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themattress · 5 years

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More bullshit from Mod A in regards to Xion. Mod M is more reasonable (although I question if toxic male fandom does hate anything that reads like fanfiction at first glance...I think that if it reads like the kind of fanfiction they like, then they’ll eagerly accept it. I like to consider myself equal opportunity in this regard: if it reads like any kind of bad fanfic, then I dislike it.)

I’m with @riniuchihaa here. For me, Xion, far from being the best KH character, was the first glaring neon warning sign that the series was going off-course, that an original character was being created for the sake of it despite not being able to impact much of anything given her placement, and then was not ever let go of even though the excuse given as to why she was forgotten by KH2 should have rendered it impossible for her to appear in the series again.

“not a damsel in distress, action girl or sex object”

Is she not those things, though? She has to be rescued or protected several times throughout the game. She wields a Keyblade and can even be better at it than Roxas if she’s absorbed enough of his strength. And there are a lot of creepy guys online that will argue that she is sexy, particularly with KH3′s model of her suggesting that she’s not wearing anything underneath that coat, which is open all the way to just above her chest. By KH3, she’s even taken Namine’s “plot device to make convoluted shit happen” status. If anything, people take issue with her being all of those things, and not even being them as well as other KH girls. She’s very derivative with little to add for herself.

“she’s a regular human being with a regular human emotional arc”

I would actually say that of Xion in the manga.

In the game, I think this is a case of projecting. Xion’s personality and arc are written as such a blank slate, with more people talking about Xion and what she’s going through than her and it being onscreen, that it’s easy to project on to. But when looked at objectively, there isn’t much humanity to it at all.

Ask yourself this: what is Xion like when she’s not around Roxas and Axel, doing missions and eating ice cream? What are her likes and dislikes, her own personal hobbies or aspirations? What are her feelings on matters completely unrelated to her friends? For the life of me, I can’t come up with an answer. The closest I can get is with the text of her Secret Reports, where she honestly shows more character than she actually shows in the game itself (but then, that’s the same with Roxas and his Diary entries.)

Before her identity crisis kicks in, all of Xion’s scenes are shared with Roxas and/or Axel, in the context of missions, ice cream, and being good friends with them, simply going along with whatever they’re doing and saying. Any feelings of inadequacy she feels during periods of time where she’s “malfunctioning” are skimmed over, and again is talked about more by other people than by her. Once her identity crisis happens, any scene she has apart from Axel and Roxas either still works them in somehow (they are consistently her biggest motivations in her own personal conflict, the only reason she’s conflicted about her existence is because of them since they give her a reason to exist) or just focuses on her freaking out about the fact that she’s a replica whose personality was formed based on the fragmented memories of another person that leaked into Xion through that person’s Nobody, which makes her less fit to exist than those who aren’t meant to exist. Yeah, totally a regular human emotional arc right there! Can’t count the number of times in the history of the human species that people have had to go through that!

Kairi in KH and Namine in COM actually felt like human beings with emotional arcs in spite of their extraordinary circumstances. Xion feels more like KH2′s Kairi and Namine, where I get the basic trope behind their personalities and development, but can’t really pin them down as three-dimensional and realistic. That’s Xion - the writing for her is very trope-y, not human. The main points of how she was written were three-fold: as a plot device (a means of getting Roxas from point A to point B), as a wish-fulfillment character (she’s basically Tomoko Kanemaki’s self-insert), and as an exploration of a theme (the “What Measure is a Non-Human?” theme that Kanemaki is obsessed with). The humanity being inferred in regards to her being a trans girl case study was not at all intended to be there, and it can only happen because she was sketched thinly enough for it to be applied to her.

“complains that she’s taking too much space or stealing the spotlight”

I’m sorry, but this is a valid complaint. When it was announced there was going to be a game about Organization XIII set between COM and KH2, everyone was wanting and expecting more development and focus on the members who had already been firmly established, most of whom were in desperate need of such development and focus. So to suddenly have Xion introduced and be the major focus of the game, whether she’s actually on-screen or not, would be very jarring and disappointing.

What’s worse is all the games she pops in after Days, as not only does it destroy the established rules of canon in regards to her fate, but she ultimately steals the spotlight in an even more harmful way in KH3: Kairi, the original KH girl, who had been receiving build-up for YEARS as a Keyblade-wielding Guardian of Light, is literally screwed out of this role in favor of Xion, her Mary Sue copycat whom no-one asked for to begin with and whom many people weren’t keen on having return, as not only did it destroy the main thing she had going for her (her nature as a tragic character) but it robbed Kairi of development and focus that, again, she was in desperate need of. But Xion got over 30 more votes than Kairi in a Japanese popularity poll, so...priorities?

