The Thirteen Ansems

The reason I wanted to record this episode today is because I've been having these weird thoughts lately. Like, is any of this popcorn real or not? Dude, that's so good. We gotta do an AI of Haley Joel Osment's voice. Dude, we could just like call him and ask him. He's got nothing else going on right now. He does love coming back to do Sora, no matter how old he is. Yeah, no matter how old and low his voice gets which it just doesn't stop before we get into this i have an important question to ask you who would win in a fight dark heart cold heart or no heart from the care bears i don't see how that's related but um i think obviously dark heart well no he's got a cool the dark heart has he can't actually do anything except transform into a little boy he can transform into animals of all kinds so can no heart but no heart can only do it when shrieky shrieks he doesn't do it on purpose are you sure about that i i know he does do it when

shrieky shrieks but i kind of thought it was something he can do at will but no cold heart probably wins he defeats yes i was gonna say i was thinking about this all day i i would put all of my bets on cold heart that man is like far more formidable than anyone else the care bears ever fight it's like it's it's like a horror movie dude it's crazy land without feelings is the care bear slasher it's just one by one they fall it's insane tender heart he's just like a total freakin badass as he climbs that wall he just won't stop he just keeps climbing pulling those hearts out of his tummy i was thinking about it though because it's not even really a slasher it's like the best analog i could come to it was like saving private ryan it's like a movie where someone gets kidnapped and then the team that goes to save that person gets killed one by one that's a good theory the land without feelings careverse special is the saving private ryan of

the Care Bears universe it really is though I mean in terms of like plot but also quality it's like the highest quality piece of media Care Bear has ever put out in my opinion I can't forget that part where Tenderheart is just like I don't know who this Kevin guy is all I know is that his blonde friend told us to rescue him and that's what we're gonna do good old Tenderheart doesn't care about kevin no caring is a crap about kevin it's just the thing i'm doing right now you think i'm going to stop the thing i'm doing i do have a theory about that movie it's just dark and depressing though which is that cold heart was just like a child trafficker who was like kidnapping kids and getting them addicted to like heroin obviously and then they turned into you know like heroin watch the movie it's pretty clear cut in my opinion i mean it's that's that kind of uh moral at least for kids like don't uh get in a car with a very very clear cut moral like if you ever talk

to a stranger because you're feeling depressed he will f up your life like he will give you some sort of like beer drug cocktail and you will turn into a slave yeah just a mindless slave forever and the only person who can save you is tender heart not because he likes you but because he won't stop doing what he's doing yeah well glad we cleared that theory up well oddly enough that's not what i wanted to talk about at all today what i want to talk about a game that is near and dear to to your heart i know and to my heart and i think the hearts of pretty much anybody who grew up during the time that we grew up and owned a playstation 2 i want to talk about the kingdom hearts series um which is quite a series it's a yeah it is an incredibly incredibly interesting and strange series of games a very sprawling series and why it's it's like these are the disney games you know if you want to play a game about disney characters it's kingdom hearts right

that's all you've got really besides certainly don't play epic mickey right well i mean epic mickey is the other closest thing you can come to like an actual game the only other things that you have are like the licensed you know movie games that they stopped making in like the mid 2000s they had disney infinity for a while kingdom hearts is where all of the disney characters have gotten their like multiverse event they hopped on that train like three decades too early multiverses are all the rage now i don't know that disney was just like way ahead of ahead of the time but um i think square enix was way ahead of the time yeah okay these games have little to do with disney well but it's it's strange because square enix seems to consider the multiverse aspect of the games to be more of like a hurdle to be overcome rather than like the draw you know what i mean like they're like well we gotta include all these disney games let's just

have them like visit different planets really we want to focus on like all of our crazy characters though we want to focus on what sword as long as there's lots of ansems yeah yeah lots and lots of ansems oh boy okay so that's that's actually you've hit on my theory for the day what i want to talk about is ansem what and if i say that i want to talk about the character ansem you might find yourself asking who is he talking about because there are a lot of characters names Ansem. Mostly all I can do is just laugh to hide my shame. Whoa yeah I mean that is something that some people named Ansem tend to do sometimes. It's less of a theory and more of an essay. Normally we have a crazy theory but the game itself the actual story is crazy enough. You don't need a theory you just need someone to explain it. I don't think I'm going to go very far into explaining the Kingdom hearts games today yeah they're kind of inexplicable i want to answer the question who

is ansem who are all of the ansems why are there so many ansems and specifically i'm going to outline for you the what i consider to be canonical 13 ansems that exist in the universe of kingdom hearts 13 that's an important there are 13 ansems and that's it 13 is a very important number in king of hearts there is debatably 14 ansems but just like there's debatably 14 members of organization 13 there's debatably more than 14 members and don't even get me started on the real organization 13 which is a completely different organization from organization 13 with completely different members and completely different goals um they have literally nothing to do with each other it's like if you had disney that was like making kids movies and then another company came and they called themselves the real disney and they just like did uh plumbing i mean so in this episode you're going to answer all the questions we have about oh i've got all

the ansoms for you i hope this answers your question because uh if this doesn't nothing will at the beginning of kingdom hearts 3 on destiny islands in the intro that's going on yeah where you have these strange thoughts lately like is any of this real or not right riku wanted to share a papu fruit with sora and was just being tsundere right there is one true and unbreakable love in this series and it's most certainly riku and sora right i don't know what kairi's doing there i believe that riku introduced the idea of a paupu fruit through the race to see who could share one with kairi to throw sora off you know he's he's a little tsundere he couldn't just say i want to do this with you he's like hey let's fight over who gets to do this with kairi but then later that night as they were all hanging out on that sub island right next to the real island with the tree on it kairi went home first sora followed after and riku was the last one and

