Ansem: Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts II
So, Kingdom Hearts is kind of big and confusing. All of the broad strokes, I think, make sense, but some of the details are a little trickier to pin down.
For example:
The Many Faces of Ansem
I'm going to divide this up by game, and each game into sections, because otherwise it will hurt everyone who tries to read it. At least this way, I can keep things relatively clear!
Abbreviations and Terminology:
- KHI: The first Kingdom Hearts.
- KH:FM/FM: Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix, which, to date, has only been released in Japan, and was basically the English game but with Japanese text, Japanese subtitles, new keychains, new Heartless, and several extra movie scenes. (There were more changes, too -- relevantly, Final Mix added three new Ansem Reports -- but that's the gist.)
- KH:CoM/CoM: Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, a GameBoy Advance title that takes place directly after KHI.
- KHII: Kingdom Hearts II, which takes place a year after the first game.
- SARs: Secret Ansem Reports, previously translated by Deep Dive as "Ansem's Other Report" (and corrected from previous essay's "ASR" -- they're Secret Ansem Reports, not Ansem's Secret Reports. My bad, Sam!)
- Repliku: The replica Riku made by Vexen in CoM. Because it's what the fandom calls him, and it's adorable.
Acknowledgments:
- Quotes from the script for Chain of Memories are taken from David "dragonblade3325" Wald's game script on GameFAQs.
- Everything having to do with Final Mix is summarized or paraphrased (or taken out of context and mocked) from Thorfinn "Thorf" Tait's Final Mix FAQ, also at GameFAQs. This includes the translations of Ansem Reports eleven, twelve, and thirteen, which he apparently did by himself. I do actually own Final Mix myself, but I haven't beaten the Unknown yet.
- Hopefully, since this is just a LiveJournal entry, neither of these people will mind having their work, err, stolen. Haha. It should be taken as flattery, really!
KINGDOM HEARTS
This game is probably the easiest to summarize, because, although there are already at least two people who could be called Ansem, only one of them gets any real screen time, and he's quite straightforward, in a crazed-and-genocidal sort of way.
I. Hooded Figure [unofficial title]
He appears to Sora shortly before the destruction of Destiny Islands, in the cave behind the waterfall -- Sora and Riku's Secret Place (now accepting Kairis, too). He seems to have emerged from a door that wasn't there the last time Sora checked, and is generally very Creepy and Mysterious, instantly reminding everyone who might have otherwise forgotten that they are playing a Disney/Square game. It's this man who asserts that Destiny Islands has been "connected" and "tied to the darkness."
Full of bluster, Sora tells him to stop "freaking [him] out like this," and then realizes that, hey, he has never seen an adult in his life, let alone one on the play island doesn't know this guy, and where did he come from anyway. Condescendingly, the man observes that Sora doesn't yet "know what lies beyond the door," and then mocks him for being so ignorant.
(His comments about there being "so very much to learn" sound so much like awareness that Sora is about to go on a journey and become Someone Important that I wonder if a translator didn't get lazy and make the sentence passive when it shouldn't have been. "There is so very much to learn. You understand so little," sounds far more all-knowing than, "You have so very much to learn. You understand so little.")
At this point (if I remember right), Kairi calls Sora's name, and when he turns back, the hooded figure has vanished, but the door remains. If you approach the door, Sora makes some interesting note about how the door won't open, but otherwise, it's back to happy fluff on Destiny Islands for him. Apparently, strange men in cloaks and weird doors that appear out of nowhere aren't worth mentioning in Sora's head, because he never brings it up with Riku or Kairi. Awesome.
II. "Ansem"
Leon and Aerith are the first to really mention him -- as something of a red herring, he's referred to as a genius, a scientist whose study into the nature of the human heart went further than anyone else's -- a man whose research they are trying to find because they want to understand the Heartless. Like everything else in KHI, Ansem's Reports are a collection of scattered items you are told to find and agree to look for because Sora is a.) a Nice Guy who can't seem to resist doing other people's laundry for them and b.) incredibly lucky when it comes to finding the most random things he needs strewn like bread crumbs down the path to the plot.
You find all of these reports, of course, and -- although it wasn't obvious right away -- put them into sequence to realize that this Ansem guy who did the writing is really creepy and was obviously not as interested in hearts per se as he was in the darkness in them. The first report seems to be more or less what Leon and Aerith hinted it was, a record of a ruler who decided to delve into the mysteries of the heart to protect his world from darkness. But the other reports are very, very quickly creepy; they talk of experimenting on people, human beings, to make Heartless, and then imprisoning them in the basement. They establish that all Heartless other than the small Shadows (and their brethren, the Darksides) are Ansem's creations -- of all the Heartless out there, only the ones which lack insignia, "marks" that Ansem establishes having given the results of his experiments, are the natural result of people's hearts being overwhelmed with darkness. Fun times.
(An interesting side-note in the reports, I think, is the bit about the Gummi Blocks, which apparently come from worlds where the barrier around the heart of the world has been destroyed, and the heart consumed. I found building Gummi ships so thoroughly distasteful that I am not at all surprised, really, to learn that they are made when a thousand voices cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced.)
In one of the extra reports from KH:FM, Ansem also discusses the heart of a world, and the door that leads to it. This door is hidden, in the form of a Keyhole, and initially locked. By unlocking that door, you open the world up to travel from other worlds. And naturally, just as you can now get to that other world, so can the Heartless from your world -- Heartless which will then seek out the heart of the world like they seek out the hearts of people. And when the heart of the world is consumed, that world falls into darkness, as Radiant Garden did.
(Tangentially, there are obviously stages of recovery from this consumption; where the other worlds that Sora visits and saves seem normal, it takes Hollow Bastion a full year and a lot of effort on the parts of everyone involved to come back from its destruction and become Radiant Garden once more. Because of these stages, I feel I'm able to assume some people don't simply come back from the dead/being Heartless once the world is brought back into the light -- that it depends on how long the world spent in darkness.
(And yes, some people do seem to come back from the dead/being Heartless; unless you think any of Sora's friends are gone. I suppose they could be, but I can't help thinking that the casual way Kairi and Selphie talk about Riku's disappearance is really inappropriate if it coincided with anyone dying.)
Anyway. The point of all of this is that Ansem is really, really creepy by the time you read the last Ansem Report, so when he shows up possessing Riku (and forcing him into skin-tight leather catsuits) it's almost not really surprising. I can imagine, however, that there were a lot of red faces in Leon's group; oops, forgot to mention that the "genius" scientist was a megalomaniac and psychopath, didn't we? Our bad.
So, that's Ansem in KHI. A scientist obsessed with darkness and the heart and the darkness in the heart who, presumably, became corrupted during his research into it despite the fairly noble intentions he had at the start. Power corrupts, or something. We're not really surprised, it's a Square game.
III. Unknown [Final Mix]
As a direct tie-in with KHII, this man appears once all 99 Dalmatians have been rescued in the same place where Sora originally entered the battle with Maleficent. Apparently Xemnas is lured out by puppies. Thanks for that, Square. Where the green light used to be, there is now a dark portal. (The assembled Princesses of Heart comment on its appearance if you talk to them -- they sense a power from it, a power neither of darkness or of light, and Jasmine in particular points out that, if it were darkness, they would be able to hold it back for you, but apparently they can't do anything about this other energy. Everyone seems to think it might be more dangerous than darkness, and Alice tells Sora to be careful.)
On the other side of the portal, Sora and Co. find a man in a black cloak who flickers in and out of existence -- visible, and invisible. This man sneaks up behind them, because they apparently lack Spidey Sense, and actually walks right through Sora, not unlike Kairi at the beginning of the game, except without the part where he disappears afterwards. As the man passes through Sora, the screen goes black, and a ton of dialogue (subtitles only) from earlier in the game flashes past. Memories, maybe. Sora stumbles, and turns to face the man, who now seems solid.
(Well, more or less. When he speaks, the man's voice is accompanied by darkness and subtitles, apparently heard only in Sora, Donald, and Goofy's minds.)
Veterans of KHII will, of course, notice that this man is wearing an Organization cloak. And wields dual red lightsabers. And, basically, although the guy goes out of his way to avoid giving Sora his name, he is, in hindsight, clearly Xemnas. (Like a bitch, he responds to Goofy's curious, "Ansem...?" by saying, "That's a familiar sound.")
Anyway. For all that he is only on screen for a couple of minutes, Xemnas manages to drop many giant chunks of plot on Sora's head -- "You look like him. Which means, you are not complete." -- and then engages the boy in battle in order to test his power.
The fight that follows is extremely difficult, even more so than fighting Sephiroth, and Xemnas shows a marked tendency for bending the laws of physics to his will. If Sora is lucky enough to beat him, Xemnas just moves away, seemingly unfazed. I hate it when villains do that.
"...Truly fascinating," he remarks. "This is going to be enjoyable."
Sora, of course, doesn't appreciate that crap, and charges him with keyblade ready, demanding to know what the heck he's talking about. As he leaps into the air, though, everything goes monochromatic, there's a strange buzzing sound, and Xemnas becomes semi-transparent again. Naturally, this results in Sora going straight through him. And, not unlike the Hooded Figure from the beginning of the game, Xemnas has no interest in explaining further. "In your present state," he says, "you probably cannot understand. In any case, the time when we can meet again will doubtless come."
He's obviously about to leave, so Sora tries one more time to get him to explain wtf, who are you. Xemnas vanishes, but in his place, Sora hears, "I am..." and there's a ripply movement on screen in a man-sized shape, clearly showing that Xemnas is walking away from Sora, who, oblivious as ever, just keeps staring at the spot where he was standing.
"...a mere shell," Xemnas finishes, and as the darkness lifts, there's no sign of him having ever been there. (And no further mention of him ever again, because Square can't be bothered to even give us a lousy keychain for our efforts. We do get an EXP Necklace* and the final Ansem Report, though. Hooray! Or something. I hate you, Square.)
And, yes. Those of you paying attention to timeline? The person that Xemnas thinks Sora looks like? He's been alive for a day or two, at best. I mean, you do have to complete Hollow Bastion before you can fight Xemnas, but~...
*EXP Necklace? No, I have one better for you. The Crystal Crown. I don't even remember what it does, but it's the most awesome accessory ever. I need to get it, and this necklace, and my earrings down. Then Sora can be the prettiest princess ever.
KINGDOM HEARTS: CHAIN OF MEMORIES
Warning: This section is much longer than either of the others, because I don't feel I can assume everyone reading is familiar with Riku's scenario in CoM, as I assume they're familiar with KHI and KHII.
I suppose I should note here that it's possible that the "Ansem" to whom Riku speaks throughout CoM isn't literally Ansem at all but rather a representation of the darkness in Riku's heart, as Riku himself sees it. One piece of support for this theory is that there are, really, any number of things that Ansem should have recognized and had commentary on as he and Riku wander the floors of Castle Oblivion. (It's probably omitted to avoid blatantly spoiling things in KHII, but it's still there.)
