And then there's how this scene would have had to take place before or at the very beginning of KH3. Which is another headache.
Yep. Chronologically speaking, it could only really take place shortly before KH3, meaning she was thrown into the darkness at the eleventh hour
right before here rescue. After all the struggle the character went through, the victory that she had already
earned was undermined by a last minute twist that was clearly thrown in for the sake of shoehorning somekind of unnatural conflict. And why? Is there really any compelling drama in having Aqua's arc litterally fall through the floor
again? I mean... I guess one could find drama in that, but it just feels like drama for the sake of drama that has no
actual place inside the narrative of the character (especially when you look at the end of 0.2, Blank Points, and the secret ending of DDD).
Remember when we all thought Aqua was gonna come back as this badass, level 9000 Keyblade Master that would
actually be able to follow through with all the promises she made leading up to KH3? Weeelllll, nope!
Despite doing her doing damnedest to survive and overcome the myriad of obstacles thrown in her way, at the last second she gets her Keyblade stripped away, her magic stripped away, her intellect stripped away (otherwise she would've dodged SoD's attack, stopped Vanitas' attack, and fought back against the Heartless Tornado), and then gets flicked away as an
afterthought by someone who had absolutely
no buissness being there in the first place....
Like.. I can only
imagine Aqua's frustration when Nomura stuck his hand into the RoD and swiped away all of her stuff off-screen. Guess she was just getting
so strong, and
so popular that only the writer himself could go in there and knock her down a few pegs. The biggest problem with being in the RoD is that it prevented her from getting the memo that this was supposed to be
Sora's story. HE was gonna save everyone whether they liked it or not! That includes her, Ventus, Terra, Kairi, Riku, Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Roxas, Namine, Xion, Emphemer, Skuld, Ava, Strelitzia, and hell, even redeem Xehanort while he's at it! Who cares if he's dead? "Death" doesn't mean anything in this world. The Lich can drag you down into the darkest abyss and it won't mean a thing.
No one can escape their fate of being Sora's damsel! Eventually, everyone, every
where WILL succumb... And the universe will worship him like a
GOD! HAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahaha..... Ugh.
I need to sit back and laugh from the insanity of it all for a sec, because of how short this scene is. In 2 minutes a whole subplot comes crashing down, introduces a retcon (Subject X), powers out of nowhere, questions on where did Ansem put Ansem the Wise this whole time and why did he wait so late in the game to take him to the old mansion, and possibly more (like how come Terra never reacted in any way if he's the Guardian?) When you take the whole story in, this scene doesn't just mess up the Aqua subplot but reverberates throughout.
Oh you have NO idea how bad it actually gets once you start looking at it from a broader perspective. Remember how I kept saying a while back that I wanted to post a really long critique of the Anti-Aqua subplot? Though I never got around to totally finishing it, after KH3 came out, I analyzed the whole thing (including all it's connected scenes and characters) for WEEKS, and that's how I ultimately came to the conclusion that the entire concept was just fundamentally broken. When looked at closely enough, NOTHING about it actually works.
Now I won't go into every issue it creates, but I will list off a
few more narrative problems.
Ansem SoD appears out of
nowhere, spouting about some retcon girl that was never once mentioned before, knocks Aqua (who's stripped bare at this point and can no longer be useful) into the abyss, and takes AtW hostage for most of the game. This contrived BS is what they use to justify:
- Humiliating Aqua and forcing her to fail in achieving any part of the promise she made at the end of 0.2. Said promise pretty much extends to, and I'm paraphrasing: "I'll survive and keep my light shining bright so my friends can find me when the time comes, and in the mean time, I'll help however I can from here. The next time someone ends up in the RoD, I'll be here to help them. I'm Master Aqua, and this is my promise." In the original Japanese version, she actually ends that last line off by saying "there's no need to worry." This all bassically gets thrown right out the window with this ONE scene (though it's just as much Anti-Aqua as a whole that does the damage).
- Despite beating the crap out of Aqua in his last scene, SoD somehow gets outmaneuvered by three powerless teenagers (who he doesn't kill), and once they manage to get AtW away to safety, SoD recognizes that there must be a traitor in the Organization. However, rather than sick some heartless on them, since he knows they can't have gotten very far and the heartless can sweep over every inch of a world in no time at all, or even simply inform his fellow members, he instead opts to do nothing because he (by his own admission) doesn't care about any of it anymore. AtW, Subject X, his own life, none of it matters to him after that. So essentially, he attacked them in the RoD over a retcon that he didn't actually care that much about in the first place (despite the writers trying to frame it as something important), and as soon as it somehow slips through his fingers, he loses all interest entirely. That WHOLE intrusion that destroyed Aqua's arc was for absolutely nothing (beyond shamelessly trying to padd out the story and shove in more sequel bait that is).
- But then what about Ansem the Wise? Well, after being kept in a box for most of the game (off screen
), he goes on to operate in the background (off screen 
) for the remainder of the story, and doesn't once get mentioned by any of the protagonist. Not even Aqua, despite the fact that she brought up arriving at the Dark Margin during her rant to Riku and Mickey while she was anti-fied, and somehow still immediately followed that up by saying "Do you have any idea how lonely it is to have no one?" Remind me why I should take anything Anti-Aqua said seriously again?
- And just when you think they couldn't damage Aqua's character and her arc anymore than they already have, the writers had the audacity to use this whole poorly constructed mess an excuse to humiliate her even further. Rather than give her the victory she EARNED, they instead decide to make it so that she's somehow "weaker" than usual (because I guess all those levels she gained in the secret episode of BBS & 0.2 don't matter anymore, even though Sora, who loses his power all the time, can go from being weaker than Pete & Maleficent to at times soloing MX over the course of ONE game), and have her lose Vanitas in the stupidest way possible. I guess she just can't be the one to save Ven or Terra anymore (despite that being her end goal as a character since the end of BBS), and has to, ironically, be saved by them herself. Like... How embarrassing. This is the reward she gets for fighting over ten years in the RoD.
Now, I could easily go on about several other issues this scene, and really the concept as a whole brought to KH3, but I'm not trying to rewrite my whole analysis in this one post, lol.
I know, right? There's no reason to de-power the apprentices except for one dude. I'm trying to find what reason Nomura could have had for doing so but can't.
I wish there was at least an in-story reason given for why they lost their Nobody powers but not Lea.
Same. There's no legitimate reason I can think of, in or out of universe, for that to be the case. That kind of selectiveness goes past just being convenient, contrived, or biased. It's one of those things that's just flat out inconsistent.
I'm like, 70% sure that the intention was the epic slap, but I'm 5% mystery incident like Donald apologizing to Goofy about the ice cream, and 25% it was just something for Ienzo to give reason why he's being good boys now.
Ienzo: "Aeleus, whatever's between you and Roxas, it's in the past."
Of course, my 25% doesn't dismiss my 70%, but it's possible Nomura wasn't thinking of the slap scene when writing this and just got lucky.
Knowing Nomura, he probably just got lucky. If he couldn't even remember that Sora and Zexion never met, then I have trouble believing he'd remember that brutal backhand scene (for as memorable as it was, lol).
Honestly, that explanation feels perfectly in line with the way he seemed to write the game off of memory. Some things hit. Some things miss. And everything else comes out of nowhere.
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