“A Nobody does not have a right to know, nor does it have a right to be.”
Thus says DiZ in the opening act of “Kingdom Hearts 2,” in reference to Roxas and his status as main protagonist Sora’s Nobody. Nobodies are the remains of a person after their heart is stolen: they can no longer feel genuine emotions, they are shunned by both Light and Dark, and according to DiZ and Yen Sid, Nobodies do not truly exist at all. Given that the player’s sympathies are with Roxas, who acts as the would-be protagonist of the game before the switch is made to Sora, DiZ comes off as being a big jerk here, rather than being insightful. Not helping the matter is that Roxas’s life, such as it is, consists of little but constant anxiety and torment: the life he thought he was living only minutes before turns out to be a virtual-reality lie, and his real life prior involved watching one of his best friends die in his arms, his other best friend more or less deceiving him, and Organization XIII, the antagonists of “Kingdom Hearts 2” and Roxas’s former business associates, driving him to the point of betrayal, leaving him with nothing. And now here’s DiZ saying that he might not even exist at all? Roxas has every right to be a little upset about that, and so might the player. But if one can get over the image of the puppy-dog-getting-kicked motif that is Roxas, it might be seen that DiZ may have a point. Maybe Nobodies /don’t/ exist, at least not in the sense that you, I, and Sora exist. The main lament of the Nobodies in “Kingdom Hearts” is that they can’t have genuine feelings, but the problem permeates further than just one of indifference: it could very well be, as we shall see, that their presence in the world is indeed just a superimposed one without any real substance. Maybe underneath those puppy dog eyes and insane cowlick, Roxas is little more than a figment of our imagination, not worthy of our pity, as his very being relies on keeping a part of Sora from being restored, and whom we should curb stomp unmercifully until he gives that power back.
Of course, curb stomping Roxas would make you the worst person on Earth. Come on, the guy is as nice as can be, identity theft notwithstanding. Still, does he have a right to be?
Into this question of Nobodies and video games comes a man who’s never heard of Kingdom Hearts, but is very concerned with the soul and existentialism. Rene Descartes was a 17th century philosopher who pondered the idea of how confident he could be that he existed. To this end, he attempted to deconstruct everything around him until he found a point where there were certifiable truths which could not be deconstructed. This process included questioning whether he could trust what he saw, felt, thought, and experienced, and whether he could rely on any of them as proof that he existed at all. Looking at his book, “Meditations,” we can apply his thoughts on the matter to the situation of Roxas in “Kingdom Hearts 2” and see whether the Nobodies can hold up in the eyes of Rene Descartes.
When we first meet Roxas, we learn that he’s a regular teenager with a regular teenager life. He and his close group of friends (Hayner, Pence, and Olette) live in Twilight Town, and are enjoying the last week of their summer vacation. We watch as they encounter obstacles such as dealing with Siefer and the local bullies, partaking in the sport of Struggle (which entails beating your opponent with a whiffle bat and knocking orbs out of them. Fun for all ages), and trying to complete their homework. However, on the second last day of this vacation, Roxas wakes to discover that his friends not only no longer see him, but that, evidenced by a photo of the three of them without Roxas at their side, they have never known him at all. Further investigation reveals that the town Roxas lives in is a digital recreation of Twilight Town, and that all the experiences we have had up until now have been utterly fake. He had been captured by DiZ and put in a virtual reality to live out his days as his real body is slowly siphoned back into Sora. The opening of the game, then, never actually happened: Roxas didn’t really win the Struggle Championship or investigate the Seven Wonders of Twilight Town: he was just mislead to believe that he did. Yet, had there not been the big reveal as to this falsity, or had the game simply ended after the end of the fifth day with Roxas being put back into Sora without even realizing what was happening, neither Roxas nor the player would know that Roxas’s life as presented in the game was a lie, and that the true origin of his experiences were created as per the wishes of a third party.