However, for the purposes of Ansem's character, it works the same either way: Riku clearly was possessed by Ansem for a time, and he recognizes the darkness in him as Ansem. So it looks enough and acts enough [and smells enough!] like Ansem for him.
And another note: The "Ansem" that Riku speaks to for the first part of the game isn't the one in his heart, either. That's DiZ. See "II. DiZ" for details!
I don't know about you, but I'm confused already! So let's get started, shall we?
I. The "Ansem" in Riku's Heart
So, we find that, as is such with all videogame enemies, killing Ansem only makes him stronger. Despite being totally annihilated by light at the end of the first game, he's apparently still around -- and still in Riku's heart, as special as that sounds. And now creepily obsessed with Riku, in addition to darkness. (Seriously, the man needs a hobby.) Maybe Ansem just likes the blue/white/silver hair Riku has going on, but he clearly wants the kid's body.
And, there's really NO WAY to discuss Ansem's interest in Riku without it sounding like this, huh? Should I go into the way that the final boss version of Ansem keeps saying, "SUBMIT!" when you're fighting him? No? Oh, but it's so much fun.
Ah, well.
Pseudosexual creepfest aside, Ansem does have another reason, canonically, for wanting to inhabit Riku's body above all others: as is somewhat retroactively established while Riku progresses through Castle Oblivion, Riku is both reminiscent of Ansem in the past (see various lines by Organization members describing how he "wears darkness" in a similar manner or has a similar scent to that of "the Superior" -- we'll get to him in a bit) and fascinating in his own right.
After all, as someone who eventually chooses the path between darkness and light, Riku could be seen as potentially being part of the "in-between" world that Ansem obsesses over in his extra KH:FM repots. [We know now that this in-between world is the place where Nobodies reside, but Ansem still hasn't figured that out at the time of CoM, and he died still researching, still wondering. So it seems natural that Riku's hybrid existence would catch his attention, right?]
But whatever reasons Ansem has for wanting Riku, he's still horribly creepy. And maybe I lied about not going into his "SUBMIT!" thing, but it's still not one of the quotes here! Take a look at some of this dialogue:
"Riku... I can see your heart..."
"That's it, remember me... Let me drift into your heart..."
"Mwa ha ha... You called my name, Riku... You're thinking about me... You're afraid of the darkness I command. Good... The more you think of me, the closer my return draws. And when I awaken... Your heart will be mine!"
"Riku...Riku... I know you can feel it, Riku -- the grip I have on your heart. You've let the darkness in. And all-consuming darkness is what your heart shall become!"
"The deeper the darkness runs in you, the stronger I become. Controlling your body is an effortless task."
Oh god why.
In the end, and with a little help from King Mickey, Riku does manage to conquer the darkness in his heart, shutting Ansem out -- although he as much as says it's not for good, that there's still a tiny bit of darkness left in him despite his struggle. (So, to expand on Sora's darkness-and-light theory in the first game, while there's a tiny bit of light in your heart that never goes out no matter how far you sink into darkness, there is also a tiny bit of darkness that never fades away no matter how you strive for the light. Unless you're a Princess of Heart, of course. They're 100% Darkness-Free. You get a certificate. ;)
But, still. All of this is relatively consistent. Ansem's this guy, see. He was a scientist, he wrote a bunch of reports, he tried to research darkness, he became corrupted utterly and plunged into darkness himself. He went after Riku's jailbait ass. Then he got a nice long lecture on how the dark side was bad and Riku would rather be with Sora in the realm of light again, kthnx. And there was much rejoicing.
II. DiZ
Now things get a little sticky, because, as noted above, DiZ pretends to be Ansem for a while when he first appears. But at least he clears it all up for us later! Yeah, right.
At the beginning of "Reverse/Rebirth," Riku is shown waking up somewhere between darkness and light, and a Mysterious Voice(tm) asks him to choose between the "security of sleep," and leaving the fight to others (like King Mickey), or awakening to "thorny light."
This voice is rather unpleasant and manipulative most of the time, and goes out of its way to make sure Riku realizes that waking up will be unpleasant, that the light of awakening will "bring only anguish to one in [his] state." He also talks of sleeping as "turn[ing] away from the light," and urges Riku to do so, obviously because it will be easier. Riku notes that the voice is making it sound like he's some sort of vampire, and the voice asks him if he can "face the truth."
Yeah, DiZ is a real sweet guy.
Since there'd be no game otherwise, Riku chooses to wake up and leave darkness behind. ("Yeah, well... Seems like a boring place to take a nap anyway.") And, despite its earlier antagonistic comments, the Mysterious Voice clearly approves, and gives Riku his first world card, so that he can enter the next room, which leads to Maleficent's castle. Riku kind of wigs a little, and the Mysterious Voice explains it's not actually Maleficent's castle, just a room that looks like it, because all of the rooms in Castle Oblivion change to reflect the memories of those who enter -- a nifty trick which was one of the castle's selling points, obviously. (And probably makes it really hard to find the bathroom, unless Nobodies can't use the trick. Which would make plenty of sense, and also be horribly depressing! Score.)
Well, Riku and the Mysterious Voice chat some more, and the Mysterious Voice takes every opportunity to imply that Riku isn't, or shouldn't want to be, as free of darkness as he thinks he is. It eventually comes to a head when the Voice reveals itself as Ansem and demands to know why Riku won't accept the darkness, doesn't he like it, isn't it pretty, it's just his size. Riku gets uppity, Ansem makes some more creepy "submission" remarks, and the two of them square off in battle.
(By the way? This whole sequence? Very interesting. Riku is very candid with the Mysterious Voice/Ansem[/DiZ], and we get to hear a little bit of what working with Maleficent was like. I wholly recommend reading the game script available at GameFAQs and downloading all of the movies from KH-Vids.Net. I'd also recommend playing the game itself, but, from what I understand, Chain of Memories is a miserable gameplay experience suited only to masochists.)
After the battle ends, Ansem tells Riku that he can't run away from darkness, that "chasing the light will not distance [him] from the dark," and gives him some more cards. He also gives him dark powers, which allow Riku to enter Dark Mode -- whereupon he will find himself in that scary bondage familiar outfit again. Well, Riku yelps, very wtf, because apparently the darkness has cold fingers or something, and Ansem claims to have "tempered the darkness that remains in [his] heart." Riku is still insistent that he won't actually use this darkness, but Ansem says it's his choice, which is a bit strangely-worded for someone supposedly trying to corrupt him again. Fortunately, he manages to end it on the note of waiting for Riku to "yield to the darkness," and the unpleasantly slashy general tone of their interactions is maintained.
Plot happens. Again and again, Riku finds that there are no people in his memories, only enemies like Maleficent and a billion Heartless. He is told that this is because his heart is full of darkness, blah blah blah, he can only see other people also consumed by darkness, yadda yadda, and oh, by the way, this guy named Vexen made an evil clone of you, ENJOY THAT. Ansem appears one last time, to contradict Riku when he calls his replica fake. Ansem agrees that the Repliku is a copy, but maybe, in accepting darkness, that copy is more truly Riku than Riku himself.
(If this were about Riku, there'd be a whole long section here on the Repliku and what its cattiness at Sora after being filled up with Riku's memories and Namine's -- err -- lies indicates. But it's not about Riku, so discussion of his now-blatant and apparently violently-repressed gay for Sora will have to be saved for some other time.)
Then Ansem accuses Riku of fearing the darkness, and Riku snaps back that he's not afraid, but when Ansem concludes that he fights the darkness because he fears it, Riku quickly realizes what he's up to and informs him that he isn't going to give into darkness just to prove he's not afraid of it, sorry. Good for you, Riku! Peer pressure is bad! Just say "no" to the forces of darkness. Again, "Ansem" seems perhaps a touch too accepting of this response, gives Riku some more cards for his deck, and vanishes.
It isn't until the real Ansem appears, however, that it starts becoming obvious that our friendly neighborhood Mysterious Voice wasn't him. For starters, when this Ansem shows up, Riku remarks on his foul scent, and how that scent could only belong to one person -- as opposed to when DiZ was pretending to be Ansem, and Riku merely makes the logical conclusion based on his having been "chatty" about the darkness. Also, this Ansem appears when Riku is plunged into darkness abruptly by Lexaeus, and when he does, he announces, "I can see... I can see clearly!" and, more unsettlingly: "I can see into your heart," and "Let me drift into your heart..."
The real Ansem is, after all, about ten times as gay as anyone pretending to be him could ever hope to be.
But DiZ appears to Riku again before the end of the game, still pretending to be Ansem, and challenges him to fight. When Riku doesn't immediately attack him, this "Ansem" asks if he's giving up already, and tells him callously to "accept [his] fate," then, and "accept Ansem as [his] master." Since Riku's pretty sure Ansem hasn't developed the habit of speaking about himself in the third person recently (and since DiZ doesn't, apparently, smell the same), he confronts DiZ about it, and identifies him as the voice who guided him at the beginning, and who pretended to be Ansem in order to get him to accept his darkness. I bet DiZ found being accused of not really being Ansem pretty fucking hilarious.
At this point, there's obviously no point in the charade any longer, so DiZ reveals himself, a man wrapped in crimson bandages, wearing strange clothes. He tells Riku he's been watching him in the shower, and that he's special. He stands between darkness and light, "in the twilight." But DiZ wants him to choose, ostensibly between them.
Now, it turns out that Mickey knows DiZ, and the two of them have been working together for a little while. Also, Mickey has the sneaking suspicion that he knows DiZ from somewhere, imagine that! Riku tries asking DiZ who he is, of course, but like all Ansems DiZ replies with irritating riddles. "Nobody," he says, "or anybody. It all depends on whether you choose to believe in me or not." (A reference to his own weird in-between existence, or just him being obnoxious? You decide!) Riku points out that DiZ really loves forcing decisions on other people, and DiZ responds that he chose to wake up and face Ansem. Not that this choice was right or wrong, of course -- DiZ is just here to watch.
...I hate him.
Anyway, in his last appearance, at the Crossroads of Blatant Metaphor, DiZ finally makes Riku choose between the road to darkness and the road to light -- or he tries to, anyway, since Riku responds by choosing both. Or, at least, the road between them. DiZ seems surprised by this, but, and in my head he sounds vaguely smug, asks, "You mean the twilit road to nightfall?" Riku's defiant response: "No...the road to dawn." [EDIT: Stop trying to lead people into darkness, DiZ.]
So, in conclusion, DiZ is technically a "good guy." But he really needs to stop enjoying fucking with people quite so much.
III. "The Superior"
Only vaguely referenced by various members of the Organization, he still bears mentioning. Riku's scent (or, more logically, Ansem's scent) reminds everyone of the Superior, and Zexion in particular says that Riku "wears darkness" like no one else. So there's someone, obviously, similar to Riku [Ansem] out there. Hmm~. Any other implications of this so far? Oh, yes. The eleventh Ansem Report, available only in KH:FM, but it doesn't make any sense until we get into KHII.