then he stopped sora after kairi was out of you know view and out of hearing distance and he said hey sora you wanted this right and then he threw him a paupu fruit and i'm like oh there's only two people here and one paupu fruit i think i think riku's making you an offer sora we might want to mention what the significance of a paupu fruit is because i just realized our audience might have no idea why that is important a paupu fruit is something that you share with someone you love and if you share it with them you're like destined lovers or something yeah no your destinies will be intertwined yeah the kingdom hearts one has a pretty interesting opening with him having these strange thoughts lately like is any of this real or not that makes you think that this strange island where they just hang out without any parents at all sharing paupu fruits and playing with titus um is like totally fake and in sora's mind or something it really seems like it somehow they

managed to get this opening completely confused with the opening of kingdom hearts 2 where roxas who you're playing as is in a fake actually lives in a fake universe and yet they don't have it starting with i've been having these strange thoughts lately like is any of this real and also his world is much more real seeming and fleshed out than Sora's island ever was. I hate that at the end of every Kingdom Hearts game, they try and kind of put them back on Destiny Island because I'm like, there's nothing on Destiny Island. It's the world's most empty place. It's like an island that they just go to, like kids just go there to hang out. Okay, so I have a lot to say about the Kingdom Hearts games in general. Kingdom Hearts games in general are like really crazy and go off the rails as far as like what they're actually about and i think kingdom hearts 3 actually managed to be the craziest oh no they really tried very hard

to bring back every single anthem in kingdom hearts 3 yes they did oh my gosh they went out what this series was about i know now more than ever kingdom hearts is handsome it sure is this story starts with a man named master xehanort also known as old xehanort you might wonder why i'm not starting with somebody named ansem it's because this guy is perhaps the most ansem out of anyone in this the most anthony he's an old dude he possessed another character named terra by putting his heart into him to become a young guy named Terra Xehanort. And I'll talk more about Terra Xehanort later. Terra Xehanort is another Ansem. Later, as Terra Xehanort, he split himself into two, a Heartless named Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, and a Nobody named Xemnas, who is the leader of Organization XIII. It is noteworthy that in Dream Drop Distance, which is the 3DS, Kingdom Hearts game, there are two Master Xehanorts because after Ansem and Xemnas were defeated,

his heart reforms into Master Xehanort and his body reformed into Terra. He was in Terra's body for a while, right? So after his nobody got defeated, Terra's body reformed, but without a heart. So it was just a shell. So he then went and got a Terra Xehanort heart from the past and put that into the new shell terra that he had to make another terra zehenart just uh just for funsies i do have to point out what an amazing title dream drop distance is doing three d's wow on the 3ds how'd they come up with that how hard everybody who developed for the 3ds went on like naming their thing their games things that had like 3ds in them so yeah master zehenart he's kind of, I guess, the father of all the Ansems. I mentioned Terra Xehanort. This might be confusing because there's a character named Terra and a character named Xehanort. Terra is just another guy in the series. You don't even need to know anything about him except that he got possessed

by Xehanort. Xehanort shoved his own heart into Terra to make Terra Xehanort. He is also known as Ansem the Wise or as Ansem. Oh. He is the young version of Xehanort. Not to be confused with young xehanort who is a completely different character oh no terra xehanort was created when master xehanort possessed terra by putting his own heart into terra after being created he was fought and defeated by the lingering will which was terra's lingering will possessing his keyblade armor and he somehow ended up in radiant garden confused and amnesiac because of you know getting the crap eaten out of him and uh tara's heart fighting with xehanort's heart xehanort's heart ends up forcing tara's heart out into the dark figure which from that point on the dark figure becomes ansem seeker of darkness's bodyguard for some reason ansem seeker of darkness being a completely different character who we'll talk about more later ansem seeker of darkness is

and the bad guy first game one yeah the bad guy from kingdom hearts one i know that ansem yay the dark figure it has tara's heart in it and tara is one of the good guys but it is the thing that shows up on destiny island at the very beginning of kingdom hearts one it's that big like medusa looking uh black uh heartless with like a big hole in its chest yeah yeah i remember it yeah that's tara i don't know why tara's eonor that's who we're talking about yeah he wakes up in radiant garden he's pretty confused his hearts are fighting he fights with aqua who's another one of the good guys he is left completely amnesiac with no memory he is then found by ansem the wise who is another ansem who is probably i guess the purest form of ansem um we'll talk about him in just a little bit is ansem the wise dizz yeah dizz is another ansem yes oh no ansem the wise is not dis ansem the wise is dis but just trying to get i guess

this is and we'll get to this we'll get them i'm just trying to to place all these ansems and figure out what who they are well dis i guess you would say is not ansem the wise because he's in disguise right anyway so yeah ansem the wise is basically the king of radiant gardens which later becomes Hollow Bastion he also has a bunch of followers he finds Terra Xehanort and he's like hey you want to be one of my followers and he's like well yeah my name's Xehanort not Terra Xehanort then for no reason Xehanort eventually decides to start going by the name of you guessed it Ansem the Wise and he starts writing reports signing the name Ansem the Wise he also betrays the real Ansem the Wise and takes all of his followers and he reiterates that his name is now Ansem when killing his fellow apprentice Bragg. And then he splits all of the remaining apprentices into heartlesses and nobodies and himself into a heartless and a nobody, specifically a heartless

