Woe betide you -- I'm thinking about things again.
I was rolling around this old nugget in my head, the idea that Nomura was so busy building a story about separation, he never really thought about what SRK would be like when they're together.
And this is, to an extent, I think, sensible.
KH1 starts on the islands, and we do get to see about two days in the lives of the kids, and that's great. It's literally the only reason the rest of the game works at all. We got to experience their "normal" for a few days before "normal" literally fell apart beneath their feet.
Even then, it's very loose and very abstract, and I don't think that's actually a flaw. I would consider that a feature, not a bug.
I think everyone is a little bit confused when they first start KH1.
One tiny island, two barren beaches, the tiniest amount of structure made from random planks that are visibly uneven and badly overlaid.
Is this Lord of the Flies?
What the fuck is happening here?
We learn about "the raft" before we learn what they're actually using it for. You wouldn't be wrong to assume these kids are basically castaways.
And we know that some of that was more or less intentional. Production sketches show that at some point in the conception of the series, some point after Sora stopped being a lion-boy but before the world was fully cemented around him, they were something like castaways, hunting and foraging, living on their own.
You can easily imagine a version of this game where they started every day looking for rope and fish and mushrooms and eggs. I do think that DNA bleeds through pretty clearly.
But, no, the game goes on, and you find out pretty quickly that they've lived here their entire lives.
The raft is not a desperate search for civilization. They're basically just indulging their teenage angst.
And then, in a very special one-two punch that takes pretty much everyone by surprise, they do have regular houses, and they do have regular families. Sora, dinner's ready.
I do think the unclear, shifting expectations contribute to the spiraling, dreamlike feel the game is explicitly going for. I've been having these weird thoughts lately.
But it does feel a shame that we never eventually revisit this.
What does Sora's house look like?
How does he talk to them?
Where do they think he's been for all this time?
In a flashback from KH1, Kairi was "at the mayor's house" after she fell from the sky. Does she live with the mayor long-term, or was that more of an emergency thing? Was she ever officially adopted?
What does an actual, typical day look like for them, not on the play island?
In the immediate wake of KH2, I always kind of assumed KH3 would be an SRK game. SDG would always be friends, but they did the thing. Everyone got home. We're doing something else now.
KH3 would be a PS3 game, and it would use all that fancy new HD technology to give us a fancy new island segment, this time on the "main" island, giving us this whole new look at their lives before they set off on their journey to answer Mickey's letter together.
I still regard that as a better, happier timeline.
A timeline where maybe Square knew what the fuck they were doing in the PS3 generation.
It's always going to be more interesting to have your main characters interacting than to keep contriving reasons to shove them off in their own separate subplots. The separation isn't even useful or interesting anymore. It's not a conflict. It's not a theme. We just can't have them in the same room for too long because Nomura hasn't thought about what would happen if they were.
The last time it was really used thematically at all in the meat of a game was DDD, where the whole thing was about Riku and Sora being in perfect sync even when they can't see or hear each other.
The game Kairi didn't get to be in.
Two seconds at the end of a secret ending.
Which really does get down to the crux of it, I think.
It's true that Nomura hasn't thought much about what the group would be like together.
They're certainly not doing the slice-of-life stuff I wish they would, the stuff that makes this world feel lived-in and real.
And they're not doing a SRK game probably ever.
But the problem is not equally distributed.
Riku's gotten to be a party member.
Riku's gotten to have several heart-to-hearts with Sora.
They've gotten to be rivals.
They've gotten to be bitter enemies.
They've gotten to be perfectly balanced partners.
The problem is not evenly distributed.
The problem is that, overwhelmingly, Nomura just doesn't like to write for women. Because, overwhelmingly, Nomura does not think we're people.
You go back to that whole thing with FFXV.
How he said he couldn't put a woman in the party because it would destroy the "emotional purity" of the group.
The game is about the boys' chemistry, their bond, the open sincerity of their emotional expression with each other.
And you can't have that with a woman in the car.
No man has ever bantered in the presence of a woman.
You put a woman in that car, the whole thing dries up.
Women are no fun. They're anti-sincerity. And they're aliens, apparently, 'cause, of course, the bigger problem is the fact that he seemed to be conceiving of a woman as being external to the friend group to begin with. It would be the friends...and a woman.
You can't just be friends with a women.
Or women. Imagine multiple. Jesus, can that happen?
why do we let this man do things.
