“Everything went topsy-turvy and upsy-downsy.”
Even without some spoilers, I more or less surmised the Final World is a purgatory/afterlife situation. The name for one thing, death being the next step after sleep for another. The imagery also brings to mind the light (of heaven or rebirth) at the end of the tunnel some people describe after a near-death experience. It just makes sense.
This parallel’s interesting because the journeys are essentially flipped. In the PoTC world, Sora is moving from death to life. At the Station of Awakening, Sora is moving from life to death.
Which is another observation I’ve left on the back burner until now — Sora’s “awakening” at the start of the game doesn’t feel much like an awakening. With both Sora and Roxas in the past, the dark breaks away to reveal light/a heart station underneath, specifically in the form of birds taking flight. In KH3, water — which has been a consistent symbol for darkness — floods Sora’s heart station instead, similar to what it looks like when his heart is asleep/fallen to darkness in DDD.
The water crushes Sora in a tidal wave like the op of KH1, but, unlike KH1 (and this scene in PoTC), we never see him actually break the surface. He’s just suddenly standing in the Final World shaking water off of him. It feels more like a death than a birth, like the darkness has swallowed the light rather than the light breaking through the darkness.
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