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Welcome to Thinking Through the Darkness, a LoreBySpec podcast with me, your host, Spec.
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This is a podcast where we talk through all of the pre-production that goes into making the theories that you see on the LoreBySpec channel and its associated channels.
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So this is coming off the back of me already having done a lot of the Latin lexicon videos — that, depending on when this goes up, because my Thinking Through the Darkness podcasts have had to have a shuffle around, since my podcast software lost a few episodes.
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So I don't know where you guys are going to be in terms of hearing the background of the videos that will now come of it. But one of the more recent ones — and one I'm particularly excited about — is me going through a lot of the roots of Latin when it comes to Quadratum, and coming up with a good three or four solid roots as to the word Quadratum, and how it leans into four.
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And then it leads into a lot of interesting things of note — like Yozora's attack being a tetrahedron, tetrahedron, whatever the simplest four-sided 3D shape is, that he uses to try to trap Sora in.
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And between all of that research — which took a long time, by the way — and pulling everything together, I've been talking to my friend Steve, from Quest Accepted, who has agreed to come on the podcast, for his sins.
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We're hoping to maybe get him in in and around October, maybe. For those who don't know Quest Accepted, they are primarily a D&D channel, and I was their resident KH lorist in chat for them when they went through the entirety of the Kingdom Hearts series.
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So they are friends of mine, and friends of the channel. And if you don't follow them on Twitter — Twitch — @questaccepteddnd, you should absolutely do so. You'll more than likely find me over there.
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They do streams on Wednesdays, Thursdays, every second Saturday and Sunday, so follow them. And I look forward to introducing you all to Steve when he does apparently pop up — because we talk lore in our spare time, when we aren't chatting about random bits and pieces.
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And he came across this when I was finished doing my video — from Aye Aye Captain Kai — and I want to play the audio of that for you. Hopefully it'll come up for you in the actual audio itself.
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But it's about this notion of the progress we've made in terms of understanding some of the languages within KH — specifically Scala and Quadratum.
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And I'm very curious to know — and what I want to talk about primarily today — is this notion of why exactly Twilight Town and Quadratum would share a lexicon, and would have the same language, when it's very clear that throughout Kingdom Hearts language has changed so frequently, and so often. Adding three new languages — good luck solving that anytime soon.
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So here's the video. [Clip plays — Aye Aye Captain Kai] "Why is bro speaking ancient Keyblady? And due to being a Kingdom Hearts content creator, unfortunately, I'm contractually obligated to gatekeep that information."
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"Guilty. Maybe I can let it slide this time. Over the last few years there's actually been a lot of discoveries in the scholarly Caelum language. And, not to toot my own horn, but my very own video was a huge breakthrough for the community."
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"We went from knowing about 20 letters to almost the entire alphabet, with the exception of eight characters. Then, with the help of Breezyfeather and a few others, we've gotten down to only missing three letters — meaning we pretty much have a fully working alphabet, with the exception of the capitalised letters."
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"A lot of the Easter eggs we found back in Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link's beta footage before it was cancelled was Mary Poppins. So — when the cat's got your tongue — supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Khluminari and Breezyfeather both found backwards nursery rhymes. And then Breezy went back to Kingdom Hearts 3 and discovered there's a few posters that are actually in Japanese."
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"Then we started trying to decipher this stone tablet in Kingdom Hearts 3 Re:Mind, but unfortunately we just don't have the key yet. Just recently, Breezyfeather posted this in my Discord channel, talking about an old promotion for Birth by Sleep that had a very similar-looking cipher that we might be able to use — but we haven't come to any conclusions just yet."
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"And just between you and I, they've made some pretty big headway in what they call Quadmoji — which is a language that can be found in Quadratum and Twilight Town. If you ever want to learn more about the Scala Caelum language, you're more than welcome to join my Discord server, where we talk about it quite often."
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"I know this person called me the GOAT and all, but truly, after I posted my video, Breezyfeather's been at it, and in a twist of fate, Kingdom Hearts 4 is adding three new languages. Good luck solving that anytime soon."
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Okay — so, obviously, tremendous work by Aye Aye Captain Kai and co, and I will probably dip into the server at some point to see what progress has been made, to see how it might inform my own theories and stuff.
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Because, in and of itself, the concept of the Scala language and stuff being cracked is very interesting. It's also interesting that they've worked out that that stone tablet in Re:Mind is indeed a cipher — though I think we always kind of knew that it wasn't going to be a simple translation.
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Do I think that the Birth by Sleep promo art might have something to do with the cipher that was displayed? Obviously you guys can't see the Instagram post on the audio podcast, but if I remember, when it comes to editing, I'll bring up the post and its video, or leave it as a link for people to view.
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But it is a cipher that is displayed in some of the very early promo art of Birth by Sleep. Of all the places to put it — Birth by Sleep is the one place that's making me go, nah, I'm not sure.
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So the thing that springs to mind for me — which is what I want to talk about today — is: what exactly do we have, in terms of what we know about Scala, and how it overlaps with Twilight Town?
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Because one of the things we don't really ever kind of question, as a fandom, is: how on earth have we all just sort of skated by this notion of digital Twilight Town? And we've never really stopped to ask the question as to how, and why, that ever comes about.
