Quick Links
Being a mixture ofFinal Fantasyand Disney, it might be hard at first glance to exactly imagine what the storytelling ofKingdom Heartswould be like. Light and thematic like Disney, or more heavy and direct like Final Fantasy. To its credit, Kingdom Hearts somehow manages to be both and neither at the same time.
RELATED:Kingdom Hearts: Why Is Sora So Special?
Every aspect of Kingdom Hearts is hilariously convoluted, yet it always makes sense eventually. Even as a light vs dark story, the simplest of themes, it manages to also be the most singularly complex and difficult to parse piece of media going. Of all the wonderful terms within Kingdom Hearts, the Power of Waking is one of the prime examples of its storytelling and how, even within its own lore, words can take on new meanings as the games progress.
Sleeping Worlds And Sleeping Hearts
Before being able to understand the Power of Waking,it’s important to know what it affects and what exactlytheyare. As we see in the original Kingdom Hearts,whole worlds can be consumed by Darkness,trapping them within the Realm of Darkness.
Following the end of Kingdom Hearts, most of these consumed worlds are restored to their original state save for a few. There’s no clear reason for this, but that’s partly to be expected in Kingdom Hearts.
Dream Drop Distance establishes thatthese are ‘Sleeping Worlds’— worlds that haven’t awoken yet from their darkness. As is also established in the first Kingdom Hearts,both individuals and worlds have their own Heart and Keyhole that unlocks them.
DDD then is about Sora exploring these Sleeping Worlds, themselves a dream of their original selves, to reawaken them. Sleeping Hearts of individuals work in much the same way, being Hearts that have fallen to Darkness yet not yet awoken.
DDD also handles the idea ofexploring a Sleeping Heart. While Sora is exploring Sleeping Worlds, Riku is exploring Sora’s Sleeping Heart, which itself a dream of the Sleeping Worlds that Sora explores.
As we see, Riku explores through each Sleeping World until he progresses to Sora’sStation of Awakening, the deep black area with stained glass portraits.Here, Riku can free Sora’s Sleeping Heart, having ventured to its deepest reaches.
As such, to awaken both a Sleeping Heart and Sleeping World requires diving to their deepest sections to find their respective Heart andrestore them to their original state.
As with everything in Kingdom Hearts, it’s important to not use real-life definitions in reference to its terms.‘Hearts’ are not the literal heart, but ametaphorical core of someone as a person.
However, it is also not a soul, asKingdom Hearts 3seems to imply the soul is also a thing as shown in The Final World.
Who Can Use The Power Of Waking?
Within the series,three characters are confirmed to have the Power of Waking. These are Sora, Riku and Mickey Mouse. Yen Sid, despite the obscene and unexplained powers he possesses, does not seem to directly have the Power of Waking nor the means to acquire it.
To acquire the Power of Waking,one must awaken the hearts of the Sleeping Worlds. Presumably, there are others methods of acquiring the power, though none have been explicitly mentioned.
This is the means by which both Sora and Riku acquire the Power of Waking.Sora directly awakens the Sleeping Worldstrapped within the realm of Darkness. Meanwhile,Riku awakens Sora’s Sleeping Heartand awakens the Sleeping Worlds by proxy, granting him the power.
Mickey Mouse also has the power, as revealed directly in his Gummiphone entry in Kingdom Hearts 3, though we’re never shown him directly using it, at least in any entries where the power was given a name.
The Abilities Of The Power Of Waking
The Power of Waking was directly introduced in Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distanceand was expanded upon in Kingdom Hearts 3. The ability likely appeared in previous games without a name, though this has never been directly mentioned and as such would fall in the realm of theories.
As stated directly in DDD,the Power of Waking allows its users to awaken Sleeping Worlds and Sleeping Hearts, bringing them back to their original state. In DDD, we see this being used to bring the Sleeping Worlds back from the Realm of Darkness and to reawaken Sora in the world of the living.
That all sounds a bit singular and not quite wide in its usage, so Kingdom Hearts 3 expands on it massively. Here, we are told that the Power of Waking can be used in two much more direct ways:to use Hearts to travel to worlds and to use worlds to travel to Hearts.
Retroactively, we see Riku use the Power of Waking to travel to Sora’s hearts, and as a result an extension of the Sleeping Worlds in Dream Drop Distance.This is the intended use of the power, to use your connection to individuals to travel to worlds and help them all.
Sora also uses it in Kingdom Hearts 3 through his connection to Ventus, another Heart contained within him. With the Power of Waking,he can discover where Ventus is sleeping and awaken him, letting Castle Oblivion disappear and the Land of Departure return in its stead.
Abuse Of The Power Of Waking, And Its Consequences
However, the Power of Waking can also be abused. Through one’s connection with the Hearts of worlds,it can be used to instantly travel between them to discover the Hearts of individuals.
After all of his friends are genuinely killed by Organization XIII,Sora uses this abuse of the Power of Waking to travel across various worlds to track down the Hearts of his friendsand restore them to their original state of life.
RELATED:Kingdom Hearts: Why Does Roxas Look Like Ventus?
We see that this causes a rift in time, creating a reality where they all live, a reality that should not have come to pass without his abuse of the Power of Waking.
Though it is not directly said what is the exact consequence of abusing the Power of Waking in this way, it can be fairly comprehensively presumed. In the ending of Kingdom Hearts 3, we see Kairi and Sora together briefly beforehe simply disappears, with Re:Mind (which deals with the consequences of this rift in time) showing Sora fightingYozora in a form of reality entirely unrelated to his own.
Established in Melody of Memory,this reality is known rather wonderfully as Unreality, with the known world there called Quadratum.
With that in mind, we can assume that using the Power of Waking in such a way can causeyour own Heart to simply become lost. Not sleeping directly as we’ve seen previously, but simply lost among the worlds and even the very reality in which you exist.
Melody of Memory comes to a similar conclusion, withRiku once again using the Power of Waking to follow Sora into Quadratum, having no natural way of travelling there himself.
This very action implies thatthe Power of Waking may very well have even more uses, seeing as it can quite literally bring its users into a whole new version of reality — something Kingdom Hearts 4 will undoubtedly expand upon.
