That... was a lot to unpack. The gist of it was pretty much what he'd been expecting, but the extra stories were interesting, and he filed away various information including the concept of 'Wordless' for future reference. With his life, there was no telling what might be significant down the line.
"I never thought you were treating me like a child," he said. "I figured you had your reasons for being the way you are and thinking and acting the way you do, even if I didn't know the specifics til now. But it's not going to change my mind, because I have reasons for being the way I am and the way I think and act too."
"I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I wasn't always someone who mostly disregarded rules that I thought wouldn't hurt anyone if they were broken. Vexen can attest to that much; Isa and I drove Dilan crazy with our sneaking into the palace, back in the day. But that's kids' stuff, literally. I understand that breaking rules can have consequences. But so can following them. And what I've learned is that trusting in rules to tell you what's right and wrong in a given situation, that the people who make those rules knew what they were doing and had everyone's best interests at heart, is the bigger risk than trusting your own heart."
"As a kid, I trusted the authorities in my own world. I believed that they were working for the general good and would never knowingly cause someone real harm. I learned the hard way how wrong that was. And yeah, I'd like to blame Xehanort for all of it, but the truth is that with the exception of Ienzo, they were all adults and knew what they we doing. Xehanort absolutely played them, but ultimately, they're responsible for their own actions. And their actions brought my home to the brink of collapse, not by accident, but by choice. They did horiffic experiments on people, bred Heartless, banished Lord Ansem, and ripped out Isa's and my hearts, among other things."
"Then as adult, I followed the rules of the Organization. Well, as much as anyone did; everyone in the Organization except maybe Luxord and Demyx had some kind of scheme going on at any given time. But even if I didn't trust Xemnas himself as far as I could throw the castle, I at least trusted that the Organization operated the way it did for a reason and that we were all ultimately working toward the same goal. Again, I found out the hard way that that wasn't the case, and my insistence on sticking it out and trying to follow the rules, such as they were, almost certainly made things way worse for Xion and Roxas, and potentially the rest of the world too, since anything Xehanort has a hand in tends to be connected to about a million other things."
"Even here, in Auradon, you've seen how the 'good guys', the people in authority and the ones making the rules, acted. People who in our world would have been our allies, some of them even Princesses of Heart. They treated an entire group of people like trash. Literally. And then they left a generation of children to rot on the Isle when their only 'crime' was being born to the 'wrong' people. It's only because of Ben that things were and are getting any better; Belle and Beast seemed perfectly content to leave them there."
"To be blunt, Aqua, I don't trust people in authority- at least ones I don't know personally-, and by extension, the rules they make. I've learned that authorities that seem to have people's best interests at heart often don't. That they can be just as cruel, selfish, arrogant, and shortsighted as anyone else. Do I want to give people like that the benefit of the doubt? To believe that they must have had good reasons, at least in their own minds? Sure. But I can't. Here, or back home. There's too much evidence stacked against it."
"Let's not forget, the first bunch of Keybladers, the ones who came up with the rules governing the world order and how to protect it were survivors of the first Keyblade War. At best, they would have been exhausted and traumatized. At worst, they might have been part of those who wrecked things in the first place. Either way, not a group of people who'd be in any kind of state of mind to make far-reaching rules for future generations. One thing we can't forget: Keyblade wielders are the reason the world was broken to begin with. The reason the supposed 'world order' even exists. The world isn't broken because of Darkness, it's broken because a bunch of Kedbladers broke it."
"Which brings me around to the second conclusion I've come to: I don't think that 'more Keybladers' is the best way to protect the worlds back home. That's like looking at a bunch of bombs that blew up a world and coming to the conclusion, 'hey, do you know what would be the best way to prevent this from happening again? Make a bunch more bombs!'"
"Even a half-decent Keyblade wielder is basically a one-person army. And yes, while most Keybladers won't ever 'detonate'- to continue the bomb analogy-, because of training or personality or just basic decency, even one doing so is dangerous. Pretty much all of our world's current mess comes back to one Keyblade wielder gone bad. Just one. The more Keybladers their are, the greater the chances of another Xehanort cropping up."
"And even if the next guy isn't some grand scope plotter like he is, they could still wreck tons of havoc before they could be stopped. Keyblade wielders can hop from one world to another almost as easily as an average person might go out for pizza. They wield immensely powerful weapons, they can't be locked up, and the only way to reliably disarm them is to kill them. Keyblades are, to put it bluntly, dangerous to have around."
"And yes, while I understand that there will be more Keybladers, I think we need to get away from the idea that more is necessarily better in the long run. Or that we should try to put things back to roughly the way they were before Xehanort started Xehanorting. What we need is to come up with a better way of handling things that doesn't require a large number of Keybladers; for the worlds to by and large be able to protect themselves, without our intervention or constant monitoring."
"And before you ask, no, I don't know exactly what that would look like. I'm not a tactical genius or anything, and long-term planning is not my strong suit. But I do think that people who are smart when it comes to tactics and planning should definitely work on that idea once the more immediate problems back home are handled, if only as a back up. Because like it or not, things have changed, and we can't just try and go back to the status quo; if we try to do that, we'll eventually end up with the same sort of mess all over again at some point down the road."