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What I mean by that is — we should have all really treated digital Twilight Town as more of a red herring, and more of a red flag, perhaps, than we maybe should have.
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Because it's all very hand-wavy in KH2 — that there's a digital version of Twilight Town. That DiZ himself somehow has the ability to replicate a world. Not in full — because we know that Riku has to intervene when they try to go to the beach. And the beach is actually not simulated. It's not actually there. And therefore they can't actually go, because it doesn't really exist in that digital space.
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But yet, if we remember, we are able to navigate, I do believe, in and out of digital Twilight Town. And that gives me some pause — because we do have to use those portals that Pence and stuff create, to reopen the portal where Roxas came from, which we would assume would have some connection to digital Twilight Town.
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But let's roll it back a little bit, because I'm getting a little bit ahead of the game. So — why does DiZ, and Ansem the Wise, have the ability to do this?
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How does he know that that's a thing that can be done? How does he know it can be considered a world? And how does he know that he can push what is essentially hearts and consciousness into a digital space?
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I don't recall any of the Secret Reports ever going into the details as to how he can fabricate a world. Because — if you consider it — what he's done is akin to what happens in Union Cross. Somebody has digitised a Book of Prophecies; that is essentially what DiZ has done, in Two. And there's no sort of back and forth about that.
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When, if you take it apart standalone, that's very clearly what DiZ has done. He has created a digital replica of a world. It's not a fully fleshed-out one like we see in Union Cross, but it has a lot of the same parallels as to what happens in Union Cross.
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It does eventually become corrupted. It does eventually become a virus. It does eventually start to decay. We notice this in the abilities to lose the words — photos, literally, from the people in Twilight Town — and other rogue things that start to happen, where we get restoration updates about Sora's consciousness midway through.
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Roxas is having moments where he's fallen from the clock tower, post beating the Struggle battles. The world around him is starting to decay, when the Nobodies are trying to suss out where Roxas's consciousness has gone.
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That's very similar to what ends up happening in Union Cross — where, as Brain says, how will we know what's real and what's not? Except for when there are strange things, that shouldn't physically be able to occur, suddenly happening in front of our eyes.
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And I don't think we've ever really paused long enough to be like: why does Ansem the Wise, specifically, have the power to do this?
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Because if you think about it — and let's take aside, for a second, the fact that Ansem ends up getting possessed by Xehanort and all the rest — Ansem the Wise's obsession with the heart has never really been fully dug into, properly. Right?
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We don't ever really know why he's dedicated so much of his life to the pursuit of understanding the heart. As far as I'm aware, we've never gotten any sort of background into that.
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I am open to correction on this, but I don't recall anything in his character files, and I don't recall anything in any of the Ultimanias — either the character files or the third English Ultimania — of his motive and knowledge of this.
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The reason I bring this up is because that's an immense amount of knowledge. That is a dangerous amount of knowledge to have, if we think about it, in the context of what we know now, when it comes to everything with Union Cross and Three, and what that should cost you.
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Because, once again, we need to keep in mind: Sora has been murdered — yeeted from our current reality — because he broke rules specifically to do with the Power of Waking.
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While Ansem's pursuit of knowledge, when it comes to the heart, has resulted in him accessing knowledge that arguably he should not have access to, without that breaking some sort of taboo.
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Him creating a digital world that he can then input other consciousnesses into should, in and of itself, be breaking some sort of taboo. Because if nothing else, that's not a place-to-place movement. That is a heart-to-heart movement. You are literally moving people's hearts from one to another. That should be breaking some sort of taboo.
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And more interestingly, for me, is focusing squarely on the fact of: how does he know how to do this? How did he work that out? And I don't think we ever really get an answer as to how he knows, or why he knows.
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Because we need to keep in mind — King Mickey has always been cool with Ansem the Wise. Has very much been aware of what he's doing. Why would Mickey be okay with everything that Ansem has been doing, in terms of his pursuit of knowledge of the heart?
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Surely, if Mickey is a part of some sort of grand design — of knowing Scala, etc, etc — there might have been some inclination of our dear King to be like: hey, maybe not. Maybe this is a little f'ed up. Maybe this is a little bit sketchy. Maybe we shouldn't do this.
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Maybe we should, you know, think about what power we now have, by having these discoveries — because we don't know to what end this research was meant to culminate in the first place.
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This seems to be knowledge for knowledge's sake. Research for research's sake. Like, when we get to the end of Melody of Memory, we come to the conclusion — or at least the others do, and Ansem says — that this can only be the plane of unreality.
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He is aware that that is a thing, as a concept. And that, in itself, is baffling to me. That it's not like — oh, you know, he could be in X place, he could be in Y place, or we just don't know. They simply circled down the drain of: oh well, if it's not in X and Y place, then the only place it can be is a place completely distinct to this — which is unreality.
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My bet here is that Ansem the Wise is probably actually from Scala. He's probably a researcher from Scala, who decided to move off-base, to go somewhere contained, where he could research separately.
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But that's the only rationale I can come to that would imply that he would know what he knows, and has the ability to do the things that he reasonably should not know.
