SARAH TRITONE

One such case concerns the final boss of the game, Void Termina. If you’re unfamiliar, Kirby games don’t tend to be interested in such frivolities as “actually telling you what a boss’s deal is supposed to be” and tend to instead hide the relevant lore in special descriptions which only show up if you pause while fighting that boss. Void Termina has a great number of these, as it has four phases, each with their own separate text, and certain phases are replaced with different versions with their own text in the game’s boss rush, and the replacements are different depending on the difficulty.

It’s the text on the second phase of its most difficult incarnation from the DLC that’s been driving me down a horrible rabbit hole. In the English version, this is what you get:

Void exists in all dimensions, but his shining form in another dimension inspired the ancients to transcribe his mysteries in sacred texts. What will be written next?

Will the new scrolls describe a destroyer of worlds, or an ally to the stars?

This is… close enough to most of the original text, to my best understanding. I’ve heard the original text actually implied there’s exactly one Guy Named Void per dimension, and the shitshow of whether or not the original text is actually referring to “Another Dimension” from Return to Dream Land is outside my scope right now. I’m interested in a crucial sentence that wasn’t included in the translation at all. From the Japanese text[1]:

Translating this text is a nightmare, and I don't know Japanese, so I’ll just give you the text from the retranslation mod[2], because I like it:

Dream, Dark, Soul, Heart… Within these matter, chaos and potential are completely gathered, and he is born as the origin of origins.

Now, if you’re a longtime Kirby fan, this is the sort of passage which causes you to shit yourself, because it sort of sounds like they mentioned Dark Matter, and Kirby fans shit themselves when a game mentions Dark Matter. Dark Matter, of course, being the formless black cloud of evil that shows up in Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64 to possess people and do evil, controlled by a big white eye creature named Zero or 0². And Void Termina sometimes looks like Zero, too, and like 0², so it really gets all the gears turning.

Supposedly there are also several other “matters”, also of great significance, and they can fill out the cosmology. Imagine the alignment charts we might assemble with this information! Are you a Heart player or a Dark player? Which matters constitute the Ice Dragon from Dream Land 2? What symbols should we use for these? Is Fecto Forgo composed of Heart Matter?

Stop. We’re already too far. Here’s the thing: the word ‘matter’ is not actually used in that text. Not in English, not exactly in Japanese. The word that is used is the compound 物質, which is more like generically referring to a substance, material, or element. It essentially lists them off and then goes like “Those substances [blah blah blah]”. We’re not referencing Dark Matter, we’re just referencing elemental darkness. Which is certainly unrelated.

Stop again, and read those characters above the kanji on the top line. If you can’t, listen to what I am about to tell you about them. Normally, tiny kana like that (‘furigana’) are used in Japanese to clarify the pronunciation of a kanji in context, because kanji can be pronounced multiple ways. Kirby uses a lot of these, which I assume is because it’s a game intended to be playable by small children who aren’t always going to have the education necessary to guess.

But this is really weird furigana. I believe those kanji are typically pronounced as Yume, Yami, Tamashī, and Kokoro, respectively, but the katakana above them instead literally spell ‘Dream’, ‘Dark’, ‘Soul’, and ‘Heart’ in transliterated English. Importantly, one of the reasons kanji can be pronounced multiple ways is because the same kanji are used in Japanese and Chinese, but many have different meanings or are pronounced differently. That is to say, furigana sometimes indicate that a kanji is to be pronounced, contextually, like you're speaking Chinese. So my best guess is that this furigana is essentially extending that concept to English, saying that while we're using 闇, that character should be pronounced not like on, or an, or yami, but like ‘Dark’.

There's actually something similar used elsewhere in Star Allies, too— ‘Another Dimension’ is in some places written as 異空間 (Ikūkan) with the furigana アナザーディメンション (Anazā Dimenshon). Not getting into the nature of ‘Another Dimension’ here, but these generally both refer to the same thing in Japanese, so the furigana thing fits.

In short, there’s apparently some sort of equivocation being made here between the Japanese and English words. But why? And what does this mean about Dark Matter?