“Xion’s story is about the right to define her own existence, to live as her own true self, etc.”

No, that’s not what Xion’s story was about. It was about her learning that she had no right to her existence because it was actively hurting the existences of others, including her best friends’, and that the right thing to do is to disappear. I take some issue with how it played out (mainly that Xion accepts this way too easily and becomes a “Too Good For This Sinful Earth” type who does the right thing for the sake of her friends even when a more angry, selfish and conflicted Xion would’ve been more engaging and human, and that Riku is OOC in his treatment of her considering his treatment of Roxas), it was still incredibly tragic and it owned that. So for that tragic story to be undone in favor of a “lol, just kidding, Xion can exist and get a happy ending with her friends after all, no tragedy here!” way of appeasing the fans who called foul and raised a stink about it (especially in Japan) will never sit right with me, especially when the writing doesn’t even TRY to justify it. It just happens for the sake of it.

“It has a lot to do with the fact that Xion is a young girl whose story expects us to genuinely empathize with her”

OK, here’s a tip: it is rarely EVER a good idea to expect your audience to all feel a certain way toward something and try to force that reaction. “Death of the Author” is a thing, which is why you’re best not taking sides or playing favorites when making a story, you’re better off putting your personal feelings aside and just letting things play out, allowing people in the audience to make up their own mind. When the story pushes for the audience to genuinely empathize with Xion, with lines by others such as “poor Xion!”, then it’s not surprising that the opposite effect happens: some fans don’t like or empathize with her because they resent the hamfisted attempts at being told that they should.

“That’s like saying Kairi didn’t matter in KH1 because Sora forgot her in COM”

That’s a false equivalence if I ever saw one. KH came out before COM, and Sora didn’t forget her so much as she was replaced by someone else, Namine, in his memory, which drove that story’s conflict. Its resolution was Sora learning the truth and remembering Kairi again. Kairi is still a factor in COM, a very important factor at that. Days came out after KH2, where there isn’t even a hint of Xion, she is not a factor in that game because she wasn’t invented yet. Sure, Xion matters to Days, but that mattering doesn’t feel like it amounts to much when she isn’t seen, heard from or mentioned for the entirety of the game it was leading up to.

“But so what?”

So, it feels incredibly unnatural to have a character jammed into a pre-existing timeframe and pre-existing dynamic prior to KH2, with mass amnesia being used as a plot device to explain away why she wasn’t present in any way in KH2, only for every game taking place after KH2 (and thus after Days was made) to suddenly start featuring Xion again, with the mass amnesia plot device being casually discarded. What’s worse is how canon rules were obliterated so that Xion could return in KH3 and reverse the tragedy element that made her story effective to begin with, at the expense of characters like Kairi who have been around longer than Xion and who desperately needed exposure more than Xion. Seriously, in addition to the point I already raised about Xion taking Kairi’s place, just think about this: characters that were created as a trio, Sora, Riku and Kairi, are no longer a trio, just the duo of Sora and Riku, while characters that were created as a duo, Roxas and Axel, are now a trio thanks to Xion. It feels like a slap in the face to all the fans who liked Kairi and the Destiny Trio, and it’s a big reason as to why Xion’s inclusion in the series feels like a mistake to those fans and thus why she’s such an off-putting character to them.

The only statements made here that I agree with is that Xion sadly wouldn’t have gotten as much hate if she was a badass, older male character, that her being forgotten due to memory magic isn’t really a mark against her since that’s a cheap plot device that happens to a lot of characters in the series, and that you can’t really do the story of 358/2 Days without her since she’s so integral to it...but on that note, the story of 358/2 Days didn’t need to happen. The KH series during its early days was meant to be Sora, Donald and Goofy’s story, so leaving the period of time where they were asleep a blank made perfect sense. We never needed to know about Roxas’ time in the Organization beyond what was said and shown in KH2, and to this day I honestly wish we hadn’t. In game form, anyway. The manga is great, it can stay!

#Disney #Square Enix #Kingdom Hearts #Xion #Opinion #Objection #Correction #Fandumb #Bad Writing #Jumping the Shark #This Franchise Got Screwed Up #Anti-Xion #Anti-Kingdom Hearts

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