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synovelle · 2 years

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Thought about this last night before fell asleep, Sora’s mom has been given a single voice line and one separate mention, so it’s easy to forget that these kids have parents - Sora's mom is seeing all these people be happy together and reunited after all of the terrible stuff they had to go through, but her son is gone again. Apparently some of these kids originated from her son’s heart? So it’s not like he’s truly gone, but none of those kids are actually Sora, and that has to be painful to accept. But she sees Sora in everyone he’s helped, she’s proud of her son, and she admires how he’s helped make everyone happy even though he had to sacrifice himself to do so. “This boy was in your son’s heart for a decade, these two kids were made from your son’s heart and memories, this girl is from your son’s friend’s heart after she left your son’s heart”.

“Your son reunited multiple people who hadn’t seen each other in a long time, saved multiple worlds from darkness, fought in a war, oh and this is actually not the first time that he’s died.” Imagine being told this about your son who hasn’t even finished high school yet? Your only son who’s always has a big imagination and warm heart and need to adventure has been whisked away on some crazy magical journey after his friends were taken and he had to harbor the hearts of other people because of how strong and full of light he is, when he comes back home he’s nearly two years older and apparently died, came back to life, was put into a coma, woke up, then went on ANOTHER journey before you could see him again. A short time later, he had to leave again, go to sleep again, nearly got possessed by some old guy, then went into a THIRD journey. That third journey ends with him dying A G A I N but this time he didn’t come back. All of these people has befriended are now on your island and they’re happy to be alive, but your son is gone. A year passes with no trace of him coming back yet. All you know is that the two kids who he spent his childhood with are putting themselves on the line for him because they’re the only ones who can, and all you can do is sit at home and wait. Wait for your son and his friends to come home so you can have a peaceful dinner for once.

This is why I want to see Sora’s mom. We’re going into bloodlines in the series now, and it doesn’t matter if she’s some average soccer mom, I think it’s important to see how the protagonist’s literal mother feels about all of this.

#Kingdom Hearts #KH #KHIII #KHIV #KHDR #Sora #Kairi #Riku #Roxas #Xion #ventus #Aqua #Terra #kh3 spoilers #KHIll spoilers #KHDR spoilers #Sora’s mom #Destiny Islands

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ultraericthered · 3 months

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MASTER NARIX

"Every heart will return to the light, once all darkness is expunged!"

Time to ellaborate on this beautiful bastard! Master Narix is the overarching Big Bad of the third and final trilogy/"chronicle" in the whole KH Divergence Saga, the Hearts In Chaos Chronicle, debuting in KH4 after having been set up by the secret epilogue of KH3, then serving as the chief antagonist in The Missing Links and one of the main antagonists/final bosses in KH5. The founder and leader of the Luminous Vanguard who dissolved the Dandelion Guild and its unions ages ago, Narix and five of his followers chose to enter a state of time stasis once it became clear to them how impossible the task of eliminating all the darkness and Darklings brought into the World by Darxomnious was, so they'd await the day when Luxu fulfilled his mission and the World was cleansed of that evil, at which point the Vanguard would return to construct a new World order.

Narix has long believed that the majority of hearts are naturally weak and susceptible to darkness that begets dark powers that defile the World, and that only the strongest and purest of hearts should set the course for the World and its denizens. Envisioning a reality where darkness no longer exists, light conquers all Worlds, and he reigns supreme as the light’s oppressive guardian, Narix arrogantly looks to use blight to tear down and reconstruct Kingdom Hearts from within its innermost heart, and will eradicate all that would get in his way.

Since the character concept of Master Narix only solidified fairly recently, most of what I can say about him here are some tidbits:

Quite obviously, I designed Narix as a Contrasting Sequel Antagonist to Xehanort by nature. Xehanort was a former Keyblade Master turned darkness supremacist, Narix is a non-Keyblade wielding Master who's become a light supremacist. The quote up there is even a direct parallel/reversal of Xehanort's famous line "Every light must fade, every heart return to DARKNESS!" And it really ought to be stressed how equally dangerous a light supremacist out to erradicate darkness from the World would be, as not only is, in a wise king's truthful words "the World made up of light and darkness, you can't have one without the other 'cause darkness is half of everything" so the removal of darkness would bring only imbalance and instability, but as has been established before, approaching the task of fighting darkness in a violent, hate-filled, stubborn and self-obsessed way only further feeds the darkness and begets more of it, which Narix is actually smart enough to know since he exploits that with the "blight" power and think it a worthy means so long as the ends he aims for can justify them. He's like Master Eraqus’ moral absolutism and ideals of light supremacy taken to the furthest extremes possible.