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Because one of the scenes that always bothered me in Kingdom Hearts 2 — that, once again, doesn't get a lot of love, and doesn't get a lot of things thrown at it — is the scene where the CPU is running amok, and is creating a virus in Hollow Bastion, that's causing the security system to spawn Heartless, essentially, and all of the Heartless from the grid.
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I mean, it's the Grid in Dream Drop Distance — I can't remember what it's called in Two off the top of my head — but it's from that same world.
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Why exactly, how exactly, and with what resources, exactly — are you telling me that they have machines that can not only deconstruct matter, in the way that we've seen Sora, Donald and Goofy digitised into the Grid through the laser, when they abuse the machine in Two —
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but that they also have the ability to manifest and create matter out of nothing, in that room, that Leon then goes and defends — the room that's past the central room in KH2?
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That is strange to me. Why do you have a matter-creating machine? What were you trying to do, and what were you trying to create, in those rooms?
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Now — it's not a stretch to think or say that this is where Vexen ends up creating, or forming, vessels. That's a reasonable place to go to. Because, you know, we have to understand — Radiant Garden's researchers, they all had their own individual research areas.
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Vexen was with replicas. Ansem was with the heart. It's not unreasonable to assume that there wouldn't be different areas of research, and machinery, per each research interest.
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That's not what I'm concerned about. My concern here is about the technical — like, where are you getting that technology from? Because that's not in-world technology.
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It's the same way when we saw the Ark, right — that Kairi gets shipped off to, from Apprentice Xehanort. Why do you have that technology? That technology is not of your own world. That is not Radiant Garden technology. That is very clearly other worlds' technology.
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I mean — you look at the rest of Radiant Garden, you look at the rest of Hollow Bastion, especially in Two — we have no indicators from the stone walls, and the fact that it's very much a medieval-esque village. There's nothing technologically advanced about the city that Leon, Squall, Merlin and stuff reside in. It's all stone buildings, it's all whatever.
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Having a central garrison of extraordinary technology is wholly inconceivable for the location that you're in. And that doesn't make any sense, because you would expect it to benefit, or grow, with the city. And that's just not the case there.
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When — Radiant Garden, everything's a bit more polished, that's true. But fundamentally, you don't see the same advances in the cities that you then see outside of the walls — which would imply that they don't belong there.
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And if we look at all of the other worlds, everything always matches, in terms of the technology that's used, versus the location that we're in.
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Look at Corona — everything is still attached to ceilings, wheelbarrows, there's nothing super technologically advanced. San Fransokyo, for example, is very technologically advanced. It's more of a metropolis. There's more innovation. There's electricity, there's skyscrapers, there's billboards, there's tram lines, right?
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All of the technology matches the cities. We can't say that for Radiant Garden and Hollow Bastion. The technology that's there does not match the city. Which means it's foreign. Which means it's otherworldly.
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Now — how in God's name, Spec, does this tie in to language? Because language — if we think about Twilight Town, Twilight Town being the real Twilight Town — languages are complex, and languages tend to change structure, and change forms, naturally, over time.
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Ye olde English does not sound like the English that I am speaking now. The same way that being colonised changes an island's native language. The Irish were colonised by the English, and that's why we all predominantly speak English, and not Irish.
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What I'm saying is that it's unusual for two places to speak the exact same language. So when Aye Aye Captain Kai mentioned that Quadratum and Twilight Town share the same languages — or certainly one of the same languages that is present — that gives me an inclination that there's a connection there.
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And we all know that Twilight Town has a big connection to Hollow Bastion. I'm curious as to why. Why, of all places, Twilight Town. And I'm also curious as to what that means.
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Because when two places naturally share a language, that means there is some tie together. People generally don't just have two of the same languages, but apparently no other connection. There's normally something greater underneath all that — about a shared history, or a shared ecosystem, or something along those lines.
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And my brain is ticking over as to why those two languages might be a key for each other.
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What I mean by that is — the Twilight Town that we spent the most time in, the one that a lot of us have the most connection with, is the one in Two — is the one with Roxas in it. Is the other Twilight Town, not the quote-unquote real Twilight Town without Roxas.
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I would be curious to know whether the gang over on Aye Aye Captain Kai's server have a distinction as to whether or not they're talking about the KH2 one — and whether they've split that into the real Twilight Town versus the digital Twilight Town. And, furthermore, whether or not that extends to the real Twilight Town in Three.
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I think we were all a bit surprised and confused about how condensed Twilight Town became in Three. Right? Because Twilight Town in Two felt much bigger than the Twilight Town that we eventually got in Three.
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But I think it would be unreasonable for us to say that Twilight Town is not where the oddest things happen in Three.
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What I mean by that is — the first time when Sora and co arrive in Twilight Town, they're immediately hit by a Demon Tower, that Pence and Hayner are running away from. And then, like, we hit it for a few times, and then it goes away, and nobody says anything about it.
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Like — it's very strange, if you think about it. We have a Demon Tide that comes in, attempts to nuke us, we don't even fully murder it, we only, like, get it down a few bars, and then it just, you know, buggers off. And nobody says any— the next scene is them just being like, huh. Okay.
