Shedding Starlight

Xehanort - What are his true origins?

• Shedding Starlight • Season 3 • Episode 1

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Ansem. Xemnas. Xehanort. Three names, one person? Today, we examine the mysteriousness of a deceptive man, one who is clearly the key antagonist to this series, yet who evades us for most of this game. Welcome back to Shedding Starlight.

NOTICE: Hannah's discussion audio has a lot of bumping, apologies! You're not going crazy.  

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Xehanort’s Rise Hello and welcome back to Shedding Starlight! We are starting our third, long awaited season on Kingdom Hearts 2. If this is your first time listening to us, Hannah/Mel and I discuss the lore of this game series in a way that’s approachable to new fans playing through for their first time. So while we’ll discuss Kingdom Hearts 2 in depth, we will not mention any revelations or spoilers from later titles. In our first season, we covered the original game’s antagonist Ansem, who refers to himself as “The Seeker of Darkness”, and discussed his various studies on darkness, hearts, and the greater World. However, Kingdom Hearts 2 reveals even more about who this man was, or rather, who he wasn’t. What’s changed since KH1 In Kingdom Hearts 2, we learn that this man’s name was actually Xehanort. He still experimented on people’s hearts. He still opened a door deep within Hollow Bastion. He still sent Kairi off to Destiny Islands. Most everything we read about in Kingdom Hearts 1 was still committed by this silver-haired man– only now, we realize he did so under his master’s name, rather than his own. Xehanort may have started off perhaps framing his master for monstrous deeds, but eventually he went so far as to take his name, Ansem, for himself.

Xemnas:

How long has it been since I abandoned that name? In our first season, we said that when Xehanort embraced the darkness, instead of creating a Heartless, he remained solely as a sentient heart, floating around in rags, whispering in Sora and Riku’s ears on Destiny Islands. And this was… partly true. Xehanort did remain only as a heart for many years, but when he possessed Riku, he reformed as a being of darkness that still has its heart inside, but resembles its original appearance— in other words, an extremely anomalous Emblem Heartless. He even has the Emblem sigil on his chest to imply this.

So, this man has three versions of himself, all going by different names:

His human self named Xehanort, his Heartless who stole the name Ansem, and his Nobody who followed that convention and named himself Xemnas– an anagram of Ansem in addition with the letter X. To avoid confusion with Ansem the Wise, fans often refer to this Heartless with the entire title of “Ansem, the Seeker of Darkness”. However, we will only refer to him as “Xehanort’s Heartless” to further differentiate between the two. Likewise, instead of “Ansem Reports” and “Secret Ansem Reports”, we will refer to these as “Kingdom Hearts 1’s reports” and “Kingdom Hearts 2’s reports” since they’re written by two different people. The history between Xehanort and Ansem the Wise. Speaking of the reports, Kingdom Hearts 2’s revelations give great context to the events surrounding Xehanort’s studies from the first game. Let’s walk through how Xehanort went down this path, and why he eventually split into a Heartless and Nobody. To begin, we actually start with Ansem the Wise, the ruler of Radiant Garden. Before he ever met Xehanort, he and his apprentices were already studying hearts and the darkness within. The very first Kingdom Hearts 1 report wasn’t written by Xehanort like the others, it was written by Ansem the Wise himself.“But though I am called a sage, there are things I do not understand. …As ruler of this world, I must find the answers.” Eventually, Ansem found Xehanort, almost dying, and nursed him back to health. Xehanort, who had amnesia, then became his new apprentice and volunteered in these experiments on the heart in hopes of recovering his memories. To further these experiments, Ansem installed a vast lab built with hundreds of devices that extract hearts. Although, he didn’t seem to expect things to go so awry, because when he discovered that his apprentices had been collecting people to fill those devices, Ansem essentially had a mental breakdown. He ordered his apprentices to shut everything down and destroy the results. However, this did not spur Xehanort away. Xehanort prepared a presentation for Ansem, probably to request funding, regarding what he secretly wrote about in his Kingdom Hearts 1 reports and the passage at World Terminus.

