for time travel purposes?

Maybe they wouldn't really converse with him much and only told him what he's supposed to be doing and nothing else?

Edited by fredhot16 on Apr 22nd 2019 at 11:08:29 AM

You have to leave your body behind to time travel. This is an explicit rule laid out for it. If you time travel (without some Merlin trick/Pete wishing hard enough), your body is left behind.

I do not know how anyone managed to have bodies in 3D with the exception of Sora & Riku, and even that's only because of KH 3. Unless Sora and Riku's journey in the Sleeping Worlds happened AFTER all of the real world stuff, and they got Vexen to make replica bodies in preparation for Sora and Riku's journey, but that doesn't work either because Yen Sid not being able to track Sora and Riku sounds like it should be happening as they speak, so... I don't know.

Oh.

I did not know that.

Edited by fredhot16 on Apr 22nd 2019 at 11:15:25 AM

Mhm. In KHIII, Ansem, Xemnas, Xion and Dark Riku were all left their bodies behind in the past and landed in Replica bodies that MX had ready for that exact purpose- they probably had Vexen make a new body for Xion, and used leftovers from the initial batch for the other three, which also explains how Ansem and Xemnas had bodies in DDD. Vanitas might've done the same thing, and Terranort didn't need a Replica because present!Terra's body was vacant. So that's all well and good.

But then in the Toy Box, Young Xehanort acts like he's not sure that using Replicas like that will work, and he's hanging around BBS, well before Replicas are a thing, both of which strongly imply to me that he's not using a Replica, which leaves me with the question of what exactly he is doing.

Edited by Gilphon on Apr 22nd 2019 at 2:38:24 PM

For the sake of clarity, I went to the wiki to see what the ironclad (excusing Merlin) time travel rules are. This is what I got from it.

1. To become a time traveler, you must excise your Heart from your body.
2. Once you've done this, all versions of you become capable of time travel.
3. Versions of you that have not excised their Hearts from their bodies must have their ability to time travel enabled by a version who possesses it.
4. The time traveler retains no memory of anything that transpired while traveling.

With this in mind, the picture's starting to clear up here. I think this is what happened. Bear with me.

So Terranort with partial but not complete memory restoration killed everybody with the Keyblade he'd conjured for the first time. Luxu, shocked and horrified, speculated that he was just faking his amnesia this whole time, which we already know was an incorrect explanation thrown out there in a moment of blind panic, just before Terranort killed him too. During this time, he name-dropped Xehanort, only for Terranort to demand to be called Ansem instead.

Terranort, following through on his plan to find Riku, abducted Kairi and thrust her into space. He removed his Heart to follow her. This made Xemnas and the Guardian from Terra's body and Heart, but Xehanort's amnesiac Heart lingered without a physical form as a glitch in the metaphysics.

This glitch also gave Xehanort's Not-Exactly-Heartless the ability to travel through time. Which he employed without hesitation, probably seeking comprehension of his lost memories and who the f*ck Xehanort is.

He arrived on Destiny Islands in the past, where he met Baby Nort. They conversed and Fake Ansem shared with him that THE TRUE NATURE OF ALL THINGS IS DARKNESS!!! DARKNESS DARKNESS BEAUTIFUL DARKNESS EVERYONE SHOULD BECOME DARKNESS!!! In doing so, he activated Baby Nort's ability to also travel through time, bestowed on him by Fake Ansem becoming a time traveler in the first place.

Baby Nort then proceeded to travel to the future. I don't know if Fake Ansem went with him on these journeys or if he undertook them alone. But Baby Nort did not have to cast off his body on account of Fake Ansem already taking that bullet for him. Whatever the case, Baby Nort went to the future and met himself, and then jumped around points in time assembling his alternates and building Organization 2.0.

Fake Ansem retained none of the knowledge from meeting Baby Nort. He returned to where he'd left off and continued with his intentions to find Riku, remembering nothing of other Norts.

Baby Nort eventually returned to his point in time as well, remembering nothing of the future. He just knew of the thrilling conversation he'd had with Blanket Hobo about DARKNESS DARKNESS EVERYTHING IS DARKNESS. He left Destiny Islands and became a student alongside Eraqus. Captivated by Darkness and eventually growing dismayed at how nobody will f*cking teach him a goddamn thing about it, he set off on his own to become the Seeker of Darkness. Eventually his infatuation evolved into the philosophy of "Darkness and Light in equal measure" that would define his adult career.

EDIT: Following up on that. Baby Nort can travel through time with his body because Fake Ansem activated/assisted/somehow bestowed that ability on him, per rule #3. But Baby Nort probably can't activate/assist/bestow the ability on other versions, since he's not the Nort that excised his Heart. Which is why he has to rely on Replica bodies to bring other Norts' Hearts to the future.

That makes sense to me.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Apr 22nd 2019 at 12:49:38 PM

But... Ansem... and Xemnas... used Replicas to exist in Kingdom Hearts 3...

I don't blame you for trying to make sense of this.

I blame the writing team for COMPLETELY ignoring the very rules they set out and making everything a confusing mess just to throw in time travel!

Follow-ups/suggestions/clarficiations to the above:

• Young Xehanort forgot that he had the ability to time travel upon his return, which is why BBS!Xehanort didn't use it. Possibly this is because Sora beat him at the end of KH3, like how getting beat by Lingering Will cost Terranort his memory.
• Becoming Terranort made him permanently lose the ability to take his body with him through time, so that YX remains the only 'around for KH3' Nort who can do that.

Edited by Gilphon on Apr 22nd 2019 at 3:02:51 PM