The Dark Matter Debacle

That thing I said earlier about Dark Matter was a lie substantiated by decades of well-meaning localization mistakes. I lied to you, for fun, but it was for the sake of setting up an important point: There is no substance called ‘Dark Matter’ in Kirby.

To clear this up, we need to go back to the very origin. In Kirby’s Dream Land 2, it is revealed at the end of the game that presumed villain King Dedede was actually being possessed by an evil swordsman guy. When you beat him up, he turns into a weird black orb with an eyeball. The Japanese developers of the game presumably wanted to give this guy a cool-sounding English name, something mysterious and spooky, so they went with ‘Dark Matter’ (ダークマター). The localizers, logically enough, just copied this directly.

Obviously, to a Japanese speaker, ‘Matter’ does not necessarily refer to a substance, because that’s not a Japanese word. We in the English-speaking world will see ‘Dark Matter’ and think of the unaccounted-for matter-that-should-be-there which we’ve heard of in movies, but to a Japanese speaker, that’s just the evil swordsman guy’s name. It doesn’t even matter if they know what the English word means— To quote my girlfriend’s example, if you have a character with fire powers and call him Fuego, native English speakers aren't going to assume the character is literally fire incarnate, even if they know that fuego is Spanish for fire. If the character was just named Fire, though, you might reasonably assume they’re meant to be some sort of fire elemental or something.

But if it had been me localizing Kirby’s Dream Land 2, I wouldn’t have worried about that either. It’s just the name of this one guy either way, so there’s not much room for confusion. The only way that decision would backfire would be if in Kirby’s Dream Land 3 the Japanese developers incidentally decided to portray Dark Matter as being born from a massive cloud composed of a particularly dark sort of matter.

So now there’s the ‘Dark Matter Clan’ (ダークマター族), designated with 族, the same word that gives the Mario Wiki so much trouble. It can mean group, or clan, or species, or race, or tribe. Maybe ‘Dark Matter Nation’ is better? Whatever. The point is, Dark Matter ran off and got his dad to come beat up Kirby for him, and his dad is an eyeball monster known as Zero. Also returning from Dream Land 2 is Gooey, the small, friendly goo monster who is ‘made from the same stuff as Dark Matter’[3] but importantly not ‘made of dark matter’. He is player two and has all of Kirby’s powers. Together, they form the aforementioned 族.

They all inhabit a big evil cloud of darkness, but again, that cloud is not made of dark matter, because Dark Matter is just the name of a guy who’s from there. And he isn’t made of dark matter, either, of course. That’s just his name. As a matter of fact, it’s not even called a ‘dark’ cloud in the sense of ‘evil’ in Japanese; the term used is 黒い雲, which to my understanding indicates not so much a cloud of mystical darkness as a cloud which is literally black. We don’t really get a lot of information about what the cloud is made of at all, because it’s not important. It’s an evil black cloud that can possess people, and it shares this ability with a guy who happens to be named Dark Matter, because he was born there and they are both evil.

If you were being strict, though, you might have been able to pick all that apart back then. I’ve heard that the website for Dream Land 3 claimed the cloud was ‘Dark Matter’, but the manual notably doesn’t. Now, if the official English manual of a game[5] was wrong about this, then we’d really be in a mess.

I don’t know if this was a deliberate choice made for the sake of clarity, or if the localizers themselves were just confused. Either way, this terminology wasn't in the Japanese manual, but the damage was done. What was just another black cloud in Japanese is now called ‘Dark Matter’. And the worst part is, Dark Matter himself doesn’t even appear in Kirby 64.

The thing about Kirby 64 is that the developers of the game gained a great deal of sexual gratification by including elements from Dream Land 3 almost exactly while refusing to ever say explicitly that anything in the game has anything to do with Dream Land 3. Both games have a girl who came to Popstar to practice painting and is able to paint pictures that come to life, who wears a green smock and a red beret, who gets possessed by an evil cloud, who has a boss fight where she paints the Ice Dragon from Dream Land 2 in the exact same artstyle; but one is called Ado (アド) and the other is called Adeline (アドレーヌ/Adorēnu), so who can say whether they’re supposed to be related. Similarly, in Kirby 64, said evil cloud makes her paint a picture of Dark Matter, the guy, but that doesn’t mean the evil cloud is related to Dark Matter or Zero. Every time someone claims that Zero is the bad guy in Kirby 64 and gets corrected, Shinichi Shimomura is the first to know, and he smiles. The bad guy in Kirby 64 is actually 0². It’s different.

