From Ventus Riven: A Plural Read of Vanitas
With the Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind DLC arriving soon I have been thinking back on Vanitas and his climactic moments in the final act of the main game. He’s a really fascinating character whose pathos is somewhat hampered; while I adored the main game, I wish Vanitas had been given more time and space to develop, grow, and reckon with his trauma. I know the game has to focus on Sora, on the ultimate battle with light and dark. But even on the periphery, Vanitas’s story is powerful and existential.
It starts with his creation. “Empty creature from Ventus riven…to you, the name Vanitas shall be given.” Those are Xehanort’s words as he sunders Vanitas from Ventus, separating light from darkness. Vanitas is not a Nobody; he’s just darkness. He doesn’t lack a heart; his heart is just all the darkness of Ventus’s.
In the end, Vanitas refuses to join the fight against Xehanort despite the suffering he has endured. Created, manipulated, and used without his consent, Vanitas still just accepts when he has always been told; that he is darkness, through and through. When Sora and Ventus tell him he can be anything he chooses, he claims that mantle of darkness, the one form of agency he can manage in a life designed and controlled in its entirety by someone else. “What I am is darkness.” And then he fades away.
In a lot of ways, I empathize. A year ago I reckoned with a nascent feeling that had been growing for some time; that I too was split. It’s not just that I’m one facet of a greater whole, but that I am many wholes wrapped up in another whole. Every swallowed scream, every emotion I had repressed and hidden away in my life, came bubbling back up in the form of Xoe.
If Vanitas saw himself as something of only darkness, if all he heard his entire life was that he was a tool, an incomplete and broken half, why would he not claim those curses as titles? All he is is negativity, to the point that he manifests other beings comprised entirely of his own emotions. Xoe has described herself in the same way. Or rather, I have, when I am Xoe. It is easy to feel like you are broken when you’re hiding a part of yourself; anyone who’s lived in a closet knows that. I felt impossible and aberrant, and Xoe still does. Her poetry paints her as a glitch: “it’s a terrifying thought to be a ghost in someone’s head / just a glitch in a system you didn’t mean to create”.
There was a crushing pressure in my chest when I finally reckoned with the fact that I wasn’t one; wasn’t alone. My fiancee was on the phone with me as I writhed in my bed, agonizing my way toward the resolve to admit that Xoe was there. It was painful and raw and I would never want to take it back. If I lost Xoe, if she lost me, I don’t know how either of us would survive. That would be a true incompleteness. If that happened, it isn’t hard to imagine facing life with the same nihilistic boredom Vanitas did.
I don’t think Xoe is going anywhere, and I don’t think we are doomed like Vanitas. Like all applications of real world identity to fictional characters, there are limits to the metaphor. Just because she feels broken and doomed doesn’t mean she is. But it’s hard not to see myselves in this boy, this tragic and embittered villain.