The possibility that his experiences and sight were capable of being manipulated, or at least that they might not be trusted, occurred to Descartes as he sat in his chair and thought deep thoughts. He might have reason to believe that he was indeed sitting in a room by himself, that he lived in the Netherlands, and that this was the 17th century: through immediate experience he could believe he had walked in the room and sat in his chair, and long term experience would say that he had been in the Netherlands, and that it was the 17th century, for some time. For all he knew, all his memories and his waking moments indicated that what he saw at this moment in time was what truly was. But what if, thought Descartes, all those experiences he had which hammered home the fact that he lived where he thought he lived were somehow untrue? He might not have thought that someone like DiZ had created a virtual world for his Nobody (would that make him Dexcartes?), but it might have so happened that he was knocked on the head and suffered brain damage, meaning that his reliance on knowledge of place might be muddled. It could be that the room he walked into had red wallpaper, but due to a strange biological quirk, Descartes’ eyes were unable to see red, and thus he was not experiencing the room as it truly was. Heck, what if he was just really, really drunk, or inhaled a ton of ether, and was just hallucinating every waking moment? Experience, then, could not be trusted as an indication of existence or truth, because experience was easily manipulated. Not just via a Matrix-like machine such as DiZ had created, but through basic, real world possibility. What you see and experience on an everyday basis, emphasized to the point that you take it for granted to be true, cannot be verified beyond certainty as real, and thus cannot be relied on as proof of existence.
This deconstruction of the existence of experience critically hurts Roxas’s bid for existence, moreso than it might Descartes or any regular person. The Roxas we know in “Kingdom Hearts 2” is, for the most part, presented only as he is in the faux Twilight Town. Now, the Roxas we hang around with at the beginning of the game is a nice guy who might fumble the ball now and again, but he means well and really cares for his friends. But the thing is, the friends he cares for don’t exist. The woman who owns the candy store that Roxas talks to early on can verify that Roxas has been her favorite customer for years, but she doesn’t exist either. And if she doesn’t exist, then of course those years of patronage that Roxas had does not exist either. The day to day experiences that Roxas has, as well as past experiences which might lead to the here and now, are shown to be constructs of DiZ’s world. Everything that Roxas believes in is shown to be wrong, and thus the player has reason to believe that the Roxas they’ve been playing as is not the person they know. If the world we’ve been playing in doesn’t exist, than the actions Roxas has been committing don’t exist. He didn’t laugh and have fun with his friends, he didn’t sit on the clock tower to eat ice cream. And if all the elements that have constructed the Roxas we think we know do not actually exist, then Roxas as we know him does not exist. If not for the benefits of a few flashbacks and a separate game centered entirely around him, the player would have no idea of what Roxas was really like before he entered the fake Twilight Town. If DiZ’s world can falsify the experiences of Roxas, so too might it alter his personality, his thoughts, even his looks. The Roxas presented to us at the beginning of “Kingdom Hearts 2” is revealed to have been potentially manipulated and reconstructed in every conceivable way, and cannot be thought of as truly existing. Just as Descartes cannot trust his eyes and his past experiences, neither can we trust this representation of Roxas.
Of course, thanks to the appendix game of “358/2 Days,” we do know that there was a Roxas before being inserted into the fake Twilight Town, that he was more or less the same guy, personality wise, and had experiences of his own (unless you want to embrace the idea that all the narratives of “Kingdom Hearts” are similar fabrications, but that’s taking things a bit far). The game fills in the gap of time in between the first and second “Kingdom Hearts”: coming into creation as a Nobody after Sora’s heart is removed in the first “Kingdom Hearts,” Roxas joins a group called Organization XIII, made up of powerful Nobodies, who seek to find Kingdom Hearts so that they might regain their hearts and become complete people once again. In the universe of the game, a person consists of a soul, body, and a heart. When a heart is removed by the stock baddies of the game, known as the Heartless, the remaining body and soul form into a Nobody. The Nobody might look like the person they were previously, but they are unable to have genuine feelings: what emotions they might have are triggered by memories from their past life, and are not truly theirs. The idea of not being able to feel emotion might sound more the topic for high school poetry than metaphysics, but it triggers some interesting questions.
