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Nobodies vs. the concept of good and evil
I don't think this entry will contain any new or shocking information. This is just a pseudo-essay musing on hearts, Heartless, and Nobodies; more than likely you've heard all this before. XD
On Hearts and the Composition of People
In the world of Kingdom Hearts, the 'heart' is very important to the worldview, and essential for life as we know it. But what exactly is a heart? While we can probably assume that the characters all have an internal organ that pumps blood through their bodies, that's not what's referred to whenever somebody in Kingdom Hearts talks about a heart.
The KH heart seems to be an almost entirely metaphysical thing; it can be lost, sacrificed, or regained, it can be overcome with darkness, or it can even be transferred from one person to another. Worlds also have hearts. It actually seems to be analogous to the popular concept of the soul, though characters in KH have souls as well as hearts. Loss of a heart does not exactly result in death, though it seems to be the end of a person - the by-products are a Heartless and a Nobody. So, I hypothesize that the heart primarily functions as the vessel of the personality and base emotions, the creative spark, and general "person-ness". That leaves the body for basic life functions, and the soul for higher mental functions and more complex emotions.
So in short, the composition of a person in KH seems to be thus:
Heart rules emotions, soul rules thought, body carries out life functions, and all together you have a person. That's what I've gathered, at least. Kairi pokes a bit of a hole in this, but Kairi was a special case.
Anyway.
The Creation of Nobodies and Heartless
So, we know the heart is important, and that losing it creates two entities - a Heartless and a Nobody.
The Heartless actually make a lot less sense as of KH2; in the first game they were easy to explain as the shells of people who had lost their hearts, but, whoops - the Nobodies take that honor. Thanks a lot for your misleading nomenclature, Xehanort.
It would seem, as of KH2, that the Heartless are actually hearts that have collapsed and been taken over by darkness, thus explaining the scene where the hearts raining down from Kingdom Hearts turn into Shadows. (Although wholly failing to explain why Sora was able to get his heart back. Did Kairi reinstall him from backup, or heal his collapsed heart?)
So, the collapsed heart is basically a walking mass of darkness. Because this violates the basic balance of light and dark in everything, it goes around trying to get hearts to fill its void; unfortunately, it only succeeds in collapsing the hearts it touches, and creating more Heartless.
Axel tells us that killing a Heartless with the Keyblade 'releases a captive heart', confirmed by the way we see a heart float away every time we kill one - but this doesn't totally make sense, because if the Heartless actually take and hoard hearts, then how are new Heartless created, if they are actually collapsed hearts? Maybe the Keyblade forcibly restores the heart to its whole state by reintroducing light, but lacks the finesse to do anything for the heart after that, thus it goes floating off to Kingdom Hearts?
I think I like that. We'll go with that.
At any rate, whatever the hell a Heartless actually is, it's there and is created when a person loses their heart (unless you're Kairi and therefore special). There is also something else created - a Nobody.
A Nobody is a little more straightforward, though their existence would seem to merit the term 'Heartless' more than the actual Heartless do. I believe it's Yen Sid who explains that the Nobody is the body and spirit left over when a heart is lost. In most cases, these simply degrade into the Dusks and other varieties that we see, but a very rare few (hi, Organization XIII) are able to keep something like their human forms.
Yen Sid also tells us that Nobodies, unlike Heartless, are sentient. This seems a little strange considering we have villains commanding armies of Heartless, but I guess it works. Heartless can be made to understand orders, while Nobodies already do. The sentience of Nobodies works with the idea that the soul rules over mental functions.
It is also alleged within the game that Nobodies do not feel. This is a fairly uncomfortable assertion, and seems to contradict evidence from the Nobodies' actual actions. Roxas' feelings when he doesn't know he's a Nobody - and also when he does - seem genuine. As do Axel's for Roxas, Demyx's in general, Xemnas's rage and despair, Larxene's schadenfreude, the Dusks frantically grabbing for falling hearts...
I think the best explanation of this is that most feelings do tend to originate in the heart; however, more complex emotions are more in the province of the soul, and the basic ones can leak over or be remembered well enough that an individual Nobody can trick himself into feeling them if he doesn't actually have them. I tend to think that the Nobodies are emotionally stunted, and the emotions they have might decay over time, and some of them really do just lack them - but in general, Nobodies are not without feeling. They're just limited, and perhaps muted.