named Ansem Seeker of Darkness and Xemnas, leader of Organization XIII. I know that one. Yes, you know both of those ones. So Ansem the Wise, you wanted to know more about. Like I said, Ansem the Wise, the next person I'm going to talk about, he is the purest form of an Ansem. He has literally nothing to do with the original Xehanort, with Master Xehanort, old Xehanort. Here I thought it was Xehanort copying Ansem, but really Xehanort came first. Xehanort came first, but like Xehanort's whole goal in life was to make a lot of himself that all became Ansem. He wants like many, many copies of himself that are all Ansems. You should call him Stansom. Whoa. That's like a really good joke. That's so clever. So Ansem the Wise. Like I said, he really has nothing to do with old Xehanort. He did at some point in his life find amnesiac Terra Xehanort and make him his apprentice. Okay, so wait a minute.

I'm just trying to put faces and names. Is Terra Xehanort the bald guy with the beard from Birth by Sleep? No, that's Master Xehanort. Terra Xehanort looks almost exactly like Xemnas. So Master Xehanort is the bald guy from Birth by Sleep. Yes. Is he the first Xehanort? He's the first Xehanort. Okay, so he was around before Ansem. He was around before all of this stuff. Before Ansem, the wise Xehanort. He's the father of the Ansems. He became Terra Xehanort by putting his heart into Terra. Yes, he wanted to be younger. Terra Xehanort looks like who we think of as Xehanort. No, Xemnas. As Xemnas. Yes. Which Xehanort split into Xehanort's Seeker of Darkness and Xemnas? That was Terra Xehanort. Okay, that's what I thought. After becoming Ansem the Wise, he took that name. And then he was like, screw this. I want to make everybody into two of everybody. So he turned all of his followers and himself into two people by splitting them all apart into a heartless and a nobody.

It's so great that every character in Kingdom Hearts has two of them. I know. At least. Well, usually they have three of them, though, because they have themselves, they have a heartless, and they have a nobody. Now, the heartless is usually inconsequential, but I'm going to get to that in just a minute.

Ansem the Wise. He is known as a peaceful and knowledgeable scholar. He has lots of apprentices. He's actually not a very nice guy. He's like a really, really mean sack of crap, but he has a really popular name. Everybody wants his name. Yeah. After the end of this episode, I think maybe I'm starting to think about taking on that name. I know. Like, seriously, I can't believe like that name, like Ansem, like, whoa, that's just a cool name. I wish I was called Ansem. I mean, people would be like, oh, he's so Ansem. Whoa.

He's so handsome. A couple of tidbits about him. Sometimes he gets really sad when his apprentices steal his name and become evil. Usually this is done by Terra Xehanort or sometimes by Riku. At times he likes to dress up and call himself Diz, which you alluded to before. Sometimes when his apprentices say that they are handsome, he has to laugh to hide his shame. Well, right. So sometimes he plays tricks on his apprentices, specifically usually on Riku, by pretending to be another guy named Ansem. But this usually results in him feeling shameful and then laughing about it. But he's not pretending because he is another guy named Ansem. Right. I know. It's pretty interesting the way he chooses to live his life. He's honestly, I think, the most mysterious of all of the Ansems. Not for any good reasons, though uh so we talked about Diz this has to do with what you just talked about uh with him

laughing um so Diz which stands for darkness in zero it's an acronym oh it's not just a reference to Disney no it's not next you're gonna tell me that Yen Sid is also an acronym and not oh boy have I got news for you have you ever tried reading that backwards and reversed dizz darkness and zero this is what ansem the wise calls himself when he's sad and wants to dress up to make himself feel better basically it's when he wants to cosplay that's kind of what riku does too it is exactly what riku does and you can see why him and riku are such good friends sometimes dizz as i mentioned earlier dizz who is ansem the wise likes to pretend to be and to actually look like Ansem, Seeker of Darkness. And this is usually when he wants to confuse Riku and play a trick on Riku for reasons unknown. Okay, so sometimes Diz, who is Ansem, disguises himself as Xehanort. No, no, as Ansem, not Xehanort. Well, as Ansem, Seeker of Darkness,

who is a heartless of Xehanort. Who is Xehanort's heartless. Right, who is Xehanort's heartless. So he's disguising himself as a person who took the name Ansem and he is ansem but he's disguising himself as that person right so he's not disguising himself as ansem he's disguising himself as diz this is his disguise he takes on the persona of ansem seeker of darkness purely to play a trick on riku it's not really what i would consider a disguise riku's not already confused enough i know like poor riku right yeah so wait we've been talking about anthem seeker of darkness i'll cover him now um so anthem seeker of darkness you may know him as the main bad guy from kingdom hearts one if you just played kingdom hearts one you'd call him anthem you wouldn't even know the names they wouldn't even know about all these other anthems you honestly it's pretty odd that they all exist it's like after making kingdom hearts one which

was like a very self-contained game even if it was a little crazy uh somebody was like i gotta to make more games and i have money to do it let's just make the world's most convoluted plot ansem uh he is terra zehenort's heartless who for no reason no reason at all despite being a heartless he remained able to look like a human and kept his intellect and emotions which no other heartless ever has done in the series yeah heartlesses are all like completely like mindless brainless like darkness serving monsters but he's just a guy so i don't know why that happened they look like trouble from a journey through fairyland which is a great reference to throw ones look because people know that better than kingdom hearts heartless anthem seeker of darkness used maleficent's help to possess riku but right when he fully possessed riku sora and riku's heart fought him off but then he later in that game in kingdom

