Kingdom Hearts II Understanding Xemnas

If this is already a discussion that is happening on these boards, please refer me to it!

I have been trying very hard to understand what the "plot" of the KIngdom Hearts Saga really is, and I've almost gotten my brain around the whole thing, but I am left confused when it comes to Xemnas and what his intentions were during the timeline of KH2.

If his role in Xehanorts master plan was to gather 13 darknesses in order to eventually create the x-blade, then where does creating his own kingdom hearts come into play?

Mostly I'm just trying to understand where the entire plotline of Kingdom Hearts 2 fits in with this greater plot of the x-blade.

Also trying to figure out where the true form of Xehanort is since both Xemnas and his heartless have been defeated. All we saw for sure in 3D were versions that had time traveled to get where they were.

 

Xemnas was going to use the Kingdom Hearts made in KH2 to fill the rest of the Organization up with Master Xehanort's heart. Arguably, you could say he was telling them the truth about Kingdom Hearts giving them back a heart, heh.

The true form of Master Xehanort was the one at the end of KH3D. He was (slowly) being put back together as we see right around the time Mickey cast Stopza, and he was finished being put together right after the Young Xehanort fight.

 

^ What Plums said. Though I find it interesting that, at the time of being split into Heartless and Nobody, Xehanort may not have had the full extent of his memories (considering Xemnas doesn't use a Keyblade, which would be a silly thing to refrain from if he knew he could). So... who really kept those wheels spinning? I wonder if it might be Xigbar. He always seemed a little too smug to be a one-off. Then again, Xemnas shows signs of regaining his former self, such as referring to one of the BbS trio as an old friend, so maybe he found his way back to his original self's plan some other way.

When it comes to the various incarnations of Kingdom Hearts... I've thought for a while now that not all of them are the real deal. That it takes a little something more than just gathering a lot of hearts to make it appear. Seems like it would've happened more often, at the rate the worlds come under fire from Heartless, Unversed, Dream Eaters, what-have-you... not to mention it seems to pop up wherever it feels like lately. So maybe the one Xemnas was building was a fake of sorts, for his and only his purpose.

 

I recon Xemnas's memories are a bit screwy, I always wondered why he relied so much on Roxas to use the keyblade if he could use one himself, unless he can't because he can't remember how (like it's not so much he can't remember being able to, it's he doesn't know how). I also wondered why, if they are technically the same person why they don't all use the same keyblade. Young Xehanort has 2 weapons though, his keyblade and the blue blade things that are used by "The Mysterious figure" which are obviously linked to Xemnas' light sabers xD

Well, the actual Kingdom Hearts has never really been explained, it's still an entity shrouded in mystery and I don't think we will ever properly understand it- for Ansem SoD it was filled with darkness, for Sora it was light, for Riku and Mickey it was filled with heartless, for Xemnas it was his own world. Why do all the villains want it so badly and why doesn't Sora?

 

These are all really helpful answers. Thanks!

What I'm still wondering though is if we saw the true form of Master Xehanort at the end of 3D, than why did he disappear when the "time was up?" I had always thought that was a version of him that had traveled through time, but if that was indeed his true form returned, than shouldn't he be able to exist in that time just as Axel/Lea is?

Also, how does he plan to fill the each vessel with his own self now without Kingdom Hearts, because I thought the point of forcing the 13 darknesses and 7 lights together was to create the x-blade which would...unlock kingdom hearts. Doesn't one need to happen before the other?

 

These seem like pretty good explanations, but all of them also seem retroactive. I think the most obvious answer is that Nomura and co. are making this up as they go along. In the case of Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, he doesn't seem intent on much other than overrunning the worlds in darkness. He doesn't seem terribly interested in Sora or the Keyblade. As for Xemnas, maybe it's because he didn't have his memory ("or maybe, I'm all there ever was"), but regardless I think both his and Ansem's stated intentions are more or less sincere in their respective games, and now they've been repurposed to do this complicated lights-and-darknesses thing after the fact. I understand that they're trying to give the whole "Xehanort Saga" a kind of cohesiveness, but I don't believe for a second that all of the plotlines have actually led up to this, given that every plot connection between the games is clunky and in no way suggests previous authorial intent.

 

Is there a problem with that? A lot of great twists were written that way. Besides, it's all roughly equivalent on the consumer's end, barring the few hiccups an informed, attentive viewer may notice.

They may not have meant to help MX but they certainly didn't hurt. This is the challenge a real strategist must face, because life is not a book; everyone is playing their own game, and sometimes your own win conditions have to be flexible. All things considered, at the time Ansem and Xemnas were running amok, any ordinary person would've been dead: plans ruined, no agency in the coming events, no stake in the ultimate outcome. MX was just waiting to come back. The bits of him that picked up the slack did what they needed to in the lull.

 

My point is that Ansem, Seeker of Darkness and (to a lesser extent) Xemnas weren't written with Xehanort's scheme in mind, mostly because Xehanort's scheme seems to have been more or less made up on the spot by the writers in 3D. That is to say that in my opinion, the answer to the question of "where does KH2 figure into the plot with the X-Blade?" is that it doesn't. Nor do the plots of any of the KH games other than Birth By Sleep and 3D. Well, except for the fact that the characters from those games have been repurposed towards a new plot, which in turn renders almost every accomplishment so far null and void.