"Now wait a minute!" I hear some of you asking "You said back in this post about the Star Wars sequel trilogy "Apparently a whole lot of folks just think having this one guy serve as the overarching main antagonist, direct or indirect, for two trilogies and then having a completely different guy from right out of nowhere with no link or connection to the previous guy nor anything from the last six installments step up as the main antagonist for the third and final trilogy is perfectly fine storytelling so long as the second guy comes off sufficiently Big and Bad enough or whatever.", but how is what you're pushing with Narix any different?"

There are three major differences. 1. Yes, KH Divergence reimagines the whole Kingdom Hearts saga for 25 years as a trilogy of trilogies, and yes all of those trilogies are intertwined to connect with each other in some way, but they are not CONNECTED in the same way Nomura likes to do; while they share the same universe, cosmology, history, themes, and basic common elements across them all, each chronicle is still more or less its own complete story than can stand on its own even if you did not experience the other ones, with even the handling of continuity being kept as newcomer-friendly as possible in the way most game series' are. 2. Narix keeps with the running theme of "darkness begets more darkness". Darkness in the hearts of people begat Darxomnious, who begat darkness in Luxu, whose actions led to circumstances that begat darkness in Narix, whose actions led to circumstances that begat darkness in Xehanort, whose actions begat darkness in Vanitss and Maleficent and Braig and Ansem the Wise and many other villains, essentially putting the whole series as it began in motion, and so in the series' present day narrative the arc with Xehanort begets the arc with Darxomnious which begets the arc with Narix. It's cyclical by design. And 3. Xehanort still factors into the last trilogy as the one who created Evanessé. When you get down to it, Xehanort was THE chief antagonist of the first trilogy - the KH Trinity, or the Door To Light Chronicle - and of KH0.1 (BBS) but was just part of the Big Bad Ensemble in the second trilogy (playing second banana to Maleficent and Darxomnious in the second and third games of it), and a posthumous Greater Scope Villain behind one of the antagonists in the final trilogy. So you can't say he ever stopped mattering here.

Narix's name is derived from a double meaning. Like the other Lost Masters names, it's a play on one of the seven deadly sins (Avali = avarice/Greed, Fura = fury/Wrath, Gorgeyo = gorge/Gluttony, Jelus = jealousy/Envy, Ecaed = acedia/Sloth, Luxu = Lust); as Narix's sin is Pride, his name refers to Narcissism. The NAR in his name, with how it's pronounced like that, is also pulled from the word "Lunar", as in the moon, like Kingdom Hearts itself. Additionally, it felt right to put the "X" letter at the end of his name. Xehanort had it as his name's first letter (as did Xemnas), both Darxomnious and Luxu had it somewhere in the center of their names, Narix has it at the very end.

His hair being brown is also a deliberate choice. Sora was a brunette hero whose nemesis was silver haired. Now we have Ephemer as a silver haired hero whose nemesis is brunette. It's poetry, it rhymes! And the weird styling of it where it goes up into double pointed ends is meant to call to mind rabbit ears. Yes, rabbit ears. It's another reference to the whole "lunar" connection: the fabled Moon Rabbit.

Design-wise, Narix is meant to invoke vintage Final Fantasy villains, primarily the evil Emperor Mateus from Final Fantasy II. This would also work coming off of Xehanort, who was either a straight-up Disney Villain (Master Xehanort in KH0.1/BBS), a Disneyfied Final Fantasy Villain (Terra-Xehanort/Ansem), the Disneyfied Final Fantasy Villain so re-Final Fantasified that he becomes fittingly an in-between "neither Disney nor FF villain" KH Villain (Xemnas), or a crappy Shonen villain from a crappy Shonen manga/anime (Master Xehanort in every game since BBS in Nomura's KH Canon).

