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vryyn · 1 year

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The Emancipation of Performative Apathy

A personal essay about growing up

When I was younger, I always thought I was way too cool to ever express myself, especially to my peers. At the risk of sounding insane, I didn’t really like anyone- most things that I did feel were things that I could only describe as reactionary. I didn’t enjoy the people that I called friends, and, in that time, I lost a lot of interest for the sake of trying to be cool in front of them. Which means that after a certain age, I was that annoying, goofy ass, punk that just didn’t let myself or anyone else enjoy things. And through it all, through the eons that have passed, the thing that got me out of that funk was Kingdom Hearts. (That's right, this is a love letter to kingdom hearts, eat my ass. I’m pushing 30, let me have this.)

(Kingdom Hearts box art via CNET)

For the allistics reading this, Kingdom Hearts is a video game franchise that, as of writing, has 3 main numbered entries and 10 side games. All of these games are integral to the overall story that has spanned over the course of twenty-one years. It’s a game that tries the ludicrous idea of attempting a giant crossover between two IP’s- Final Fantasy and Disney. In all of these games, you play as spikey-haired anime protagonist OC known as Sora who goes on adventures with Disney’s Donald and Goofy. They explore Disney’s catalog of animated films and engage in anime fights with the villains of said movie. If I had to sum up the experience of what it’s like playing it would be something like Goofy and Squall from Final Fantasy 8, meeting up and having a melodramatic conversation about light and darkness. Nothing about this game should have worked, but my 4-year-old ass sat on the floor and loved every second of it. I was hooked from the first game despite that game being very hard and even harder to understand at that age.

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My brother and I would play that game together and by play, I mean I just watched while he played. The problem was that we were both young children, so we barely knew how to play the game. We got stuck a lot. The first game in this franchise is very hard- the hardest one, if you ask me. Replaying it now is still a struggle in some parts. Things don’t work the way they’re intended to, and characters move like they’re knee deep in mud. Keep in mind this was the early 2000’s, like prehistoric, ancient Mesopotamia era- there was no internet especially in the border town we lived in. The only consistent resource we had were our parents and, of course, a book.

This, however, wasn’t just any old book, this was the holy grail of all knowledge, a heavenly divine scripture written by the gods who wished to bless us mere mortals with a tome filled with their wisdom. Our journey to acquire such knowledge was not going to be easy and we were prepared to face those challenges. We begged, cried, and, most importantly, asked our parents to take us to our conveniently located Barnes and Noble. And after searching for what felt like eons, there it was- The Official Kingdom Hearts Strategy Guide.

(from ‘Kingdom Hearts: The Official Strategy Guide’ (pages 62, 63) via piggyback)

The guide contained everything we ever needed from maps and battle strategies, stickers, art, important item locations, secrets, stickers and, most importantly, enemy stats. We never bought it. But God I wanted those stickers. Anyway, Barnes and Noble had a copy opened so we may have skimmed it. The most important piece of information the guide ever gave us was to use defensive magic. Like that was it. And that has been the most game changing advice I have ever gotten for a game. And with that, we beat the first game, under leveled and slightly better gamers. After the first game, I was sort of left to play these games by myself.

Up until 2013, I had played every entry that came out, including the one where the real- time combat is done with one time use cards that have to be reloaded upon use. The series had a game come out on every piece of hardware you can imagine, so even if I wasn't home to play one of the titles, there was always something in my pocket to give me access to this world. I didn’t understand a damn thing that was being said in the game, but I loved it anyway. It was just nice to see Goofy do the most broken, most insane juggle in the game to go on and get a wombo combo by Donald casting a string of spells that barely work while you were fighting a different enemy using a spinning twits kick. It was nothing short of brilliance.

