Roxas' Experience And Being On The Spectrum
I'm going to ramble about Kingdom Hearts II, so this post will have spoilers.
Around when I was thirteen years old, I experienced something traumatizing enough that I closed myself off completely.
The few friends I had found that baffling. I still hung out, but I kept my headphones on at all times. I'd become drier and found everything and everyone puzzling and difficult. While they changed interests and wanted to broaden their world, I kept deep diving into games and Japanese media, and at some point what we shared as friends became something annoying I was too enthusiastic about. Many years later I understand it was a two-ways road, and I made myself very difficult to be saved because I... didn't know how. Teenagers can only do and understand so much.
I've called it PTSD for years, as my therapist once defined it, but discovering I'm autistic added a layer to the whole "completely disconnected from the outside world and finding difficult to understand it or being understood" thing. That said, these are names, and names are not supposed to be precise rules defining reality. How I'd felt and how it shaped me into my teenage years and adulthood do not depend on me using the right name for it, but they do help navigating it.
Some time before then, Kingdom Hearts II came out. I was a big fan of the series, and the second numbered chapter1 stole my heart2, quickly becoming my favorite video game. This changed back to Chrono Trigger some years later and then became Xenoblade Chronicles 3 just last year, but I might orbit back to Chrono Trigger, who knows. Sora had always been my favorite character and fictional crush3, but I'd been deeply intrigued by Roxas ever since he was teased in the Final Mix secret ending. I'd been waiting eagerly for the arrival of BHK, the Blonde Haired Kid the whole Internet was wondering about, and when the game started and I could play as HIM I was overjoyed. Even though Sora was my favorite! I don't know why he had such a grip on me at the time, because the reason why I like him so much now came later.
Anyone who's gone through a traumatic experience of varying degree knows that, when recalling the memories around the fact, time tends to blur and events don't match up exactly. One thing I do remember, though, was celebrating my birthday with the expectation of it being the best ever, and at some point realizing, surrounded by all my best friends... "Man, I really am alone."
Roxas starts out his last week before the end of summer vacation surrounded by his friends, excited to have the time of his life. And his friends love him back, they want to spend as much time with him as he does in return... except things are weird.
It's not just "weird things are happening". When weird things happen to a group of teenage friends in this kind of stories, they're all in it together. Maybe the adults don't believe it, but they know it's real. Roxas is constantly experiencing stuff that makes no sense to him, and his friends... aren't there. They shrug it off. They assume it as something different. At some point, Roxas stops trying to talk about it because it's just no use, but the worlds grows weirder and scarier. When the gang investigates the seven mysteries of Twilight Town, they all come up with explanations that don't fit at all with what Roxas experiences. When Roxas gets robbed and the trip to the beach falls through... it's just awkward. Roxas lives through it all beneath a glass that gets increasingly thicker, as friends he's close with get farther and farther, and people he doesn't know push onto him expectations, an identity that's not his.
As I watched my friends drift away, the world getting more complicated, and a sense of self that was trapped between "doing the right thing that's expected of me" and "everything feels wrong no matter what I do", Roxas felt close. Understandable. Real and relatable, a story I could connect with.
One thing that's always bothered me about "Roxas' Seven Days" is that everything I've said about Hayner, Pence, and Olette, and how much they love Roxas, is fake. Granted, Virtual Avatars in Kingdom Hearts often are as real as their counterpart, but as far as I remember no one in Virtual Twilight Town has ever been given the agency that's been given to, say, Data Sora in Coded. Roxas' affection and his feelings are real, but his perceived friends are a simulation. The projection of relationships he wished could be real, but he knew he could never have. His days in Virtual Reality are the wish for a normal life, and even then he can't live it properly because it's not his. That's not who he is, and he's forcing it. And it's painful. Especially when, as it dawns unto him that his "summer vacations" are over... he realizes that not a single thing was real, not even his feelings.
This part is particularly maddening to me, since the game is pretty insistent in hinting that yes, Nobodies can actually have feelings; and if they don't, what's different from what they're showing and the real deal? What makes an emotion real? And how much are you going to think about it when you're a young kid whose feelings are constantly made smaller, or asked to be bigger, or just morphed into something that's more pleasant, more fitting? Someone who, even before realizing they're feeling something, asks themselves "What's the right thing to be feeling right now?"
Who are the people looking at you seeing? And who do you see when you look at yourself in the mirror? Do you remember how to do that with no one to tell you how to look like?
This post wouldn't be complete without mentioning Axel. When I was a kid, the "No one would miss me" scene hit hard: that was so me. Axel's words were just excuses. Now, years later, I hear a friend who desperately reaches out and fails. Someone who cares deeply, but doesn't know how to be there in a way that might help. Someone who tries, who mourns, who beneath "That's not true! I would..." screams "Please, you're loved. Please, don't go. Please, I need you."
But when you really feel like no one would miss you, "That's not true" just sounds like an easy way to shut you up. And that's just lonely.
I don't think Roxas is much autistic coded to be honest, but DiZ totally put him into the autistic torture simulation and I will never forgive him for that.