R.I.P. Strelitzia (and Everybody Else)

R.I.P. Strelitzia (and everybody else)

So after everything (released up to 3/8/19), there’s only three people that I can suspect of killing Strelitzia.

Ventus, Brain, and Vanitas.

Every other possible suspect has either a reason not to have done it, or no reason to do it.

Lauriam’s her brother and is desperately investigating her disappearance, seemingly unaware that she was chosen to be one of the leaders like him.

Elrena is helping Lauriam investigate and unless she’s lying in order to manipulate him for some ridiculous end, she doesn’t know about the current state of the world in Union X. Manipulation’s unlikely though since she’s managed to keep up a familiarity with Marluxia all the way through KH3, something I wouldn’t believe possible if he had figured her out (which he would have by then) or if she was trying to accomplish something with a deadline back in UX.

We didn’t do it (I think), since we aren’t shown to remember her and wouldn’t have run headlong into the Keyblade War if we had her copy of the book (unless we were suicidal and/or somehow learned from her book that we’d get saved and mind-wiped by Ephemer and Skuld and would get away with killing her and it’s part of our fall to darkness that causes everyone else’s fall to darkness and we were the villains all along, but that’s such a stretch that it’s borderline insane…)

And Ephemer and Skuld were guaranteed leader spots.

So why those three?

Well, Brain’s currently talking about hijacking the timeline and he seems to have known about the oncoming glitches, so he’s either got a more detailed book than the others somehow (Strelitzia’s maybe?), or he’s really been doing his research. Either way, that he spent most of the time up until now with his face hidden and that he said the same ‘virus that will overwrite the timeline’ phrase as the Secret Reports in KH3 are the main pieces of evidence indicting him. But at the same time, he’s talking about hijacking the timeline so that the world doesn’t end, which it hasn’t on account of UX being a prequel. Unless of course he’s talking about the world splitting into the various different worlds or the eventual collapse of Daybreak Town, but even then that would require him knowing too much about the future.

Maybe he’s the Master of Masters or Luxu in a new body? I don’t know, I just feel like he’s a little too perfect as a suspect to be responsible for everything that goes wrong during and after Union X. It feels like he’s being set up to be a fake-out, a red herring.

Ventus, on the other hand, is too quiet. It’s like if Brain is standing in the middle of the room and yelling ‘I might be the bad guy’, then Ventus isn’t saying anything at all while he’s trying to sneak towards the door. He doesn’t chip in much when the other leaders are deciding what to do, he hasn’t really given any details of his current life away, and we know from BbS that he has a pretty powerful dark side. Of all the repeated non-Disney characters that we see in UX, Ventus is the only one who isn’t eventually a Nobody or dead, so we know he won’t fall to darkness or get killed by the end of UX’s story. I’m assuming that UX is going to end like BbS did, where all of the main characters get screwed over or die in the fallout from the reveal of Strelitzia’s killer, and being said killer who gets away with it while the others fall like dominoes in his wake is a pretty decent reason for Ventus to still be fine afterwards. Otherwise I have to assume that not only does Ventus have nothing to do with that murder, but he doesn’t have anything to do with any of the events afterwards either. Basically, I’m banking on Ventus being in UX for a reason, because if he isn’t involved with the murder plot, and nothing happens to him after that murder plot is resolved, then he’s only in the game to fill a leader space and his eventual dark side comes from… what? Not fighting in the Keyblade War? Not manipulating his fellow wielders? Not doing whatever it takes to get what he wants? If Ventus ends up doing nothing in UX, then it means that his hesitancy during training with Xehanort in BbS comes either entirely from Ventus not liking Xehanort(which is fair), or because he saw what using a Keyblade did to the other kids back during the aftermath of the war that he helped lessen the terror of. And neither of those would excuse Vanitas’ extreme villainy and personality.

So we come to the last, the dreadfully and hilariously most likely suspect, Vanitas, who isn’t even in Union X. Yet.

Don’t worry, I’ll explain myself.

So from the conversation at the end of KH3 between Sora, Ventus, and Vanitas, it really isn’t hard to suspect/learn that Vanitas is the real identity of the Darkness character that showed up to talk with Maleficent in UX. Vanitas even ended the KH3 chat by saying ‘I Am Darkness’. 

So how’s Vanitas in UX? 

He used Xehanort’s time-travelling method through his connection with Ventus. 

Since Ventus and Vanitas are still technically two halves of the same person (but not in the regular KH way), any moment in time that Ventus exists is a time period that Vanitas can send himself to.

So why would Vanitas kill Strelitzia?

Because he already did.

Or rather, because Ventus found out that Vanitas did, learned that Vanitas was himself from the future, which would make him hate and fear himself, which leads to him cultivating both a darkness from self-loathing and a desperate want to avoid that future self, which leads to his refusal to accept that darkness in himself when Xehanort demands he do it to forge a X-Blade, which leads to Xehanort ripping the darkness out of Ventus and forming it into Vanitas (who knows at least an abridged version of what he’ll eventually do because Ventus knew), which leads to Vanitas going along with Xehanort’s plans so that he’ll eventually learn how to time travel so that he can go back in time, and finally it all comes full circle when Vanitas uses that knowledge to go back and commit the murder that he knew would lead to his own creation.

And the only evidence at this point that counters that Homestuck-level time loop nonsense is that we have been led to believe that Ava only picked five people to inherit the books and Unions and not six like the Master did.

tl;dr

If Brain did it, there’s only five books and he did it because he already knew the future and needed to steal Strelitzia’s spot/book in order to change the future.

If Ventus did it, there’s only five books and he did it because he’s not just a nod to the fans and is actually a stone-cold killer who eventually becomes a good boy after being exorcised of his murder demons.

If Vanitas did it, there’s six books and it was to screw with Ventus and to make sure that Vanitas was born.

If someone else did it, it’s because the writers are hacks and thought an unfounded murder with no motive was the best they could do.