Anyway, the main thing 0² seems to do is float around in a big black cloud and send out pieces of that cloud to brainwash people, in the form of dark orbs with eyeballs. Those orbs actually have names this time, based on a licensed third-party guidebook[6]: Dark Rimuru (ダーク・リムル), Dark Rimura (ダーク・リムラ), and Dark Rimuro (ダーク・リムロ), all of which use the same katakana for ‘Dark’ (ダーク) that Dark Matter uses, followed by some sounds I don't know the meaning of. I’m bringing this up because it’s the only time anything in the Japanese version of Kirby 64 is actually called ‘Dark’ in English, to my knowledge; even Dark Star, the final world, was originally called ‘Final Star’ (ファイナルスター).

There’s also a guy in Kirby 64 called ‘Miracle Matter’ (ミラクルマター), and he’s presumably related to 0² somehow, but it’s utterly unclear how. Perhaps he’s the Dark Matter equivalent here rather than Dark Rimuru/a/o? Or perhaps it literally doesn’t matter. He’s got Matter in the name, though, so that’s kind of weird.

That’s the end of the Dark Matter saga, in any case. The future from here would mostly consist of a bunch of insubstantial teases, like Drawcia in Kirby Canvas Curse summoning ‘Para Matters’ (パラ マター), the ‘Black Mirror’ (黒い鏡) from Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, and Claycia in Kirby and the Rainbow Curse being possessed by ‘Dark Crafter’ (ダーククラフター). In Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, you've also got ‘Dark Meta Knight’ (ダークメタナイト) and ‘Dark Mind’ (ダークマインド), the latter of which is presumably using his fire powers to become ‘over’ Dark Matter. Except for him, under is over, and fire is water, because it's the mirror world and everything's backwards. Later, some spider looks at the mirror too much and turns into a giant evil bee lady, and also Dark Meta Knight was there.

Kirby Squeak Squad also had an evil star with an eyeball called ‘Dark Zero’ (ダークゼロ), the ruler of shadows (暗黒の支配者), who was introduced and killed within all of ten minutes. The English localizers decided to change his name to ‘Dark Nebula’ and call him the ‘ruler of the underworld’ for some reason. That was the last traditional Kirby game for a while.

So we’ve gotten a little more insight, here. 闇 means darkness, and the kanji there is equivocated with the English word ‘Dark’ (ダーク). By extension, ‘darkness’ is associated with Dark Matter, Dark Mind, Dark Crafter, Dark Zero, and most of all, Dark Rimuru. So perhaps it’s fair to say that this text is talking about some abstract elemental substance of ‘Dark’ which is innate to all of these guys, even if said substance is not actually called ‘dark matter’, and is not equivalent to the evil cloud that brainwashes people.

That leaves the big question: Does this generalize? Do we have similar concepts of ‘Dream’, ‘Soul’, and ‘Heart’, such that we can start drawing diagrams?

Dream of the Stars

This one is easy. Kirby lives in Dream Land, after all, and we've already talked extensively about the Kirby's Dream Land games. Except, no, in Japan, Kirby lives in the deliberately nonsensical ‘Pupupu Land’ (プププランド) and stars in the Kirby of the Stars series, written as 星のカービィ or Hoshi no Kābyi. It's actually kind of a miracle (Miracle Matter mention?) for the localizers that the games went on to have so much dream-based iconography anyway.

It starts all the way back in Kirby’s Adventure, which introduced The Fountain of Dreams, a Super Smash Bros. stage powered by the Star Rod which gives everyone dreams, or something. In Japanese, this is referred to as 夢の泉, or Yume no Izumi, though the title of the area is given in-game as ‘THE FOUNTAIN OF DREAM’ in Latin-alphabet text. The plot of the game involves an evil guy named Nightmare (ナイトメア) possessing it and giving everyone nightmares. He turns from a dark and starry orb into a wizard, Kirby defeats him, and he has no clear relationship to anything else in the series, somehow.

