#kh:days

And I know at first glance that sounds like a ridiculous claim, but here's the thing - it all comes down to context. And since it's such an easy target for taking out of context, let's dive into said context.

When Roxas and Axel first have sea salt ice cream together, Roxas has no heart and basically no memories. Same goes for when he starts to consider Axel a friend, something which is explained to him as people who do this sort of thing, because he doesn't yet have the ability to fully feel or comprehend the emotions that come with friendship.

In other words, sharing ice cream is both a formative experience for Roxas as well as the very definition of friendship to him. "Friendship" and "having ice cream together" are, to Roxas, two concepts inextricable from one another.

As the story progresses and Roxas ends up growing a heart, his friendships with Axel and later Xion progress as well, though ice cream at the clock tower remains a foundation of those friendships.

Roxas very clearly has the same emotional capacity as anyone else by the time Xion disappears, but he never learns the language we'd use regarding friendship (or emotions in general), and he has less than a year's worth of memories and experience to pull from when trying to express his emotions. So it's perfectly natural that he falls back to the definitive idea of what friendship is to him when he's confronted with losing it. Because to Roxas, being friends is sharing ice cream, and of course his language is going to reflect that.

It's easy to take that line out of context because we don't have that context in our own lives and can't directly relate to it. We've had years to figure out emotions and friendships, decades for some of us, and a good number of us had people around us who could help us understand when we had questions.

But Roxas and Xion didn't get years. Roxas got a week shy of a single year, and Xion got even less than that. Neither of them had people who could answer their questions in a way that helped them understand their emotions. Instead they had Axel, who was under the impression that none of them could feel emotions to begin with and therefore wasn't in a position to offer useful advice on understanding them.

Roxas and Xion had to figure all of this out practically on their own within the span of 358 days (for Roxas) or less (for Xion), part of which was spent developing the ability to feel emotions in the first place, and all of which was spent in the Kingdom Hearts equivalent of a fucking cult that explicitly told them they couldn't actually feel emotions. And also made them try to kill each other multiple times. So it's honestly no surprise that they have an incomplete understanding of friendship.

You see these precious children? These are my favorite, most beloved children. Let me tell you why.

It's because their desires, their goals, were so bleedingly simple. They didn't strive for the horizon, looking for adventure, trying to leave the familiar behind. Neither did they knowingly try to fight evil, dedicating their lives to maintaining the balance between Light and Dark.

That's not to say that the Destiny Trio and the Wayfinder Trio didn't have their share of hardships. Obviously, they did; the Wayfinders especially. BbS was utterly tragic; no one would say otherwise…

...but Aqua, Terra, and Ventus were at least training for some sort of conflict. They had some level of… I dunno… “consent” in how much danger they were willing to face. And Sora, Kairi, and Riku were ready to take off on a makeshift raft, looking for something new. They obviously didn't want to lose their home to Darkness, but they were ready for something big to happen.

Roxas, Xion, and Axel were just… trying to live. They were just trying to live as best as their shitty circumstances would allow. They weren't looking for adventure, or to become heroes, or to fight back against any sort of world-eating darkness. They weren't aiming for anything incredible.

For pity's sake, their loftiest goal was going to the beach together.

These poor kids were just trying to have normal lives. To be together and feel something good amidst all the horrors surrounding their existence.

There's just something so despondent about them, trying to keep themselves safe in the Organization, trying to meet up and have their ice cream and laugh together, all while their world falls apart into lies and mistrust and regret and agonizing loss.

They didn't want anything special; they just wanted to live and be happy together. And they couldn't even have that.

Ever think about how it must've felt for that to be the only part of them that the Organization (and later DiZ, for Naminé) ever cared about? Only being valued because you're useful to others is a bad enough feeling on its own, but CoM and Days take it a step further and Naminé and Xion are only valued because the circumstances of their creation are useful to their captors, and they're both discarded without remorse once that usefulness is gone or no longer working in their favor.

Cried before talking to even one character.