hearts 1 he merged with the world of chaos and that was when he became a boat and then he was he was beaten by sora yet again and ansem seeker of darkness made his uh grand reappearance in kingdom hearts 3 which was pretty great to have him back was it yeah it was i mean depending on how you feel about about Ansem's I mean I feel the same way everyone else does they're great yeah it's like so cool I love Ansem I wish I was Ansem in fact I am Ansem which seems to be what most people decide that's how it starts so let's talk about Ansem Seeker of Darkness's other half which is Xemnas Xemnas is Terra Xehanort's nobody he is the bad the main bad guy of Kingdom Hearts 2 so if you play kingdom hearts 2 you know him yeah well if you've played like if you've played like 30 hours of kingdom hearts 2 you know him because he's not introduced until like right near the end that's a long game unlike heartless nobody's often but not always retain some sort of humanish

form well more often than a heartless usually they become like these skinny squiggly dancey dudes and sora kills them they're just like heartless but they're a little dancier yeah i know it's like there is no reason for them to exist and that's the opinion that just about everybody in the kingdom hearts universe has especially ansem the wise he hates nobodies he can't stand nobodies he's like you guys don't have the right to exist you don't have hearts he's like riku if they tell you they have hearts don't believe them they're lying they don't have hearts but they'll try and trick you and tell you they do yeah and even if they seem really good oh they're not good like rocks is like totally good guy but evil he's bad no i mean especially namine dude poor namine i feel the worst about her he hates namine so much and he just uses and abuses her he's like he calls her a witch to her face like he's like you witch just change their memories and then

he tells riku to dispose of namine after she brings everybody's memories back ansem the wise is such a jackass he's such a jerk he's like and namine is like one out her usefulness go and dispose of her ridiculously pure-hearted nobody she only does good she causes a lot of problems i mean i'm kind of well with lark scene on this one that you know after like completely ruining sora's life for eternity she then was like oh actually i like sora and i want to help him i think she is a duplicitous little uh conniving manipulative but i really like her i like nomine a lot jiminy cricket wrote down the note thank nominate so they wouldn't forget and after they read it and they're like what's this after the entire game that means nothing after the whole kingdom hearts one of keeping like the world's most detailed journal at the end of kingdom hearts chain of memories he's like wait we're all gonna forget everything there's one thing we really need

to remember and that's namine we're all gonna forget about her he's like oh i've got an idea i'll write it in my journal there thank you at that time they all seem to think that's a great idea oh yeah that'll remind us that'll do it but then they wake up with no memories they're like thank namine what does that mean and then they move on and they never think about namine again namine is of course kairi's nobody right yes and oddly enough i'm not completely clear on this but namine seems to exist in a world that also contains kairi which shouldn't happen you should only be able to exist in a nobody if your somebody has been split into a heartless and you once you're dead and the heartless is dead your somebody comes back so i don't know how they can both exist at the same time that's that's a mystery for another episode i guess now some people have this theory which might be totally wrong but i have heard the theory that axel

is riku's nobody that can't be right okay but riku doesn't have a nobody then does he riku was never split into a heartless what are you talking about lost his heart didn't he no riku's never lost his heart when did that happen i don't know he turned into into ansem he turned into ansem yes he never lost his heart he just joined the heartless so it seems like it's actually it's a good question we don't know who axel's heartless is we do know who his somebody is his somebody is a guy named leah or le i'm not sure how you pronounce it it's l-e-a i think it's leah well see christine always wanted it to be riku was his nobody right because best friends with zora well because in kingdom hearts three five eight days over two which is apparently how you say the title of that game according to the trailer she just loved how like the first level is all about rocks is just like going to meet axel for a romantic date on top of the clock tower where they have sea salt ice cream sea salt ice

scream they love it they're so oh man they're so into it i have to remind you what yansid tells us though nobodies don't really exist at all despite all evidence to the contrary that's correct yes they nobodies don't exist but they do exist they definitely do speaking of nobodies we're supposed to be talking about zemnas he was the leader of organization 13 not the leader of the real organization 13 the the plumber plumbers group yes that's right so out of respect for terra xehanort and ansem seeker of darkness and ansem the wise having already taken the name ansem the wise which uh yeah that name was quite popular so out of respect for all of them he uses a so-called anagram of ansem the wise as his own name and calls himself zemnas despite zemnas not being an anagram of Ansem the Wise. Does he call it an anagram? Yes. Who calls it that? He likes to take names and then put an X in them and then call them anagrams.

He did the same thing when he named Roxas. He took the name Sora and put an X in it. And he's like, here's your anagram name. So he just doesn't know what the word anagram means. No, he doesn't know what it means. He thinks it means mixing up the letters and adding an X. All right. Like Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, he makes his grand reappearance in Kingdom Hearts 3, because I guess everybody had to. Does Terra Xehanort make an entrance in Kingdom Hearts 3? I haven't played Kingdom Hearts 3, by the way. Very importantly, yes. But how could Terra Xehanort exist at the same time as Xemnas? That is a very good question, which is answered in Kingdom Hearts 3, and I will answer for you as well. Oh, okay. Terra Xehanort comes back in Kingdom Hearts 3 because Xemnas and Ansem Seeker of Darkness were both destroyed. So Terra Xehanort, who he had split into Ansem Seeker of Darkness and Xemnas, he reforms as reconstructed Terra Xehanort.

