#self‑insert: ambivalent observer (xiara)

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9. who are your self insert’s closest friends?

I was gonna say for anyone you'd like but since you wanted us to specify...maybe kingdom hearts :)?

Thank you for this, Paris!! Specifying a series rather than just a specific name is absolutely fine, hehe - since it's just the one question, I can answer it for all of my Kingdom Hearts self-inserts for you!~

(question source: "ask game: self-insert lore" by inserthaven)

9. who are your self-insert's closest friends? - So, Aria isn't really someone who makes particularly close friends, out of both being naturally fairly introverted and self-sufficient, and the fact she wields darkness putting her somewhat at odds with most others right off the bat, even though she's not evil. It takes some time for them to warm up to her, but she does eventually become friends with Terra and Ventus due to the amount of time she spends with them in the Land of Departure and the fact she helps them by siphoning away their leftover darkness remnants from Xehanort and Vanitas. Back in the age of fairytales, Aria's closest friend was her Nobody counterpart, Livi (who is an old friend of mine's self-insert).

Ves is a lot more of a friendly person, but she is also naturally more shy than Aria, so she again doesn't have too many particularly close friends to start with. She ends up working closely with Kairi at Radiant Garden and helping her a lot, so the two of them become pretty close friends, but she's pretty friendly with most of the main cast in all honesty. In the Daybreak AU where she is around as herself during the age of fairytales, Ves' best friends are Shiro (an OC made by the aforementioned old friend) and Strelitzia, though she also ends up becoming close with Ephemer, Skuld, Ventus and Lauriam.

Xiara has a very limited capacity for emotions, due to not only being a Nobody but also having no memories of her life before becoming a Nobody that she can use to emulate emotions. Therefore, whether she has the ability to make friends and be close with others is debatable. However, she tries to be as kind as she can be to the others, and spends most of her time trying to support Roxas and Xion since she recognises they are burdened by their important role. She also spends a lot of time "researching" (i.e. following around and writing down amusing things about) Werm, my friend @dragonsmooch's self-insert.

I hope that all these answers are alright!! Thank you very much for sending in this question, friend ^-^

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How about 💢 and 🤝 for your choice of KH? (If you remember anything any Werm lmao) (dragonsmooch)

“If I remember anything about Werm”. Drake, I’ve made a render with them in it thanks to you and also alluded to their lore in my writing. Werm is wonderful and will never be forgotten!!! Though please do correct me if I misremember something here ;w;

Thank you very much for sending this, dear dragon - since I absolutely want to talk about Werm, I will be using Xiara for both of these!

(question source: this post by hobgayblin)

send me a self-insert of mine and..

💢 – I’ll tell you about an enemy of hers - So, Xiara's position as a member of the Organisation (albeit more of a reserve, since she doesn't have a number or seat) means that she is technically opposed to Sora and the others, since she does seek to gain her own heart and understands that the completion of Kingdom Hearts should enable this.

Xiara is one of the members assigned to Castle Oblivion, so I'm thinking Sora might have one battle against her somewhere on the later floors, when he's more aggressive and initiates the fight without hearing her out first. This causes her to have to return to The World That Never Was, meaning she's the only one other than Axel to survive Castle Oblivion, and she encounters Sora again later during the events of KH2 for probably one or two more battles before he takes her down and she disappears forever, confusing him due to the fact she appears to know she will not recomplete.

🤝 + a name or description - I'll tell you how she’d interact with one of YOUR self-inserts from the same series =) - So, since Xiara acts as somewhat of a scientist within the Organisation through her work assisting Vexen with the Replica Project, I like to think that she is the one in charge of documenting Werm's behaviour and the results of "experiments involving them" to justify "keeping them around" in the castle (i.e. following them around with a notepad and writing down what happens when they eat stuff, for the most part. no mean science going on here. she's the subject of those experiments). Though her lack of memories compared to many of the other Nobodies means she cannot express emotions very well, Werm's increased sentience and ability to evolve over time compared to other Heartless is something that really interests her, and she can tell that their antics make Roxas and Xion in particular very happy, which brings her.. about the closest thing to happiness her own system can approximate.