KINGDOM HEARTS II
So far, we have "Ansem," an Unknown, a man known only as "the Superior," and DiZ.
You thought CoM was confusing? Well, you ain't seen nothing yet.
I. "Ansem"?
During Roxas's scenario, two men spend a lot of time in deep conversation about him. One of them is clearly DiZ, although, since many people did not play CoM prior to KHII (and I was one of them), the presence of this strange guy with the red bandages covering most of his face and the yellow eyes provideed no clue as to who the other man might be.
But then that other man pulls down his hood, and he's clearly Ansem.
Much gaping. Those who had played CoM doubtlessly wonder whether Ansem hadn't defeated Riku and taken possession of him again between the games. Everyone else just wondered why the hell that loser still isn't dead yet. And neither DiZ nor "Ansem" offer any explanations whatsoever. Those bastards. (The closest DiZ comes is asking "Ansem" whether or not he remembers his "true name" yet. The reply? "Ansem." Helpful!)
For the first hour or so of gameplay, Ansem and DiZ look very much like villains. (And, from Roxas's perspective, they really were villains. Why the pain?! What did he EVER do to them? Why oh why.) Then Roxas reluctantly merges with Sora, Sora wakes up good as new and completely oblivious, and DiZ and Ansem both precede to disappear for the next, oh, twenty hours. At the very least.
When Sora first sees Ansem, he has his hood up again and is fighting with the Soul Eater, Riku's red spiny sword from KHI and CoM. (Note to fandom: Not a keyblade. It becomes the Way to Dawn keyblade later. But right now? It's just a sword.) Naturally, Sora assumes that this figure is Riku. He's shockingly perceptive, really, especially considering that Ansem and Riku are built very differently, even with Riku's sudden growth spurt. Silly of him! Without speaking, Ansem fights Sora, although he really seems more like he's fighting the Heartless swarm than Sora himself...
Well, Sora is a source of boundless optimism, so the fact that his boyfriend best friend left without so much as a backwards look and is, you know, wearing the cloak favored by members of Organization XIII, doesn't seem to faze him in the slightest. He's upset, and worried about Riku, but he never stops to think that Riku might be working for the other side again -- or that this guy might not be Riku at all.
This "Ansem" [Riku?] person shows up several more times, always working behind the scenes; most notably, he brings Pluto to Kairi, and saves her from Axel's first attempted kidnapping. (He is the one who whistled for Pluto, we know because there's a good shot of a man inside the dark corridor wearing an Organization cloak right before Kairi passes out and wakes up in Twilight Town -- and who else would it be, really? Way too tall for Mickey. And Pluto wouldn't listen to anyone else.)
And then, of course, there's his appearance in the World That Never Was, where he fights Saix briefly and is revealed to be working with Namine -- who calls him Riku. Kairi does a double-take, and rushes over after the battle to stop him from leaving. (He was, in theory, going to chase Saix -- but I bet getting away from Kairi after Namine revealed his Secret Identity oh noes! was also a high priority.) She catches his arm, and he pulls the hood back--
--and is Ansem.
(It's interesting that Kairi doesn't actually seem startled, but, to be fair, the scene cuts away from them before we can really see her reaction. Even money says she never saw him as Ansem in the first place, though.)
Of course, everyone's going, WTF WHY by now. In bits and pieces, from Riku himself and then from DiZ, we do get an explanation as to why Riku looks the way he does -- apparently, in order to restore Sora's memories, they needed Roxas, and Riku wasn't able to take Roxas down on his own. In a display that DiZ found very moving, and not at all gay, really, Riku responded by letting himself slip into darkness completely so as to have the power to beat Roxas and bring him back.
(It's stated in the game that this victory was by the skin of his teeth, even so. You know what that means, fandom? It means you have to stop assuming Riku's a better fighter than Sora. It also means you have to stop assuming Riku would top him. Whatever Sora says, he's clearly got an adorable blind spot where Riku is concerned -- and Riku himself states that being a better fighter never mattered, anyway, since Sora's heart is so much stronger than his. Sora and Riku haven't fought since then, but, assuming Sora fought at full strength, Riku wouldn't win. Accept it!)
So, Riku looks like Ansem now. And has spent the better part of the game introducing himself to people as Ansem. And looking like what everyone thought Ansem looked like. And being confusing as hell! What the hell, Square, that was so unnecessary.
For what it's worth: although Riku looks like Ansem, he does not seem to be possessed by him. Ansem's voice is likely still there, lurking in the back of his mind, but Riku is clearly in control of the body, whatever its form. Because I don't think Ansem would be too terribly interested in helping Sora or Kairi.
Also, at the end of the game, Riku is completely free of Ansem. Completely. He has also lost most if not all of his dark powers. (In battle, he was certainly able to use his Dark Shield and Dark Blast, but he can't make corridors anymore, and Mickey tells him straight up that he doesn't belong in the dark realm anymore.) This much is canon, because of what Riku tells Mickey at the end of his game in CoM:
Mickey: So, Riku...what's next? Are you going home?
Riku: I don't know if I can. It's still there. His [Ansem's] scent...it's faint, but not gone. I can't go home until it is. His darkness may still have a hold on me...
So, obviously, Riku wouldn't have gone back to Destiny Islands with Sora unless that lingering taint was gone completely. He would have just refused. And that means that he's free of Ansem. Hooray! Ansem is a sucky thing to have in your soul. I bet it tastes like burning.
II. "Ansem"
What? Not Riku pretending to be Ansem, but...an actual Ansem?
Well, I can truthfully say...sort of. But Ansem doesn't really show up in this game. At least, not the one we're familiar with.
In KH:FM, as mentioned above, there were additional Ansem Reports -- numbered eleven through thirteen, appropriately enough, and one of the big things that KHII introduces is the concept of Nobodies. Heartless, we already know and love -- they're the result of somebody, in one way or another, losing his or her heart to darkness. So far we've seen four ways this can happen:
1.) The somebody is attacked by other Heartless, which overwhelm him or her and, somehow, extract the heart (c.f., that man in Traverse who is chased by Heartless and trips and falls and loses his heart).
2.) The heart is expelled from the body with a special keyblade (c.f., Sora in Hollow Bastion).
3.) Surrounded by Heartless and submerged in darkness too long, the heart is slowly consumed (c.f., Maleficient or any of the other Disney villains from KHI).
4.) In an extremely Star Wars fashion, the somebody is lured to the Dark Side through manipulation of his feelings until the darkness in his heart overwhelms him (c.f., Riku in KHI and the Beast in KHII).
No matter which method is chosen, the heart is overwhelmed by darkness, and what's left behind is a nasty thing known as a Heartless. For some reason, this Heartless senses and craves other hearts, and attacks other people for them, making more Heartless. (KHI seemed to imply that the Heartless sought what they themselves lacked, but KHII shakes it up a little and states, flat-out, that Heartless do indeed have hearts. It's possible that these hearts are still not their own -- that your heart was consumed by the Heartless that made you, and you now contain the hearts of others -- but this theory falls somewhat flat because each Heartless, when killed with a keyblade, only releases one heart. You'd think they'd all have more than that by now.)
(Also, more relevantly, you have to look at the names given to your adversaries: a Heartless is a being that is nothing but a heart, albeit the darkest parts of it made manifest, and a Nobody is nothing but a body, albeit a slightly changed and [sometimes extremely] twisted version of that body. Since the irony in Nobody is unarguable, it seems like the same kind of irony in Heartless can be assumed. Remember, the Nobody [as they were called in Japan] are jealous of the Heartless, mindless creatures of endless hunger who at least still have their hearts. That jealousy wouldn't make much sense if the Heartless didn't still have their own, original hearts.)
And this brings us to our next plot point. We have known for ages what happens to a heart when a person dies -- that heart becomes a Heartless. But what about the body that is cast off? Well, according to KHII (and, actually, Ansem's twelfth Report, which is again available only in KH:FM), that body doesn't always disappear. If the heart was strong enough, the body and the soul don't give up. They keep going. And a Nobody is born.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, in order to travel the worlds, Ansem made a decision that his eleventh report (available only in KH:FM) chronicles, because he really really really wanted to go to Disneyland other worlds, and darn it, his body was just too frail and breakable to survive the rigors of whatever not-face-sucking-outer space exists between worlds in the KH universe. And by the time he's written the twelfth report, Ansem has done this, somehow:
I have transcended to an existence of only the heart. I should have come back as a Heartless, but there is no sign of such a transformation.
My body has surely perished. However, I am different from the other Heartless, keeping the memories of before, and I have not taken on the form of a Heartless. It is clear that there are still many things to be studied.
What does this all boil down to? Well, despite Ansem's protests on the subject, statements made by Mickey -- who knows everything and is watching you all the time like God -- would seem to indicate that the guy we fought in KHI was in fact a Heartless. I don't know about you, but I really kicked myself after the fact for never wondering why Ansem had a giant frickin' Heartless insignia on his chest. (...which, according to his own reports, would mean he was created artificially, for those of you just tuning in.)
So, Ansem made himself into a Heartless on purpose in order to become better, stronger, faster!! And, naturally, that means that what Sora took out in his final boss fight wasn't Ansem at all, but just a part of him. And if he has a Heartless, then he has a Nobody, too. Oh snap.
Incidentally, in his thirteenth and final report, Ansem did hint at all of this. If he has cast off his body, he wonders what happened to it -- if it still exists somewhere, like he exists.
Certainly when the heart changes into a Heartless, the body disappears.
However, that is only this world's story; in another world, mightn't they change forms like the Heartless and exist there?
If we take that to be the case, there must be a you other than yourself existing somewhere.
An existence neither of darkness nor of light.
An in-between existence.
Cast off by the heart, a mere shell, one who begrudges both the darkness and the light.
Again, I find part of this interesting -- it sounds like he's referring to some sort of parallel universe, but logically I know he means Twilight Town, where Nobodies are born. Where Ansem's own Nobody was born: Xemnas. (And yes, that we can determine, the names of all Organization XIII members are anagrams. This leads to hilarity while people try to find not-ridiculous combinations of letters. Demyx = Medy? Edym? Dyme? Myde? Axel = Ale? Ael? Ela? Eal? Lea? Lae? Saix = Isa? Asi? Marluxia = Alimaur? Raliuma? Laurima? Imaural? Uliaram? ...Larxene probably = Arlene, at least.)
So. Now we have two Ansems running around out there somewhere -- three, if you count the whole person he used to be. It's a little confusing, right? Oh, it hasn't even started getting confusing yet.
III. The Real "Ansem"
On a trip to Hollow Bastion, Sora and Co. find a painting of Ansem in a study, and, upon examining the computer in the next room, that it belonged to him. So now we know that Ansem was from Hollow Bastion, which is interesting on several different levels, not the least of which is that it tells us where Kairi came from originally. From one of the KH:FM-exclusive reports:
If the door has been closed by the key known as the Keyblade, you probably cannot reach that world's heart again. Before the one with the Keyblade appears in this world, I must take measures to do something.