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When there's not a Heartless in sight in the village — they should not be like, oh, that's weird. They should be, like, terrified. Like, people should be running for their lives. That shouldn't be a regular occurrence. It's a Demon Tide.
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It should not — like, I can't understate this. This is a Demon Tide. The same things that broke Riku and Mickey's Keyblades in the Realm of Darkness. The same Demon Tide that turned into a demon tornado at the Keyblade Graveyard. The same Demon Tide that has done unspeakable levels of damage to our heroes.
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And yet we have normal people being like — huh. Anyway. Like, it's a Tuesday. No — that's weird. You can't tell me that's not weird.
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Then we have the whole Pooh Bear stuff, which I have talked about ad nauseam — about how the Hundred Acre Wood is weird, Sora's reaction to it is weird, Merlin's hand-waving about it is weird. It's all weird. And I will not be convinced that it's not weird.
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And there are other things that happen in Twilight Town in general that are just weird. As much as Hayner trying to drop-kick Ansem — Xemnas — is never not going to be iconic, that's still an odd thing to do. You know that? That's still an odd thing to do. And, once again, you're not going to be able to convince me otherwise. That's not the thing to do.
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The fact that the Haunted Mansion remains unguarded, when we all know that the stuff in the Haunted Mansion still exists in the Haunted Mansion — the computers, all of the stuff, Naminé's things, all the rest — we can all naturally assume still exists in Twilight Town.
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I don't think anybody ever, you know, poured cement into the hole that we opened up once Roxas filled in a drawing. I don't think that magically got refilled in. So we can assume that that technology still exists down there.
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Why is Twilight Town unguarded? Why are people so unfazed about a literal Demon Tide going through their city? Why is Twilight Town so condensed? Why is it all very distraction-y?
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The city is watching cute animations on a screen. We're fed mini-games of various varieties about food — not just through Remy and the cooking mini-games, but through — this is where we access Pooh, this is where we also go ingredient-hunting for specific grapes.
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It's very food-orientated. It's very distraction-ridden. When we have some alarming things in front of us, guys — like, why are we not really paying attention to what's happening here?
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So there's lots of things that are happening in Twilight Town that, when you take a step back, don't make a huge amount of sense.
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And while I understand — when you're so limited with Keyblade wielders, you can't be everywhere, and certainly standing guard in Twilight Town would not be the most interesting thing in the world — then sure, you could rope the Twilight Town gang to put up sensors or something, that if anybody goes near the Haunted Mansion, they'd, you know, be aware of it. Let somebody know.
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Maybe the Haunted Mansion, in Twilight Town in general, has always felt too important to be sidelined in the way that it has. Because, in many regards, it doesn't serve much purpose in Three.
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And what I mean by that is that, really, the events of the things that take place in Twilight Town could have happened anywhere else. If you think about it — there was no real reason to have Twilight Town, when we could have had Hollow Bastion. Merlin keeping the book in Hollow Bastion makes sense, rather than him just having a coffee in Twilight Town and carrying the book with him.
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Otherwise — Remy could have been a restaurant in San Fransokyo, in a big metropolis, or in Radiant Garden, that would have equally made as much sense.
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Why, specifically, were we made to go to Twilight Town in Three? What was so important about Twilight Town, that it needed to stay, and Radiant Garden needed to get cut — when we know that so much orbits Radiant Garden, and yet that was the bit that got cut?
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It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because I've never been able to work out why. And the language matching, both Quadratum and Twilight Town, makes me more firm, more convinced than ever, that we're missing something in Twilight Town.
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Because it would imply that the presence of both languages means that there is a jurisdictional overlap. That there is some sort of reason — culturally, symbolically, whatever — that there would be matching languages in both places. Be that governmental, be that colonisation, be it function.
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I'm thinking of it as function — because we've already established that Twilight Town could exist in various forms, be it a data version or a quote-unquote real version. But we have seen things happening in this real Twilight Town that arguably shouldn't have happened. And those are all the hallmarks that we've seen from Union Cross and stuff — that there is a problem with that.
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And if we put that same logic to Quadratum — if we look at Quadratum, to the fact that it's all muted colours, there aren't any children, the colour palette is minimal, the Darksides are huge, are towering, that the Heartless that are there, in and of themselves, don't really look like Heartless — they look like forms of darkness, which are distinctly different to Heartless in terms of matter, and in terms of function.
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And we're suddenly looking at things that, equally, couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't be possible.
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And I'm looking at the parallels, and being like — is this leaning into all of the theories that I have created up to this point, of how Quadratum, in and of itself, is a prison? In and of itself, isn't real? That there is something else happening here that is fake, or manufactured?
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I don't know. But, much like anything else — the more you dig into this, the more these things are starting to reveal themselves.
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This has been Thinking Through the Darkness, a LoreBySpec production, with me, Spec. Thank you so much for listening.
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I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me today.
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Just as a reminder, don't forget — if you haven't followed the LoreBySpec YouTube channel, go ahead and subscribe. It's free there.
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Once again, thank you all so very much for listening, and I will see you all next time.
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Welcome to Thinking Through the Darkness, a LoreBySpec podcast with me, your host, Spec.
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This is a podcast where we talk through all of the pre-production that goes into making the theories that you see on the LoreBySpec channel and its associated channels.
