sam

I feel like after literally eighteen years of being confused and annoyed about the question of "do nobodies in kingdom hearts have emotions?" (specifically as it's presented in KH2 and days) when the answer feels like a screamingly obvious "YES, OF COURSE" something has finally clicked in my brain that makes it all make a lot more sense

from our perspective as the player, it's like, clearly roxas has emotions. why is everyone telling him he doesn't? he keeps saying stuff like "I'm sad" or "I'm scared" or "I'm sad about how scared I am of being sad" and everyone keeps brushing it off like lol no you're not. you can't be, remember?

but something that never occurred to me is that we're told that nobodies, particularly ones who remember their human lives, will go through the motions of acting emotional largely because those behaviors are just ingrained into them as part of their personality, whether they feel anything or not. anything beyond that is mostly based on wants/needs e.g. "vexen wants to live so he can keep doing his experiments, so when faced with impending death he acts the same way he would have if he truly could feel fear, even though he can't really"

if that's all true then from saix's perspective for example, when roxas starts claiming to have all these different emotions, it makes sense that he would just roll his eyes and say come on roxas no you don't, none of us do, you're just acting out of instinct because on some level you remember how you would've reacted when you did have emotions

honestly this is a plot point that bothered the shit out of me for a looooooooooooooooong time so it feels like a huge weight off my shoulders that I've made it make sense especially now that I've made it my job to regularly talk about kingdom hearts into a microphone LMAO. as always this raises the question "is this actually what was intended, or am I just trying to make kingdom hearts make sense?" and I have no idea. sound off in the comments