#kh discourse

Now, this is not to say there is never room for criticism, because there is, but that is a very different thing from what you’re describing, which is plain old bashing. Criticism and critique are offered in the hope that something will improve; bashing is done to express pure vitriol, and it isn’t productive for anyone. It might feel good in the moment, but in the end it just leaves people bitter and empty. 

There are plenty of people critiquing K/H and how the games went and how the various character arcs unfolded and how the relationships developed, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Shutting down all criticism isn’t healthy; it should be allowed and encouraged, as constructive criticism leads to healthy dialogue, both with other fans and with S/quare E/nix. And Square has listened to fans in the past; they’ve fixed issues with gameplay that occurred when 1.5 and 2.5 were ported to the PS4 and converted to 60 fps, for example.

Neither is there anything wrong with venting to a close friend in a private setting - DMs, PMs, on your personal blog or twitter account with the ship you’re criticizing censored somehow so that everyone who likes it doesn’t have to stumble across your venting. Heaven knows I’ve had to vent a lot to stay in the fandom without lashing out. The issue is when someone thinks it’s okay to force their anger and negativity onto other people who don’t want to see it or hear it. 

So the question is, why are we stumbling across such strong feelings? Because it’s clear people feel pretty strongly about all this. 

I don’t think there’s an easy answer as to why this is happening, but I’ll take a shot at explaining what might’ve happened all the same. I’m sure if you asked someone else, they might give you a different answer, and it’s worth getting multiple perspectives. This is just my two cents, and naturally, it’s going to be biased towards my experiences and preferences. 

The shipwars in the K/ingdom H/earts fandom have been nasty for years. From what I can gather, they got really bad when KH2 was released, though I’m sure there was probably drama before then. S*kai fans and S*riku fans did not see eye to eye on how that game went, and it’s all been downhill ever since. People on both sides have been mean and nasty, I’ve seen them be nasty, hurling insults and slurs and accusing each other of awful things to the point that the question of “who started it” is pretty much moot at this point. A more productive question would be, “how can we end it and get along, or at least start treating each other better?” 

Now, since I ship S*kai (obviously), I’ll share why this is such a touchy subject for me personally. I’ve been in fandom for a while now, and something I’ve noticed is just how much fans tend to hate female characters because of sexism and internalized misogyny.   

I was in the M/C/U fandom before this, and Sh*ron’s actress got death threats around the time C/ivil W/ar came out from angry shippers. And then P*ggy’s actress has likewise been harassed after E/ndgame came out by, again, angry shippers. I was a big F/M/A fan back in the day, and W*nry got so much hate from, you guessed it, angry shippers. I remember a friend back then rolling her eyes and bashing W*nry, and when I asked her why she hated her, she couldn’t really give me a clear answer other than that she was “whiny.” 

Heaven forbid a female character not be completely perfect. 

Over and over, I saw this pattern repeating. A female character gets hate because there is a popular alternate pairing that she “gets in the way of.” Even before I had the vocabulary to talk about it, the hatred just struck me as very gendered. I never saw that level of hatred for any of the male characters unless they were written to be hated (hello Shou T*cker). And I was likewise harsher on female characters than on their male counterparts. It took me years to realize what I was doing and to try to put a stop to it. 

So then I came to the K/ingdom H/earts fandom with all that background and baggage, dealing with years of people hating characters I liked and looked up to and identified with, and I saw the same thing happening again. Yet another female character getting nasty hate because of her gender, because she dared to like a boy who was shipped with another boy. Because she dared to fall in love. How dare she have feelings, how dare she be feminine, how dare she wear pink and have a flowery Keyblade. How dare her strength of heart be stronger than her physical strength. There is only one kind of strength that matters, and it’s how hard you can kick someone’s ass (wrong, wrong, wrong, and one look at the whole power of friendship thing this series revolves around would tell you that). 