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Let's get the shilling out of the way first. If you haven't gone and subscribed and liked and commented on the videos on LoreBySpec on the YouTube channel, please go ahead and do that now. That's one of the best ways that you can support me.
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This podcast is also available anywhere that you can find podcasts. So if you are listening, if you could like the podcast and maybe leave a little review, that does wonders for the algorithm on the podcast side, which really helps.
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So this is coming off the back of me already having done a lot of the Latin lexicon videos — that, depending on when this goes up, because my Thinking Through the Darkness podcasts have had to have a shuffle around, since my podcast software lost a few episodes.
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So I don't know where you guys are going to be in terms of hearing the background of the videos that will now come of it. But one of the more recent ones — and one I'm particularly excited about — is me going through a lot of the roots of Latin when it comes to Quadratum, and coming up with a good three or four solid roots as to the word Quadratum, and how it leans into four.
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And then it leads into a lot of interesting things of note — like Yozora's attack being a tetrahedron, tetrahedron, whatever the simplest four-sided 3D shape is, that he uses to try to trap Sora in.
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And between all of that research — which took a long time, by the way — and pulling everything together, I've been talking to my friend Steve, from Quest Accepted, who has agreed to come on the podcast, for his sins.
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We're hoping to maybe get him in in and around October, maybe. For those who don't know Quest Accepted, they are primarily a D&D channel, and I was their resident KH lorist in chat for them when they went through the entirety of the Kingdom Hearts series.
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So they are friends of mine, and friends of the channel. And if you don't follow them on Twitter — Twitch — @questaccepteddnd, you should absolutely do so. You'll more than likely find me over there.
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They do streams on Wednesdays, Thursdays, every second Saturday and Sunday, so follow them. And I look forward to introducing you all to Steve when he does apparently pop up — because we talk lore in our spare time, when we aren't chatting about random bits and pieces.
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And he came across this when I was finished doing my video — from Aye Aye Captain Kai — and I want to play the audio of that for you. Hopefully it'll come up for you in the actual audio itself.
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But it's about this notion of the progress we've made in terms of understanding some of the languages within KH — specifically Scala and Quadratum.
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And I'm very curious to know — and what I want to talk about primarily today — is this notion of why exactly Twilight Town and Quadratum would share a lexicon, and would have the same language, when it's very clear that throughout Kingdom Hearts language has changed so frequently, and so often. Adding three new languages — good luck solving that anytime soon.
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So here's the video. [Clip plays — Aye Aye Captain Kai] "Why is bro speaking ancient Keyblady? And due to being a Kingdom Hearts content creator, unfortunately, I'm contractually obligated to gatekeep that information."
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"Guilty. Maybe I can let it slide this time. Over the last few years there's actually been a lot of discoveries in the scholarly Caelum language. And, not to toot my own horn, but my very own video was a huge breakthrough for the community."
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"We went from knowing about 20 letters to almost the entire alphabet, with the exception of eight characters. Then, with the help of Breezyfeather and a few others, we've gotten down to only missing three letters — meaning we pretty much have a fully working alphabet, with the exception of the capitalised letters."
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"A lot of the Easter eggs we found back in Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link's beta footage before it was cancelled was Mary Poppins. So — when the cat's got your tongue — supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Khluminari and Breezyfeather both found backwards nursery rhymes. And then Breezy went back to Kingdom Hearts 3 and discovered there's a few posters that are actually in Japanese."
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"Then we started trying to decipher this stone tablet in Kingdom Hearts 3 Re:Mind, but unfortunately we just don't have the key yet. Just recently, Breezyfeather posted this in my Discord channel, talking about an old promotion for Birth by Sleep that had a very similar-looking cipher that we might be able to use — but we haven't come to any conclusions just yet."
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"And just between you and I, they've made some pretty big headway in what they call Quadmoji — which is a language that can be found in Quadratum and Twilight Town. If you ever want to learn more about the Scala Caelum language, you're more than welcome to join my Discord server, where we talk about it quite often."
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"I know this person called me the GOAT and all, but truly, after I posted my video, Breezyfeather's been at it, and in a twist of fate, Kingdom Hearts 4 is adding three new languages. Good luck solving that anytime soon."
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Okay — so, obviously, tremendous work by Aye Aye Captain Kai and co, and I will probably dip into the server at some point to see what progress has been made, to see how it might inform my own theories and stuff.
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Because, in and of itself, the concept of the Scala language and stuff being cracked is very interesting. It's also interesting that they've worked out that that stone tablet in Re:Mind is indeed a cipher — though I think we always kind of knew that it wasn't going to be a simple translation.
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Do I think that the Birth by Sleep promo art might have something to do with the cipher that was displayed? Obviously you guys can't see the Instagram post on the audio podcast, but if I remember, when it comes to editing, I'll bring up the post and its video, or leave it as a link for people to view.
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But it is a cipher that is displayed in some of the very early promo art of Birth by Sleep. Of all the places to put it — Birth by Sleep is the one place that's making me go, nah, I'm not sure.
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So the thing that springs to mind for me — which is what I want to talk about today — is: what exactly do we have, in terms of what we know about Scala, and how it overlaps with Twilight Town?