The Fountain of Dreams does, though. In Kirby Super Star, the Fountain of Dreams on Popstar is revealed to be just one of many. There's one on every planet in Kirby's solar system, and if you do something unspecified at each of them, you can summon Galactic Nova (ギャラクティック・ノヴァ), an ancient mechanical clockwork star thing which can grant wishes, or I suppose, dreams. He gets used for evil, so you have to go inside him and blow up his Heart.

Return to Dream Land would then heavily hint that both Nova and the fountains were created by an unspecified ancient civilization which also created Magolor's ship and the evil magic crown used in that game, the one which turns you into a dark orb with an eyeball if you use it too much, the one that's sort of like the One Ring, basically, the one that's outside my scope. The point is, they created a bunch of high-tech ancient shit using an unspecified ‘incredible power’, all of which maybe has a mind of its own or whatever.

This all came to a head in Kirby Planet Robobot, in which an evil corporate executive named Haltmann uses a magic planet-sized computer he found to engage in Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism, and also to turn everyone into robots, the highest stage of Capitalism. This computer is called Star Dream, or in Japanese, 星の夢; you might recognize the first Kanji there as the hoshi in Hoshi no Kābyi, and the second Kanji as the yume in Yume no Izumi. Dream of the Stars, Kirby of the Stars. The computer is shaped like an orb, and it can suck you up in its boss fight.

Anyway, Haltmann eventually gets his soul eaten by the capitalist machine he sought to control, Star Dream proclaims it is going to bring about the end of history, and then it's revealed to have been another Nova all along, with all of the associated powers and a ‘Heart’ at its core. And then you blow it up, just like the original. Good work.

Star Allies itself also has some Dream content, In the form of ‘Dream Friends’ (ドリームフレンズ) summoned by the ‘Dream Rod’ (ドリームロッド) in the ‘Dream Palace’ (ドリームしんでん). Suddenly, ドリーム is all over the place, even for the Dream Palace, which appends it to the Japanese word shinden (しんでん). This is our new favorite word for dream things, I guess, but as we know due to the quote that started all this,ドリーム as in Dream Rod is just a particular kana rendering of 夢 as in Fountain of Dreams. Again, we have a relatively consistent elemental force of sorts associated with technology, wish fulfillment, and abstraction.

Also, it's associated with the ‘friends’ in Star Allies for some reason, which probably has something to do with whatever unsaid reason the Dream Rod is required to summon them, and/or with why Dark Meta Knight counts as a friend. But whatever. The Dream Rod has a heart on it, and does the same thing as Kirby's Friend Heart, but who knows what that's supposed to mean.

Again Heart Paradise

Most of the appearances of 心/ハート (Kokoro/Heart) are isolated to Star Allies, but there are also older examples. In Kirby's Dream Land 3, you have to collect the ‘Heart Stars’ (ハートスター), a sort of congealed goodwill you get from helping people, and use them to drive out the mysterious dark force controlling everyone. Once you do that, they all merge into the ‘Love-Love Stick’ (ラブラブステッキ), which fires heart-shaped projectiles that can kill members of the Dark Matter tribe. 心 makes occasional appearances as well, like in Kirby Mass Attack, where it is used to describe Kirby's star-shaped ‘heart’, i.e. the thing that follows your Nintendo DS™ stylus accessory in the game. It's mostly descriptive, though.

There's also the ‘Heart of Nova’ debacle. That term is never used in Japanese, even though there is still a big mechanical heart-shaped object inside Nova, and even though the ultimate final form of Star Dream has a big mechanical heart-shaped object at its core. But that entity has never been referred to as anything but the guy it's in, whether that's Galactic Nova or Star Dream Soul OS.