Well, actually, I should say Old Xehanort, Master Xehanort, he reforms as Reconstructed Old Xehanort, who is yet another Ansem. And then Reconstructed Terra comes back without a heart. So Old Xehanort takes this empty shell, Reconstructed Terra, goes back in time to find another Terra Xehanort, takes its heart and comes back to his own time and puts that heart into Reconstructed Terra to create Reconstructed Terra Xehanort. So I've just gone over two more Ansoms, Reconstructed Old Master Xehanort and Reconstructed Terra Xehanort. And this Reconstructed Terra Xehanort is then made member 11 of the real organization 13.

So, okay, wait. So, reconstructed Terra Xehanort looks like Xemnas. Reconstructed Terra Xehanort looks like Terra Xehanort, who looks like Xemnas. Or rather, I should say Xemnas looks like Terra Xehanort. And I'm just trying to imagine these people. And so, reconstructed old Anthem looks like there's no such thing as reconstructed old ansem reconstructed old xehanort looks like the bald guy from birth by sleep okay yes but whoa so no now my next question is if that makes them new versions of ansem when sora comes back after roxas is destroyed does that make him reconstructed Sora? Yes, that would make him reconstructed Sora. Except in Sora's case, it's different. So that's why I say that would make him reconstructed Sora. It doesn't make him reconstructed Sora because he didn't come back due to Roxas's destruction. Sora was brought back due to Kairi's heart when she hugged his heartless. So he was brought back prematurely

and his nobody existed at the same time as him. Which is why I said that shouldn't happen, and I don't know why it happened for Namine and Kairi, but it did happen for Sora because of Kairi. Roxas did not need to die to bring Sora back. However, Roxas did need to die as part of the memory reconstruction surgery that Namine was doing for unknown reasons. We don't know exactly why. They set up the rules for why a nobody needs to die to bring back a person and then they got rid of Sora and brought in his nobody but then didn't use those rules all right because he'd already been brought back so that's true because he comes back already in Kingdom Hearts 1 and then they get rid of him it was like he came back before the rules were made and then the rules were made and they had to find a way retroactively to explain why they didn't apply but then they're like hey let's get rid of Roxas anyway so then Kairi is

not reconstructed Kairi well and this is the thing is I'm not entirely sure when Kairi became a heartless it happened she loses her heart at some point no no okay I know I know when Kairi became heartless I'm sorry I lied Kairi became a heartless at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts 1 when Destiny Islands were under attack she got scared and when Kairi gets scared her heart flees into Sora's heart so at that point she became a heartless because her heart left her body and jumped into Sora's heart and then she created Namine and then but her body oh that's why that's why she exists with Namine so no her body turned into Namine that's where Namine came from when you become a heartless your body turns into your your nobody it doesn't stay where your body is though it teleports somewhere else but it is your body the nobodies totally exist they they exist more than heartless to talking about right they always did exist they are the physical

being that was there already that's why kairi can exist at the same time as her nobody because she was brought back from being a heartless which i don't know if she ever she did probably produce a heartless but it was just like a random monster that sora killed without knowing it either way her heart was residing in his heart and he took her heart out of his heart by stabbing himself with a keyblade which turned him into a heartless wait this gets deeper than what you thought though oh no so right so he took riku ansem's keyblade who i'm actually about to talk about next that keyblade had the power to unlock hearts riku ansem wanted to use that keyblade on sora and unlock his heart because sora's heart had kairi's heart in it and they needed her heart to go back in her body so that she could complete the keyhole to kingdom hearts and they could open it it needed all the princesses of hearts and she was the last one he then fought off riku ansem

and was like no i won't let you unlock my heart and then immediately immediately after he fought off riku ansem he was like huh and then took the keyblade and then he just smiles i don't know why i'm like why did why didn't he just let riku ansem do it if he was just gonna do it he just mischievous smile when he does it too maybe i think it's supposed to be like like wistful and like sad like tragic no i think he was just like just making fun of riku's like i'm just gonna do it anyway no i got incredibly confused at this point because it was not just kairi's heart that emerges from sorrow's heart when this happens all of the princesses of hearts hearts emerge there's eight hearts come out when he does this and i was baffled because i was like i can maybe figure out why sora had kairi's hearts in him i can't figure out why he had anyone else's hearts but apparently what actually happened here was the hearts of the princesses of heart had been

merged together to forge the keyblade of heart which was the keyblade that ansem riku was using he he couldn't take sora's keyblade he tried to sora got it back so he went and forged this one out of all the princesses of heart when sora unlocked his own heart with the keyblade of very smart because he needed all those hearts right no i know but he also needed the last heart from sora and he needed to unlock sora's heart to do that so he's like i'll make a key i'll use the also news to me that you can make keys out of hearts yeah i know weird right so But when Sora unlocked his own heart with it, he was actually breaking it. So when he broke the keyblade of heart, it did unlock his heart, but it also shattered and released all the princesses of heart's hearts. So all their hearts went back into them. Kairi's went back into them and it completed the key to the kingdom hearts. But Kairi's body is still around somewhere, isn't it?