At any rate, there we have it. Lose your heart, and it collapses and turns into a Heartless, while the rest of you turns into an emotionally-stunted Nobody.
The Philosophical Question
And so, in a roundabout way, we make it here.
Losing one's heart is a bad thing. It's a little hard to argue against this. Losing your heart basically robs you of your personhood; you have to have an exceptionally strong heart to even retain a semblance of your prior appearance as a Nobody, and you have to be unbelievably strong in order to retain your sense of self as a Heartless. (See Sora and Xehanort; and Xehanort seems to be a short-bus Special Case anyway.)
Also, losing your heart creates a Heartless. There is no way a Heartless can really ever be considered a good thingunless it's a White Mushroom; Heartless destroy hearts and thus make the owners of said hearts arguably worse than dead. Worse yet, they can corrupt the hearts of worlds, and thus plunge an entire world into darkness. Even one little Shadow, left unchecked in a world with an unlocked Keyhole, will eventually bring down a scourge of darkness and destruction ending in the demise of the world and a flood of hungry Heartless. They have no capacity to not do this; unless commanded, this is what they do. Only Sora!Shadow and Xehanort's Heartless did not exactly do this, and they're bad examples; Sora was a Heartless for about half an hour, and Xehanort's Heartless was just Special, and was still more or less following his destructive instincts.
So, losing your heart is a bad thing to happen, and the creation of a Heartless is likewise bad.
However, the process of losing a heart also creates a Nobody. And a Nobody has choices. A Nobody can choose just to wander alone in search of a way to restore his heart. A Nobody can even choose to resign himself to his fate; he likely won't, but he has the capacity to do so. A Nobody doesn't have to do anything bad. They are sentient, presumably can remember the moral codes they followed when they had their hearts, and can make their own choices.
It seems to be asserted in the game, mostly by DiZ and Yen Sid, that Nobodies are on the same level as Heartless; i.e. bad because of what they are. This is the most uncomfortable assertion made about the Nobodies in game; not least because you've just spent six hours getting attached to Roxas and Naminé and Axel when you first hear it. Sora buys into this, but has incongruous flashes of sympathy for Axel and Roxas, and even a brief one for Xemnas. But in general, he seems to go with the idea that because Nobodies are Nobodies, they're bad and need to be eliminated. Yes, he does go against this at times, but in my opinion, there simply was not enough doubt shown on his part for this to come across as anything more than hypocrisy on Sora's part; "Nobodies are bad, but you helped me/helped someone I know/are my Nobody, so you're okay". I love Sora to pieces, but this is still hard to swallow.
At any rate. The underlying philosophical question, which would have been really great to see better addressed in-game:
Are Nobodies bad because of what they are? Are they bad because they are by-products of a bad process? Is it fair to treat them that way?
Most of the fandom's answer is already "no", I'm sure. But it would have been wonderful if Sora had ever asked himself this.
On Hearts and the Composition of People
In the world of Kingdom Hearts, the 'heart' is very important to the worldview, and essential for life as we know it. But what exactly is a heart? While we can probably assume that the characters all have an internal organ that pumps blood through their bodies, that's not what's referred to whenever somebody in Kingdom Hearts talks about a heart.
The KH heart seems to be an almost entirely metaphysical thing; it can be lost, sacrificed, or regained, it can be overcome with darkness, or it can even be transferred from one person to another. Worlds also have hearts. It actually seems to be analogous to the popular concept of the soul, though characters in KH have souls as well as hearts. Loss of a heart does not exactly result in death, though it seems to be the end of a person - the by-products are a Heartless and a Nobody. So, I hypothesize that the heart primarily functions as the vessel of the personality and base emotions, the creative spark, and general "person-ness". That leaves the body for basic life functions, and the soul for higher mental functions and more complex emotions.
So in short, the composition of a person in KH seems to be thus:
Heart rules emotions, soul rules thought, body carries out life functions, and all together you have a person. That's what I've gathered, at least. Kairi pokes a bit of a hole in this, but Kairi was a special case.
Anyway.