Supposing that there is a close relationship between the Princesses and the Keyblade, it seems likely that they will resonate with each other...
I have chosen one special girl. I do not know if she possesses a power like that of the Princesses. But, there is a chance, and this is an experiment. She may lead me to the place where the one holding the key is...
I shall send her off to the ocean of other worlds.
(Yes, this is Kairi. In a later, KHII-bound report, Ansem flat-out states that Kairi was a "denizen" of his world. [There's no acknowledgment in this report of what he did to her, but...he has a very good reason for that.] And who else would this be, really?)
(And, on a very, very long list of bastardly deeds committed by people named Ansem? Tossing a four-year-old girl into the ocean to reach another world by herself, on the premise that a.) she would turn out to be a Princess of Heart, b.) Princesses of Heart have some sort of connection to the keyblade, and c.) that that connection would be enough to draw a little girl to its next wielder. Very nice, and an excellent reason to risk getting a child killed. Not to mention the fact that he then apparently forgets about her for the next ten years.)
Then Mickey shows up, takes one look at the painting, and says, "Uh, that's not Ansem." At which point, we're reminded that Mickey met Ansem -- there's mention of him, vaguely, as coming to Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden in the original Ansem Reports:
Simply astonishing! Today I had a guest from another world. He is a king, and his vessel is built of the material that composed the meteors. He called the pieces "gummi blocks." It seemed that my opening the door has opened a path to interworld travel.
We talked for countless hours, but one story in particular caught my interest: that of a key called the "Keyblade." The Keyblade is said to hold phenomenal power.
One legend says its wielder saved the world, while another says that he wrought chaos and ruin upon it. I must know what this Keyblade is. A key opens doors. It must be connected to the door I have opened.
(Personally, I think this last part was originally intended as an oblique reference to Sora and Riku, each of whom was destined for the keyblade in KHI. As Sora chose light and Riku chose darkness, they certainly provide the duality that the Ansem Report talks about. One to save the world, one to bring chaos and ruin. Even now, this line makes me wonder whether all keyblades have two masters, two futures. And where exactly the Way to Dawn fits in. Sora's is the Keyblade of Light, and Mickey's is, oddly, the Keyblade of Darkness -- so Riku's must be the Keyblade of Twilight...)
Note: There is actually a small plot hole here. Mickey comes to Hollow Bastion after the door to darkness is opened? But we see him eating with Ansem, and meeting Xehanort, and everything seems shiny-happy. Plus, Xehanort is still Xehanort. What the hell?
Anyway. The guy in the painting isn't Ansem. Actually, it's really this kid named Xehanort who used to work for Ansem as a research assistant. Ansem -- or, as Mickey calls him, "Ansem the Wise" (see V. Ansem the Wise for details!) -- is this blond white guy. Also, apparently, he's not evil. [Edit: No, wait, yes he is. Shut up, Mickey.]
This is when the SARs start to make some kind of sense. As explained by the first report, none of the previous Ansem Reports were actually written by Ansem himself except for the very first one, which is the one that, if you remember, actually sounded vaguely like a concerned ruler trying to research darkness so as to protect his people from it. (NOTE: Ansem calls this report "number zero," which it was in Japan, but wasn't in America. There are only twelve original Ansem Reports in Japan -- zero through twelve -- but thirteen in America -- one through thirteen. Just something to keep in mind.) All of the rest of the Ansem Reports were actually written by Xehanort, the real name of the Somebody from whence "Ansem" and Xemnas came -- and a guy too creepy to be believed from all of his descriptions in the SARs.
IV. Xehanort, Xemnas
In Mickey's flashback, we get our one and only glimpse of the actual Xehanort. He is clearly teenaged there, or at the very least considerably younger than Xemnas or Ansem -- this is him nine years ago, after all, before the destruction of Radiant Garden. When he bursts in on Mickey and Ansem the Blond White Guy Wise, we see two things immediately: a.) Xehanort was working with Ansem on researching the human heart and b.) that he and Ansem do not completely get along.
It seems safe to assume that the "experiments" Xehanort conducted, using human test subjects and, basically, torturing them until the darkness in their hearts consumed them and changed them into Heartless, were not OK'd by Ansem. He probably would've wanted to use little kids or cute puppies instead.
Regardless, something comes between them in an unretractable way, whether it's Ansem's refusal to acknowledge Xehanort's genius, Xehanort doing the unthinkable and sleeping with a woman, or Ansem's exceedingly unintimidating (and thusly unappropriate) love for seasalt ice-cream. Whatever tentatively positive relationship they have with each other that allows them to live and work under the same roof, it vanishes, and Xehanort responds by doing the only reasonable thing and locking Ansem in his own basement to be eaten by Heartless. Then he takes the name Ansem for himself because...honestly, I'd guess because it was just a lot easier to spell.
At this point, as noted under the earlier "Ansem" section, Xehanort, now calling himself Ansem, decided to make himself into a Heartless in order to travel the worlds. Both the resulting Heartless and the Nobody are very strange, in that they look almost exactly like Xehanort himself -- where Namine and Roxas, for example, came out looking rather different from Kairi and Sora, whatever people say -- but then (and we're entering Tentative Theory Space now, so keep your hands and arms inside the cart), this might be because Xehanort was already a Nobody to begin with.
The obvious piece of evidence for this claim is that Xehanort's name already contains an x, and can be de-anagramed to spell interesting things, such as "Another" or "No Heart". (Seriously, I'm half-convinced Xehanort tried to plunge Hollow Bastion into darkness just because he hated his name.) Then there's also the fact that Ansem makes it pretty clear in the SARs that Xehanort isn't human, and that he had no memories when Ansem first found him -- which would make Xehanort a Roxas-type Nobody, theoretically the result of someone only being a Heartless for a minute or so and then reclaiming his/her heart.
I shall perform an experiment to probe the depths of a person's heart. One of my own apprentices, Xehanort, has volunteered to be a subject.
The young man has served me ever since I nursed him back from death's door some years ago.
He had lost all his memories at the time, but later showed remarkable intellectual curiosity and readily absorbed my teachings, gaining deep wisdom. Any mental immaturity is surely due to his young age.
If I explore Xehanort's heart with psychological tests, I may be able to recall the past locked away within. My apprentice Even has also shown great interest in Xehanort's memories.
But is he really the right subject?
Xehanort does indeed exhibit extraordinary talents...
Too extraordinary...
Perhaps they are even superhuman.
(And, well. Becoming a Nobody and a Heartless again would certainly go some way towards explaining why Xehanort's Heartless is, as he himself describes it, not quite a normal Heartless -- and why he possesses Riku and seems incapable of taking on a real, physical form of his own. Also, it helps to explain why Xemnas, when he met Sora in KH:FM, kept flickering in and out of existence.)
But, Nobody or not, Xehanort and his colleagues are the ones responsible for turning Radiant Garden into Hollow Bastion. (I'd suspect Xemnas of giving it the new name, what with his penchant for poetic names that are full of horrible, but I more think it's just a property of the world having been devoured by darkness, because otherwise I can't imagine why everyone would forget that it was called Radiant Garden and then remember together all at once. Not when, according to Ansem, Namine can only affect the memories of those connected to Sora's heart, and anyway it was Hollow Bastion before she was "born.") The current going theory says that, whatever they did in the basement to open a dark corridor to other worlds and annihilate their own, it also turned the whole lot of them into Nobodies. And at least Xehanort, now rechristened Ansem, into a Heartless.
V. Ansem the Wise
So, whatever happened to the actual Ansem? The one that Xehanort locked in the basement and left there, presuming him dead or as good as dead?
Well, as he says in the SARs, Ansem didn't have the common courtesy to die. Because he never let go of his rage -- his lust for revenge -- he never lost his sense of self completely. And, after a while, he figured out how to manipulate the darkness from the inside. Like Riku, perhaps, he took control of that darkness, made it work for him, and wielded it without letting it consume him, the way that Xehanort (and his five other assistants) had.
It's actually hard to tell what's going on in the SARs, because Ansem tends to ramble on and on about his stupid theories instead of giving you any solid information on what's happening around him, but it seems safe to say that Ansem eventually made a dark corridor and left Radiant Garden/Hollow Bastion forever.
And, according to Ansem, this is when he took on the "name" DiZ:
I, too, have had everything taken away from me, bashed to a hollow realm of nothingness.
What is Xehanort hoping to gain with my pilfered existence?
Will my people cease to smile?
If the light of hope has been extinguished, I shall henceforth walk with darkness as a friend.
Here, in the realm of nothingness to which I have been relegated.
Darkness in the midst of nothing.
"Darkness in Zero."
Thus, I shall be known as DiZ.
Discarding the stolen name "Ansem"...
And going in search of revenge.
Darkness in Zero. That's the best name ever, Ansem. Really, I can totally see why you'd prefer it. (What the heck is the matter with these people?!)
...
And, there will be more here later! I'm too tired to finish this right now. XD;;
IN CONCLUSION
KHI
I. Hooded Figure [Xehanort's Heartless]
II. "Ansem" [Xehanort's Heartless]
III. Unknown [Xemnas]
KH:CoM
I. The "Ansem" in Riku's Heart [Xehanort's Heartless/Possibly just Riku's darkness]
II. DiZ [Ansem the Wise]
III. "The Superior" [Xemnas]
KHII
I. "Ansem"? [Riku]
II. "Ansem" [Xehanort's Heartless]
III. The Real Ansem [Ansem, "Ansem", and Xehanort]
IV. Xehanort, Xemnas
V. Ansem the Wise
So, we have "Ansem". Who is really Xehanort's Heartless, just calling itself Ansem, because Xehanort himself started calling himself Ansem, and...
Then there's the other "Ansem", Xehanort, the Somebody/possibly Nobody renamed after believing himself to have killed the original Ansem.
Then there's Xemnas, who is the Nobody of the man who renamed himself Ansem after trying to kill the original Ansem and whose name is an anagram of Ansem because Xehanort renamed himself (and also to avoid showing us what happens if there's already an x in the Somebody's name when the Nobody is born, the bastard).....
Meanwhile, in order to best Roxas in hand-to-hand combat and bring him back to awaken Sora, Riku delves fully into darkness and takes on the shape of the man he thinks is Ansem but who is actually Xehanort's Heartless. As Riku forsakes his own name to do this, he spends the better part of the next year introducing himself to people as Ansem. And looking like what everyone thought Ansem looked like. And not explaining why he still isn't dead yet.
Then we have DiZ. Who is actually Ansem, but looks nothing like any of the people who went by that name before, and, as mentioned above, is completely evil despite all of Mickey's protests, in a Darth Vaderish sort of way. (Which is to say that, despite everything horrible he's done, one apology and apparently the force of Riku's gay for Sora seems to enough to make him good again.)
