User blog:DragonDude83/PE Proposal: Xemnas (Manga)

Here it is, the time has finally come. Since the manga counterpart of Ansem, Seeker of Darkness has been approved, I will now propose Xehanort’s Nobody. What do you have to say about the manga version of Xemnas?

Who is Xemnas? What Has He Done?
Just like in the games, Xemnas is the Nobody of Xehanort, the amnesiac apprentice of Ansem the Wise, who betrayed him, stole his research, taken his name, and brought ruin to his world. When Xehanort became a Heartless, his body did not fade into darkness, it became a new entity; a being without a heart that has a mind and will of its own. This is what happens when a being loses a heart but their wills are still firm and strong, which is what creates a Nobody. Since Xehanort has been calling himself, "Ansem," when he became a Heartless, the Nobody he left behind created a name for himself by rearranging Ansem’s name and adding an X, calling himself Xemnas. Being born into an in-between realm with nothing, cast away from both light and darkness, feeling empty inside, and even having power over the force of nothingness itself, Xemnas’ goal is to become his own existence that was greater than nothing, something greater than his human self would ever be. For this reason, he formed Organization XIII from 12 other Nobodies, with the last one including Sora’s Nobody, Roxas, and was concocting a scheme that would gain him access to the source where all hearts come from: Kingdom Hearts.

Chronologically, Xemnas is first seen in the 358/2 Days manga, where he approaches Roxas, who has no memory of his human self unlike most Nobodies. Xemnas tells him that he’s nothing, he comes from nothing, feels nothing, and will forever be nothing unless he joins the Organization, which would give him a purpose. This sets the standard for how Xemnas would run the Organization as more of a cult. He would call the members his "friends," but he would show no friendly affection, and he would make promises to the members on what they would gain if they helped him with his plans, which are ultimately empty.

In this manga, he only shows up occasionally, but he is the driving force behind every major conflict within the Organization. He plans to collect hearts from slain Heartless as it takes to trap them all in a dark void of Xemnas’ creation, which he has linked to the Realm Between and the Organizaton's home world, the World That Never Was, and have the hearts welded together to form a Kingdom Hearts moon within this world. Once Kingdom Hearts has been completed, Xemnas promises the Organization members that they will finally be granted hearts of their own, and become true beings that exist. To complete his plan, Xemnas plans to exploit the power of the Keyblade. He has Vexen create a replica with a fraction of Sora’s memories and powers in his replicas, so they would be alive and have the power to wield the Keyblade to slay as much Heartless as they can to aid Xemnas in his plan. The only replica that was created was Xion. Xemnas placed Xion into the Organization as the 14th member, and had her get closer to Roxas, allowing her to use a Keyblade power more effectively than Roxas. Eventually, Roxas and Xion have become best friends, and it was to the point where Xemnas wanted to pit them against each other to prove who is the more reliable Keyblade wielder, and the loser would be done away with as being obsolete. Xion tries to run away from the Organization, trying to find out who she really is, but Xemnas ordered that she’d be brought back alive so he make her into the perfect puppet he intended her to be, and he did that when Axel brought her back to their headquarters. He had her placed in a test tube, and tortured her psychologically with the full extent of the memories and Keyblade abilities that had leaked out from Roxas into her so that her form changes and she transforms into a perfect Sora replica who feels an innate urge to kill Roxas and absorb all traces of Sora that he held within him into herself in order to be completed. Xion manages to let Roxas kill her before she could succumb to the urge of being Xemnas’ puppet. Before she dies, she tells Roxas to stop Xemnas’ plan to obtain Kingdom Hearts, and set all the captive hearts free.

Now we’re in the Kingdom Hearts 2 part. In the chapters where Sora is getting his memory restored, Xemnas shows his traces of adaptational villainy. In both the game and the manga, Xemnas orders Axel to either bring Roxas back alive or eliminate him. But in the game, he threatens to turn Axel into a lowly dusk if he fails to do either. In the manga, he straight up threatens to eliminate Axel altogether if he failed with no chance of Axel living even as a lowly Nobody, just total annihilation.