The Creation of Nobodies and Heartless
So, we know the heart is important, and that losing it creates two entities - a Heartless and a Nobody.
The Heartless actually make a lot less sense as of KH2; in the first game they were easy to explain as the shells of people who had lost their hearts, but, whoops - the Nobodies take that honor. Thanks a lot for your misleading nomenclature, Xehanort.
It would seem, as of KH2, that the Heartless are actually hearts that have collapsed and been taken over by darkness, thus explaining the scene where the hearts raining down from Kingdom Hearts turn into Shadows. (Although wholly failing to explain why Sora was able to get his heart back. Did Kairi reinstall him from backup, or heal his collapsed heart?)
So, the collapsed heart is basically a walking mass of darkness. Because this violates the basic balance of light and dark in everything, it goes around trying to get hearts to fill its void; unfortunately, it only succeeds in collapsing the hearts it touches, and creating more Heartless.
Axel tells us that killing a Heartless with the Keyblade 'releases a captive heart', confirmed by the way we see a heart float away every time we kill one - but this doesn't totally make sense, because if the Heartless actually take and hoard hearts, then how are new Heartless created, if they are actually collapsed hearts? Maybe the Keyblade forcibly restores the heart to its whole state by reintroducing light, but lacks the finesse to do anything for the heart after that, thus it goes floating off to Kingdom Hearts?
I think I like that. We'll go with that.
At any rate, whatever the hell a Heartless actually is, it's there and is created when a person loses their heart (unless you're Kairi and therefore special). There is also something else created - a Nobody.
A Nobody is a little more straightforward, though their existence would seem to merit the term 'Heartless' more than the actual Heartless do. I believe it's Yen Sid who explains that the Nobody is the body and spirit left over when a heart is lost. In most cases, these simply degrade into the Dusks and other varieties that we see, but a very rare few (hi, Organization XIII) are able to keep something like their human forms.
Yen Sid also tells us that Nobodies, unlike Heartless, are sentient. This seems a little strange considering we have villains commanding armies of Heartless, but I guess it works. Heartless can be made to understand orders, while Nobodies already do. The sentience of Nobodies works with the idea that the soul rules over mental functions.
It is also alleged within the game that Nobodies do not feel. This is a fairly uncomfortable assertion, and seems to contradict evidence from the Nobodies' actual actions. Roxas' feelings when he doesn't know he's a Nobody - and also when he does - seem genuine. As do Axel's for Roxas, Demyx's in general, Xemnas's rage and despair, Larxene's schadenfreude, the Dusks frantically grabbing for falling hearts...
I think the best explanation of this is that most feelings do tend to originate in the heart; however, more complex emotions are more in the province of the soul, and the basic ones can leak over or be remembered well enough that an individual Nobody can trick himself into feeling them if he doesn't actually have them. I tend to think that the Nobodies are emotionally stunted, and the emotions they have might decay over time, and some of them really do just lack them - but in general, Nobodies are not without feeling. They're just limited, and perhaps muted.
At any rate, there we have it. Lose your heart, and it collapses and turns into a Heartless, while the rest of you turns into an emotionally-stunted Nobody.
The Philosophical Question
And so, in a roundabout way, we make it here.
Losing one's heart is a bad thing. It's a little hard to argue against this. Losing your heart basically robs you of your personhood; you have to have an exceptionally strong heart to even retain a semblance of your prior appearance as a Nobody, and you have to be unbelievably strong in order to retain your sense of self as a Heartless. (See Sora and Xehanort; and Xehanort seems to be a short-bus Special Case anyway.)
Also, losing your heart creates a Heartless. There is no way a Heartless can really ever be considered a good thing
So, losing your heart is a bad thing to happen, and the creation of a Heartless is likewise bad.
However, the process of losing a heart also creates a Nobody. And a Nobody has choices. A Nobody can choose just to wander alone in search of a way to restore his heart. A Nobody can even choose to resign himself to his fate; he likely won't, but he has the capacity to do so. A Nobody doesn't have to do anything bad. They are sentient, presumably can remember the moral codes they followed when they had their hearts, and can make their own choices.
