King Mickey totally has a family portrait commissioned at least once for every family and hangs every one up in the castle on full display because LOOK AT HIS GRANDKIDS GOOD GOLLY GOSH LOOK AT ALL OF THEM :DDDDDD
i think one of my favorite bits of kh2 was right near the end, that realization that while sora, donald, and goofy have been adventuring around, riku & mickey have been doing the same thing? it just touched my heart. T__T ♥ it humanizes riku so much, even though their scene is so short.
For years, I was upset that my favorite quote from Reverse/Rebirth was taken out of the official English translation of Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories. Even though it’s on every other page of the Shiro Amano official artbook! ;o; But I just found out that it wasn’t Namine’s quote, but Mickey’s. o_o All this time, I thought that these self-acceptance concepts were being Disneyfied away, in favor of reiterating a simplistic, “black & white” approach to “good vs evil”, that Sora was already exploring—What’s the point of dual protagonists if the 2nd Hero can’t explore a different perspective?! But it turned out that I had just forgotten who really said the line to Riku. I was looking in the wrong scene. ~.~;;;; Though it is true that Shiro Amano’s manga cut the line from the Chain for Memories manga, since that entire scene after defeating Ansem was cut out, it turns out that the official English translation of the game kept the quote in tact. And by keeping it, they avoided advocating those dangerous absolutist extremes, like the idea that Darkness is always all bad, everything gets classified as either “Good”/Light or “Bad”/Darkness, and any Darkness/”Bad” only deserves destruction. Sora’s story already reiterated that message, but as the story progressed, it felt like Sora’s and Riku’s perspectives would temper each other and synthesize together in the end. If they had kept to the “Darkness is always ‘bad’ message”, the theme would have run counter to so many of the Hero protagonists in the series (Roxas, Terra, Riku) and anti-heroes (Axel). I always felt like accepting one’s own Darkness as a part of yourself, just as much as your Light, was a much more meaningful and realistic message than just “always destroy the Darkness; don’t even try to understand it”. And I’m so relieved that the official English translation kept that self-acceptance message in that quote. ^___^
saratogaroad 