Anyway, Star Allies revolves around an evil cult whose thing is that they portmentau every third word with 邪魔 (jama), a Japanese compound word that literally refers to demons obstructing Buddhist practice but figuratively refers to any old obstruction or annoyance. They are implied to have some bad blood with unspecified high-tech ancients, and they kick off the game by trying to release Void Termina from a big evil heart-shaped object called the ‘Jama Heart’ (ジャマハート). They do this by removing four ‘Spears of the Heart’ (心のヤリ) which are named with 心 despite the heart itself being referred to with ハート. These spears were left there by some guys I don't care about.

In English, the heart and most related things were referred to with ‘Jamba’ instead of ‘Jama’; my girlfriend tells me this is because of paid sponsorship from the Jamba Juice brand, so I figure that’s probably why.

That’s a lie, obviously. I don't know why and it's not important. The point is, the attempt to use the Jamba Heart backfires, scattering a bunch of fragments, or ‘hearts of darkness’ (闇のハート) throughout the universe, which then go on to possess people and make them act evil.

There's that 闇 character again… and for more or less the first time in Kirby. I couldn't find many examples of it in the past, but it's all over the place here, and its pronunciation is weird.

At the end of the game, the main bad guy shouts out an extremely long rant that goes by in about two seconds, which is rendered entirely in hiragana (even the part where he's shouting ‘happy birthday’ in English), indicating childishness. Hiragana is generally only pronounced the one way, so when he references worshipping a ‘matter most dark’ in English, or the ‘dark substance’ from the quote that started all this (やみのぶっしつ, or more properly, 闇の物質) in Japanese, he does pronounce 闇 as yami (やみ).

But then later, we're told it's actually pronounced ‘dark’ in a similar context. So I'm not 100% sure what to take from that part. Maybe the latter thing being DLC-only is related? But also, this dipshit's Japanese rant wasn't even on Wikirby, I had to transliterate it myself, And the use of hiragana paradoxically makes it harder for someone who doesn't speak Japanese to pick it apart. So I might just be misunderstanding something.

I digress; this is the Heart section, not the Dark section. When the dark hearts are scattered around the place, Kirby also gets a ‘Friends Heart’ (フレンズハート) that he can use to make people be friends with him. He sets out to free everyone of evil, and the cultist guys set out to gather all the dark hearts so they can actually finish their goddamn ritual.

One of their ships makes it to Popstar, and is called a ‘Fortress of Shadows’ (暗黒あんこくよう), said shadows (暗黒) being the same as the ones Dark Zero was the ruler of. The cultists call it the Jamaharuda (ジャマハルダ), which was changed to ‘Jambastion’ by the localizers, even though including HAL (ハル) in the name was almost certainly part of the joke. Also, later, the DLC for the game revealed that ハルダ (haruda) is actually the cultists’ word for ‘Heart’, which is cute since ハルダ is kind of a corruption of ハート. Meanwhile in English, the localizers were forced to look everyone dead in the eyes and say that the language where most words are shit like ‘bonjam’, ‘jamblasted’, and ‘jawaii’ actually calls hearts ‘bastions’.

You may notice I'm not calling these people or their language ‘Jambandran’, and that's for good reason. ‘Jambandra’ is as real as a big black cloud of ‘dark matter’, in that it is mostly a fiction of localization.

I assume they called the planet-sized space station where you confront the cultists ‘Jambandra’ to parallel it with Halcandra (ハルカンドラ), the implied home planet of those unspecified ancients. And, like, I get it. It doesn’t exactly take a genius to put together that the ancients the cultists have beef with are probably the same guys who made Nova and all that other shit. Magolor's ship, the Lor (ローア) even lines up with the Japanese name of the cultists’ home base, ‘Great Magical Star Majuharugalor’ (大魔星マジュハルガロア). Lor means ‘paradise’ in the cultists’ language, apparently, and Maju means ‘again’ (except in the English version, where it was changed to ‘Majaja’ for some reason, even though it obviously should've been translated as ‘demon beast’). The ‘haruga’, then, is portmenteauing ‘haruda’ (Heart), but with a parallel to the ‘haruka’ at the beginning of ‘Halcandra’, and also to the Japanese word haruka (遥か), meaning ‘distant’.