Isn't it like floating around somewhere? Yeah, it was just laying there. It was right behind him. Right. So it's not Naminé. Yeah, I don't know. i mean uh according to yen sid um your body becomes your nobody and then he says a really cryptic thing where he's like and then the nobody will remain even after the body fades away and i'm like why would the body fade away what like it would rot i guess but the nobodies aren't zombies so i don't know perhaps a nobody is somehow created it's like it's a reflection of your body but it's not your body it just like is based on your body i don't know i don't know it's pretty incomprehensible just because it's mildly related i have to say my favorite part of kingdom hearts one was always the monstro level just because riku is like such a cool ruthless badass just being like kairi needs a heart and that stupid puppet has one for some reason but he's like a toy puppet he doesn't need one yeah he's like i'll take that one and he's

just like sora the girl that we both like is in trouble why are you protecting this stupid thing that's not supposed to even have a heart yeah fair enough although i'm not sure what putting pinocchio's heart into kairi's body would have done no so there's two more things that i have to say about that scene number one is that also contained my favorite part but my favorite part oddly enough was a pinocchio line they imply that pinocchio has had his heart removed so i'm not sure what happened to his heart um but then he's laying there and everyone's like no pinocchio and geppetto jumps over into him he's like pinocchio are you gonna be okay buddy and pinocchio's like i'm i'm not gonna make it and he like fades away and then his nose grows and he's like oh i guess i'm fine because he's like oh it was a lie i am gonna make it and i was like that's pretty good so that was pretty funny trying to psych everyone out i didn't need a heart because i'm just a

puppet two other things to note about this scene that i hadn't been playing to get so deep into at all the reason kairi's heart was inside of sora there's two possible widely agreed upon reasons for this number one is that that night that destiny islands fell to darkness kairi was surrounded by darkness and she got scared and aqua had long ago cast a magic spell on kairi which led kairi's heart to leave her body and seek refuge in Sora's heart keeping her safe this spell is supposed to activate anytime she's scared and in mortal danger and this spell was the reason she showed up on Destiny Islands because if you remember Kairi was originally from Radiant Gardens she wasn't from Destiny Islands like the rest of them were I don't remember that but okay yeah it's okay you don't need to remember that they didn't know where she was from but she was the reason that Sora and Riku who were both so into the idea of exploring and leaving the island,

they were like, whoa, she's not from here. That means there's other places. So is she just like an orphan that they were hiding on the island? Yes, she is. It's pretty interesting. We don't really know who her parents were who were taking care of her, but presumably the adults handled that. She's going to school later in Kingdom Hearts 2, and she starts with an S, right? Right, Sora. When they told the voice actor how to pronounce the name, it's not Sura, Sura. Sora. It's Sora. The other possible reason that her heart ended up in Sora's heart, which I think is actually more believable, because Aqua's magic spell wasn't supposed to remove her heart from her, it was just supposed to keep her safe and move her somewhere else, which it did when it teleported her out of Radiant Gardens, right? So why would it only teleport her heart later? It doesn't make sense. So the other possible reason is that Sora's heart is special.

This is implied canonically. His heart builds connections with many other people. And while his own heart isn't necessarily that powerful, he draws on his connections when he's in battle to get extra power. He's an anime character. Exactly, yes. And sometimes these connections that he builds lead to him pulling other people's hearts into his own to protect them and shelter them from the darkness when they're on the verge of losing their hearts. so that's kind of his power yeah he makes a heartless by taking their heart he just grabs and pulls it into his own um this thing happened explicitly with ventus ventus who's like the kind of is sora yeah yeah yeah he's like the pre-sora aqua is like the pre-kairi and terra is the pre-riku oh and i get why he turns into them yeah that's exactly why yeah you got it so that happened with ventus uh sora ended up with ventus in his heart um and it's probably

what happened when destiny islands was under attack and kairi needed someone to protect her so so i was like yoink and took her heart into his without noticing it okay so now moving on from that incredibly complicated little tiny piece of story like that that is one single event in kingdom hearts one that needed like a massive explanation oh okay i would like to talk about riku ansem and the good news is we're about halfway through the ansems oh no i don't even know exactly what's going on here so i've always been very mystified by and it's so it's been so it's so annoying because like the character you love most from kingdom hearts one is riku is he's cool but he spends most of kingdom hearts one being handsome and then so it's like all right kingdom hearts two they're looking for riku yeah and then when riku first shows up he's blindfolded again and he's like way taller and he's not riku he's handsome yeah he's handsome so okay riku

handsome he can look he can come in like three basic appearances he can look like riku he can look like Riku wearing a purple outfit with feathers around his waist, or he can look like Ansem. When he looks like Ansem, he can wear a variety of outfits, sometimes incorporating stylish decisions such as blindfolds, other times just dressed like Ansem himself, other times wearing an Organization XIII cape. Sometimes he wears blindfolds as Riku as well. I'm going to get into that in just a minute. By looking like Ansem himself, we mean looking like Ansem Seeker of Darkness who is Xehanort's Heartless. Yes, sorry. Yes, he looks like Ansem Seeker of Darkness. He does not look like Ansem the Wise. Okay. Riku Ansem is Riku possessed by Ansem Seeker of Darkness. Which is something that Ansem Seeker of Darkness can do. And to my knowledge, no other Heartless can do? No, no, no. It's just something he can kind of do.