Like a pesky Darkside that keeps screwing up your attempt to beat “Kingdom Hearts” on expert mode, Descartes arises once again to ruin Roxas’s life. After deciding that the world around him might not be there, Descartes wonders whether the world /inside/ of him might not be there. That is, his thoughts, his feelings, and his senses may also be deconstructed. The problems with senses trace to the problems with experience: if you cannot rely on experience, then you can’t rely on the senses you derive from that experience. You might feel awfully comfy sitting on your couch while playing video games, but if that experience of sitting on the couch is fabricated, than so too is the sense of feeling comfy. If you are inclined to believe that we are products of our experiences, and that our minds and thoughts are formed as such, than those too are under attack, or at least, not beyond the realm of scepticism. And what of the possibility of mind control? Descartes goes so far as to say that there might very well be an evil genius controlling his thoughts, which, if somewhat absurd sounding, has enough plausibility behind it to cause doubt as to the sanctity of thought.
The mind-control theory might seem a bit bogus at first, but when you apply it to Nobodies, it actually seems to work. To use an analogy, consider a table top RPG. Say my character is a knight named Dave, who is walking through the Temple of Malicious No-Goodniks. Dave encounters a large bat and instantly flies into a rage, as his family was killed by bats (which makes his family kind of wimpy, but whatever). The emotions Dave feels are anger and the desire to kill, and he attacks. Of course, Dave isn’t really feeling anything, because Dave doesn’t exist: his backstory, emotions, and current state of affairs are being projected onto a miniature as per my wishes. Dave exists only as an extension of my thoughts, and without me to superimpose a personality upon him, Dave ceases to be the Dave I have described. Nobodies have the same sort of situation as Dave, where their looks, memories, and personalities are superimposed by a pre-existing person. Vexen only acts the way he does because Even was like that first before having his heart removed: Vexen’s personality is not his own, and of course, neither are his looks. Nothing they are has been created by themselves, but are created as per the specs of another person. As such, it could be said that Nobodies really are in a state of mind control of a third party, and that their existence is not genuinely theirs, being that what they are now depends on what someone else has made them. Their thoughts come about based on what their previous selves might have thought, their personalities come about based on what their previous personalities might have been, and all they become is a projection of what someone else once was. They exist only based on what their Somebodies existed as, and thus their own existence in disingenuous. Just like Descartes believes his sensations and thoughts are potentially being manipulated, Nobodies are in the same boat of having their existence essentially meddled with, and thus may still have their existence brought into question.
By now, Roxas has every reason to hate Descartes as much as he hates DiZ, because if DiZ didn’t do him any favors, Descartes is hardly lending a helping hand either. But Roxas fans might hold up some hope yet. In his musings, and deconstructing both the act of experience, memory, sensation, and the possibility of being constantly manipulated, it seemed to Descartes that, if this was all happening, then clearly there was something there to be manipulated: you couldn’t manipulate thought if there was no mind. This idea was coined in the now paraphrased: “I think, therefore I am.” Even if everything else about him was fake, there was a mind to process that which was fake. The ability to process information could not be deconstructed, and thus Descartes knew that if nothing else, his mind existed. And Roxas might have comfort in this: he only exists because of Sora, his experiences might be completely fraudulent, but at least there is something for DiZ to mess around with. Everything else might be fake, but because Roxas is able to perceive this, than to a certain extent, he exists.
Should you decide that, the next time you’re going through “Kingdom Hearts 2,” that Roxas is ten times better read than most junior high students usually are, feel free to imagine him pointing at DiZ and shouting “I OBJECT!” as he hurls a copy of “Meditations” at his red-taped head. And then imagine him somehow earning the Summon ability early, and with it Summoning Descartes to rain down fiery existentialism down upon him. And then, standing before the still comatose Sora, you can imagine Roxas proclaiming that at least he has a mind, and that he /does/ have a right to exist.
Of course, since Roxas is obligated to have the worst life ever, Sephiroth comes down from the ceiling and runs him through with a six foot sword. Hey, just because he exists doesn’t mean his life is any better.
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