soc_puppet | Thoughts on Kairi

This post contains absolutely no Kingdom Hearts II spoilers ¦D Be glad.

So yesterday I finally finished watching Skies of Memory. It was good to finally see more of the Organization and its politics, though I admit missing the actual worlds. Following that, I decided to start watching Skies of Hope today.

Once we got past the opening cutscene and the bit with the fighting shadows and stuff (mostly glossed over, due to the nature of Skies of Hope) we finally got to meet Kairi--shortly before we are introduced to Riku. As she interacted with them, I was struck by a familiar thought: why does half the fandom hate Kairi [in the first game]? She's every bit as snarky as the other two main characters, she's got guts, and yet she knows when it's better to stay on the sidelines and cheer. Why don't/didn't people like her?

My first thought is it's because she's female. Subsection A of this being: She is a female who can potentially get between Sora and Riku's Twoo Wuv and is therefore Evil; and Subsection B being: Female anime/manga/game characters get a worse time than male characters in general for Reasons Unknown.

And then I got to the pier sceene, which I had probably blocked from my mind up until that point. Oh, thought I, so that's why. Because Kairi acts like that for the first half of the sceene. I'll admit, even I was hard-pressed to excuse that. The only thing I can think of that would possibly excuse it is if she was having weird, premonitionary dreams about what would happen in the game. I'm not going to get into the possibility of this here, only mention that she would probably be denounced as a Sue if she did.

Anyway, shortly after that Kairi went back to being awesome. I mean, she rowed out to the island in the middle of the night, and though we don't know for sure why, we can at least assume it's for similar reasons to Sora and Riku. It was also at least a little stupid, but she was still cool for doing it. She needs more love.