And I'm not sure why he did it. And he can only do to Riku. Right. Well, I mean, I'm assuming that's because of the whole Terra Xehanort thing. Maybe it meant that Riku was like predisposed to having his heart inside of him or something. He got Maleficent to corrupt Riku enough so that he could possess Riku. So for some reason, and this is where things get interesting. Yeah, they were so boring before now. Yeah, whoa. Everything else is boring. This is getting interesting. For some reason, Riku Ansem usually looks like Riku when Ansem is in control. like ansem when riku is in control which is the weird part wow it would be too simple the other way around unless he gets fully possessed and then he looks exactly like ansem while ansem yeah exactly it was he's wearing like ansem clothes so even though all of this is like basically finished in kingdom hearts one as riku begins to work with dizz he still seems to be like

very much ansem he seems to be telling people that he is ansem um he introduces himself as ansem i'm just uh laughing to hide my shame yeah well this has the effect of making diz laugh and feel a lot of shame well and the funny part is riku does not know that diz is ansem so it's pretty funny that he's introducing himself as the guy who he's talking to but he's not he's introducing himself as ansem seeker of darkness we mentioned this before he he likes to blindfold himself before especially before major fights at the on the side of skyscrapers he says that this is to keep himself from lying to himself that's why he blindfolds himself ah he's kind of embarrassed about looking like ansem so he actively avoids his best friends sora and kairi which causes a lot of problems yeah even a lot of heartache falls onto his knees at the end one of the best moments it's like i looked everywhere i know and and he wasn't even like out of commission he was just

there he was just like i don't want to talk to sora today i'm gonna do something else also he needs more affection than you know so but yeah that that i do know however much affection you think you know that he needs he needs more than that you gotta go give him some affection i need more affection than you know oh man that was just genius do you want to explain what what i'm referring to there you can take it away well first of all let's just go back to the theme song for kingdom hearts one that's the most iconic everyone loves like don't get me wrong i love it pop song but do i really have to meet its father wow maybe someday when you're older you'll understand what i meant so simple and clean everyone loves simple i don't think life is quite that simple by the way now when kingdom hearts 2 came out and sanctuary was the theme song it's not a bad song but i was like it's not as catchy

as simple and clean until you know i realized that whoa she's speaking backwards at the beginning and actually this song is genius because if you play sanctuary backwards she says i need more than you know backwards and then the rest of the song she says things that are forward sound like like my sanctuary but when you play it backwards it sounds like i was there are hints in the song to play it backwards um there's certain sections of the song when you play it normally where she sounds like strange she's like yeah instead of saying sanctuary my sanctuary she says right so it's it's it's telling you to play it backwards and like you said when you play it backwards of course those backwards sections of the song actually begin to make sense but the rest of the song sounds like she's saying i believed i was handsome i believed i was handsome yeah and then the part that is actually backwards says i need more affection than you know so that that

part's definitely what she is actually saying yeah the rest of it is just conjecture but Yeah, it's kind of it. You have to interpret it, but it sounds like it. And yeah, so I mean, pretty genius move on their part to hint to play it backwards. And then turns out the song is all about Riku and how he was handsome and he needs more affection than you know. The other interesting thing here, which I think is really cool, we should have done a whole episode about this. Like this is an actual fan theory that is like something we could get into. Yeah, Sanctuary. Just a whole episode about Utada Hikaru's Sanctuary. sanctuary when played forwards is about sora and kairi um it's about basically all the stuff he's gone through all the battles he's been in and wanting to find a sanctuary like a place where he can be safe and specifically it is covering the events in somewhat kingdom hearts one but also in

chain of memories um and the best part is when you play it backwards it's about riku in kingdom hearts 1 and chain of memories and the coolest thing is chain of memories first you play forwards through as sora and then you play it backwards as as riku like after you beat it as sora you get to play chain of memories backwards from the last level to the first level as riku it's so cool it's amazing that they made chain of memories and then they made this song which reflects chain of memories for kingdom hearts 2 which came out which is yeah it is not the theme song for chain of memories though it should be and also as it plays in in the opening video for kingdom hearts of chain of memories which was not a 3d game at the time yeah they redid parts of chain of memories in 3d to show sora doing stuff like on like the upper side of the staircase while riku is running on the underside of the staircase it's so another hint that you should play it backwards right well

i mean it's it's completely like to me i mean this is not even a theory this is just the way it is so that's the way they designed it which is insane because how could they design it like this now the next ansem i would like to talk about is related to everything that we just covered his name is riku replica this is an artificial replica of riku ansem who was created he made his debut in chain oh right it's repliku yes repliku as he is also known um repliku was originally created by vexen one of the members of the original organization 13 to test riku's strength riku replica thinks he's riku but isn't and then finds out he isn't which causes like a massive meltdown and like he's like ah which is confusing because actual riku thinks he's handsome and finds out he isn't chain of memories was all about everybody trying their hardest to confuse Sora and Riku um I mean it like legitimately that's the whole plot of that game is Organization

13 trying to confuse Sora and Ansem the Wise trying to confuse Riku I don't know why Ansem the Wise was doing that he's just a big jerk he thought it was fun um he's like really really mean Riku replica he really really likes Namine like a lot which is good because nobody else gives a crap about her so i'm glad that he likes her um he fights with sora a lot he seems to have like ansem powers um he can you know turn on his purple outfit and access the dark powers of ansem this is my favorite part of kingdom hearts 3 basically is that or well of kingdom hearts the series i guess it's um in chain of memories he makes a promise well no he actually never made this oath this promise but he remembers making a promise to namine that he will always protect her he didn't actually do that it's a memory she put in his head and she put the same memory in sora's head and they got mad at each other about it because they're both like i promise to protect