How dare K*iri not be an instant expert at fighting, which is cruel and ironic because if she was an instant expert at fighting, everyone would be crying Mary Sue. How dare she sass and tease S*ra, she’s such a bitch. Oh, she doesn’t tease him as much in K/H/3 and is more gentle and supportive because he’s going through hell and nearly loses everything and she knows he needs her support now more than ever? She’s a complete pushover! 

See what I mean by how hard people are on female characters? K*iri can’t win no matter what she does. She could have the best character arc ever post K/H/3 and people would still find something to complain about. That’s not to say I don’t have issues with how she’s written, I just think the criticisms against her tend to be way overblown. There aren’t enough discussions about how she could improve moving forward (though I have seen them, and thank you to those of you who do have them!), instead people just write her off completely as useless and worthless and want to improve her character by… dropping her out of the story completely (and yes, I’ve run into someone who actually thought this would be a good thing and always felt the need to talk about it, and it absolutely drove me up the wall). 

And worst of all, she can’t win because S*ra fell in love with her. Really, it’s ironic that she gets as much hate as she does for something S*ra did. She had no control over S*ra falling in love with her, and yet she is absolutely despised by people because he did. She isn’t “good enough” for him apparently, whatever that’s supposed to mean.  

I share all this to explain why I was so sensitive to the issue coming in. I saw the same thing happening I’d experienced time and again and I was so exhausted. So tired of it. I didn’t want to deal with it again, and I was on my guard right from the start. Especially because it’s so normalized in online KH communities to bash K*iri and S*kai. The major ones, too, with lots of people and a wide range of (or lack thereof) of shipping preferences, not just dedicated shipping groups. Try to go an entire discussion without seeing it come up… it’s a lot harder than you might think. 

At first I tried to be patient and understanding. Other people have different tastes, and I wanted to be understanding of that. But after years of watching the bashing happen, my patience ran thin. I was sick of seeing it enabled in major K/H communities, sick of seeing mods refuse to put a stop to it, or worse, low-key join in with the bashing, sick of having to put up with so much negativity when all I wanted was somewhere to discuss something I enjoyed. Some people seemed almost gleeful, almost eager in their bashing; any time K*iri was brought up, they felt compelled to express their hatred for her. They were more obsessed with her than her actual fans were; felt more passionately (albeit negatively) about S*kai than some actual S*kai shippers did. 

When I reached that point, the point where I was tempted to be negative and snappy and rude, I knew I couldn’t engage with certain people anymore. So I stopped trying. I searched for S*kai fans here on tumblr and stuck with them. I didn’t want to add to an already tense situation, and thankfully, there are other people who feel the same way (but more on that later). 

And on the S*riku side of things, some of them have shared that they have been told nasty homophobic things for shipping S*riku. And for many of them, I’m sure S*riku is a way of expressing their identity, a way of exploring their feelings and expressing them in a safe, welcoming way with fellow fans who get what they’re going through. Representation has gotten better in recent years (though it still has a long way to go), but back when the K/H games were first coming out, things were different, and people had to take what they could get from canon and run with it if they wanted to see more content that represented them. 

I’ve also seen a few people say that certain S*kai fans went out of their way to message them and rub what happened in K/H/3 in their faces. That kind of gloating is bound to upset anyone, yikes. Canon has become the new gold standard for shipping in the last decade or so, and it has sadly been weaponized in the ever-nastier ship wars, when really, a ship’s value shouldn’t be based on how “canon” it is but on the joy it brings to people. 

So yeah, we have a situation where enough people on both sides were treating others poorly that everyone got defensive, because how could you not when people keep attacking something you love, especially if you feel strongly about it/associate it with your identity? And that made people more likely to lash out, and when they did, people got even more defensive, and the cycle repeated, over and over and over again. 

And you know how I mentioned I sought refuge with likeminded fans? I think that happened all over the fandom. People seek out those who will support them and support their beliefs and form identities and communities based around them… and that’s a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it’s great to get so much support, especially if you’re seeking refuge from a particularly nasty ship war. Having a safe place to vent and unwind and finally get to talk about what you love without fear of getting hate over it is awesome.

