I actually thought the same. Riku starts saying he wants to become strong to protect Sora at such a young age, and with such fervor, it makes you wonder.
I also want to point out that the problem seems more evident with Sora than Riku (which doesn’t mean Riku didn’t have problems, stay with me, I just want to go through Sora first because he seems to have more clues).
Both Kairi and Riku are unwilling to leave without Sora.
Kairi jokes about leaving Riku behind, which is shitty, but I don’t think she would have done that if Riku was the one with an actually shitty situation at home. But it seems like both want to get Sora out.
Sora is the one to ask “what about our parents?” meaning that despite the desire to leave, he is still on the edge - while Riku seems more independent. This would make one initially think Riku is the one who wants to leave for himself.
Sora lies, Riku can’t lie. White lies, lies to hide his emotions, lies to make others feel better (like Pooh in KH3), but lies that come easy to his tongue.
A lot of characters note that Riku is honest to a fault. Sora isn’t.
He keeps a lot inside and masks and lies a lot. He brushes off abuse and stays quiet when an authority scolds him and he tries not to cry. He is self sacrifical. He has a shitty self esteem. But the second he sees someone else raising their voice against another person (like Beast in KH2) he immediately steps in to protect the other person. He gives people second, third, fourth chances (not just Riku, which is understandable - he was even willing to offer Xemnas a second chance).
And he sneaks out. He goes out of the window during a storm, and he seems to have no problems with that. He doesn’t use the front door. He uses the window.
Relationships: where do we stand?
He is confused about relationships (not just romantic) and love, which could just be him being aromantic (and could also be a mix of both) - but it could also be having been raised with authority figures who were abusive (lovebombing, then abusing, then victimizing, then lovebombing again is a very common pattern). It’s harder to know where you stand with people and your feelings if all you are used to is people who give you hot and cold signals (even Donald and Riku have been at fault for that here and there), and to repress your own emotions.
And then you have rage form.
Something that is very common with people who are used to repressing their own emotions for their own safety, either to become people pleasers to satisfy authorities and parents, or because exploding would make things worse, is that those people likely develop worse emotional management in the long run.
Anger explodes instead of just puffing here and there. I don’t have the passage at hand but there was a book I read about cptsd that described anger outbursts due to abuse in nearly exactly that way. If we are running on metaphors, and we are running on Nomura’s words (antiform being Sora taken by darkness/depression, rage form being Sora tired of getting hurt), then Rage becomes an excellent visual metaphor for exploding after years of swallowing hurt.
Which is also why no one brings it up. Many people would prefer to disregard things like these unless they affect them personally (I have experience with people doing that).
Sora’s room is… odd, to a point. I don’t even know how to explain it but it strikes me as very weird setup. It’s not warm like Roxas’ room in Twilight Town, it’s not full of books and astronomy things (clearly stored by Ventus) like Ventus’ room. It feels cramped in the drawing, and dispersive and kinda empty in the game visuals.
But also, you have a lot of sad faces. A LOT of sad faces. He has sad faces on the wooden robots he built, he has a sad face drawn on his casual dailywear shirt. It’s sad faces on stars. Just sad faces.
Which is an odd choice for a character we have been introduced as an easy-going short fuse friendly little dude. So I am assuming it’s there to do what Nomura wants hs to do, which is giving hints to look closer, read between the lines.
The truth is not what you hear, but what you see with your eyes.
What we see is Sora being short tempered despite is very gentle nature, ready to defend people but very quiet when authority scolds him personally. Everyone’s cheerleader, with a self esteem so low it’s probably under sea level. Someone who is ready to sacrifice at the blink of an eye over and over. Someone who would rather brush off when people hurt him but came back than confront them about it. Someone who seems very adaptable and hyper-independent in the sense that he seems to have no problems solving everyone’s problems and never asking for help. Someone who is very adamant about affirming other people’s right to be happy and exist, but who makes himself small despite having achieved so much.
Sora is a very curious character and very well layered.
What we know of his family life is that he still had a dad when he was five, who used to bring him and Riku to the Play Island (which is reasonable since they are so small).
Then we know he has a mother from her calling him after he sneaks out.
