Axel is NOT “The Organization’s Assassin” in canon.
(Reposting from my personal since Tumblr has APPARENTLY decided my 7-year-old personal blog is a bot and won’t put my posts in the tags :) :) :)
Original post )
So okay, it seems like a thing that people genuinely think Axel had an actual job in the Organization as an assassin for Xemnas and that is just straight up not at all supported by canon even a little bit. Especially this concept that there were previous Org members that he eliminated before CoM?? Like that just straight up did not happen.
1) We know from kh3 that Xemnas personally hand-picked the entire Organization. Members 1-8 were all Apprentices and Isa and Lea had connections to the Keyblade War via Skuld and Ventus. Members 9-12 were also hand chosen for their connection to the Keyblade War. Roxas and Xion were both there also for their connection to the Keyblade. There is absolutely no evidence any other members ever existed. Even if you were to take Xion’s fear of being turned into a Dusk as a real thing Xemnas might do, that still implies Xemnas would have taken care of unwanted or useless members himself rather than outsource it.
2) Axel has never been called an assassin in canon. Marluxia is the one with assassin in his title, not Axel.
3) The cutscene between Axel and Saix in Days before Axel goes to CoM makes it clear that it’s Saix’s order for Axel to go on this mission, not Xemnas’s. Saix at first says that it’s orders from the top but Axel’s response highlights that Saix is the one making the call. It could have been anyone; Xaldin would have been happy to do it based on his later argument that Xion should be eliminated when she runs away, but Axel was chosen because Saix was in charge of assigning personnel and Saix wanted to eliminate Zexion (confirmed in one of the prior Ultimanias).
Axel has no pre-existing role as an assassin and being able to assign him this job is the payoff of Saix’s rise to power. Saix wouldn’t have had to become the second in command to put Axel at Castle Oblivion if Axel would have been sent anyway by Xemnas.
4) Axel was also sent after Roxas because of his personal connection to Roxas and Sora, not because it was his job. Saix sending him to Castle Oblivion was what put Axel on the position of having a connection to the Keyblade, which Xemnas found useful once it had already happened. Axel was also the one who would have been most motivated to get Roxas back alive and stop him from going back to Sora. It had nothing to do with a job title.
5) Axel doesn’t even behave like an assassin. He’s secretive with Saix and he’s sneaky about Zexion but his tactics are too blatant to be called assassination. He kills Vexen against Xemnas’s wishes right in front of witnesses. At Castle Oblivion he mostly lets Riku and Sora do all the work and then cleans up after they’ve done the heavy lifting, but that’s mostly just to cover up what he does for Saix. It’s still incredibly obvious (Xigbar outright says in a journal entry that Axel was obviously working for Saix during that whole debacle, and Xemnas has a journal entry about how he was not planning to lose Vexen yet), but his connection to Sora makes Axel too valuable to punish yet.
There’s no evidence that Axel has ever killed anyone before Castle Oblivion. If anything, the Organization seems like it was mostly doing research for ten years while Xemnas set up the game board for when the Keyblade reappeared. Sure, Evil Coffee Boy is less cool and edgy than assassin but there’s a lot more evidence for the latter than the former.
By all means I’m not saying don’t have fun. There’s a lot of fun to be had with the idea of a darker version of the history and what ifs ands aus. My point is just that, in current canon, there’s no evidence for it. Any meta or theorizing that comes from the assumption that Axel has a job as an assassin is inherently flawed because that’s just not supported by the text.
Axel is not Assassinations Georg. Castle Oblivion is an outlier and should not have been counted
I would agree, if KH3 didnt have Xemnas say that Axel was the one who dealt with traitor, meaning that axel did have a job to kill who Xemnas wanted.
Either that or this goes to the whole idea that Xemnas knew that Saix and Axel was going to betray him and it was him mocking Axel.
Someone else also brought this up, and I addressed it in a separate post, but essentially there’s much more evidence for your second suggestion than the first. Xemnas says that right in front of Sora and Kairi (the only people, to Lea’s knowledge, that are still on his side) in what can easily be read as an attempt to alienate them and isolate Lea further, while also mocking him before he kills him.
It remains a fact that the only confirmed kills Axel ever made were Vexen and Zexion, both of which Xemnas intended to keep alive. He never killed any of the people he’d actually been instructed to kill by anyone other than Saix. Marluxia and Larxene were taken out by Sora (and it’s not clear that Axel was ever specifically told to kill them, since Saix only vaguely references ‘the traitors’), he brought Xion back alive, and he couldn’t bring himself to kill Roxas. So if we take Xemnas at his word, then Axel is a pretty bad assassin.
I mean, I dont think bringing it up in front of Sora really means anything because Axel tried to kill Sora and kidnapped Kairi so hearing that Axel got rid of traitors seems really insignificant when Sora and Kairi got over the things Axel did to him. Like why would this isolate them from Lea when they know he’s just doing his best now.
I think that when it comes to KH and the organization, theres alot that doesnt work or make sense. Like Lea and Isa being chosen because of their flimsy connection to skuld, but also the fact that this connection was just brought up at the last second and not something either character cared about. So yeah. You’re points make sense, but Xemnas saying that makes no sense at all.
I don’t think it’s a matter of whether it would actually isolate Lea, so much as Xemnas failing to understand what actually would isolate Lea. It kind of rubs in that Xemnas loses because he doesn’t actually understand how friendship works. Similarly he missed Saix bringing Roxas and Xion back right under his nose because of that same assumption about how easily he can break friendships up.
I think that in general, yeah, there’s a lot of retconning, but there’s also a lot that Nomura does to pick up little hints he left around in prior games that he maybe was or wasn’t planning on following up on. The implications between Saix and Axel in Days are vague enough for him to have capitalized on that way. He does definitely dial back on the previous implications of the dark stuff that was going on but tbh, it’s a lot more egregious for, say, the Apprentices. If anything I personally think it’s likely that Isa and Lea were convenient test cases for his little Nobody experiment, but that’s only implied and in this post I’m trying to stick with what’s actually on screen.