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Because one of the things we don't really ever kind of question, as a fandom, is: how on earth have we all just sort of skated by this notion of digital Twilight Town? And we've never really stopped to ask the question as to how, and why, that ever comes about.
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What I mean by that is — we should have all really treated digital Twilight Town as more of a red herring, and more of a red flag, perhaps, than we maybe should have.
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Because it's all very hand-wavy in KH2 — that there's a digital version of Twilight Town. That DiZ himself somehow has the ability to replicate a world. Not in full — because we know that Riku has to intervene when they try to go to the beach. And the beach is actually not simulated. It's not actually there. And therefore they can't actually go, because it doesn't really exist in that digital space.
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But yet, if we remember, we are able to navigate, I do believe, in and out of digital Twilight Town. And that gives me some pause — because we do have to use those portals that Pence and stuff create, to reopen the portal where Roxas came from, which we would assume would have some connection to digital Twilight Town.
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But let's roll it back a little bit, because I'm getting a little bit ahead of the game. So — why does DiZ, and Ansem the Wise, have the ability to do this?
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How does he know that that's a thing that can be done? How does he know it can be considered a world? And how does he know that he can push what is essentially hearts and consciousness into a digital space?
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I don't recall any of the Secret Reports ever going into the details as to how he can fabricate a world. Because — if you consider it — what he's done is akin to what happens in Union Cross. Somebody has digitised a Book of Prophecies; that is essentially what DiZ has done, in Two. And there's no sort of back and forth about that.
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When, if you take it apart standalone, that's very clearly what DiZ has done. He has created a digital replica of a world. It's not a fully fleshed-out one like we see in Union Cross, but it has a lot of the same parallels as to what happens in Union Cross.
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It does eventually become corrupted. It does eventually become a virus. It does eventually start to decay. We notice this in the abilities to lose the words — photos, literally, from the people in Twilight Town — and other rogue things that start to happen, where we get restoration updates about Sora's consciousness midway through.
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Roxas is having moments where he's fallen from the clock tower, post beating the Struggle battles. The world around him is starting to decay, when the Nobodies are trying to suss out where Roxas's consciousness has gone.
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That's very similar to what ends up happening in Union Cross — where, as Brain says, how will we know what's real and what's not? Except for when there are strange things, that shouldn't physically be able to occur, suddenly happening in front of our eyes.
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And I don't think we've ever really paused long enough to be like: why does Ansem the Wise, specifically, have the power to do this?
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Because if you think about it — and let's take aside, for a second, the fact that Ansem ends up getting possessed by Xehanort and all the rest — Ansem the Wise's obsession with the heart has never really been fully dug into, properly. Right?
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We don't ever really know why he's dedicated so much of his life to the pursuit of understanding the heart. As far as I'm aware, we've never gotten any sort of background into that.
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I am open to correction on this, but I don't recall anything in his character files, and I don't recall anything in any of the Ultimanias — either the character files or the third English Ultimania — of his motive and knowledge of this.
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The reason I bring this up is because that's an immense amount of knowledge. That is a dangerous amount of knowledge to have, if we think about it, in the context of what we know now, when it comes to everything with Union Cross and Three, and what that should cost you.
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Because, once again, we need to keep in mind: Sora has been murdered — yeeted from our current reality — because he broke rules specifically to do with the Power of Waking.
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While Ansem's pursuit of knowledge, when it comes to the heart, has resulted in him accessing knowledge that arguably he should not have access to, without that breaking some sort of taboo.
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Him creating a digital world that he can then input other consciousnesses into should, in and of itself, be breaking some sort of taboo. Because if nothing else, that's not a place-to-place movement. That is a heart-to-heart movement. You are literally moving people's hearts from one to another. That should be breaking some sort of taboo.
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And more interestingly, for me, is focusing squarely on the fact of: how does he know how to do this? How did he work that out? And I don't think we ever really get an answer as to how he knows, or why he knows.
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Because we need to keep in mind — King Mickey has always been cool with Ansem the Wise. Has very much been aware of what he's doing. Why would Mickey be okay with everything that Ansem has been doing, in terms of his pursuit of knowledge of the heart?
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Surely, if Mickey is a part of some sort of grand design — of knowing Scala, etc, etc — there might have been some inclination of our dear King to be like: hey, maybe not. Maybe this is a little f'ed up. Maybe this is a little bit sketchy. Maybe we shouldn't do this.
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Maybe we should, you know, think about what power we now have, by having these discoveries — because we don't know to what end this research was meant to culminate in the first place.
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This seems to be knowledge for knowledge's sake. Research for research's sake. Like, when we get to the end of Melody of Memory, we come to the conclusion — or at least the others do, and Ansem says — that this can only be the plane of unreality.
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He is aware that that is a thing, as a concept. And that, in itself, is baffling to me. That it's not like — oh, you know, he could be in X place, he could be in Y place, or we just don't know. They simply circled down the drain of: oh well, if it's not in X and Y place, then the only place it can be is a place completely distinct to this — which is unreality.
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My bet here is that Ansem the Wise is probably actually from Scala. He's probably a researcher from Scala, who decided to move off-base, to go somewhere contained, where he could research separately.