It seems to be asserted in the game, mostly by DiZ and Yen Sid, that Nobodies are on the same level as Heartless; i.e. bad because of what they are. This is the most uncomfortable assertion made about the Nobodies in game; not least because you've just spent six hours getting attached to Roxas and Naminé and Axel when you first hear it. Sora buys into this, but has incongruous flashes of sympathy for Axel and Roxas, and even a brief one for Xemnas. But in general, he seems to go with the idea that because Nobodies are Nobodies, they're bad and need to be eliminated. Yes, he does go against this at times, but in my opinion, there simply was not enough doubt shown on his part for this to come across as anything more than hypocrisy on Sora's part; "Nobodies are bad, but you helped me/helped someone I know/are my Nobody, so you're okay". I love Sora to pieces, but this is still hard to swallow.
At any rate. The underlying philosophical question, which would have been really great to see better addressed in-game:
Are Nobodies bad because of what they are? Are they bad because they are by-products of a bad process? Is it fair to treat them that way?
Most of the fandom's answer is already "no", I'm sure. But it would have been wonderful if Sora had ever asked himself this.
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stickKEYBLAD TILL HE GO BOOM. >(And, once again, he's an adolescent who's spent one year in a sort of cold stasis and at least another traveling around with a duck and a strangely anthromorphic dog-thing as companions, and never really settles; Sora, I think, is the sort of character who DOES think in black-and-white. He's a good person or else the Keyblade would not have chosen him, but he's not a particularly deep or self-reflective sort. I think he's sort of on the right track to it at the end, when he and Riku are on the beach -- but at that point, the story's wrapped up and he has no further actual interaction with the Nobodies.
Plus, I've seen folks arguing that the generic Nobodies are capable of speech, but the only time we see that happen is when you're in control of Roxas (also, I note, when you're playing as Roxas defeated Nobodies drop munny and health; as Sora, they only drop magic). It's probably easy, in that black-and-white view of Sora's, to NOT think of the Nobodies as human/close to human, because like the Heartless, they mill around, they attack him, and except for the Organization and Naminé, they don't talk to him.
I mean, I love Sora to pieces; he's my favorite character. But he's a Disney hero in a Squaresoft world, and that really kind of limits him in a lot of ways for the sorts of questions that the story wanted to bring up -- and I THINK he was starting to get it, but like I said, that development came too late for it to have impact on his interactions with the other Nobodies he might've met.
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I mean, he had that wonderful crisis of conscience about the Keyblade itself. And he DOES show sympathy for some of the Nobodies; hell, he even has a moment of sympathy for MALEFICENT, and she's the biggest Black Hat he's met. I just would've loved at least some more notice of the shades of grey, even if he wasn't ready to confront them yet.
(and don't worry, the misspelling totally worked where it was XDDD)
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I think, if there'd been more time, we might've gotten something like that with Mickey and Sora -- if you think about it, Mickey doesn't really interact with Sora much. Even when they get to the World That Never Was, Mickey's constantly running off ahead, and by that point, Sora's too distracted by the whole ZOMG WORLD ENDING GOTTA SAVE IT thing. XD Donald, as I see him, is a character who's not evil, but really PETTY (he's selfish and self-centered, but he does come through and do the right thing), and while he may not see things in terms of black-and-white like Sora does, it's more comfortable for him.
For the lines of the story as they were drawn, I'm not entirely sure HOW you could give Sora his crisis of faith on the Nobodies without bogging the story down some; the game plays fairly fast and the story does actually move at a fairly quick pace, once you get down to the whole "Ansem vs the Organization vs KINGDOM HEARTS WILL EAT YOU."
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I don't really know how this problem could have been fixed, honestly. I think we're just getting into the necessity of fanfic, here. XD
thread necromancy~
*skitters back to the bowels of the internet*
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You have to do what you have to do to make yourself able to fight your enemies. The Nobodies weren't necessarily bad-- they didn't /have/ to be, that is-- but they were doing things that hurt people anyway, and using Sora to accomplish an end that seemed nebulous and at the very best likely to have consequences that would shatter countless worlds, given that Xemnas could have cared less (I am so funny c_c;;;!!) about the state of anyone's world after he was done getting what he wanted (as nobody, heartless, and as whole person, evidently). Because they were doing bad things-- hurting people that he was being told by every authority figure he met that he needed to protect, that he wanted to protect-- he needed to be able to fight them.