So I guess it is sort of like Halcandra? And ‘Jambandra’ has the ‘Jamba’ in it, like how the Japanese name references 魔 again, one of the words from jama? Maybe the localized name is fine for what it is? But it's a real shame that the English version doesn’t have this aspect where you find out the nonsense name actually meant ‘Again Heart Paradise’ all along, leaving us all to wonder what that means. Or even the aspect where it's the 星 from Hoshi no Kirby again.

Anyway, Heart is pretty basic. The ancients and the cultists both have Heart stuff, I guess, so it's probably just a sort of neutral ‘passion’ thing. And then Dark is, like, hatred and magic, and Dream is optimism and technology. The dark hearts drive you to act with malice, anger, greed, etc. while the heart-with-the-properties-of-the-dream-rod drives you to cooperate and be friends. Something about society. That has a certain ring to it, that's probably fine. I'm imagining diagrams already.

Just one last thing to take care of.

Soul of Chaos

Somehow, Kirby Canvas Curse was the one to start this trend. When you defeat Drawcia Sorceress (ドロシア ソーサレス), the game’s main antagonist and final boss, she gets really mad and turns into an orb with a big, gooey eye-shaped mouth on it (Dark Matter mention???). The orb is made of paint, because she is a paint witch. In this form, she is called ‘Drawcia Soul’ (ドロシア ソウル), probably because it is her dying soul trying to defeat you. She’s pink, and I guess that makes her sort of like Kirby if you really think about it.

That was the moment when everything changed. They remade Kirby Super Star on the DS after that, and so they gave Mark (マルク), the game’s final boss, an extra special ultimate form fought only in the hardest version of the boss rush. This form was known as Mark Soul (マルク ソウル) and gained a lot of Drawcia’s attacks for some reason, including the paint themed ones. He also screams really loudly and frankly does not look all that much like a soul.

Then, the trend was set in stone. In Return to Dream Land, Magolor (Maholor/マホロア in Japanese) gets to become Magolor Soul (Maholor Soul/マホロア ソウル). In Triple Deluxe, aforementioned evil bee Sectonia (セクトニア) gets to become Sectonia Soul (セクトニアソウル), or ‘Soul of Sectonia’ in English. In Planet Robobot, our friend Star Dream digests Haltmann's soul to become Star Dream Soul OS (星の夢.Soul OS), which is rendered in the Latin Alphabet because of computers. And, of course, Void Termina itself, who is called ‘Ende Nil’ (エンデ・ニル) in Japanese and always has been, gets to become 魂沌, Soul of Nil (ソウル オブ ニル).

Ah, yes, ‘Essence of Chaos’, that’s what 魂沌 means. Sort of. Not exactly. 混沌 means chaos, and just chaos; it’s a combination of ‘mixed’ and ‘uncertainty’, and it’s pronounced konton. But 魂 can also be pronounced kon, so 魂沌 sounds exactly the same, except 魂 just so happens to be that same Kanji that means ‘soul’ and is later, in Void Termina’s double-ultimate DLC-exclusive hardest version, said to be pronounced as ‘Soul’ (ソウル). It’s a pun, and a clever way of messing with the formula going forward— Chaos Elfilis (カオス・エフィリス) from Kirby and the Forgotten Land is also a ‘Soul’ boss, despite the name, and they’re denoted as such with the same trick, their title being ‘New Species of Chaos’ (魂沌新種). Also, because they turn into an orb and still use all of Drawcia’s attacks.

In a way, the equivocation of ソウル and 魂 is an opening of opportunity. This means that in the future, as far as the Japanese developers are concerned, they have many more options for implying that something is a ‘Soul’ boss than just sticking ‘Soul’ in English on the end of it. After all, ソウル was only ever a particular rendering of 魂, ultimately. And ダーク, like Mr. Matter and Mr. Meta Knight and Mr. Rimuru, was only ever a rendering of 闇. And all those times they wrote 夢 when describing the nonspecific ancients, their mysterious star-based technologies, and not the place Kirby lives in, they might’ve just as easily written the text as ドリーム and it would’ve meant the same thing. And, of course, should they ever want another way to refer to all the Heart shit in Star Allies, it can be understood that 心, when appropriate, may reference the same thing.