With Sora reawakened with his memories restored and Roxas merged with him, Xemnas plans to exploit Sora’s Keyblade power to gather more hearts, manipulating him by having his members of the Organization set up situations that wind up having him slay more Heartless with the Keyblade. He had Saïx kidnap Kairi to further motivate him to push forward. More adaptational villainy comes out when Sora, Donald, Goofy, and King Mickey are fighting 1000 Heartless Xemnas summons in Hollow Bastion. In the game, the notorious moment of Goofy's "death" occurs in the sequence before this situation. But in the manga, this is what directly sets off Goofy's "death" - two of the summoned Heartless cause a whole bunch of large rocks to breaks off from the ledge Xemnas had been standing on, so Goofy makes a dive towards the falling rocks to protect his friends from them and is seemingly crushed to death by all of them falling on top of him. This devastates Goofy's three friends, but especially Mickey, who goes off on a rampage and slays most of the 1000 Heartless. Unlike the game, when Goofy’s "death" is played for laughs as his friends felt kind of stupid as if that moment would have killed him at all, the manga played it very seriously with the reactions that Goofy actually risked his life for them.

When we reach the climax in the World that Never Was, Xemnas is sending all collected hearts into his Kingdom Hearts as a sacrifice. Saïx informs him that Sora has killed Demyx, to which Xemnas replies that this is what happens when the weak fights against a strong heart, but that such necessary sacrifices serve the purpose of weakening the hero's resolve, making him feel guilt over having killed a sentient being. Demyx was the most emotional member of the Organization, and looked sad on his impending fading, which made Sora question if anyone was really sure that Nobodies didn't have hearts, and Xemnas was counting on that. He uses the tragic passing of his own followers as a means of servicing the advancement of his plans.

When Ansem the Wise appears to blast Xemnas’ Kingdom Hearts with a device meant to encode it as data, Xemnas appears and reveals that not only is going to get a heart of his own, he also intends to use Kingdom Hearts to recreate the World by merging his power of nothingness with the power of the heart that originates from Kingdom Hearts itself so that the hearts of everything in existence will be reduced to nothing and then re-made from that same nothing, all now slaves and extensions of Xemnas's new heart and the power it grants him, as Xemnas could then reign over all of existence as a deity forever bonded with Kingdom Hearts. Then he summons Sorceror Nobodies to kill Ansem and Mickey in order to stop them from meddling in his affairs, having Mickey fight back. Ansem tells Mickey to stop and leave since his overloading device is about to explode, taking his life with it. Xemnas gives a satisfied smirk as he takes his leave.

As the heroes arrive at the Altar of Nought for the final showdown with Xemnas, he asks them why they hate Nobodies even when they never had a choice in the circumstances of their birth and that they belong to neither light or darkness. Riku says that they only hate the Organization and their Nobodies for messing up their worlds and endangering their hearts. Xemnas asks what other choice would they have? Sora gets angry, and tells him that the Organization is made up of Nobodies who can't feel anything like sorrow and regret...only to pause midway through, remembering what he saw displayed by Axel and Demyx, which proved that Nobodies could make a choice and could even come to feel in some way, so he instead finishes with "YOU, XEMNAS, don't feel sad about anything!" Xemnas admits that he cannot and will not ever feel sorrow, no matter what misery comes to the worlds and for those who suffer because of his actions. He levitates himself into his ruined Kingdom Hearts, and calls upon the hearts filled with the negative emotions of rage, hatred, envy, etc. to empower him, as he absorbs the energy of those hearts and enters through Kingdom Hearts, declaring that he and Kingdom Hearts shall be bound together and that hearts are the source of all power! Sora, Kairi, Riku, Mickey, Donald and Goofy enter through a door sent by the Heart of All Worlds into the threshold of the spiritual realm of Kingdom Hearts itself, where Xemnas has warped the interior into a twisted reflection of the World That Never Was' city and is commandeering a large battle station. When Sora, Donald, Goofy and Riku face him at the top of this battle station, Xemnas wields the powers of all the deceased members of Organization XIII against them. Sora declares that Xemnas' dead followers mean nothing to him except for what he could take from them and use for himself, to which Xemnas replies something along the lines of "Why shouldn't they? It's natural for the gifts of those who were weak to service the truly strong!"