Sympathizing with your enemy is a terrible way to go about winning a battle, romantic as it might seem to try and understand them; look at the way that people slander muslims and the al quaida in order to rationalize the brutal murder (bordering on genocide) of a distant people who, because they are 'not quite like us', we can treat as enemies. Countless times in history, similar generalizations have been made to smooth over the difficulty those of us who give a damn about the other side's feelings, so that we will support our own side if we need to fight to win whatever conflict is occurring. It's dirty and it's ugly and I hate it, but that's the truth; Sora was told what to believe, and despite those instances of wavering and being unsure if he was really doing the right thing, Sora chose to kill rather than be killed because of what he had been told, and because of the secrets kept from him for such a long period of time. Had he remembered what he'd learned in Castle Oblivion, he may have acted differently, but he had already chosen to give up those memories in order to regain his old ones.
Personally, I see the Real Ansem and Yen Sid as two of the most villainous characters in the game; the Disney villains I can dismiss because most of them were only really concerned with what went on within the boundaries of their own worlds, and thus could have cared less about heartless, nobodies, and the like. 'DiZ' was cold enough to use Sora, Roxas, Riku, and even King Mickey to do whatever it took to get revenge on the Nobodies of his enemies-- yeah, sure, he coated it with a pretty rationalization that he needed to right his wrongs, but even he admitted he was letting his emotions get in the way in a very negative fashion, and for all that I think he realized what a fool he'd been by the end, he was a bastard through and through. (Dunno what Tron saw in him, poor guy.)
Yen Sid, on the other hand, you only see briefly; but he was also cold, calculating-- when he told Sora of what was to come, I was unnerved at best. He already looks creepy, and I got the most terrible feeling inside that tower that what mattered to Yen Sid was results, the results he wanted to get from the occasion; not saving people, stopping evil, or justice.
(this is two long, I shall try making two comments.)
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Justice takes a nasty hit in KH2; the question you posed is one that really does need to be asked, rather than answered without thought. (I'm seeing that happen a LOT in fandom.) While I get the distinct feeling sometimes that Nobodies do have emotions, they're definitely not much more than shadows of people who once were; they are quick to change their minds, and less attached to their emotions than others.
sidenote:
I would say I got the impression that 'hearts' were more the memories than personality, necessarily, though arguably personality is pretty heavily tied into memories. (And your notes on how heartless no longer make sense are both amusing and so right. x_x; damned Nomura).
Okay, back on track. Last thing I wanted to do was pose another question, one that I've been worrying around in the back of my mind since before KH2 came out. That would be 'where do heartless REALLY come from? where did the first heartless come from? What creates them?' Because as much as I'm sure Ansem and Xehanort would like to take the credit, there are two problems with that theory that bother me.
One being that there are so many, MANY heartless around; ignoring my dislike of KH-manga canon, there is still the fact that the FF bunch 'grew up' in Hollow Bastion, or at least lived there nine or ten years ago. That means that theoretically, heartless could only have been going about the worlds for nine years, which either implies that a ton of worlds we don't know about were already destroyed in KH, or that they moved really suddenly at the beginning of KH and began wreaking havoc everywhere more or less simultaneously, nine years later.
The third option I'd postulate here is that they've been gradually emerging in every world for a lot longer than nine years, and that they didn't get to every world simultaneously. Which still leaves the question 'where did they come from?' On to the second reason I think Ansem and Xehanort couldn't have created heartless on their own, so much as figured out how to do it:
Xehanort's name, which (as Nomura said in an interview I can't remember the link to >_o; sorry, I'll look for it) is just like all the Organization names: Remove the X and it spells either 'Another' or 'No Heart'.
Now, if Xehanort has been around for a REALLY long time, it's possible he's the Nobody of someone ELSE...a Nobody that, over time, either figured out how to replace his original heart or started 'growing' a new one. That would explain why his heartless, unlike all other heartless, retained form and an ounce or two of reasoning capability--because it was a heartless created from something that was already a Nobody, making it a pretty strange heart (Nomura calls it powerful, but the only way I can see Xehanort's heart being so powerful is if he was the greatest keyblademaster EVAR in a previous self or something). Which means maybe Xehanort would have known (or should have, but had forgotten, perhaps triggering Ansem's research? Who knows) where the heartless really came from, but also implies that it didn't come from Ansem.