...I'm crazy, huh?
For example:
The Many Faces of Ansem
I'm going to divide this up by game, and each game into sections, because otherwise it will hurt everyone who tries to read it. At least this way, I can keep things relatively clear!
Abbreviations and Terminology:
- KHI: The first Kingdom Hearts.
- KH:FM/FM: Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix, which, to date, has only been released in Japan, and was basically the English game but with Japanese text, Japanese subtitles, new keychains, new Heartless, and several extra movie scenes. (There were more changes, too -- relevantly, Final Mix added three new Ansem Reports -- but that's the gist.)
- KH:CoM/CoM: Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, a GameBoy Advance title that takes place directly after KHI.
- KHII: Kingdom Hearts II, which takes place a year after the first game.
- SARs: Secret Ansem Reports, previously translated by Deep Dive as "Ansem's Other Report" (and corrected from previous essay's "ASR" -- they're Secret Ansem Reports, not Ansem's Secret Reports. My bad, Sam!)
- Repliku: The replica Riku made by Vexen in CoM. Because it's what the fandom calls him, and it's adorable.
Acknowledgments:
- Quotes from the script for Chain of Memories are taken from David "dragonblade3325" Wald's game script on GameFAQs.
- Everything having to do with Final Mix is summarized or paraphrased (or taken out of context and mocked) from Thorfinn "Thorf" Tait's Final Mix FAQ, also at GameFAQs. This includes the translations of Ansem Reports eleven, twelve, and thirteen, which he apparently did by himself. I do actually own Final Mix myself, but I haven't beaten the Unknown yet.
- Hopefully, since this is just a LiveJournal entry, neither of these people will mind having their work, err, stolen. Haha. It should be taken as flattery, really!
KINGDOM HEARTS
This game is probably the easiest to summarize, because, although there are already at least two people who could be called Ansem, only one of them gets any real screen time, and he's quite straightforward, in a crazed-and-genocidal sort of way.
I. Hooded Figure [unofficial title]
He appears to Sora shortly before the destruction of Destiny Islands, in the cave behind the waterfall -- Sora and Riku's Secret Place (now accepting Kairis, too). He seems to have emerged from a door that wasn't there the last time Sora checked, and is generally very Creepy and Mysterious, instantly reminding everyone who might have otherwise forgotten that they are playing a Disney/Square game. It's this man who asserts that Destiny Islands has been "connected" and "tied to the darkness."
Full of bluster, Sora tells him to stop "freaking [him] out like this," and then realizes that, hey, he has never seen an adult in his life, let alone one on the play island doesn't know this guy, and where did he come from anyway. Condescendingly, the man observes that Sora doesn't yet "know what lies beyond the door," and then mocks him for being so ignorant.
(His comments about there being "so very much to learn" sound so much like awareness that Sora is about to go on a journey and become Someone Important that I wonder if a translator didn't get lazy and make the sentence passive when it shouldn't have been. "There is so very much to learn. You understand so little," sounds far more all-knowing than, "You have so very much to learn. You understand so little.")
At this point (if I remember right), Kairi calls Sora's name, and when he turns back, the hooded figure has vanished, but the door remains. If you approach the door, Sora makes some interesting note about how the door won't open, but otherwise, it's back to happy fluff on Destiny Islands for him. Apparently, strange men in cloaks and weird doors that appear out of nowhere aren't worth mentioning in Sora's head, because he never brings it up with Riku or Kairi. Awesome.
II. "Ansem"
Leon and Aerith are the first to really mention him -- as something of a red herring, he's referred to as a genius, a scientist whose study into the nature of the human heart went further than anyone else's -- a man whose research they are trying to find because they want to understand the Heartless. Like everything else in KHI, Ansem's Reports are a collection of scattered items you are told to find and agree to look for because Sora is a.) a Nice Guy who can't seem to resist doing other people's laundry for them and b.) incredibly lucky when it comes to finding the most random things he needs strewn like bread crumbs down the path to the plot.
You find all of these reports, of course, and -- although it wasn't obvious right away -- put them into sequence to realize that this Ansem guy who did the writing is really creepy and was obviously not as interested in hearts per se as he was in the darkness in them. The first report seems to be more or less what Leon and Aerith hinted it was, a record of a ruler who decided to delve into the mysteries of the heart to protect his world from darkness. But the other reports are very, very quickly creepy; they talk of experimenting on people, human beings, to make Heartless, and then imprisoning them in the basement. They establish that all Heartless other than the small Shadows (and their brethren, the Darksides) are Ansem's creations -- of all the Heartless out there, only the ones which lack insignia, "marks" that Ansem establishes having given the results of his experiments, are the natural result of people's hearts being overwhelmed with darkness. Fun times.
(An interesting side-note in the reports, I think, is the bit about the Gummi Blocks, which apparently come from worlds where the barrier around the heart of the world has been destroyed, and the heart consumed. I found building Gummi ships so thoroughly distasteful that I am not at all surprised, really, to learn that they are made when a thousand voices cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced.)
In one of the extra reports from KH:FM, Ansem also discusses the heart of a world, and the door that leads to it. This door is hidden, in the form of a Keyhole, and initially locked. By unlocking that door, you open the world up to travel from other worlds. And naturally, just as you can now get to that other world, so can the Heartless from your world -- Heartless which will then seek out the heart of the world like they seek out the hearts of people. And when the heart of the world is consumed, that world falls into darkness, as Radiant Garden did.
(Tangentially, there are obviously stages of recovery from this consumption; where the other worlds that Sora visits and saves seem normal, it takes Hollow Bastion a full year and a lot of effort on the parts of everyone involved to come back from its destruction and become Radiant Garden once more. Because of these stages, I feel I'm able to assume some people don't simply come back from the dead/being Heartless once the world is brought back into the light -- that it depends on how long the world spent in darkness.
(And yes, some people do seem to come back from the dead/being Heartless; unless you think any of Sora's friends are gone. I suppose they could be, but I can't help thinking that the casual way Kairi and Selphie talk about Riku's disappearance is really inappropriate if it coincided with anyone dying.)
Anyway. The point of all of this is that Ansem is really, really creepy by the time you read the last Ansem Report, so when he shows up possessing Riku (and forcing him into skin-tight leather catsuits) it's almost not really surprising. I can imagine, however, that there were a lot of red faces in Leon's group; oops, forgot to mention that the "genius" scientist was a megalomaniac and psychopath, didn't we? Our bad.
So, that's Ansem in KHI. A scientist obsessed with darkness and the heart and the darkness in the heart who, presumably, became corrupted during his research into it despite the fairly noble intentions he had at the start. Power corrupts, or something. We're not really surprised, it's a Square game.
III. Unknown [Final Mix]
As a direct tie-in with KHII, this man appears once all 99 Dalmatians have been rescued in the same place where Sora originally entered the battle with Maleficent. Apparently Xemnas is lured out by puppies. Thanks for that, Square. Where the green light used to be, there is now a dark portal. (The assembled Princesses of Heart comment on its appearance if you talk to them -- they sense a power from it, a power neither of darkness or of light, and Jasmine in particular points out that, if it were darkness, they would be able to hold it back for you, but apparently they can't do anything about this other energy. Everyone seems to think it might be more dangerous than darkness, and Alice tells Sora to be careful.)
On the other side of the portal, Sora and Co. find a man in a black cloak who flickers in and out of existence -- visible, and invisible. This man sneaks up behind them, because they apparently lack Spidey Sense, and actually walks right through Sora, not unlike Kairi at the beginning of the game, except without the part where he disappears afterwards. As the man passes through Sora, the screen goes black, and a ton of dialogue (subtitles only) from earlier in the game flashes past. Memories, maybe. Sora stumbles, and turns to face the man, who now seems solid.
(Well, more or less. When he speaks, the man's voice is accompanied by darkness and subtitles, apparently heard only in Sora, Donald, and Goofy's minds.)
Veterans of KHII will, of course, notice that this man is wearing an Organization cloak. And wields dual red lightsabers. And, basically, although the guy goes out of his way to avoid giving Sora his name, he is, in hindsight, clearly Xemnas. (Like a bitch, he responds to Goofy's curious, "Ansem...?" by saying, "That's a familiar sound.")
Anyway. For all that he is only on screen for a couple of minutes, Xemnas manages to drop many giant chunks of plot on Sora's head -- "You look like him. Which means, you are not complete." -- and then engages the boy in battle in order to test his power.
The fight that follows is extremely difficult, even more so than fighting Sephiroth, and Xemnas shows a marked tendency for bending the laws of physics to his will. If Sora is lucky enough to beat him, Xemnas just moves away, seemingly unfazed. I hate it when villains do that.
"...Truly fascinating," he remarks. "This is going to be enjoyable."
Sora, of course, doesn't appreciate that crap, and charges him with keyblade ready, demanding to know what the heck he's talking about. As he leaps into the air, though, everything goes monochromatic, there's a strange buzzing sound, and Xemnas becomes semi-transparent again. Naturally, this results in Sora going straight through him. And, not unlike the Hooded Figure from the beginning of the game, Xemnas has no interest in explaining further. "In your present state," he says, "you probably cannot understand. In any case, the time when we can meet again will doubtless come."
He's obviously about to leave, so Sora tries one more time to get him to explain wtf, who are you. Xemnas vanishes, but in his place, Sora hears, "I am..." and there's a ripply movement on screen in a man-sized shape, clearly showing that Xemnas is walking away from Sora, who, oblivious as ever, just keeps staring at the spot where he was standing.
"...a mere shell," Xemnas finishes, and as the darkness lifts, there's no sign of him having ever been there. (And no further mention of him ever again, because Square can't be bothered to even give us a lousy keychain for our efforts. We do get an EXP Necklace* and the final Ansem Report, though. Hooray! Or something. I hate you, Square.)
And, yes. Those of you paying attention to timeline? The person that Xemnas thinks Sora looks like? He's been alive for a day or two, at best. I mean, you do have to complete Hollow Bastion before you can fight Xemnas, but~...
*EXP Necklace? No, I have one better for you. The Crystal Crown. I don't even remember what it does, but it's the most awesome accessory ever. I need to get it, and this necklace, and my earrings down. Then Sora can be the prettiest princess ever.
KINGDOM HEARTS: CHAIN OF MEMORIES
Warning: This section is much longer than either of the others, because I don't feel I can assume everyone reading is familiar with Riku's scenario in CoM, as I assume they're familiar with KHI and KHII.
I suppose I should note here that it's possible that the "Ansem" to whom Riku speaks throughout CoM isn't literally Ansem at all but rather a representation of the darkness in Riku's heart, as Riku himself sees it. One piece of support for this theory is that there are, really, any number of things that Ansem should have recognized and had commentary on as he and Riku wander the floors of Castle Oblivion. (It's probably omitted to avoid blatantly spoiling things in KHII, but it's still there.)
