After finally graduating (yay) I took the time to read the document about this theory, given all the kerfuffle it made.
Boy, I did not like it almost at all. By end of it, it was hard not to scoff at most things.
> Starting with what I did like, which is the theory about the Realm of Dreams being something greater and different than the Sleeping Worlds and the connections between the Dive to the Heart at the beginning of KH III and the apparent team wipe at the Graveyard.
The document sold those concepts pretty well, and made my gears turn in the right direction. Although Ultimania being a bit unclear about where and how the time reset and the prologue are placed throw a reasonable shade of doubt, and the authors' stubborness in wanting to see that Ultimania was absolutely confirming their theory was a bit concerning.
> This pattern comes back comes after a few pages, in which I started to notice the need of WANTING to make some things work in a certain way, or seeing them under a certain light.
Miss me completely with that analyzing the way Sora blocks attacks as a connection to Link Block and that the way Young avoids him in Toy Box is an hint of time travel and history repeating. "Swag dodging" has always been implemented as a visual effect, unless we want to consider CoM Marluxia as a powerful time traveller who already experienced all of that.
Or when Sora noticing Goofy saying "All for one, one for all" as a tie-in with his adventures in DDD. C'mon guys, SDG have been using that catchphrase since KH1.
> It's not the first time I'm hearing people arguing that the lessons in the Disney worlds are important and are all linked together as a big message for Sora, and I still don't buy it. To me it's the same generic moral lesson about love and friendship at the end of each world visit like it has been since KH II. And it doesn't help (or maybe it does?) that those moral lessons are implemented in 90% of animated movies aimed at a young audience, hence the repetition and apparent "connection" between them.
Sora having direct flashbacks at some Disney world scenes made a portion of fans wild, but to me it's like when it happens in BbS, and I don't feel like it makes anything deeper than what it is.
> The biggest problem that at some point made it almost difficult to just keep on reading was definitely the Riku-Kairi thing. The BIAS, man. Pure, unadulterated bias.
Riku is Light. Riku did this, and this, and that (each instance gets mentioned to increase numbers, even if some are just repetitions). Riku has a halo which contains the true Mayan calendar inside.
Kairi is... meh. She isn't even there. I mean, she IS, but that's not really her, she's like some FMA chimaera or something. She's weird. Doesn't she look weird to anyone else? Also, it's suspicious (yeah, suspicious works as an apparent neutral and not biased term, let's use it) how she's considered so relevant, like Riku -let's call him Riku the Perfect Hero of Light from now on- did ALL OF THAT versus the... meh, one, one and a half times Kairi was Sora's Light (yeah, sure.)
Oh, and Sora only reached to her to say goodbye.
You can't tell me there wasn't some prejudice after the lenght they go at analyzing that Kairi is just a little bit on the side regarding the Light and how that makes her not that great, but when Sora and Riku are walking towards the Light it's the most important thing ever.
It has been stated by game and Ultimania how important Kairi was throughout the "reality reset" sequence and she's almost absent when they go through most of it in the theory, and only mentioned as some sort of abnormality. Words and phrasing do tell a lot about what people think and feel.
I don't even really care whether it was for shipping purposes or not. It's the sheer difference in treatment between two characters that was extremely off-putting.
If they're Kairi fans, that's an odd way to be as such in my opinion.
> Also I don't really care how much they state it to be a fact, I strongly disagree that Sora used the Power of Waking to reach Riku at the Dark Margin. In the theory itself they keep showing the Sleeping Keyholes as some powerful clue and I agree, and I see none of that when Sora is at the Island. What I see is a door from which Sora emerges, which the authors also theorize it being a Door to Light.
The thing is, the Door to Light has already been used to travel from the Realm of Darkness to the Realm of Light, without any Power of Waking whatsoever (which also disproves the thesis that Sora had no means to reach the RoD exceptdark corridors and Power of Waking). It happened in KH II.
oh wait that was because of Kairi so that's probably why they didn't care about it
That's mostly what I wanted to share about my time reading it. I've read many theories (as I suspect did most of you all), and while this was a surprising huge amount of work that may have struck true in a couple of places, I still think it's mostly people wanting to see secrets and genius and a secret plan behind disappointment.
Which honestly has been the fandom's mantra since forever, "let's wait for this to make sense in the Grand Design of things" so I'm not even that surprised.
This puts too much trust in Nomura having some desk filled with notes and references connected to a dozen different cultures and mythos on Earth, when there's proof of him introducing and rewriting stuff at later dates and forgetting or abandoning entire plot points into the dust, or straight up lying about them.
To me it's like when people were studying ancient monasterial codes to "decipher" the Foretellers, and I remember how well that went.
Now though, in all fairness: even imagining all of this theory was true. All of it, or even just the majority.
That wouldn't make KH III better to my eyes. Because that would mean Nomura essentially "hid" the grand finale of a saga behind a mountain of blink-and-you'll-miss-it clues and some quantum physics timeline for... what? For the sake of delivering a Galaxy Brain theory? Like Lumiair said: how does all of this make the experience of a saga finale that it's supposed to be KH III better? I was led to believe that convoluted foreshadowing and sacrificing main scenario stuff to add yet another teensy bit of detail was what we didn't like about the whole thing.
If Kingdom Hearts truly expects me to pay more attention to how many times Riku clenches his fist, the logo coloration or how hair might work than to Xehanort's motivations then I'm even more out of it. This is the kind of "d33p L0r3" I don't want, I don't find it particularly interesting or elegant and it serves only to clutter the experience and the fluidity of the main story.