And in the process of typing this out, I also remembered that in the first game it's plainly said at some point that Ansem began his research after the heartless first started appearing, trying to figure out what to do about them-- while many things in the first game were contradicted in the second with 'that's forgery, it wasn't really Ansem', that particular statement was not proved false-- just left unmentioned.
If the heartless were already appearing before Ansem started his research, regardless of whether Xehanort was already a Nobody or not (which is probably fanrambling on my part), then I really wish I knew where the heartless actually come from. Because I got the impression also that they don't come from the Realm of Darkness. Or, not directly anyway.
Any thoughts? :x (on any of it, not just my question. c_C)
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It IS dangerous to start sympathizing with one's enemies, no question. Considering how Sora wants to Fix Everything, though, I'd think that if anybody could pull it off, he could. It would have been really hard to work, though, story-wise... Sora's the magic fixit, but the Org as a whole can't really be 'fixed'. Demyx could potentially be coaxed to join The Good Guys if he was sure they'd protect him, Axel already went turncoat for Sora/the Roxas in Sora, maybe one or two others could be convinced... but as a whole, they'd be awfully hard to 'save'. Some, like Saix, I don't think even could be 'saved'.
I guess what I'm getting at is I'd just have liked Sora to question things a little; even if he just came to the conclusion of "I feel sort of bad for you guys, but as long as you're doing this crap with the Heartless and hurting people and worlds, I'm going to keep fighting you and I won't hold back", I'd have loved that.
I totally agree with you that DiZ is a bastard. I can't help a little sympathy for him, but he and Xehanort basically fucked everything up and there is still no excuse for the way he treated Roxas and Naminé. Yen Sid, I don't know. He's cold, but he's also isolated. I can't really see him as a villain; just very out of touch. He has a lot of knowledge, but for all that he's a powerful old sorceror, he's running a little low on wisdom and just isn't that understanding of people and the way of the world anymore. His tower isn't literally ivory, but has had that effect, I think.
Oh, you're probably right about the hearts and memories. XD; But then, don't most Nobodies have memories of their past selves? I seem to remember Roxas being the weird one for not remembering Sora. ... Which was probably because Sora's heart got fixed real fast and the memories didn't have time to filter over. Okay, answered my own question!
As for your questions about the Heartless... You know what, man, I have no idea. x_x Your guess is honestly as good as mine, perhaps better. I've never thought about that.
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On Sora's reasonings for killing nobodies, and the nobodies themselves:
I can't help but respond to the affirmation that Sora should have had better reasons for what he was doing in two ways:
a) Well, then the 'Land of Dragons', Pridelands and Hercules' part of the Collisseum should have been treated better or at least given flowers after their brutal rapes XD;;
b) Sora isn't that bright. Sora is a good person, but thinking is NOT his strong point-- he travels with two doofuses and of the two of them, it's GOOFY, who you would NOT expect, that is the smarter, the more observant, and the wiser in the end. Of the three of them, Goofy's your smartest character. Now I'm not dissing Goofy here, because I love his Milly-of-Trigun-esque penchant for being SUPER smart and seeming totally ditzy (or maybe not just seeming, whatever), but he's not exactly the smartest dude around. And he's smarter than Sora. So, while I want Sora to take that necessary step and be smart enough to question himself, his reasons, I think it's more likely for him to have reached that point after the end of KH2 than at any time during; after all, during KH2 he's still reacclimatizing to life several inches and at least a year older. (Namine says 'about a year ago Sora came to Castle Oblivion', so I assume it may even have been longer than that.) He missed a year of his life-- like Cloud in FF7, I see him as being more awkward and less able to think as deeply as he should because he was unable to develop at all in that year beyond basic physical changes.
And unfortunately, that's a pretty important developmental year, given the fact that your brain is becoming active in ways it may not have been before, too. Sora's not stupid, mind you, it's just that he was never the brightest of bulbs (just probably the sweetest, in the game, for he does seem to care about everything and everyone, for the most part, in spite of himself) and he's still very much a kid. He was naive in the first game, and remembers nothing of CoM-- a lot of sobering memories that might well have made him think harder about what he was doing in KH2. (Might well, hell. he'd have known who he was fighting at least a little, then.)