However, for the purposes of Ansem's character, it works the same either way: Riku clearly was possessed by Ansem for a time, and he recognizes the darkness in him as Ansem. So it looks enough and acts enough [and smells enough!] like Ansem for him.
And another note: The "Ansem" that Riku speaks to for the first part of the game isn't the one in his heart, either. That's DiZ. See "II. DiZ" for details!
I don't know about you, but I'm confused already! So let's get started, shall we?
I. The "Ansem" in Riku's Heart
So, we find that, as is such with all videogame enemies, killing Ansem only makes him stronger. Despite being totally annihilated by light at the end of the first game, he's apparently still around -- and still in Riku's heart, as special as that sounds. And now creepily obsessed with Riku, in addition to darkness. (Seriously, the man needs a hobby.) Maybe Ansem just likes the blue/white/silver hair Riku has going on, but he clearly wants the kid's body.
And, there's really NO WAY to discuss Ansem's interest in Riku without it sounding like this, huh? Should I go into the way that the final boss version of Ansem keeps saying, "SUBMIT!" when you're fighting him? No? Oh, but it's so much fun.
Ah, well.
Pseudosexual creepfest aside, Ansem does have another reason, canonically, for wanting to inhabit Riku's body above all others: as is somewhat retroactively established while Riku progresses through Castle Oblivion, Riku is both reminiscent of Ansem in the past (see various lines by Organization members describing how he "wears darkness" in a similar manner or has a similar scent to that of "the Superior" -- we'll get to him in a bit) and fascinating in his own right.
After all, as someone who eventually chooses the path between darkness and light, Riku could be seen as potentially being part of the "in-between" world that Ansem obsesses over in his extra KH:FM repots. [We know now that this in-between world is the place where Nobodies reside, but Ansem still hasn't figured that out at the time of CoM, and he died still researching, still wondering. So it seems natural that Riku's hybrid existence would catch his attention, right?]
But whatever reasons Ansem has for wanting Riku, he's still horribly creepy. And maybe I lied about not going into his "SUBMIT!" thing, but it's still not one of the quotes here! Take a look at some of this dialogue:
"Riku... I can see your heart..."
"That's it, remember me... Let me drift into your heart..."
"Mwa ha ha... You called my name, Riku... You're thinking about me... You're afraid of the darkness I command. Good... The more you think of me, the closer my return draws. And when I awaken... Your heart will be mine!"
"Riku...Riku... I know you can feel it, Riku -- the grip I have on your heart. You've let the darkness in. And all-consuming darkness is what your heart shall become!"
"The deeper the darkness runs in you, the stronger I become. Controlling your body is an effortless task."
Oh god why.
In the end, and with a little help from King Mickey, Riku does manage to conquer the darkness in his heart, shutting Ansem out -- although he as much as says it's not for good, that there's still a tiny bit of darkness left in him despite his struggle. (So, to expand on Sora's darkness-and-light theory in the first game, while there's a tiny bit of light in your heart that never goes out no matter how far you sink into darkness, there is also a tiny bit of darkness that never fades away no matter how you strive for the light. Unless you're a Princess of Heart, of course. They're 100% Darkness-Free. You get a certificate. ;)
But, still. All of this is relatively consistent. Ansem's this guy, see. He was a scientist, he wrote a bunch of reports, he tried to research darkness, he became corrupted utterly and plunged into darkness himself. He went after Riku's jailbait ass. Then he got a nice long lecture on how the dark side was bad and Riku would rather be with Sora in the realm of light again, kthnx. And there was much rejoicing.
II. DiZ
Now things get a little sticky, because, as noted above, DiZ pretends to be Ansem for a while when he first appears. But at least he clears it all up for us later! Yeah, right.
At the beginning of "Reverse/Rebirth," Riku is shown waking up somewhere between darkness and light, and a Mysterious Voice(tm) asks him to choose between the "security of sleep," and leaving the fight to others (like King Mickey), or awakening to "thorny light."
This voice is rather unpleasant and manipulative most of the time, and goes out of its way to make sure Riku realizes that waking up will be unpleasant, that the light of awakening will "bring only anguish to one in [his] state." He also talks of sleeping as "turn[ing] away from the light," and urges Riku to do so, obviously because it will be easier. Riku notes that the voice is making it sound like he's some sort of vampire, and the voice asks him if he can "face the truth."
Yeah, DiZ is a real sweet guy.
Since there'd be no game otherwise, Riku chooses to wake up and leave darkness behind. ("Yeah, well... Seems like a boring place to take a nap anyway.") And, despite its earlier antagonistic comments, the Mysterious Voice clearly approves, and gives Riku his first world card, so that he can enter the next room, which leads to Maleficent's castle. Riku kind of wigs a little, and the Mysterious Voice explains it's not actually Maleficent's castle, just a room that looks like it, because all of the rooms in Castle Oblivion change to reflect the memories of those who enter -- a nifty trick which was one of the castle's selling points, obviously. (And probably makes it really hard to find the bathroom, unless Nobodies can't use the trick. Which would make plenty of sense, and also be horribly depressing! Score.)
Well, Riku and the Mysterious Voice chat some more, and the Mysterious Voice takes every opportunity to imply that Riku isn't, or shouldn't want to be, as free of darkness as he thinks he is. It eventually comes to a head when the Voice reveals itself as Ansem and demands to know why Riku won't accept the darkness, doesn't he like it, isn't it pretty, it's just his size. Riku gets uppity, Ansem makes some more creepy "submission" remarks, and the two of them square off in battle.
(By the way? This whole sequence? Very interesting. Riku is very candid with the Mysterious Voice/Ansem[/DiZ], and we get to hear a little bit of what working with Maleficent was like. I wholly recommend reading the game script available at GameFAQs and downloading all of the movies from KH-Vids.Net. I'd also recommend playing the game itself, but, from what I understand, Chain of Memories is a miserable gameplay experience suited only to masochists.)
After the battle ends, Ansem tells Riku that he can't run away from darkness, that "chasing the light will not distance [him] from the dark," and gives him some more cards. He also gives him dark powers, which allow Riku to enter Dark Mode -- whereupon he will find himself in that scary bondage familiar outfit again. Well, Riku yelps, very wtf, because apparently the darkness has cold fingers or something, and Ansem claims to have "tempered the darkness that remains in [his] heart." Riku is still insistent that he won't actually use this darkness, but Ansem says it's his choice, which is a bit strangely-worded for someone supposedly trying to corrupt him again. Fortunately, he manages to end it on the note of waiting for Riku to "yield to the darkness," and the unpleasantly slashy general tone of their interactions is maintained.
Plot happens. Again and again, Riku finds that there are no people in his memories, only enemies like Maleficent and a billion Heartless. He is told that this is because his heart is full of darkness, blah blah blah, he can only see other people also consumed by darkness, yadda yadda, and oh, by the way, this guy named Vexen made an evil clone of you, ENJOY THAT. Ansem appears one last time, to contradict Riku when he calls his replica fake. Ansem agrees that the Repliku is a copy, but maybe, in accepting darkness, that copy is more truly Riku than Riku himself.
(If this were about Riku, there'd be a whole long section here on the Repliku and what its cattiness at Sora after being filled up with Riku's memories and Namine's -- err -- lies indicates. But it's not about Riku, so discussion of his now-blatant and apparently violently-repressed gay for Sora will have to be saved for some other time.)
Then Ansem accuses Riku of fearing the darkness, and Riku snaps back that he's not afraid, but when Ansem concludes that he fights the darkness because he fears it, Riku quickly realizes what he's up to and informs him that he isn't going to give into darkness just to prove he's not afraid of it, sorry. Good for you, Riku! Peer pressure is bad! Just say "no" to the forces of darkness. Again, "Ansem" seems perhaps a touch too accepting of this response, gives Riku some more cards for his deck, and vanishes.
It isn't until the real Ansem appears, however, that it starts becoming obvious that our friendly neighborhood Mysterious Voice wasn't him. For starters, when this Ansem shows up, Riku remarks on his foul scent, and how that scent could only belong to one person -- as opposed to when DiZ was pretending to be Ansem, and Riku merely makes the logical conclusion based on his having been "chatty" about the darkness. Also, this Ansem appears when Riku is plunged into darkness abruptly by Lexaeus, and when he does, he announces, "I can see... I can see clearly!" and, more unsettlingly: "I can see into your heart," and "Let me drift into your heart..."
The real Ansem is, after all, about ten times as gay as anyone pretending to be him could ever hope to be.
But DiZ appears to Riku again before the end of the game, still pretending to be Ansem, and challenges him to fight. When Riku doesn't immediately attack him, this "Ansem" asks if he's giving up already, and tells him callously to "accept [his] fate," then, and "accept Ansem as [his] master." Since Riku's pretty sure Ansem hasn't developed the habit of speaking about himself in the third person recently (and since DiZ doesn't, apparently, smell the same), he confronts DiZ about it, and identifies him as the voice who guided him at the beginning, and who pretended to be Ansem in order to get him to accept his darkness. I bet DiZ found being accused of not really being Ansem pretty fucking hilarious.
At this point, there's obviously no point in the charade any longer, so DiZ reveals himself, a man wrapped in crimson bandages, wearing strange clothes. He tells Riku he's been watching him in the shower, and that he's special. He stands between darkness and light, "in the twilight." But DiZ wants him to choose, ostensibly between them.
Now, it turns out that Mickey knows DiZ, and the two of them have been working together for a little while. Also, Mickey has the sneaking suspicion that he knows DiZ from somewhere, imagine that! Riku tries asking DiZ who he is, of course, but like all Ansems DiZ replies with irritating riddles. "Nobody," he says, "or anybody. It all depends on whether you choose to believe in me or not." (A reference to his own weird in-between existence, or just him being obnoxious? You decide!) Riku points out that DiZ really loves forcing decisions on other people, and DiZ responds that he chose to wake up and face Ansem. Not that this choice was right or wrong, of course -- DiZ is just here to watch.
...I hate him.
Anyway, in his last appearance, at the Crossroads of Blatant Metaphor, DiZ finally makes Riku choose between the road to darkness and the road to light -- or he tries to, anyway, since Riku responds by choosing both. Or, at least, the road between them. DiZ seems surprised by this, but, and in my head he sounds vaguely smug, asks, "You mean the twilit road to nightfall?" Riku's defiant response: "No...the road to dawn." [EDIT: Stop trying to lead people into darkness, DiZ.]
So, in conclusion, DiZ is technically a "good guy." But he really needs to stop enjoying fucking with people quite so much.
III. "The Superior"
Only vaguely referenced by various members of the Organization, he still bears mentioning. Riku's scent (or, more logically, Ansem's scent) reminds everyone of the Superior, and Zexion in particular says that Riku "wears darkness" like no one else. So there's someone, obviously, similar to Riku [Ansem] out there. Hmm~. Any other implications of this so far? Oh, yes. The eleventh Ansem Report, available only in KH:FM, but it doesn't make any sense until we get into KHII.
