For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.
With my recent fills for the
kinkmeme,
Kingdom Hearts now qualifies!
Kingdom HeartsWhen I was in my early teens, I got most of my videogame news from magazines - my brother and I used to buy
Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK and
PSM2 every month - so one of those magazines (most likely the official one) was where I first heard that there was an upcoming Disney and Square collaboration. As a
Final Fantasy fan, I was surprised but intrigued; it sounded like fun! The magazine had some art of Sora on Destiny Islands, and I cut it out and put it up on the wall of my childhood bedroom.
The original
Kingdom Hearts came out when I was fourteen, Sora's age, so I was exactly the right audience for it! I absolutely loved it. It was fun and charming, and I shipped Sora and Riku hard. I read a lot of Sora/Riku fanfiction on fanfiction.net, although the Sora/Riku writers of the time tended to bash Kairi to a pretty ludicrous extent; I didn't have much interest in Kairi at the time, but I could see that the monstrous character she was presented as in fanfiction wasn't Kairi!
As further
Kingdom Hearts games came out, my investment only grew. The cast expanded, the plot became steadily more involved, and the series started to focus heavily on memory and identity, which are a couple of my favourite themes in fiction.
I've played and hugely enjoyed most games in the
Kingdom Hearts series, and I have to give
358/2 Days a special mention for being the hardest a videogame has ever made me cry, but
Dream Drop Distance is my favourite. It's fun to play, it lets you explore new worlds rather than just reusing old ones, and, most importantly, it contains plenty of Riku/Sora material.
Although I've loved the
Kingdom Hearts series consistently for a couple of decades, my fics for it have been scattered and rare. I wrote my first
Kingdom Hearts fic in the June of 2003, my second in 2009, my third in 2019, and my fourth and fifth here, in late 2025. I've always wanted to write more for it, but it's so sprawling and confusing that it's hard to know where to start!
Favourite character: I mean, Squall Leonhart is technically a character in the
Kingdom Hearts universe, and you know how I feel about Squall Leonhart. But my favourite
Kingdom Hearts character is Riku. He spent the entire first game making terrible decisions and has quietly hated himself for it ever since, and that's what I want in a character.
Favourite pairing: Sora/Riku must have been one of the earliest pairings I ever got really invested in, and every new
Kingdom Hearts instalment since has only made them shippier. I've said before that one of my favourite pairing dynamics is 'I'm quietly and intensely in love with you, but I don't ever expect my feelings to be returned, and I don't have any plans to pursue you romantically. I'm just in love with you; it's an inescapable fact of my life,' and I wrote that description while thinking of Riku's feelings towards Sora.
Number of words written: 9,303, across five fics. Unusually, I've never written from the same character's perspective twice in my
Kingdom Hearts fanfiction; I've got one
Kingdom Hearts fic from Sora's perspective, one from Kairi's, one from Roxas's, one from Riku's, and one - please don't ask questions - from the perspective of real-life stage magician Derren Brown.
Snippet: I've got a few unfinished attempts at
Kingdom Hearts fanfiction lying around. Here's a snippet I scribbled down around 2021 for a never-finished fic, with the slightly silly concept 'Riku confesses his love, and Sora is absolutely mystified because he had literally no idea it was possible for boys to fall in love with each other'.
( Kingdom Hearts unfinished snippet, Sora/Riku, 2021. )