I hope that those answers were okay!! Thank you very much again for sending this, dear dragon - I've really missed getting to talk about Werm with you, hehe ^-^

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"With the data I’ve collected from the subject, I should have no trouble at all with advancing my Replica Program. I had always expected my research to be successful, and the information I have gathered about the nature of the heart - and the ways in which one can be replicated - shall doubtless prove invaluable to our plans. There's definitely much to explore here, too, so long as she remains able and willing to assist..

You certainly are a strange one, aren’t you, Xiara?”

Tag list: @softskiesahead | @dragonsmooch | @thatslikesometaldude | @lilacslovers | @lux-has-too-many-fos | @beeon | @insomniaships | @setzale​ | @candyforthebrain​ (to be added to the list, use this!)

I’ve wanted to portray a scene like this for a little while now, since I finally settled on Xiara’s lore some time ago. It happens regardless of which version of events takes place - whether it’s the AU where Aria doesn’t become a thing and Xiara seems more like a normal Nobody, or the standard version of events where there’s definitely something not quite right about her - so.. hopefully that counts for AU April, or something!

Reblogs are appreciated but by no means required! There’s also something else under the readmore, if you’re curious!

“I am not your toy, Vexen..”

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So, out of curiosity, I re-rendered the second image in the Xiara render I posted a few days ago without the weird liquid stuff, played around a bit in paint.net, and accidentally came out with something that looks a lot cooler (if I do say so myself)

But then, I wondered what would happen if I saved the pose but loaded the Aria model in instead, since they do actually use different initial bases, and then did a similar sort of thing after rendering. Turns out, the facial expression comes out quite differently:

..They both look way too pale in this lighting, Aria especially, but- I just thought it could be neat to show off! I hope that’s alright!

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So, I don’t think I ever said anything about this, but: the reasoning behind that MMD render of Xiara apparently being experimented on by Vexen is because Xiara is actually not truly a Nobody, though for the most part she does function like one.

To summarise: Xiara’s a data-Nobody, and that’s why she and Aria exist concurrently. The reasoning behind how this came to be and how that can actually make sense in the context of Kingdom Hearts’ mechanics is something I have attempted to explain under the readmore.

Back in the age of fairytales, after the Keyblade War, the new Union leaders set up something called Shift Pride, where the Dandelions could do PvP battles against data recreations of their fellow Keyblade wielders, so they could train without having to physically battle each other again. Though Aria is not a Dandelion, Liviana was, and they managed to get Aria to be input into the system because they could sense she was actually still alive. Maybe the Union leaders had already collected data for all the Keyblade wielders before the War happened, I don’t know. However, the software did not know how to process data taken from Aria, because of what she is, and ended up creating a glitched thing that better resembled Ves (since it didn’t know how to handle, or maybe just couldn’t read, Aria’s Heartless aspects). Later on, this corrupted data was in turn altered by the glitches that were afflicting Daybreak Town, so it picked up more free will and autonomy than the Shift Pride framework accomodated for, and had a stable enough physical form to “exist” in some capacity (because it needed to physically exist in a tangible form for PvP battles in the first place, then was further augmented by the other external glitches).

This “broken PvP data” was then sent forward to the future via the same means as Lauriam and Elrena were (which.. we still don’t know how that happened, but we’re about to find out, I think), ending up being seen as something that resembled a Nobody enough to be treated as one, and thus was brought into the Organisation alongside Marluxia and Larxene. By this time, the technology to create data recreations that could physically exist in the real world had been lost, so since Xiara didn’t display any evidence of having a heart or any ties to light or darkness, or many memories for that matter, even she assumes she’s a normal Nobody like the others. However, since she is actually made from corrupted data, this information is used by Vexen to help him with the Replica Program.

So, I suppose the best way to sum up what Xiara is is that she’s a “data-Nobody” - unlike Xion, who I guess would be a replica Nobody? - because data worked differently in KHUX’s time and I really don’t know enough about Coded and whatnot to handle things in a way that’s more straightforward. Kingdom Hearts lore is already convoluted, so.. why not just  make it moreso? This rambling is the result of my attempts to try and get Aria and Xiara to exist in the same timeline of events, since to do that you kind of have to duplicate Ves somehow, and this is the only way I could think of to do that.

I know none of this is going to make sense to most people because they don’t know a lot of detail about KHUX, but- I kind of just extrapolated from in-game information and brainstorming with my friend about whether that would actually work on our self-inserts, and it kind of just spiralled from there, and I wanted to try and explain that in some capacity! So, thank you to anyone who has read this ^-^