KINGDOM HEARTS II
So far, we have "Ansem," an Unknown, a man known only as "the Superior," and DiZ.
You thought CoM was confusing? Well, you ain't seen nothing yet.
I. "Ansem"?
During Roxas's scenario, two men spend a lot of time in deep conversation about him. One of them is clearly DiZ, although, since many people did not play CoM prior to KHII (and I was one of them), the presence of this strange guy with the red bandages covering most of his face and the yellow eyes provideed no clue as to who the other man might be.
But then that other man pulls down his hood, and he's clearly Ansem.
Much gaping. Those who had played CoM doubtlessly wonder whether Ansem hadn't defeated Riku and taken possession of him again between the games. Everyone else just wondered why the hell that loser still isn't dead yet. And neither DiZ nor "Ansem" offer any explanations whatsoever. Those bastards. (The closest DiZ comes is asking "Ansem" whether or not he remembers his "true name" yet. The reply? "Ansem." Helpful!)
For the first hour or so of gameplay, Ansem and DiZ look very much like villains. (And, from Roxas's perspective, they really were villains. Why the pain?! What did he EVER do to them? Why oh why.) Then Roxas reluctantly merges with Sora, Sora wakes up good as new and completely oblivious, and DiZ and Ansem both precede to disappear for the next, oh, twenty hours. At the very least.
When Sora first sees Ansem, he has his hood up again and is fighting with the Soul Eater, Riku's red spiny sword from KHI and CoM. (Note to fandom: Not a keyblade. It becomes the Way to Dawn keyblade later. But right now? It's just a sword.) Naturally, Sora assumes that this figure is Riku. He's shockingly perceptive, really, especially considering that Ansem and Riku are built very differently, even with Riku's sudden growth spurt. Silly of him! Without speaking, Ansem fights Sora, although he really seems more like he's fighting the Heartless swarm than Sora himself...
Well, Sora is a source of boundless optimism, so the fact that his boyfriend best friend left without so much as a backwards look and is, you know, wearing the cloak favored by members of Organization XIII, doesn't seem to faze him in the slightest. He's upset, and worried about Riku, but he never stops to think that Riku might be working for the other side again -- or that this guy might not be Riku at all.
This "Ansem" [Riku?] person shows up several more times, always working behind the scenes; most notably, he brings Pluto to Kairi, and saves her from Axel's first attempted kidnapping. (He is the one who whistled for Pluto, we know because there's a good shot of a man inside the dark corridor wearing an Organization cloak right before Kairi passes out and wakes up in Twilight Town -- and who else would it be, really? Way too tall for Mickey. And Pluto wouldn't listen to anyone else.)
And then, of course, there's his appearance in the World That Never Was, where he fights Saix briefly and is revealed to be working with Namine -- who calls him Riku. Kairi does a double-take, and rushes over after the battle to stop him from leaving. (He was, in theory, going to chase Saix -- but I bet getting away from Kairi after Namine revealed his Secret Identity oh noes! was also a high priority.) She catches his arm, and he pulls the hood back--
--and is Ansem.
(It's interesting that Kairi doesn't actually seem startled, but, to be fair, the scene cuts away from them before we can really see her reaction. Even money says she never saw him as Ansem in the first place, though.)
Of course, everyone's going, WTF WHY by now. In bits and pieces, from Riku himself and then from DiZ, we do get an explanation as to why Riku looks the way he does -- apparently, in order to restore Sora's memories, they needed Roxas, and Riku wasn't able to take Roxas down on his own. In a display that DiZ found very moving, and not at all gay, really, Riku responded by letting himself slip into darkness completely so as to have the power to beat Roxas and bring him back.
(It's stated in the game that this victory was by the skin of his teeth, even so. You know what that means, fandom? It means you have to stop assuming Riku's a better fighter than Sora. It also means you have to stop assuming Riku would top him. Whatever Sora says, he's clearly got an adorable blind spot where Riku is concerned -- and Riku himself states that being a better fighter never mattered, anyway, since Sora's heart is so much stronger than his. Sora and Riku haven't fought since then, but, assuming Sora fought at full strength, Riku wouldn't win. Accept it!)
So, Riku looks like Ansem now. And has spent the better part of the game introducing himself to people as Ansem. And looking like what everyone thought Ansem looked like. And being confusing as hell! What the hell, Square, that was so unnecessary.
For what it's worth: although Riku looks like Ansem, he does not seem to be possessed by him. Ansem's voice is likely still there, lurking in the back of his mind, but Riku is clearly in control of the body, whatever its form. Because I don't think Ansem would be too terribly interested in helping Sora or Kairi.
Also, at the end of the game, Riku is completely free of Ansem. Completely. He has also lost most if not all of his dark powers. (In battle, he was certainly able to use his Dark Shield and Dark Blast, but he can't make corridors anymore, and Mickey tells him straight up that he doesn't belong in the dark realm anymore.) This much is canon, because of what Riku tells Mickey at the end of his game in CoM:
Mickey: So, Riku...what's next? Are you going home?
Riku: I don't know if I can. It's still there. His [Ansem's] scent...it's faint, but not gone. I can't go home until it is. His darkness may still have a hold on me...
So, obviously, Riku wouldn't have gone back to Destiny Islands with Sora unless that lingering taint was gone completely. He would have just refused. And that means that he's free of Ansem. Hooray! Ansem is a sucky thing to have in your soul. I bet it tastes like burning.
II. "Ansem"
What? Not Riku pretending to be Ansem, but...an actual Ansem?
Well, I can truthfully say...sort of. But Ansem doesn't really show up in this game. At least, not the one we're familiar with.
In KH:FM, as mentioned above, there were additional Ansem Reports -- numbered eleven through thirteen, appropriately enough, and one of the big things that KHII introduces is the concept of Nobodies. Heartless, we already know and love -- they're the result of somebody, in one way or another, losing his or her heart to darkness. So far we've seen four ways this can happen:
1.) The somebody is attacked by other Heartless, which overwhelm him or her and, somehow, extract the heart (c.f., that man in Traverse who is chased by Heartless and trips and falls and loses his heart).
2.) The heart is expelled from the body with a special keyblade (c.f., Sora in Hollow Bastion).
3.) Surrounded by Heartless and submerged in darkness too long, the heart is slowly consumed (c.f., Maleficient or any of the other Disney villains from KHI).
4.) In an extremely Star Wars fashion, the somebody is lured to the Dark Side through manipulation of his feelings until the darkness in his heart overwhelms him (c.f., Riku in KHI and the Beast in KHII).
No matter which method is chosen, the heart is overwhelmed by darkness, and what's left behind is a nasty thing known as a Heartless. For some reason, this Heartless senses and craves other hearts, and attacks other people for them, making more Heartless. (KHI seemed to imply that the Heartless sought what they themselves lacked, but KHII shakes it up a little and states, flat-out, that Heartless do indeed have hearts. It's possible that these hearts are still not their own -- that your heart was consumed by the Heartless that made you, and you now contain the hearts of others -- but this theory falls somewhat flat because each Heartless, when killed with a keyblade, only releases one heart. You'd think they'd all have more than that by now.)
(Also, more relevantly, you have to look at the names given to your adversaries: a Heartless is a being that is nothing but a heart, albeit the darkest parts of it made manifest, and a Nobody is nothing but a body, albeit a slightly changed and [sometimes extremely] twisted version of that body. Since the irony in Nobody is unarguable, it seems like the same kind of irony in Heartless can be assumed. Remember, the Nobody [as they were called in Japan] are jealous of the Heartless, mindless creatures of endless hunger who at least still have their hearts. That jealousy wouldn't make much sense if the Heartless didn't still have their own, original hearts.)
And this brings us to our next plot point. We have known for ages what happens to a heart when a person dies -- that heart becomes a Heartless. But what about the body that is cast off? Well, according to KHII (and, actually, Ansem's twelfth Report, which is again available only in KH:FM), that body doesn't always disappear. If the heart was strong enough, the body and the soul don't give up. They keep going. And a Nobody is born.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, in order to travel the worlds, Ansem made a decision that his eleventh report (available only in KH:FM) chronicles, because he really really really wanted to go to Disneyland other worlds, and darn it, his body was just too frail and breakable to survive the rigors of whatever not-face-sucking-outer space exists between worlds in the KH universe. And by the time he's written the twelfth report, Ansem has done this, somehow:
I have transcended to an existence of only the heart. I should have come back as a Heartless, but there is no sign of such a transformation.
My body has surely perished. However, I am different from the other Heartless, keeping the memories of before, and I have not taken on the form of a Heartless. It is clear that there are still many things to be studied.
What does this all boil down to? Well, despite Ansem's protests on the subject, statements made by Mickey -- who knows everything and is watching you all the time like God -- would seem to indicate that the guy we fought in KHI was in fact a Heartless. I don't know about you, but I really kicked myself after the fact for never wondering why Ansem had a giant frickin' Heartless insignia on his chest. (...which, according to his own reports, would mean he was created artificially, for those of you just tuning in.)
So, Ansem made himself into a Heartless on purpose in order to become better, stronger, faster!! And, naturally, that means that what Sora took out in his final boss fight wasn't Ansem at all, but just a part of him. And if he has a Heartless, then he has a Nobody, too. Oh snap.
Incidentally, in his thirteenth and final report, Ansem did hint at all of this. If he has cast off his body, he wonders what happened to it -- if it still exists somewhere, like he exists.
Certainly when the heart changes into a Heartless, the body disappears.
However, that is only this world's story; in another world, mightn't they change forms like the Heartless and exist there?
If we take that to be the case, there must be a you other than yourself existing somewhere.
An existence neither of darkness nor of light.
An in-between existence.
Cast off by the heart, a mere shell, one who begrudges both the darkness and the light.
Again, I find part of this interesting -- it sounds like he's referring to some sort of parallel universe, but logically I know he means Twilight Town, where Nobodies are born. Where Ansem's own Nobody was born: Xemnas. (And yes, that we can determine, the names of all Organization XIII members are anagrams. This leads to hilarity while people try to find not-ridiculous combinations of letters. Demyx = Medy? Edym? Dyme? Myde? Axel = Ale? Ael? Ela? Eal? Lea? Lae? Saix = Isa? Asi? Marluxia = Alimaur? Raliuma? Laurima? Imaural? Uliaram? ...Larxene probably = Arlene, at least.)
So. Now we have two Ansems running around out there somewhere -- three, if you count the whole person he used to be. It's a little confusing, right? Oh, it hasn't even started getting confusing yet.
III. The Real "Ansem"
On a trip to Hollow Bastion, Sora and Co. find a painting of Ansem in a study, and, upon examining the computer in the next room, that it belonged to him. So now we know that Ansem was from Hollow Bastion, which is interesting on several different levels, not the least of which is that it tells us where Kairi came from originally. From one of the KH:FM-exclusive reports:
If the door has been closed by the key known as the Keyblade, you probably cannot reach that world's heart again. Before the one with the Keyblade appears in this world, I must take measures to do something.