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But that's the only rationale I can come to that would imply that he would know what he knows, and has the ability to do the things that he reasonably should not know.
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Because one of the scenes that always bothered me in Kingdom Hearts 2 — that, once again, doesn't get a lot of love, and doesn't get a lot of things thrown at it — is the scene where the CPU is running amok, and is creating a virus in Hollow Bastion, that's causing the security system to spawn Heartless, essentially, and all of the Heartless from the grid.
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I mean, it's the Grid in Dream Drop Distance — I can't remember what it's called in Two off the top of my head — but it's from that same world.
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Why exactly, how exactly, and with what resources, exactly — are you telling me that they have machines that can not only deconstruct matter, in the way that we've seen Sora, Donald and Goofy digitised into the Grid through the laser, when they abuse the machine in Two —
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but that they also have the ability to manifest and create matter out of nothing, in that room, that Leon then goes and defends — the room that's past the central room in KH2?
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That is strange to me. Why do you have a matter-creating machine? What were you trying to do, and what were you trying to create, in those rooms?
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Now — it's not a stretch to think or say that this is where Vexen ends up creating, or forming, vessels. That's a reasonable place to go to. Because, you know, we have to understand — Radiant Garden's researchers, they all had their own individual research areas.
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Vexen was with replicas. Ansem was with the heart. It's not unreasonable to assume that there wouldn't be different areas of research, and machinery, per each research interest.
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That's not what I'm concerned about. My concern here is about the technical — like, where are you getting that technology from? Because that's not in-world technology.
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It's the same way when we saw the Ark, right — that Kairi gets shipped off to, from Apprentice Xehanort. Why do you have that technology? That technology is not of your own world. That is not Radiant Garden technology. That is very clearly other worlds' technology.
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I mean — you look at the rest of Radiant Garden, you look at the rest of Hollow Bastion, especially in Two — we have no indicators from the stone walls, and the fact that it's very much a medieval-esque village. There's nothing technologically advanced about the city that Leon, Squall, Merlin and stuff reside in. It's all stone buildings, it's all whatever.
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Having a central garrison of extraordinary technology is wholly inconceivable for the location that you're in. And that doesn't make any sense, because you would expect it to benefit, or grow, with the city. And that's just not the case there.
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When — Radiant Garden, everything's a bit more polished, that's true. But fundamentally, you don't see the same advances in the cities that you then see outside of the walls — which would imply that they don't belong there.
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And if we look at all of the other worlds, everything always matches, in terms of the technology that's used, versus the location that we're in.
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Look at Corona — everything is still attached to ceilings, wheelbarrows, there's nothing super technologically advanced. San Fransokyo, for example, is very technologically advanced. It's more of a metropolis. There's more innovation. There's electricity, there's skyscrapers, there's billboards, there's tram lines, right?
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All of the technology matches the cities. We can't say that for Radiant Garden and Hollow Bastion. The technology that's there does not match the city. Which means it's foreign. Which means it's otherworldly.
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Now — how in God's name, Spec, does this tie in to language? Because language — if we think about Twilight Town, Twilight Town being the real Twilight Town — languages are complex, and languages tend to change structure, and change forms, naturally, over time.
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Ye olde English does not sound like the English that I am speaking now. The same way that being colonised changes an island's native language. The Irish were colonised by the English, and that's why we all predominantly speak English, and not Irish.
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What I'm saying is that it's unusual for two places to speak the exact same language. So when Aye Aye Captain Kai mentioned that Quadratum and Twilight Town share the same languages — or certainly one of the same languages that is present — that gives me an inclination that there's a connection there.
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And we all know that Twilight Town has a big connection to Hollow Bastion. I'm curious as to why. Why, of all places, Twilight Town. And I'm also curious as to what that means.
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Because when two places naturally share a language, that means there is some tie together. People generally don't just have two of the same languages, but apparently no other connection. There's normally something greater underneath all that — about a shared history, or a shared ecosystem, or something along those lines.
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And my brain is ticking over as to why those two languages might be a key for each other.
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What I mean by that is — the Twilight Town that we spent the most time in, the one that a lot of us have the most connection with, is the one in Two — is the one with Roxas in it. Is the other Twilight Town, not the quote-unquote real Twilight Town without Roxas.
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I would be curious to know whether the gang over on Aye Aye Captain Kai's server have a distinction as to whether or not they're talking about the KH2 one — and whether they've split that into the real Twilight Town versus the digital Twilight Town. And, furthermore, whether or not that extends to the real Twilight Town in Three.
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I think we were all a bit surprised and confused about how condensed Twilight Town became in Three. Right? Because Twilight Town in Two felt much bigger than the Twilight Town that we eventually got in Three.
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But I think it would be unreasonable for us to say that Twilight Town is not where the oddest things happen in Three.
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What I mean by that is — the first time when Sora and co arrive in Twilight Town, they're immediately hit by a Demon Tower, that Pence and Hayner are running away from. And then, like, we hit it for a few times, and then it goes away, and nobody says anything about it.
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Like — it's very strange, if you think about it. We have a Demon Tide that comes in, attempts to nuke us, we don't even fully murder it, we only, like, get it down a few bars, and then it just, you know, buggers off. And nobody says any— the next scene is them just being like, huh. Okay.
