and then after you quit and the company falls apart and you think youre never gonna see him again, you find out that your asshole coworker is, actually, Sir Lancelot, and him working at that job was all part of his preparation for the return of the actual King Arthur.

however. the years start comin and they dont stop comin. kh4 takes place only ~1-2 years after kh2; the timeline of the games is progressing much more slowly than the timeline of Real Life. xigbar will still be a 50 year old man (ignoring etc.) using 90s slang.

but soon. a 50 year old man using 90s slang will read less as him wanting to annoy teens, and more as him using slang that he would have used as a teenager in the 90s.

i imagine he phrases it this way because it's a casual, laid-back way of expressing this idea. "more recently, i go by the name Xigbar, but you can call me Luxu if you want, I don't care either way." (and the fact that he doesn't have a strong preference about the name he's called still says something about his relationship to his own identity, i think!)

but absolutely i feel this can be interpreted on a deeper level, too. the question is about who he is—about his identity in isolation—but the way he responds defines him relationally—"these days they call me Xigbar, but hey, whatever suits you." a sense of identity that is fluid, dependent on who he serves, on what role he plays.

a sense of identity made even more tragic by the fact that, no, Xigbar isn't his real name, and neither was Braig, but neither is Luxu.

[this is Chirithy, speaking about the Master of Masters.]

if he were faking his personality, wouldn't the games make that clearer? wouldn't there be an obvious contrast between his "fake" and "real" personalities? think about other pieces of media where a character is revealed to have a fake personality—for instance, The Good Place, which does it multiple times and each time shows an extremely obvious difference between the facade and the real person. and that show is for adults! why would a video game for children be less overt about it?

wouldn't he fake a better personality? why would his fake personality be "asshole who prods people for fun" and not something that would be more useful to his role? why would he intentionally draw attention and ire when part of his job is to spy on people and get information out of them? if he has the ability to create and maintain an entire fake personality, wouldn't he fake one that makes people like and trust him more? that could successfully convince Sora to join the Org in DDD, that could convince Luxord that he doesn't have any connection to the Box in ReMind, that gives him less friction with his coworkers?

any opinions, headcanons, or theories?

do you think he gives a single shit about Luxu and the others or are they nothing but a means to an end to him?

how do you feel about the implication that he purposefully isolated Luxu from the rest of the apprentices which is implied by how distant his relationship with them seems to be even back in the day (i feel this mainly because of how we never see him interacting with any of them beside his one very antagonistic encounter with Ava in the original X finale. he's even the only missing apprentice in the cutscene where MoM teaches everybody about spirits and nightmares which would be bizarre to me if it wasn't intentional)

do you think Luxu resents him in anyway?

i don't know how much you find this interesting to talk about i just love Luxu and particularly his dynamic with the master so much and i love seeing other people talking about it too.

people havent really asked me my thoughts on the MoM before (that i can recall LOL)! and oooobh i got planny off thoughts. hes one of my favorite characters too, i'm really interested to see where the story goes with him!!

thus far i have read all of the MoM's behavior as manipulative, top to bottom. every time he jokes around with them it can be tied to a specific way he controls his apprentices' behavior—joking at Aced's expense to isolate him from the others, teasing Invi in his one-on-one conversation with her in a way she does not seem to find funny. i havent seen any indication that he cares about his apprentices at all, or sees them as anything other than pawns in whatever game hes playing. (not to say that isn't possible—thats just how i read his character so far!)

related to that, absolutely i agree he isolated Luxu from the other apprentices! and i dont think it's a coincidence that he also seems to have the closest relationship with Luxu—Luxu is the most relaxed around him of any of the apprentices, cracks jokes with him, even is quick to ask questions and doubt him when the other apprentices only very cautiously raised their own concerns. my interpretation/theory/belief is that the MoM isolated Luxu from the others so that he would be the only person Luxu felt close to, and i think he did that because he needed Luxu to be devoted to him for the next few hundred years or so.