I'm with you in wishing KH2 had actually had the balls to tackle the wrongness of what was being done head on-- in a way what Sora was doing was almost like genocide, and we never have had proof that Sora's doing the right thing; those hearts he 'releases' apparently risk just becoming heartless again, and even if they didn't, who's to say it would be impossible to find a way to reunite heart and body to actually FIX people? Sora and Kairi did it without even actually having all the parts there (apparently, hence Roxas and Namine and all, you talked about it extensively already), and it seems weird that they should be 'special' in that they're the only ones who get that chance to be fixed. The fact that they CAN be fixed would suggest that Sora should be looking for a way to fix heartless, rather than effectively kill them or whatever it is he does (I can't tell if they actually die or just become heartless again, thanks to KH2. gah!), but that never occurred to him or anyone else either. Why not, I find myself wondering; but I'm willing to bet it hasn't occurred to most of them.
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*several inches taller and at least a year older (sorry about the typo)
I didn't explain my comparison with Cloud well but I MEANT that Cloud was in a freakin' tube for five years and I totally blame that + stress + grief over Zack and hometown + trauma + MASSIVE trauma + some physical trauma to go with that mental trauma for his absolute WEIRD CRAZINESS. Sora's lucky it was only a year and under such good circumstances, I think. c_c but yes. That was, uh, what I meant with that comparison. It's totally 2:20. I should totally not be up.
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I mean, it would've been easy to have a different motivation for Axel and say that all emotions from Nobodies are manipulations, and made that much, much clearer. But Demyx even goes out of his way to point out: "We do TOO have feelings." I was waiting for a much bigger payoff, or even a brief exploration that would carry into the next game, and that never came - although maybe it's that lack of exploration itself that's going to factor in.
Meanwhile, would the Organization be able to even do what it's trying to do without feelings? They're trying to become fully human - that means they're experiencing a sense of emptiness, longing, and genuine desire. Truly emotionless people wouldn't be doing what the Organization is doing. They'd be sitting around in, y'know, apathy.
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Roxas: Organization XIII. They're a bad group!
Naminé: Bad, or good, I don't know. They are a group of incomplete people who wish to be whole.
Why was that theme even introduced, if we weren't meant to think about it?
I just think they didn't go quite far enough.
And yeah, exactly. That's why I say they're stunted, rather than completely emotionless. They feel just enough to know how empty they are. Even Saix, much though I'd like to think he just has no emotions, his dying action is a lament over his lack of heart.
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Also if they don't answer the question now, they have a better chance of reeling us in for KH3, don't they? XD
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...yes! Yes they do. XDDD
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Essentially, no -- Nobodies ARE NOT bad of because what they are. When you truly think about it, the theme of KH2 -- to me, anyway -- is NOT "good and bad" or "light and dark". It's twilight. The gray area, the mysterious area that people are afraid of. People probably like Yen Sid and DiZ (though DiZ has significantly better reasons to hate the twilight).
The deal is, there are a lot of twilight issues. Iago is one of them and so is Jack Sparrow as well as Mulan's joining of an all-male army, just for a few examples. Iago did very bad things, should they give him another chance? Jack Sparrow is a pirate and tricky, but he does very good things; should we trust him? Mulan broke a law punishable by death, but it was for a very good thing to save her father AND her country; should she be allowed to be trusted again?
The obvious answers are of course, yes and yes and yes.
Are Nobodies bad because of what they are? No. But they're in the gray area; they're very mysterious, and it's hard to trust something so ambiguous. They are neither light nor dark. Most of them do very bad things for a good cause. (Turning people into Heartless, manipulating Sora, etc.) But some of them could actually be halfway decent, if we consider possible other motivations. Many of them are outright bastards, but were they always? Can they develop to be better people, like Axel eventually became, and probably Roxas, too?
It's that strong gray area. They have potential to be either light or dark, but they stick with ambiguous twilight.
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WORD to you and all the commenters
(Is it bad that whenever people raise these questions I want to start babbling about my own fic where those questions are resolved? It's not really written yet, but I'm absurdly proud of it...)