After 2013, once I was in middle school, I stopped caring. The first trailer for the 3rd installment in the game was shown off way back then and it looked interesting but by all means I just didn’t want to care about a silly game. Instead, I decided to focus my efforts into becoming the worst possible person that a teenager could be- a centralist. I thought I was hot shit, I thought I was being super cool by adapting the language and attitudes of contemporary think tanks. At the time, that meant the rhetoric of atheists on the internet which in itself evolved into the anti-woke, anti-sjw and, eventually, gamer gate spaces. The people I had surrounded myself with just made it easier for me to become so embedded into the idea that I didn’t need to be an active member in my communities or my life. I didn’t let myself be bogged down by anything that could possibly make me feel bad. And because of all that, between the ages of 10-16, my memory is pretty blurry.

When I came to, I found myself over encumbered by the burdening realization- a passionate 3-word sentence, searing onto the tip of my tongue: I hate this. I didn’t dig my heels into the lamest world of politics- which by then shape shifted into the likes of Ben Shapario, Rubin Report, and Project Veritas. They were all things that I used to watch or was aware of who they were. I was too cool to ever be lame enough to fall into that conservative pipeline. I was just becoming an extremely apathetic man. Instead of radicalizing myself to that kind of thing, I just sat there with that nothing for a long time. I didn’t know what to talk about now. I just started listening to other people around me. I saw people who loved things and each other, who were hurt by things outside of their control. And I didn’t know what was going on. In 2016, I miraculously graduated high school even though I kind of just sort of did nothing and still came out at like 18th in my class. In that haze I somehow then performed an any% speed run through college in what was supposed to be a 2018 graduation turned into a 2019 graduation. In that time, I eventually started leaning more towards where I stand now with my political affiliations, and that meant where I was as a kid. I was super based as a kid way more than I was in my adolescence, it’s comedy really.

My brother reminded me sometime in late 2018, early 2019, that after 6+ years Kingdom Hearts 3 was finally releasing. That month I made an unprecedented amount of money in tips, and it was coming out around my birthday, so I bought it. I hadn’t played the previous games in so long and when I went back to see all these games and the plot threads that were going to be wrapped up in this 3rd main- line entry, I was surprised to see how much I remember it and, what was the most shocking to me, was how much I cared about it. Remembering all those characters, people that I hadn’t seen in at least 6+ years was a sobering reminder of my own frail creation of a personality I created and what little it had made me.

I couldn’t help but think about Sora and the quest that he’d been through in these games. Sora is nothing like me. He unabashedly and unconditionally loves, he is quick to extend a hand of friendship, he constantly wears his heart on his sleeve and, most importantly, learns what growing up means in a world that wants to grow cold. He started off as a happy kid who goes on this long adventure because he didn’t want to lose his friends. Throughout the course of the series, in what I’m guessing was the writers trying to write themselves out of a corner, decided to inject fear and doubt into him. He loses his memory and never gets it back after a yearlong sleep. When he comes to, he finds that he’s not the same person anymore and that the friend that he spent so long looking for, doesn't even look like himself. In both writing and performance, it feels like he’s in this sort of catatonic state, a stupor that t. In that time, Sora finds that he’s literally been split in two- a side portrayed by a totally different character, one that was mean, sad, and edgy, one that represented his hurt. It takes Sora a long time to sound and act like his old self, in both writing and performance. The plot device that cements this, funnily enough, is the one that introduces time travel and has Sora look like his old self from the first game. He literally goes back into his old self and the writing is better and it’s filled with so much glee that it genuinely made me laugh. It was the corniest and lamest joke ever and it made me laugh. And I will always remember that.

(Kingdom Hearts 3 title screen from ‘Kingdom Hearts 3 Title Screen Opening & Menu Selection (1080p 60fps)’via YouTube)