honestly i really love how the MoM is written....every scene i feel like you can go line by line and determine the intended effect of his words. like his conversations with young Xehanort in the keyblade graveyard...starting out by playing into Xehanort's natural skepticism and affirming it as a way to disarm it and get him to trust him. and later on using leading language like "it sounds like you're saying..." to shape Xehanort's thoughts for him and draw him to specific conclusions. so so so so so compelling to me.

also at this point I think Luxu is mostly still devoted to the MoM—hes had to be in order to live this long and see this plan through to the end. there have been non-canon things that indicate that maybe he has some doubts, which i think could be really interesting, but TBH i love projecting this thing onto him where the only way he keeps himself from falling into an endless spiral of grief is by deciding that he believes in the MoM 1000%. the alternative is believing all that suffering he's endured and permitted was meaningless.

hiiiii i found this character introduction from the official KHDR twitter account, posted around the time the game was first released.

"though he acts aloof, he cant always hide his passion and enthusiasm."

i like the ambiguity in Bragi's characterization in DR, so i understand why someone would think otherwise, but my interpretation of his characterization is that Bragi sincerely cares about his classmates and views them as his friends. i view him as the second-to-last step on Luxu's downward character spiral, one of the bridges between Luxu in KHUX and Xigbar in the present-day games. ive spoken about this before—i think it's more interesting to read him this way, as it's more dramatic, makes him a more dynamic character, and also casts his actions in an even worse light than if he's a completely coldhearted villain who doesn't give a shit.

so that's how i read Luxu in this game. he has, at this point, almost given up on friendship and human connection, thrown it all away to focus on his Role above all else, but not quite. he just needs one more push.

and im taking this reading and applying it to this character introduction, specifically that last line.

im sure that in 2020 when this was posted, this was intended to give us the impression of a prideful teenager who doesn't want to admit that he can get excited about things. but with the context of his real identity, we can interpret it a different way: Bragi actively tries to distance himself from his classmates, but just can't stop himself from getting invested anyway.

in a recent ask game i got a question about something xigbar has done that i cant get over. well. this is my answer.

[Video ID: A cutscene from 358/2 Days for DS, with high-resolution models. Roxas unsummons his keyblade and says, "Mission accomplished. Xigbar looks up and says, "Or is it?" Roxas says "Huh? Oh, come on, quit playing ar—" Xigbar shoves Roxas away, then jumps out of frame to avoid an attack by an off-screen Heartless. Roxas says, "Whoa!" end ID.]

this one moment is so important to how i think about Xigbar's characterization, in this game, in every game, that i feel the need to. write an entire essay about it lmao

YEAH like...theres a lot of stuff that i think is a little too much of a coincidence to not have been planned in advance. e.g. why does KH2FM go out of its way to tell us that Xigbar was the one who recruited Marluxia, when we wouldn't know about Lauriam for nearly a decade and XigLuxu for for over a decade?

but also the production timeline of the games is so long that i don't think it's too crazy to speculate that they had planned that in advance. we forget that as early as 2013 it wouldve been possible to speculate that Xehanort's keyblade originally belonged to a secret sixth Foreteller named Luxu (and it perhaps even wouldve been possible to speculate that braig was Luxu via body-swapping situation, though with much more tenuous evidence. e.g. the closeup of him being threatened by Xehanort with No Name; him being very mysterious and seeming to have his own agenda from the beginning; etc etc)

and yet if Mr. Tetsuya "Kingdomhearts" Nomura himself came to my door and told me that he had a concrete idea in mind for what Organization XIII's overarching plan was from the beginning i would call him a liar to his face. i know xemnas was textually lying to the Org members to keep them in line [side-eyes the "nobodies having hearts is a retcon" crowd] but some stuff just Does not add up. literally as late as KH3 we have characters wondering aloud what Xehanort is even trying to accomplish by summoning Kingdom Hearts and the χ-blade, and getting the response of "i dunno! nothing good!" and then they had to make a whole 'nother game to actually answer that question.