How fascinating a direction for Xehanort, having him realize an almost inescapable truth that takes many years to realize. You can't escape yourself, quite often the problems are not just the place you live or the people you interact with but rather the issue is you. Shifting your location often results in only moving your problems not escaping them, you have to fix yourself to avoid falling into the traps of repeating mistakes.
Xehanort's problems seem to largely stem from a life where he feels he lacks purpose, his inability to just accept a happy modest life in a cozy home with friends or family. He needs stimulation, knowledge, and purpose I might very much argue that Young Xehanort heavily reads now as someone who is suffering from depression. Who needed medicine and therapy but instead got super weapons, out of date traditions, and what might as well have been unlimited power and agency.
I wonder if this how he always is or if THIS was the result of his time travel. Where he knew his purpose and his inescapable fate but then forgot both those things and so he could feel it, this gnawing waiting for something to happen, for understanding to take place, for his life to begin to move. In other words I wonder if by traveling through time and etching his path in his heart that he doomed himself to a life that just felt like he was going through the motions. A life where you feel you are just go through the motions is a pretty textbook description of what living with depression can feel like.
It makes Xehanort's actions more understandable, not justifiable but understandable, he is trapped in his life and he ends up going to extremes to escape that. Xehanort never stopped being the kid stuck on the island he just moved to larger prisons but he couldn't escape the actual prison that was his own heart. I always wondered in all the worlds in DDD were meant to be exploring Xehanort at the same time as Sora and I feel this update and the previous confirms that was in fact the intent.
It brings I think extra meaning to Xehanort calling the islands a prison for a heart seeking freedom juxtaposed against the inside of Sora's heart that takes the form of the islands. On one hand that's where the hearts in Sora were trapped which seems to support Xehanort's words, but there is a deeper meaning to this. Where does KH3 end? It ends on the sunset islands where everyone has returned to by choice to share in friendship and happiness. The beach has always been a symbol in this series for freedom not prisons. For RAX the promise to go to the beach and live that represented the ultimate freedom they never had till now, and that goes doubly for Roxas who promised an HPO they would go to the beach but never could as DiZ would not let Roxas out of his digital prison.
While Ventus and Terra didn't have quite the same connection to the Beach, Aqua absolutely did. The beach of the realm of darkness represented a place she could escape from and wait for freedom and when she finally does escape her first sights are the Destiny Islands. Which she first thinks means she is still trapped but instead finally making it here represents her freedom and return to the realm of light. With Kairi the islands act not as a prison but a place of safety, sometimes she feels trapped but as a whole it's the thought she can always return to this place that gives her the courage to explore outside it. For Riku the islands used to feel like a prison but after he matured the ability to return to the islands without shame or guilt keeping him distant from the people there he loves ended up representing the ultimate freedom for his heart. It goes without saying that for Sora the islands have always been a source of comfort, he was curious but never consumed by that curiosity, it's not a prison but a sanctuary the world most safe and precious to his heart.
Xehanort returning to Scala and his heart being set free there I think makes a lot more sense as an ending for Xehanort in KH3 now. What's happening in those final moments is after as far as Xehanort had come he was back on Scala, back in his prison true prison his heart where this all really began, he's trapped, cornered, and doomed it should have been a suffocating and all consuming feeling of anger, desperation, and dread. Instead however it's only by returning to this prison, by reuniting with the people he left behind (well the one that was left), that finally Xehanort's heart could be set free. Free from the embittered old man that he had become who is also from the man who had set him on this path to become this, the imprisoned childlike heart of Young Xehanort in his final moments is free possibly for the first time ever in his life.
That's why we are seeing "Xehanort" get a happy ending because MX he is the one who caused all this, quite literally going back in time to corrupt his young self the same way he did to Riku, and thus in every respect Xehanort was both the victim and villain. We "killed" Master Xehanort completely and utterly he vanished from within Xehanort's own scala and we saved the young Xehanort boy who had been so lost, trapped, and corrupted just like we saved Riku. In other words the Xehanort saga, isn't about defeating Xehanort it's about saving him. That's why we could never defeat him by combat only by releasing his young heart from the decades of imprisonment that had twisted and ruined him.
Which makes me wonder even more now if the MoM is in fact a form of Sora it would be pretty thematically fitting that after dealing with a story where we rescue a young boy from the major villain, the major villain being his future corrupted self. If now the story is shifting to Sora facing off against the same thing though he doesn't know it yet. If the MoM's machinations are a time loop designed to cause Sora to become the MoM, a possibly bigger villain than Xehanort ever was, and the story is going to be based on helping Sora advert that. Preventing Sora from ending up like another Xehanort, changing time and history.
Hirokey123 Rambling thoughts™
Spoiler