When Kingdom Hearts 3 came to my door, I put the disc into my system, sat on the floor, and began what turned out to be one of the most heart wrenching experiences of my life. From a fucking game that featured Donald Duck casting a spell known as Zettaflare which is a spell so powerful that only two other mages in Final Fantasy can use. From the game that features an AMV that feels like it was ripped from an early 2000’s YouTube video. The main menu alone had me in tears. That’s how it went from that point forward, just little parts in its stilted weirdly written dialogue that would just remind me of me. It all just collectively came forward at the very end. Sora rescues everyone. The evil bad man (who is the only person in the franchise to have any melanin in his skin and I think I should be a little offended by that) stops being evil and realizes that maybe leading the world into fascism isn’t the move. The worlds that had fallen into darkness have been saved. That even the other half of Sora found happiness in his friend’s and stopped being so angsty. All is okay in the universe. The final image of the game, of this main line series so far, is that of Sora staring into the eyes of his love interest, both of their silhouettes outlined by the setting sun beside them. I’m shouting for my boy Sora, that son of a bitch did it. Right after they both lean in, there's a kiss coming, the music starts swelling, and as a beautiful bloom radiating from the sun, the colors turn vibrant as their outlines become consumed, he fades away into that light. He’s gone. Then it cuts to credits. That’s it. That's the ending. It made me cry so fucking hard.

I have never let myself be part of a world that experienced anything. I purposely closed myself off to maintain a level of vague coolness because I was ashamed to ever be seen as liking something let alone ever approaching a personality that is authentically me. I think I was just scared as being seen as childish or lesser for liking silly things like a game or show. All I got from the people around me, including adults, were positive responses for being an emotionally constipated teenager. I held myself back and I lost a lot of myself because of my shame.

Shame as I now understand it, isn’t something that comes from within, it’s a feeling that comes because of one’s relation to others. It’s a feeling that comes when there’s an innate desire of needing the validation of others to accept you and all that you encompass. And when you start thinking about it like that, then there IS a lot of pressure to be someone that others will like. That ideological framework is what hurts the most. It's the thing that makes cliques and ends up becoming a sort of internalized stigmatization. In the article Shame in Self and Society, Thomas J. Sheff would argue that in all of our understanding of lived- in experiences of expressions, shame, compared to feelings like love that have had such a much broader and wider understanding, has been so uniquely defined in our society. It’s in that we can see why there is such a shocking lack of empathy in our world. And I think I can agree with it, to a certain extent.

The word that we use now, well from what I see, is cringe. Cringe in every way shape and form is about shaming people for having any sort of noticeable attachment to something. I would argue that cringe takes it a step further by directly comparing it to standards of neurotypicality of expression which can be further expressed into conservative white thought. Like all things, cringe and shame are political and hurting someone for not being what you wanted them to be is pretty lame if you ask me. I was that person and I bullied myself for it. I hid in corners of my own life watching someone that I didn’t recognize. In my head, that’s what growing up looked like.

Three months after the release of KH3, and to the surprise of everyone, I came out as trans. I know it’s pretty stereotypical of me to be a fan of Kingdom Hearts and be trans but I think it’s funny. It’s like right there with being trans and a Sonic fan. It was a (Donkey Kong Barrel) blast coming out. And I’m happy that I did. I have found happiness in allowing myself to change, to let other people see me change. I have learned to just love things and others and myself. And that’s a weird sentence to say. It seems like just a basic human understanding, like something that would just be fundamental to just being, I don’t know, decent. And I had spent so much of my time never knowing. That pretentious kid thought they knew everything, what a punk.

Being well into my 20’s now, all I know is that I don’t want to be that person again. I don’t want to be known as someone who is there for my friends because of the simple fact that I enjoy being their friend. To let myself be completely infatuated with the small things that exist in this world. I want to be able to see others as themselves and not as what I want them to be, to see the parts of them that don’t shine anymore and still enjoy their company. I know that’s not a revolutionary take, in fact I think it makes people wince their eyes out of concern especially since the thing that made me realize it was a spikey haired anime protagonist and his closest friends Donald and Goofy. But I don’t know how else to tell you how happy that has made me. That learning from a goofball like Sora was kind of sort of freeing. And I think that I can best explain this with a simple meme, don't kill the part of you that is cringe, kill the part that cringes. I guess it was ok to just want to be a little my bestie like Sora.

(Image of Kingdom Hearts gang and their first appearance outfits from ‘Kingdom Hearts: Visual Art Collection: CG & Illustration Works’ via Internet Archive)

#kingdom hearts #writing #short essay #funny #creative writing #games #video games #what a time to be alive #what is a tag #but #a #speck #of #pain

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