Sora links his heart to the hearts of all his friends as he brings the Keyblade down upon Xemnas, seemingly finishing him for good. A wounded Xemnas moans "I need more rage...I need more hearts." Sora takes some pity on him, telling him that the heart has more positive feelings and asking if he even remembers how those emotions felt like. Xemnas just gives another Psychotic Smirk and replies "Unfortunately, I don't" as he fades away. But then just as Sora and Riku are ready to accompany Kairi through the dark portal that could lead them all back home, a backup copy of Xemnas made from his power of nothingness emerges and cuts them off, transporting them all into nothingness itself. Xemnas declares that if light and darkness are eternal, nothingness must be just as eternal and he intends to make it so. In the final battle, Xemnas attempts to murder both Sora and Riku with several lasers, then tries to take down Sora only for Riku to take the blow for his friend instead. When Sora slams his Keyblade against Xemnas in fury, Xemnas expresses a crazed glee at the power from that blade and says he will take it for himself. But Sora and Riku then combine powers and send a beam out through their united Keyblades that strikes Xemnas down. Xemnas scowls in anguish and thinks "Cursed...Keyblade....!" as he fades away once and for all, wiping away the last remaining trace of Xehanort.

Heinousness
I think he matches up to Manga Ansem’s level, if not higher. Not only is his endgame goal for taking over Kingdom Hearts - infusing it's power with his own power in order to reduce all hearts in existence to nothing and then recreate the World, "one heart at a time", into one where all the new hearts in existence are filled up and enslaved by with the essence of his own newly gained heart - arguably more horrific than his Heartless counterpart's "return everything to Darkness" endgame goal especially in how stealthily it's to be executed compared to the massive Heartless invasion of the first arc. Arguably, he is more heinous than Ansem, with how he victimized Sora, Roxas, Xion, Namine (by extension as he leads the Organization that captured her), Kairi, Ansem the Wise, and even his own Organization members being cruel, pitiless, and done in the coldest way possible, all as Xemnas flaunts his sense of self-given superiority. Also, he carries the baggage of what his human self had started, and feels no remorse whatsoever, even smugly asserting that he's only carrying on what Ansem the Wise began, that it's praiseworthy, groundbreaking works of achievement, and that Ansem must be feeling in his heart feelings of envy towards the student who surpassed him.

Mitigating Factors
Keep in mind that Master Xehanort and the Master of Masters do not exist in the manga version. Any redeeming qualities Xemnas had are ultimately subverted. Again, he leads Organization XIII like a cult leader, and he calls his followers his "friends," even though he will threaten to end their existence, should they fail him, and feels nothing when they fade away, blaming their deaths on their weaknesses. He promises the Organization members a new heart when Kingdom Hearts is complete, but after their defeats because of his lack of care for them, his confrontation reveals that his goals are for his own self interest, wanting to unmake and remake the World around nothingness so that he can play God with all hearts, including the hearts that the other members would have gained had they all been alive in the end. He wishes for Kingdom Hearts to "share it's power with all Nobodies", but only power so that they may be stronger, better subordinates to him in his new world order, and states outright that he doesn't see the heart as valuable for the feelings and sense of self it can give someone, or for it enabling Nobodies like him to become whole existences - he values the heart as "the source of all power."

The backstory is that the other Organization members are not pure evil individuals, and that they can gain a moral agency and grow a semblance of a heart, with a choice to be something other than unfeeling sociopaths. This is shown when Axel tries to make amends with Sora for kidnapping Kairi, along with Demyx feeling sad about his demise. This is summed up when Sora calls out Xemnas for his lack of empathy by saying, "YOU, XEMNAS, don’t feel sad about anything!" To which Xemnas confirms this, and also chooses not to have any regret for those he’s caused misery toward. He's as horrible as he is ultimately because he wishes to be and believes that it's in his best interest to be.

Final Verdict
I say yes. Do me a favor, if this gets voted up, please don’t put the Approved Evil seal on the original page, because I take it as a message that means, "create that page already." Sometimes, it takes time to find the most accurate information and images for a page. Though if it does get voted down, I don’t mind the original page to get the Rejected Evil seal. It saves time for everyone.