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When there's not a Heartless in sight in the village — they should not be like, oh, that's weird. They should be, like, terrified. Like, people should be running for their lives. That shouldn't be a regular occurrence. It's a Demon Tide.
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It should not — like, I can't understate this. This is a Demon Tide. The same things that broke Riku and Mickey's Keyblades in the Realm of Darkness. The same Demon Tide that turned into a demon tornado at the Keyblade Graveyard. The same Demon Tide that has done unspeakable levels of damage to our heroes.
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And yet we have normal people being like — huh. Anyway. Like, it's a Tuesday. No — that's weird. You can't tell me that's not weird.
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Then we have the whole Pooh Bear stuff, which I have talked about ad nauseam — about how the Hundred Acre Wood is weird, Sora's reaction to it is weird, Merlin's hand-waving about it is weird. It's all weird. And I will not be convinced that it's not weird.
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And there are other things that happen in Twilight Town in general that are just weird. As much as Hayner trying to drop-kick Ansem — Xemnas — is never not going to be iconic, that's still an odd thing to do. You know that? That's still an odd thing to do. And, once again, you're not going to be able to convince me otherwise. That's not the thing to do.
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The fact that the Haunted Mansion remains unguarded, when we all know that the stuff in the Haunted Mansion still exists in the Haunted Mansion — the computers, all of the stuff, Naminé's things, all the rest — we can all naturally assume still exists in Twilight Town.
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I don't think anybody ever, you know, poured cement into the hole that we opened up once Roxas filled in a drawing. I don't think that magically got refilled in. So we can assume that that technology still exists down there.
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Why is Twilight Town unguarded? Why are people so unfazed about a literal Demon Tide going through their city? Why is Twilight Town so condensed? Why is it all very distraction-y?
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The city is watching cute animations on a screen. We're fed mini-games of various varieties about food — not just through Remy and the cooking mini-games, but through — this is where we access Pooh, this is where we also go ingredient-hunting for specific grapes.
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It's very food-orientated. It's very distraction-ridden. When we have some alarming things in front of us, guys — like, why are we not really paying attention to what's happening here?
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So there's lots of things that are happening in Twilight Town that, when you take a step back, don't make a huge amount of sense.
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And while I understand — when you're so limited with Keyblade wielders, you can't be everywhere, and certainly standing guard in Twilight Town would not be the most interesting thing in the world — then sure, you could rope the Twilight Town gang to put up sensors or something, that if anybody goes near the Haunted Mansion, they'd, you know, be aware of it. Let somebody know.
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Maybe the Haunted Mansion, in Twilight Town in general, has always felt too important to be sidelined in the way that it has. Because, in many regards, it doesn't serve much purpose in Three.
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And what I mean by that is that, really, the events of the things that take place in Twilight Town could have happened anywhere else. If you think about it — there was no real reason to have Twilight Town, when we could have had Hollow Bastion. Merlin keeping the book in Hollow Bastion makes sense, rather than him just having a coffee in Twilight Town and carrying the book with him.
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Otherwise — Remy could have been a restaurant in San Fransokyo, in a big metropolis, or in Radiant Garden, that would have equally made as much sense.
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Why, specifically, were we made to go to Twilight Town in Three? What was so important about Twilight Town, that it needed to stay, and Radiant Garden needed to get cut — when we know that so much orbits Radiant Garden, and yet that was the bit that got cut?
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It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because I've never been able to work out why. And the language matching, both Quadratum and Twilight Town, makes me more firm, more convinced than ever, that we're missing something in Twilight Town.
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Because it would imply that the presence of both languages means that there is a jurisdictional overlap. That there is some sort of reason — culturally, symbolically, whatever — that there would be matching languages in both places. Be that governmental, be that colonisation, be it function.
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I'm thinking of it as function — because we've already established that Twilight Town could exist in various forms, be it a data version or a quote-unquote real version. But we have seen things happening in this real Twilight Town that arguably shouldn't have happened. And those are all the hallmarks that we've seen from Union Cross and stuff — that there is a problem with that.
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And if we put that same logic to Quadratum — if we look at Quadratum, to the fact that it's all muted colours, there aren't any children, the colour palette is minimal, the Darksides are huge, are towering, that the Heartless that are there, in and of themselves, don't really look like Heartless — they look like forms of darkness, which are distinctly different to Heartless in terms of matter, and in terms of function.
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And we're suddenly looking at things that, equally, couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't be possible.
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And I'm looking at the parallels, and being like — is this leaning into all of the theories that I have created up to this point, of how Quadratum, in and of itself, is a prison? In and of itself, isn't real? That there is something else happening here that is fake, or manufactured?
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I don't know. But, much like anything else — the more you dig into this, the more these things are starting to reveal themselves.
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This has been Thinking Through the Darkness, a LoreBySpec production, with me, Spec. Thank you so much for listening.
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I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me today.
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Just as a reminder, don't forget — if you haven't followed the LoreBySpec YouTube channel, go ahead and subscribe. It's free there.
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Once again, thank you all so very much for listening, and I will see you all next time.