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-01-24 11:11 pm (UTC)"I never thought you were treating me like a child," he said. "I figured you had your reasons for being the way you are and thinking and acting the way you do, even if I didn't know the specifics til now. But it's not going to change my mind, because I have reasons for being the way I am and the way I think and act too."
"I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I wasn't always someone who mostly disregarded rules that I thought wouldn't hurt anyone if they were broken. Vexen can attest to that much; Isa and I drove Dilan crazy with our sneaking into the palace, back in the day. But that's kids' stuff, literally. I understand that breaking rules can have consequences. But so can following them. And what I've learned is that trusting in rules to tell you what's right and wrong in a given situation, that the people who make those rules knew what they were doing and had everyone's best interests at heart, is the bigger risk than trusting your own heart."
"As a kid, I trusted the authorities in my own world. I believed that they were working for the general good and would never knowingly cause someone real harm. I learned the hard way how wrong that was. And yeah, I'd like to blame Xehanort for all of it, but the truth is that with the exception of Ienzo, they were all adults and knew what they we doing. Xehanort absolutely played them, but ultimately, they're responsible for their own actions. And their actions brought my home to the brink of collapse, not by accident, but by choice. They did horiffic experiments on people, bred Heartless, banished Lord Ansem, and ripped out Isa's and my hearts, among other things."
"Then as adult, I followed the rules of the Organization. Well, as much as anyone did; everyone in the Organization except maybe Luxord and Demyx had some kind of scheme going on at any given time. But even if I didn't trust Xemnas himself as far as I could throw the castle, I at least trusted that the Organization operated the way it did for a reason and that we were all ultimately working toward the same goal. Again, I found out the hard way that that wasn't the case, and my insistence on sticking it out and trying to follow the rules, such as they were, almost certainly made things way worse for Xion and Roxas, and potentially the rest of the world too, since anything Xehanort has a hand in tends to be connected to about a million other things."
"Even here, in Auradon, you've seen how the 'good guys', the people in authority and the ones making the rules, acted. People who in our world would have been our allies, some of them even Princesses of Heart. They treated an entire group of people like trash. Literally. And then they left a generation of children to rot on the Isle when their only 'crime' was being born to the 'wrong' people. It's only because of Ben that things were and are getting any better; Belle and Beast seemed perfectly content to leave them there."
"To be blunt, Aqua, I don't trust people in authority- at least ones I don't know personally-, and by extension, the rules they make. I've learned that authorities that seem to have people's best interests at heart often don't. That they can be just as cruel, selfish, arrogant, and shortsighted as anyone else. Do I want to give people like that the benefit of the doubt? To believe that they must have had good reasons, at least in their own minds? Sure. But I can't. Here, or back home. There's too much evidence stacked against it."
"Let's not forget, the first bunch of Keybladers, the ones who came up with the rules governing the world order and how to protect it were survivors of the first Keyblade War. At best, they would have been exhausted and traumatized. At worst, they might have been part of those who wrecked things in the first place. Either way, not a group of people who'd be in any kind of state of mind to make far-reaching rules for future generations. One thing we can't forget: Keyblade wielders are the reason the world was broken to begin with. The reason the supposed 'world order' even exists. The world isn't broken because of Darkness, it's broken because a bunch of Kedbladers broke it."
"Which brings me around to the second conclusion I've come to: I don't think that 'more Keybladers' is the best way to protect the worlds back home. That's like looking at a bunch of bombs that blew up a world and coming to the conclusion, 'hey, do you know what would be the best way to prevent this from happening again? Make a bunch more bombs!'"
"Even a half-decent Keyblade wielder is basically a one-person army. And yes, while most Keybladers won't ever 'detonate'- to continue the bomb analogy-, because of training or personality or just basic decency, even one doing so is dangerous. Pretty much all of our world's current mess comes back to one Keyblade wielder gone bad. Just one. The more Keybladers their are, the greater the chances of another Xehanort cropping up."
"And even if the next guy isn't some grand scope plotter like he is, they could still wreck tons of havoc before they could be stopped. Keyblade wielders can hop from one world to another almost as easily as an average person might go out for pizza. They wield immensely powerful weapons, they can't be locked up, and the only way to reliably disarm them is to kill them. Keyblades are, to put it bluntly, dangerous to have around."
"And yes, while I understand that there will be more Keybladers, I think we need to get away from the idea that more is necessarily better in the long run. Or that we should try to put things back to roughly the way they were before Xehanort started Xehanorting. What we need is to come up with a better way of handling things that doesn't require a large number of Keybladers; for the worlds to by and large be able to protect themselves, without our intervention or constant monitoring."
"And before you ask, no, I don't know exactly what that would look like. I'm not a tactical genius or anything, and long-term planning is not my strong suit. But I do think that people who are smart when it comes to tactics and planning should definitely work on that idea once the more immediate problems back home are handled, if only as a back up. Because like it or not, things have changed, and we can't just try and go back to the status quo; if we try to do that, we'll eventually end up with the same sort of mess all over again at some point down the road."