Here it is, the final episode of the Birth By Sleep segment of the Kingdom Hearts Primer.

Sam and I harp on this a lot, and it’s one of our biggest problems with the reveal in Blank Points: One of the easiest ways to lose me in the plot of a big franchise is to give is to negate loss or death in some way. In order to have happy endings, a lot of stories where a major character makes a sacrifice or gets killed off will have their death or the cost of their sacrifice “restored” in some way.

Get away from the primer for a second, this is one of my least favorite storytelling devices. I won’t pretend to speak for Sam, but for me I never cared for this saccharine view of loss. In the real world, when people make sacrifices, it is highly unusual for those sacrifices to be reversed. And when they are, they usually come with a bigger cost. In my opinion, I’ve always found the view that “nothing is ever truly lost” to be a very dangerous lesson to teach to young people, because it doesn’t give them the skills to cope with loss, and doesn’t prepare them to value what they have.

That said, I’m not adverse to happy endings. Loss doesn’t have to mean the end, and in the real world most people do cope with loss and move on. They learn for their mistakes and grow into better people for it. So for me, when I saw this scene that promises all the people who have ever sacrificed or suffered in this franchise will one day be saved by Sora (in Kingdom Hearts 3), a part of me was frankly annoyed by the suggestion. In my view, the basically invalidates all the suffering those people went through, and robs the significance of what they did.

Despite my misgivings, I did tear up at seeing everyone full of hope that they would be saved by Sora in the end. Say what you will about Nomura (lord knows I do), but the man knows who to touch the heartstrings. Kingdom Hearts is a good franchise, but I wonder how much further he can push it before it gets too ridiculous for ever die-hard fans like myself to handle.

I point them mostly to show how much different old Disney was to the more modern movies from the same company. Since Kingdom Hearts is, on a fundamental level, a love-letter to the many classic movies almost all of us grew up on, it’s unfair to criticize it for drawing on that same source material.

That said, it is also important to highlight some of the choices that were made outside of the influence of the source material. The big one is that Aqua is almost always the one closing up the story of any given Disney world. Not only does that mean she is always a major actor in the events leading to the story’s conclusion, but it means she’s often a big reason why the Prince of a given story is able to find their true love. Considering that the women in these original stories were often demure, and lacking in any real agency, it’s nice that they (deliberately or otherwise) have a female character make the choice to be a driving force in the plot. While it doesn’t make up for Kairi, it goes a long way.

As of this update, we’re done with the old-school Disney films. All the worlds from here on out will be drawing from the same pool of 90s-2000 era movies that the rest of the franchise uses. There’s a lot of content out there that compares old Disney with new Disney, but it’s still worth taking a look back to see how far we’ve come as a society every now and then.