At the very least, I think there is strong evidence that these four ‘elements’ have made themselves key parts of the thematic makeup of this series. We constantly see corrupting, vengeful forces of Dark with unclear motives; we constantly see mysterious treasures and mysteries and things made with the incredible power of Dream; we saw in that one game that people thought was basically okay an absurd saturation of Heart, which represented emotions or something; and, of course, the constancy of the Soul as the last vestiges of willpower, the bedrock of Id, the ability to become an orb when you are normally supposed to die but only if Kirby has defeated several other people a moment ago, speaks for itself.

So, sure, you know, the cultist guys probably know how to, like, channel those forces into physical form, and combine them, such that the resultant being can become anything. It’s like how Kirby can copy enemies, and how Void Termina can copy other beings. Because if Void is nothing, nil, zero, and indeed 0², then there is nothing it can’t be once it is born as something.

It makes me think of how four-element systems usually have a fifth element with mystical properties. Japanese Buddhists have one; It’s called the Godai, and its fifth element is 空, most often translated in that context as ‘Void’ (though not Nil). It sits above the others, the most pure element of all, capable of being anything and everything specifically because it is nothing. 空 means other things, too: a distant place, empty air, the sky. Kirby even uses it in the infamous name of ‘Another Dimension’ (異空間, lit. ‘Different Space’; 空間 is a compound that refers to a physical space in the mathematical sense). Void exists in all dimensions, after all. It's the origin of origins, formed only where chaos and potential, where all the elements, are completely gathered.

Conclusion

Alright, so I’m starting to get weird about this, only now, so it’s time to wrap up. Don’t take any of this too seriously. I basically just made this because of several unbearable wiki binges and a desperate urge to sum up everything I found interesting. Like I said, I don’t speak Japanese, so I definitely fucked something up somewhere. Let me know if you spot something, I’ll do my best to fix it. The last thing this fandom needs is more misinformation.

The funny thing is, if any of this stuff ever ends up mattering, I fully expect the localizers to just go all in on talking about ‘Soul Matter’ or whatever and act like ‘Dark Matter’ was a part of this all along. I wouldn’t begrudge them that; it’s not their job to remind everyone of the technicalities of a bunch of things only nerds like me care about, it’s their job to make sure that most people playing the game understand what is supposed to be happening. It’ll be interesting to see where the series goes in general, really. There’s that new Forgotten Land DLC that I’m not going to be playing for a while, that could be cool. Maybe that will finally let us meet with Heart Matter face-to-face, which would actually be so sick, because if you didn’t know, there’s some text somewhere in the Japanese Star Allies that like, says that Dark Matter isn’t the only Matter. Isn’t that cool?

Do you remember that time that the music got dark and then it was an eyeball monster crying blood? It really helps remind me that this series isn’t for women, babies, or gay people, and that if you think about it Kirby is actually super cool and tough despite his fucking embarrassing pathetic shade of pink that makes everyone think the game is for women, babies, and/or gay people. But it’s crazy because he’s actually tough. And the lore is fucked up though. The lore is just crazy though, it’s like Lovecraft. It’s pretty deep when you really think about it, it’s so deep, and so am I for liking it.

Anyway, off with you. I have to go do anything else. Bye.

References

Void Termina boss description, with furigana intact: https://wikirby.com/wiki/Void_Termina#cite_note-1

Boss descriptions, original and retranslated, by SYZekrom: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g8v6ynH3B2lFtoXPnNC5jWxBEYl45fFPuwqERk1oXAE/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.aowqmsn7dcss

Kirby's Dream Land 3 Manual: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Nintendo_SNES/Manual/formated/Kirby-s_DreamLand_3_-1997-_Nintendo.pdf

20th Aniversary Kirby Pupupu Encyclopedia (page 19): https://archive.org/details/kirby-pupupu-daizen-20th-anniversary-encyclopedia-art-book/page/n19/mode/2up

Kirby 64 Manual: https://archive.org/details/Kirby_64_Manual/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater