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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.
no subject
...yes! Yes they do. XDDD