namine no i promise to protect namine and then she's like neither of you promised to protect me i just made you think you did and then riku replica is like i don't care if it's a fake memory it's the only memory i've got and it's the only memory i've ever had so i will always protect you namine and then in kingdom hearts 3 he fulfills his oath to protect namine by leaving dark riku's body for namine to possess repliku comes back two times like as two different characters in that is due to the presence of dark riku who is yet another ansem dark riku is the riku replica from chain of memories back when he thought so this is from the first half of chain of memories i should say back when he thought he was real riku okay there's a replica of replica is what you're telling me no they are the same person but one of them has lived a longer life so um riku replica from chain of memories eventually found out he's not riku and then went on to

become the protector of namine before he found out that he was not real riku he was taken out of time by master xehanort to join the real organization 13 in kingdom hearts 3 that's why there are two riku replicas in in kingdom hearts 3 there's one who is taken out of time and is a bad guy and one who is nominated protector who is just you know the guy who has just always been around yeah he was just always somewhere but how did he get out of the chain of memories wasn't that like an alternate universe yeah everyone got out of there i mean riku got out of there sora got out of there mickey was there too he got out just fine right and it was just completely like just ruins Sora's quote unquote conclusion at the end of Kingdom Hearts 1 I know now more than ever Kingdom Hearts is light apparently that door opened to chain of memories it actually gets even more convoluted than this Sora did not lock himself inside of Kingdom Hearts but Riku did

right okay that's why he's looking for Riku was the bad guy for most of the game but then he had his redemption at the end when he chose to lock himself inside of kingdom hearts to save everybody as he reached the climax of kingdom hearts one they keep talking about how we need two key bearers to seal this door one from the outside and one from the inside and we're like who's gonna do it who's gonna do it and then we're like oh riku's gonna do it because you know he needs that redemption no freaking mickey does it what's mickey even doing there he just freaking shows up out of nowhere and is inside of kingdom hearts riku has a reason to be there mickey doesn't he's just there and then riku's like okay i'll close the door and mickey's like good i'll lock it and i'm like let riku do it this is his redemption what are you doing here mickey but i do really like the moment at the end of kingdom hearts 2 riku and sora are just you know chilling holding

hands on the beach or whatever i just love their conversation how like sora's like i always thought you were better than me at everything because like i always thought i was better than you at everything too but there's one thing that actually happened in reverse order but right anyway it's just good conversation and then when they somehow get teleported back to destiny island well dude a giant door appeared for them right and then i just think it's good continuity that zora hugs donald and goofy and then riku hugs mickey because they were best buds and they went on adventures together it's true zora doesn't even know mickey mickey mickey is riku's donald and goofy okay wait hold on so we were talking about what were we even talking about repliku and dark riku and dark riku yes so dark riku is riku replica from earlier in time transported to later in time um he likes to pretend that he is the real handsome possessed

riku from kingdom hearts one but he knows that he isn't he he does know that he is a replica by that time okay so this next guy who i'm about to talk about i mentioned him way back at the beginning of this essay, this vocal essay, I'm going to talk about young Xehanort. Young Xehanort is Master Xehanort's time-traveling younger self. He is rank 12 of the real organization 13. I guess Xehanort just needed another member. So he's like, well, I guess I'll just go grab myself when I was younger. Does he have hair when he's younger? He does. He looks like Xemnas. so he looks just like Xemnas okay and like Terra Xehanort yes but Terra Xehanort and Xemnas are also members of the real organization 13 that makes it a very interesting game because organization 13 is made up of like seven Ansems well they I mean they have 13 they could have just I know I know so I wish that they had used all of the 13 Ansems but then they would have had to put Ansem

the wise in the real organization 13 and he's supposed to be a good guy i assumed that maybe after kingdom hearts 2 and all the other stuff they would have been like maybe we should do be less complicated but no they were like let's know they got far more complicated let's highlight all the complicated stuff from all the previous games and mix it all up together no this this theory only works because of kingdom hearts 3 like before kingdom hearts 3 existed there was like i don't know like seven ansoms and now we got like 13 of them and so i mean seven wasn't nearly enough what kind of a series only has seven ansoms i mean come on 13 the last ansom that i would like to talk about and then i'm gonna sum up all of the ansoms is probably the most unexpected ansom and it is namine so namine technically becomes an ansem at the end of kingdom hearts 3 even though she continues to look like herself namine is put into the body of dark riku replica

at the end of kingdom hearts 3 so in doing so she does become an ansem as well okay so I'm going to now list everybody who I consider to be an Ansem we've got old Xehanort the father of all of the Ansems except for some of the Ansems we've got Terra Xehanort likes to call himself Ansem the Wise we've got reconstructed old Xehanort and reconstructed Terra Xehanort we've got the actual Ansem the Wise we have Diz who pretends to be Ansem Seeker of darkness we've got ansem seeker of darkness we have xemnas we got riku ansem young xehanort riku replica dark riku and dark riku namine so there you go that's that's 13 members of the ansem organization and that just wouldn't have yeah wouldn't have felt right without 13 of them i know exactly oh boy that's it for today i'm sure we can make more episodes about kingdom hearts if we want though yeah or or if our viewers want um yeah let us know let us know yeah we're active

on twitter you can write to us you can email us and in fact um we are a completely independent and self-funded podcast so if you like what we're doing uh you can always support us on patreon uh this is important because you know we don't receive any sort of funding from any entity which means that we can cover what we want when we want and how we want so if you like how we cover stuff And if you like the fact that we get all these guests on our podcast and we're not beholden to any specific companies or anything, then give us some support. Yeah. Music for this episode was provided by Christine. And remember that I've been having these weird thoughts lately, like the popcorn isn't real.