And if it turns out Amano consulted Nomura before this or has some notes, then he should have an uncle who doesn’t care about him and which he doesn’t like much (which is a record for Sora since he tends to like virtually anyone to a point - except for people like Larxene, Saix in kh2, Xehanort… not a good string of morally good people let’s say). We don’t really know anything else.
I also want to point out that he seems to sleep a lot, to a point Riku and Kairi comment on it. Except that the second he is away from the islands he is… very active.
We don’t exactly see a Sora who likes slacking off or being lazy, or who is often sleepy. We see someone who is very hardworking and proactive. And normally if a teenager sleeps in class all the time any decent adult would be at least somewhat alarmed, because it usually means the teenager is not sleeping at night, unless the source is medication or a health problem. Considering the problem virtually vanishes after he is away from the islands I would say it’s not just insomnia.
So, for some reason, Sora is not sleeping as he should at night. Which makes me wonder why.
So the facts we have are:
- Sora has a mother, we don’t know if his father is still alive or not. He has an uncle, he is enough in contact with him to be pissed that the uncle doesn’t give two shits about him. He presumably has no siblings or siblings he bonded with because he does not seem to know what a sibling relationship should or shouldn’t be like.
- He didn’t sleep well at night. Of course this could also be due to the prophetic dreams, but since Kairi and Riku tease him about it I will assume the problem is not recent (otherwise they would be worried).
- Both Kairi and Riku want him off the islands. Riku was very protective of him at the ripe age of six.
- He has a lot of sad faces in his room (his private space).
- His first instinct when authorities scold him is to stay quiet. His first instinct when someone else raises his voice towards another is to step between them. He has anger issues. He is a people pleaser. He is helpful to a fault. He ties his worth to how well he can perform. He is ready to give his life in a heartbeat. He sneaked out of his room.
There is… a lot, and a lot of clues that he may not have been in the best situation at home. And of course a lot of people like to think it was all fine because he seems so kind and friendly - which doesn’t make sense to me, some of the kindest and friendliest people I met had absolutely shit lives at home, and the point was that they never wanted to be anything like their abusers.
We know Riku is very honest (which makes me think he had no reason to lie to people), he has no problems being curt or even rude to authorities and people he has no reason to respect.
He is an emotional mess but we are told that is mostly due to his complex feelings for Sora (and likely abandonment issues).
In the CoM novel he tells Pinocchio he has no parents - which turns out to be a lie! But the important part is that he seems to feel that way, which makes me think that his parents were/are a bit neglectful, either maliciously or not (maybe they just worked a lot and left him home alone a lot).
So he is more independent and doesn’t need to sneak out, and he has grown fast, but at the same time, he has abandonment issues and gets jealous. So there’s also a problem there - which is not necessarily synonymous with danger, but it’s still shitty to someone’s development.
Sora doesn’t seem to be very comfortable with hugs others initiate (Kairi in kh2, I think it’s less him not wanting to hug her, and more him being the kind of person who prefers to initiate contact).
Riku seems to avoid contact as much as he can with anyone who isn’t Sora or Kairi.
But the only times he acts scared instead of annoyed at it is when Ansem SoD tries to stroke his cheek in CoM which was one hell of a way to sum up their dynamic there.
Riku really has to live with having had his body possessed and used after being manipulated into it, isolated from his friends by having his insecurities exploited, and essentially convinced it was his idea and his fault, uh?
That’s… one hell of a trauma to deal with and I really commend how they dealt with his healing arc - and I guess Sora saw through it considering how he seemed never truly angry at Riku
Nomura said he likes people to speculate and come to their own conclusions about the story, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get precise answers about Sora’s life because, in primis, it may not be essential enough to the story at hand to need being told in detail (esp. without distracting from the story), and second, this is still Disney property and unless the explanation is in a secret report scenario or a mobile game there are likely things that are likely to be left out. But the clues are there and we are invited to come to our own conclusions. And Kingdom Hearts as a game uses a lot of story metaphors to talk about trauma (just think of CoM being about memory loss, reliving what happened, and either accepting it or denying it - that’s all about two kinds of trauma reaction).
So yeah, I absolutely agree. Sora and Riku, Sora in particular, are hinted to having had a good reason to want to go away.
My question is: what, but it’s likely that will be left to our imagination.
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