Supposing that there is a close relationship between the Princesses and the Keyblade, it seems likely that they will resonate with each other...
I have chosen one special girl. I do not know if she possesses a power like that of the Princesses. But, there is a chance, and this is an experiment. She may lead me to the place where the one holding the key is...
I shall send her off to the ocean of other worlds.
(Yes, this is Kairi. In a later, KHII-bound report, Ansem flat-out states that Kairi was a "denizen" of his world. [There's no acknowledgment in this report of what he did to her, but...he has a very good reason for that.] And who else would this be, really?)
(And, on a very, very long list of bastardly deeds committed by people named Ansem? Tossing a four-year-old girl into the ocean to reach another world by herself, on the premise that a.) she would turn out to be a Princess of Heart, b.) Princesses of Heart have some sort of connection to the keyblade, and c.) that that connection would be enough to draw a little girl to its next wielder. Very nice, and an excellent reason to risk getting a child killed. Not to mention the fact that he then apparently forgets about her for the next ten years.)
Then Mickey shows up, takes one look at the painting, and says, "Uh, that's not Ansem." At which point, we're reminded that Mickey met Ansem -- there's mention of him, vaguely, as coming to Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden in the original Ansem Reports:
Simply astonishing! Today I had a guest from another world. He is a king, and his vessel is built of the material that composed the meteors. He called the pieces "gummi blocks." It seemed that my opening the door has opened a path to interworld travel.
We talked for countless hours, but one story in particular caught my interest: that of a key called the "Keyblade." The Keyblade is said to hold phenomenal power.
One legend says its wielder saved the world, while another says that he wrought chaos and ruin upon it. I must know what this Keyblade is. A key opens doors. It must be connected to the door I have opened.
(Personally, I think this last part was originally intended as an oblique reference to Sora and Riku, each of whom was destined for the keyblade in KHI. As Sora chose light and Riku chose darkness, they certainly provide the duality that the Ansem Report talks about. One to save the world, one to bring chaos and ruin. Even now, this line makes me wonder whether all keyblades have two masters, two futures. And where exactly the Way to Dawn fits in. Sora's is the Keyblade of Light, and Mickey's is, oddly, the Keyblade of Darkness -- so Riku's must be the Keyblade of Twilight...)
Note: There is actually a small plot hole here. Mickey comes to Hollow Bastion after the door to darkness is opened? But we see him eating with Ansem, and meeting Xehanort, and everything seems shiny-happy. Plus, Xehanort is still Xehanort. What the hell?
Anyway. The guy in the painting isn't Ansem. Actually, it's really this kid named Xehanort who used to work for Ansem as a research assistant. Ansem -- or, as Mickey calls him, "Ansem the Wise" (see V. Ansem the Wise for details!) -- is this blond white guy. Also, apparently, he's not evil. [Edit: No, wait, yes he is. Shut up, Mickey.]
This is when the SARs start to make some kind of sense. As explained by the first report, none of the previous Ansem Reports were actually written by Ansem himself except for the very first one, which is the one that, if you remember, actually sounded vaguely like a concerned ruler trying to research darkness so as to protect his people from it. (NOTE: Ansem calls this report "number zero," which it was in Japan, but wasn't in America. There are only twelve original Ansem Reports in Japan -- zero through twelve -- but thirteen in America -- one through thirteen. Just something to keep in mind.) All of the rest of the Ansem Reports were actually written by Xehanort, the real name of the Somebody from whence "Ansem" and Xemnas came -- and a guy too creepy to be believed from all of his descriptions in the SARs.
IV. Xehanort, Xemnas
In Mickey's flashback, we get our one and only glimpse of the actual Xehanort. He is clearly teenaged there, or at the very least considerably younger than Xemnas or Ansem -- this is him nine years ago, after all, before the destruction of Radiant Garden. When he bursts in on Mickey and Ansem the Blond White Guy Wise, we see two things immediately: a.) Xehanort was working with Ansem on researching the human heart and b.) that he and Ansem do not completely get along.
It seems safe to assume that the "experiments" Xehanort conducted, using human test subjects and, basically, torturing them until the darkness in their hearts consumed them and changed them into Heartless, were not OK'd by Ansem. He probably would've wanted to use little kids or cute puppies instead.
Regardless, something comes between them in an unretractable way, whether it's Ansem's refusal to acknowledge Xehanort's genius, Xehanort doing the unthinkable and sleeping with a woman, or Ansem's exceedingly unintimidating (and thusly unappropriate) love for seasalt ice-cream. Whatever tentatively positive relationship they have with each other that allows them to live and work under the same roof, it vanishes, and Xehanort responds by doing the only reasonable thing and locking Ansem in his own basement to be eaten by Heartless. Then he takes the name Ansem for himself because...honestly, I'd guess because it was just a lot easier to spell.
At this point, as noted under the earlier "Ansem" section, Xehanort, now calling himself Ansem, decided to make himself into a Heartless in order to travel the worlds. Both the resulting Heartless and the Nobody are very strange, in that they look almost exactly like Xehanort himself -- where Namine and Roxas, for example, came out looking rather different from Kairi and Sora, whatever people say -- but then (and we're entering Tentative Theory Space now, so keep your hands and arms inside the cart), this might be because Xehanort was already a Nobody to begin with.
The obvious piece of evidence for this claim is that Xehanort's name already contains an x, and can be de-anagramed to spell interesting things, such as "Another" or "No Heart". (Seriously, I'm half-convinced Xehanort tried to plunge Hollow Bastion into darkness just because he hated his name.) Then there's also the fact that Ansem makes it pretty clear in the SARs that Xehanort isn't human, and that he had no memories when Ansem first found him -- which would make Xehanort a Roxas-type Nobody, theoretically the result of someone only being a Heartless for a minute or so and then reclaiming his/her heart.
I shall perform an experiment to probe the depths of a person's heart. One of my own apprentices, Xehanort, has volunteered to be a subject.
The young man has served me ever since I nursed him back from death's door some years ago.
He had lost all his memories at the time, but later showed remarkable intellectual curiosity and readily absorbed my teachings, gaining deep wisdom. Any mental immaturity is surely due to his young age.
If I explore Xehanort's heart with psychological tests, I may be able to recall the past locked away within. My apprentice Even has also shown great interest in Xehanort's memories.
But is he really the right subject?
Xehanort does indeed exhibit extraordinary talents...
Too extraordinary...
Perhaps they are even superhuman.
(And, well. Becoming a Nobody and a Heartless again would certainly go some way towards explaining why Xehanort's Heartless is, as he himself describes it, not quite a normal Heartless -- and why he possesses Riku and seems incapable of taking on a real, physical form of his own. Also, it helps to explain why Xemnas, when he met Sora in KH:FM, kept flickering in and out of existence.)
But, Nobody or not, Xehanort and his colleagues are the ones responsible for turning Radiant Garden into Hollow Bastion. (I'd suspect Xemnas of giving it the new name, what with his penchant for poetic names that are full of horrible, but I more think it's just a property of the world having been devoured by darkness, because otherwise I can't imagine why everyone would forget that it was called Radiant Garden and then remember together all at once. Not when, according to Ansem, Namine can only affect the memories of those connected to Sora's heart, and anyway it was Hollow Bastion before she was "born.") The current going theory says that, whatever they did in the basement to open a dark corridor to other worlds and annihilate their own, it also turned the whole lot of them into Nobodies. And at least Xehanort, now rechristened Ansem, into a Heartless.
V. Ansem the Wise
So, whatever happened to the actual Ansem? The one that Xehanort locked in the basement and left there, presuming him dead or as good as dead?
Well, as he says in the SARs, Ansem didn't have the common courtesy to die. Because he never let go of his rage -- his lust for revenge -- he never lost his sense of self completely. And, after a while, he figured out how to manipulate the darkness from the inside. Like Riku, perhaps, he took control of that darkness, made it work for him, and wielded it without letting it consume him, the way that Xehanort (and his five other assistants) had.
It's actually hard to tell what's going on in the SARs, because Ansem tends to ramble on and on about his stupid theories instead of giving you any solid information on what's happening around him, but it seems safe to say that Ansem eventually made a dark corridor and left Radiant Garden/Hollow Bastion forever.
And, according to Ansem, this is when he took on the "name" DiZ:
I, too, have had everything taken away from me, bashed to a hollow realm of nothingness.
What is Xehanort hoping to gain with my pilfered existence?
Will my people cease to smile?
If the light of hope has been extinguished, I shall henceforth walk with darkness as a friend.
Here, in the realm of nothingness to which I have been relegated.
Darkness in the midst of nothing.
"Darkness in Zero."
Thus, I shall be known as DiZ.
Discarding the stolen name "Ansem"...
And going in search of revenge.
Darkness in Zero. That's the best name ever, Ansem. Really, I can totally see why you'd prefer it. (What the heck is the matter with these people?!)
...
And, there will be more here later! I'm too tired to finish this right now. XD;;
IN CONCLUSION
KHI
I. Hooded Figure [Xehanort's Heartless]
II. "Ansem" [Xehanort's Heartless]
III. Unknown [Xemnas]
KH:CoM
I. The "Ansem" in Riku's Heart [Xehanort's Heartless/Possibly just Riku's darkness]
II. DiZ [Ansem the Wise]
III. "The Superior" [Xemnas]
KHII
I. "Ansem"? [Riku]
II. "Ansem" [Xehanort's Heartless]
III. The Real Ansem [Ansem, "Ansem", and Xehanort]
IV. Xehanort, Xemnas
V. Ansem the Wise
So, we have "Ansem". Who is really Xehanort's Heartless, just calling itself Ansem, because Xehanort himself started calling himself Ansem, and...
Then there's the other "Ansem", Xehanort, the Somebody/possibly Nobody renamed after believing himself to have killed the original Ansem.
Then there's Xemnas, who is the Nobody of the man who renamed himself Ansem after trying to kill the original Ansem and whose name is an anagram of Ansem because Xehanort renamed himself (and also to avoid showing us what happens if there's already an x in the Somebody's name when the Nobody is born, the bastard).....
Meanwhile, in order to best Roxas in hand-to-hand combat and bring him back to awaken Sora, Riku delves fully into darkness and takes on the shape of the man he thinks is Ansem but who is actually Xehanort's Heartless. As Riku forsakes his own name to do this, he spends the better part of the next year introducing himself to people as Ansem. And looking like what everyone thought Ansem looked like. And not explaining why he still isn't dead yet.
Then we have DiZ. Who is actually Ansem, but looks nothing like any of the people who went by that name before, and, as mentioned above, is completely evil despite all of Mickey's protests, in a Darth Vaderish sort of way. (Which is to say that, despite everything horrible he's done, one apology and apparently the force of Riku's gay for Sora seems to enough to make him good again.)
...I'm crazy, huh?