On the other hand, things like echo chambers, confirmation bias, groupthink, and the false consensus effect flourish in those kinds of situations. If all you hear is that XYZ pairing must be canon or will be canon in a future game from the group of people you’ve surrounded yourself with, and everyone enthusiastically agrees because everyone ships the same thing you do and of course no one is going to rain on that parade, it can come as quite a shock when a new piece of canon comes out and doesn’t align to your expectations. Especially if you’ve spent years expecting canon to align with your expectations. 

We lose something when we can’t engage in healthy dialogue with people who disagree with us. Our perceptions get warped, our memories might even get warped, and what we could’ve sworn was canon… we might be surprised to see wasn’t, when we revisit the source material with a more critical eye or listen to someone who sees things differently than we do. 

But how can we have that healthy dialogue when there’s been so much bad blood? How can we listen to each other when there’s no trust? It’s nearly impossible, so instead we reinforce the beliefs and ideas our own communities already hold fast to, and the cycle continues. We draw lines in the sand separating “us” vs. “them” and don’t give each other a chance. Not only does this alienate people on opposite ends of the shipping spectrum, it also alienates multishippers because they’re considered “traitors” to both sides, and that is an uncomfortable place to be. 

I think that’s why you find the whole thing so jarring. I’m guessing you might not be as heavily involved with the fandom as I am, and have thus been largely immune from the perils of echo chambers and confirmation bias. So for you it must seem really weird that something that seems clear to you is so contentious to other people. I don’t say this to throw shade at anyone, because I know the same thing would’ve happened if the pairings had gotten switched around. It’s more of an observation of a phenomenon I’ve seen happen over and over again throughout the years. 

So all of that is to say, things are tense because of all these backgrounds and experiences and histories people bring into the fandom. No one exists in a vacuum, and things were already tense before K/H/3 even came out. K/ingdom H/earts has been such an important part of many people’s lives and growing up experiences that they feel a deep connection to it and almost a sense of ownership of it. It’s a shared story, a shared experience. It belongs to all of us, in a way, and yet it’s still N*mura’s baby.

And that’s where we run into more issues. How much say should fans have in a work of art? Does the creator get the final say in interpretation, or should she accept that once her creation has been released into the world, it’s up to other people to interpret what she meant? There are no easy answers to these kinds of questions, and they’re widely debated and discussed (see: the whole death of the author debacle). 

However, while I think feeling a sense of ownership and investment in a piece of art is totally fine, it crosses the line when it gets into the realm of entitlement. By this I do not mean asking for more representation, because that is a perfectly good thing to ask for; I mean demanding that the creators cater to your whims… or else. I mean contacting people who worked on the game on twitter and demanding they change the story to make it “right.” I mean directly telling one of the VAs you want her replaced because you thought she did a bad job. And yes, I am talking about actual stuff I’ve seen happen in this very fandom. All of that has also left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and other people I’ve talked to have felt the same. 

That being said, shipping in and of itself is not the problem. For every nasty tweet and bashing post out there, there are plenty of kind and good people who are just there to enjoy their ships. Lovely artists and talented writers and skilled gif makers and editors creating a wealth of beautiful content for something they love. People who would never harass others for their shipping preferences and are disgusted by those who do. Unfortunately, they’re not the ones getting the attention, and they’re probably not the ones you’re going to run into if you ship a different ship, as they tend to stick to their own spaces out of courtesy and respect. 

This means that the people you are more likely to run into are the ones who want to pick fights. The ones who bash and stir up drama and tell people to kill themselves for shipping XYZ. While there are plenty of people being cruel and nasty and toxic, there are good people in the fandom too. Kind, caring people who will see you as a person first and not an XYZ, even if they don’t agree with you on everything. They’re quiet(er), because kindness isn’t usually flashy and showy, but they’re here. You just have to know how to find them.