Speaking of, Narix's motivation should ring familiar. He wants to clean the universal slate so that darkness is no more, the World is pure and bright with the light of Kingdom Hearts always shining over it, and he remains bound to Kingdom Hearts' inner heart in order to forever safeguard that light and reign over all who have hearts in an oppressive way, "to stop the weak from polluting the World with their endless darkness - to dictate their destinies." Yeah, THIS is the sort of antagonist such self-righteous and fascistic motives actually works with as opposed to shoehorning them onto an established immoral researcher who has historically fancied the darkness. Xehanort started out believing he could "tear down a tyranny of light". Narix wishes to instill a tyranny of light. And the way he seeks to do so is truly insane: he wishes to dismantle and reassemble Kingdom Hearts itself from within its inner heart (to clarify, Kingdom Hearts' "outer heart" is what birthed the World. It's "inner heart" is what birthed every other World and keeps it tied to this KH multiverse) so as to eliminate all darkness across the multiverse, all costs be damned. In doing so he ironically creates an evil force called “blight”, light that’s been perverted to the point where it works in tandem with darkness.

Whatever else can be said about him, Narix is definitely a man of strong ideals and convictions. And one prominent ideal of his is his absolute abhoring of Keyblades. The events of Waning Way, learning more about the Keyblade War, and what occured with Luxu all served to make him swear off the weapon, believing such a weapon to not be fit for human hands. He passed this belief down to his followers in the Vanguard as they cracked down on Keyblade Mastery. The reason the Guardian Keybladers in KH0.1 is such a small and secretive order? Yeah, this would be the reason.

(And seeing how out of hand Keyblades got it Nomura's canon, I can honestly kind of sympathize!)

Now, don't confuse Narix for a Frollo or Emperor Belos type of evil, bigoted, hypocritical religious fudamentalist villain who have openly unpleasant personalities that we can all recognize as being evil beneath the superficial charisma - Narix is a very convincingly affable, charming, parental and seemingly noble individual, which makes it all the scarier to see his more pompous, self-obsessed, and even cruel side come out, especially the more he dabbles in blight and darkens his heart and soul. Narix can also be quite humorous and snarky, not in "lol weird and random" way like the Master of Masters, nor even like Xigbar, but in a more "Ardyn Izunia" way.

For Narix's English voice, I had to think of a VA, namely one who's a big name in anime and video games, who was a super veteran in the industry for years now and would be officially middle-aged by the end of the 2010s yet has a voice that retains this youthful quality to it, capable of performing the smoothy, silky, mellifluous voiceover that the character would need. Who could that be none other than the one and only Johnny Yong Bosch. A sampling of how he'd sound:

The nature of Narix's main power, "blight", is quite insidious: the Masters and lower mages of the Vanguard use their staves to steal light from other people's hearts and transfer it into the veins of creatures of darkness, creating this power where the darkness and light intermingling with each other causes one another to go totally out of whack. It effects the new "Demi-Deterged" Heartless so that rather than be attracted to the darkness of people’s hearts with the instict to prey upon those hearts, they seek out darkness and attack it in violent ways that prove dangerous to the hearts they come into contact with and destructive to the very fabric of the World itself.

While the full stories and scenarios for the Hearts In Chaos Chronicle entires are incredibly hazy to me overall right now, one of the things I can see very vividly is the Final Boss stage for KH5. Basically, the final world brings us back to...well, The Final World, right to Kingdom Hearts' doorstep, at which point a fucking enlarged, Demi-Deterged Chernabog starts tearing up the place and becomes the Climax Boss. And then comes the Final Boss, which is, I shit you not, essentially the one famous Kamina line from Gurren Lagann - "the Drill that will pierce the heavens!" An enormous tower-like contraption that is trying to drill its way into Kingdom Hearts to reach the inner heart, and three competing factions for light, darkness, and nothingness are all trying to make it work in their favor. Stage 1 of the fight pits Ephemer and friends against all the strongest "miniboss" tier enemies in the game all at once. Once that's cleared, Stage 2 is against Neodarkness and his powers of darkness. Clearing that gets you to Stage 3 against Evanessé and his powers of Nil. Clearing this advances you to the penultimate stage where of course it's Narix who's the last one standing. The final phase is triggered when the blight at last becomes too much for the unhinged Narix, filling his heart with darkness, becoming darkness itself! Defeating Dark Narix finally brings the whole thing down, freeing Kingdom Hearts and keeping the multiverse still in order. A completely broken Narix still insists on the rightness of his cause and how he could've improved all Worlds, at which point Maleficent enters the scene to zap him with her newly restored dark magic, obliterating his heart and physically transforming him into a basic Darkling who fades to the Dark Realm.

.....Hold on, I feel like I might've heard this story from Disney before.

A character model for Master Narix, and a close-up of his face.

#Disney #Kingdom Hearts #KH Divergence #disney villains #Master Narix #KHIV #the Missing Links #KHV #oc #headcanon #trivia #analysis

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