The original Kingdom Hearts follows a pretty typical story structure. Boy is childhood friends with Girl and Rival. Home gets destroyed, everyone gets separated. Boy sets out to find Girl and Rival. Girl is captured by bad guys, Rival turns to dark side. Boy rescues Girl, helps redeem Rival.
In the third game, Kingdom Hearts II (don’t ask about the numbering), the Girl, Kairi, winds up being captured by the bad guys again and the Boy, Sora, sets out to rescue her again. There are turns and twists, more Disney worlds, and stuff.
There’s nothing really ~fancy~ inherent in the broad strokes of the games’ stories, most of the fun comes from its aesthetic of mixing Final Fantasy tropes with Disney characters and worlds. They draw a lot from the Disney canon and Saving The Princess is a big part of that whole thing. Plus, rescuing Kairi isn’t the big climax or resolution of the first game. Even after she’s rescued there’s still Stuff To Do. It’s not an excuse for damseling her, by no means, but it’s something. She also gives Sora the Oathkeeper Keybalde (which is objectively the best Keyblade).
The good news is that even though she does wind up something of a damsel in Kingdom Hearts II, by the end of it she’s using her own Keyblade and fighting bad guys. That’s right, after all this time having Sora and Riku save her, now she can fight her own battles.
Anyway, thirteen real-world years go by, a bunch of other Kingdom Hearts games come out and I play a couple of them. And finally, Kingdom Hearts III, the tenth game in the series (please don’t ask about the numbering) came out last month. Something teased by the prior games is that it’s been leading up to a bunch of heroes fighting a bunch of villains, one of those fighting heroes being a Keyblade wielding Kairi. Which, dope. Let’s have the Boy, Girl, and Rival fighting together against the bad guy in the kind of anime showdown I’ve been awaiting for the past thirteen odd years.
Alright, here there be spoilers for Kingdom Hearts III, as I’m gonna be getting into plot details. I haven’t finished the game yet, but I’m getting real close to that final boss.
Kairi gets sidelined for a good chunk of the game, off training with another character. Cool, fine, but we only see her in a couple cutscenes, which is a bit of a bummer, but, fine, it’s fundamentally Sora’s story after all. When everyone shows up at the Keyblade Graveyard it’s finally time to rock and roll, and everyone’s fighting. After an initial defeat, it’s Kairi who rescues Sora after he’s saved everyone else, which is a delightful twist to have him be saved by her for a change. Look at how this game has grown, man!
Big showdown happens again, with Sora going to his allies in turn to assist them in fighting one of the villains. It’s while helping Kairi that the fight is interrupted with a cutscene — and Kairi gets captured by Xemnas who overpowers her by twisting her hand over her head.
Okay.
So.
Kairi, Keyblade wielder, is overpowered that easily? And then she’s turned into a damsel again!? It’s frustrating how straight this is played, Kairi makes no attempt to fight back against Xemnas, instead struggling helplessly. Sora, of course, is pissed and here we go again, a male character motivated by the endangerment of his sometimes love interest.
Great.
Oh, but wait, it gets better.
Sora defeats Xemnas and the other villains and is now staring down the Big Bad Xehanort. He taunts Sora, summoning an unconscious Kairi, and decides that Sora needs some motivation.
So he kills Kairi.
Explicitly to give Sora some motivation. The villain (and narrative) effectively fridges Kairi for the plot.
Look, I love Kingdom Hearts but it’s 2019, can we please stop treating female characters like this? We’ve done the damsel in distress over and over again, can we just, not? Can’t there be some other motivation for Sora to really wanna defeat Xehanort besides him offing Kairi? It’s lazy, and frustrating, especially when the story’s already made her a fighter. It seems like the game undercuts her growth at every turn, reducing her again and again to being just a plot point for Sora to be motivated by or to rescue. As other major games have been making great strides in how they handle female characters, it’s such a shame to see Kingdom Hearts regress to old habits. It’s just plain lazy.
I haven’t finished the game yet, and maybe, just maybe I’m judging the game prematurely; maybe just maybe they’ll find a way to redeem Kairi’s character. But somehow, I doubt it; at the end of it all, Kairi’s just another damsel. Again.
And to top it all off, I didn’t even get Oathkeeper out of it.
Essays, Not Rants! 