Xehanort:

Master Ansem. Regarding the experiment I presented the other day… With your permission, I'd like to proceed---

Ansem the Wise:

I forbid it! Forget this talk of doors, and the heart of all worlds. That place must not be defiled! Now, you might remember King Mickey present for this conversation, as he and Ansem are old friends.

Mickey:

Wise Ansem. I'm here to seek your advice. Mickey suggested Ansem review Xehanort’s data, probably in case it had clues or solutions to doors and Heartless appearing throughout the worlds, something Mickey was investigating at the time. At the time, Ansem blamed himself for this. It wasn’t until he discovered Xehanort’s reports from the first game that he realized who was responsible.

Since Xehanort was now completely cut off from his master’s resources, he decided to reach Kingdom Hearts his own way. He wrote in Kingdom Hearts 1’s 10th report:

“My path is set. I shall seek out the wielder of the Keyblade, and the princesses. My body is too frail for such a journey, but I must do this. I will cast it off and plunge into the depths of darkness.” This is most likely when he took on the name Ansem permanently. He released Kairi to find the Keyblade wielder, then plunged himself into darkness, separating his heart from his body–creating Ansem the Seeker of Darkness, and Xemnas, the leader of the soon-to-be founded Organization. Lastly, Xemnas, using his power as an elite Nobody, sent his previous master, Ansem the Wise, into, quote, a “realm of nothingness”. Two methods to create a Kingdom Hearts. We never get to see Xehanort’s Heartless and Nobody plot together, but they both tried to complete Kingdom Hearts through different means.

Ansem the Wise writes in his final report about Xehanort:

His Heartless had attempted to draw out the great darkness of Kingdom Hearts, created from the hearts of all worlds. His Nobody, however, is now almost finished gathering human hearts to be assimilated into Kingdom Hearts as well. Xehanort’s Heartless commanded other Heartless to steal the hearts of worlds. These hearts would then gather and combine to create Kingdom Hearts near the Door to Darkness. His Nobody on the other hand created an Organization to continue experiments with the heart, like for example, their experiments with memory at Castle Oblivion, but their main objective was to use the Keyblade wielder to collect hearts from Emblem Heartless to create their own Kingdom Hearts.

Saix:

Pitiful Heartless, mindlessly collecting hearts. … The rage of the Keyblade releases those hearts. They gather in darkness, masterless and free, until they weave together to make Kingdom Hearts. So the Kingdom Hearts in the first game was created from worlds, and the Kingdom Hearts in this game is created from people. That might be obvious to many but sometimes casual players forget that multiple Kingdom Hearts exist separately. Did Mickey and Xehanort speak with each other? Something else fans might have forgotten, or dismissed as being retconned, is how Xehanort spoke to King Mickey about the Keyblade, and possibly Kingdom Hearts itself.

Today I had a guest from another world. He is a king … We talked for countless hours, but one story in particular caught my interest:

that of a key called the "Keyblade". Because Kingdom Hearts 2 covers that Mickey visited his friend Ansem the Wise, people believe this report was retconned to be about him rather than Xehanort. But it’s important to remember that by the end of Kingdom Hearts 1, both Mickey and Xehanort knew about the Kingdom Key and its counterpart. Xehanort writes about this in the World Terminus passage, and in the beginning of the first Kingdom Hearts game, Mickey writes to Donald, asking him and Goofy to find one Keyblade while he leaves in search of the other. So, it’s possible that while Xehanort came to hypothesize about the heart of all worlds himself, either Mickey told him two Keyblades were tied to the Door of Darkness, or Xehanort taught Mickey that– both are a less than comforting thought. Conclusion

In this first episode on Kingdom Hearts 2, we looked at the villain from the original Kingdom Hearts game, Ansem the Seeker of Darkness, in a new, sinister light. We now know he was really the Heartless of a man named Xehanort, who was a scientist during Hollow Bastion’s glory days. He, along with other apprentices, betrayed and dethroned their master. Xehanort, Ansem, Xemnas. Kingdom Hearts’ villain is a man with many names and many faces–But they have one ultimate goal:

to complete Kingdom Hearts.