 

This is definitely a valid point. I guess I'm just trying to understand what it is Nomura and co. are trying to get across to the audience now. I know there is a good portion of this that was made up as the story developed, but I'd like to think that as they were creating this new plot, they did it with the old stories in mind and were able to mold them together in a way that makes some sense with the right amount of digging.

For example, the plot of the first game makes sense to me. Gathering the 7 princesses of heart in attempt to find the 7 lights adds up perfectly with this 7 lights versus 13 darknesses plotline. Even the ambitions of Ansem-SoD go along with the idea that Xehanort wanted to fill the worlds with darkness (feeling that the world had an imbalanced abundance of light) in addition to obtaining Kingdom Hearts. To me the Xemnas plot is the only one that doesn't fit among the rest, which is why I felt as if I were missing something. Now I under that the point of him creating his own Kingdom Hearts was to fill the 13 darknesses with Xehanorts....though it still seems to me that he got caught up in this idea of "nothingness" along the way.

Now, my last question...and I'm unsure if there is an answer to this one....why did the original Master Xehanorts body reappear when he had "TerraNorts" body when he became a heartless and a Nobody? Shouldn't that have been the body that returned instead?

 

Ok. Let's break this down.

Terra-Xehanort was created when Master Xehanort willfully flung his heart from his body, using it to possess Terra. That means TX is made up of one body, two hearts. We have no idea what happened to Master Xehanort's body after that. Maybe it also fused with Terra? Maybe No Heart is his empty body? Who knows. Not terribly important either way, but worth noting for later.

So, TX lost his memory, then got split into Ansem Seeker of Darkness and Xemnas. We've taken that for granted this whole time, but what exactly does it mean? If Terra's body and heart were the ones that got split, maybe that means Asod and Xemnas are more Terra than they are MX—Obviously both sides retained MX's personality and MO, but their constituent parts are borrowed, or at least joint-custody.

Now, we know how a person becomes whole again after they've been split into Heartless and Nobody: Vanquish both halves, and the original picks up where they left off. Sora kills Asod and Xemnas. Now what? We assumed that TX would return fully formed, but TX is no ordinary being. It is at least two hearts and potentially two bodies. There really isn't a precedent for this, maybe aside from Sora, who seems to play by his own rules as well. Even then, what we know of Sora seems to suggest that the reconstruction process gets messed up when there are too many hearts, bodies, what-have-you.

Let's use Sora as a framework here. When he returned from Heartless form, Roxas was still around. What was Roxas at that point? Well, in all likelihood he was at least in some part Sora's body, because he wouldn't have a body without Sora. "But Nova, Sora had his body, so...???" Good point! But we know from 3D that none of this is an exact science: Hearts can leave fragments of themselves behind when they depart, which can grow fully-formed in their own right, so who's to say a body can't be splintered that way? This is likely what made hunting Roxas down so important: Sora looked whole, but without a piece of his body he probably couldn't function 100%.

What does this have to do with Xehanort? Well, here's where we get to my hypothesis, in two parts:

1. When Asod and Xemnas were defeated, two people were created: Master Xehanort himself, since his heart had been freed, and an incomplete Terra-Xehanort, borrowing a fragment of MX's heart and likely in an unstable state (maybe even still amnesiac).
2. Master Xehanort, Young Xehanort, or one of their minions seized on the unstable TX and split him again, re-creating Asod and Xemnas, who were now up to speed on the master plan.

And this would lead up to the revelation at The World that Never Was, that the heroes would now be facing not only the big three but a whole circus of Xehanorts. Asod may have also used this chance to visit YX and give him what he needed to traverse time, or it may've been sooner (Reaching on that one, it's probably just a shoddy retcon). If all this is true, it means Terra will have an even harder time with his heel-face turn than we thought, since he's split in half and probably still won't be in good shape when he's reunited.

My question is, does MX like this turn of events? He didn't seem too jazzed about being stuck in his old self in BbS. This may have been a change of heart on the part of the writers—or Leonard Nimoy, for that matter, since I originally heard he'd only been contracted for a single game, yet there he was in 3D. Could be that a fragment of Terra's body gave him a jumpstart... or maybe he'll try to possess somebody again in KH3.

 

I feel the implication regarding hearts without bodies is that hearts are able to take other material and reshape it into a body of sort. The Heartless obviously use darkness, and I think the implication is that Sora became a sort of 'light Heartless' thanks to Kairi. The extreme case is Roxas, where Ventus' heart used a body to create... another body :P
There's obvious SOME sort of matter manipulation going on here because Ansem SoD was eventually able to reshape Riku's body into Terra-Xehanort's, what's more somehow a fragment of Terra-Xehanort's Heartless is able to manifest through Riku's body, and WHAT'S EVEN MORE is that Riku eventually was able to use this power WITHOUT giving up control to the heart. It would seem to me that hearts are able to create an incredibly malleable sort of pseudo-body

 

Valid points all. In that case, it could be that MX has changed the form of TX's body and just re-created Asod and/or Xemnas by his own power. Who knows what you can do with DA DAUKNEZZ.