Part Twenty: Light
…well, you could call it Light, I guess, but it was really more of a feeling. It felt like the joy of a fat kid swinging through the trees of Deep Jungle with Sora and Donald and Goofy, forgetting for a moment that he gets picked last in gym class. It was a little girl curled up on her father's chest as the sound of a princess movie with a happy ending plays through her dreams.
And if it was Light, it was color. Color, yes, bright splashes of the stuff across a canvas, light and color in the hands of a fangirl staying up all night to lovingly render a painting of Sora and Riku in a compromising position. It streamed through the monitor of a clunky old Dell as a Harry Potter fanboy decided, hey, why should Disney characters have all the fun?
And sound, it was the sound of keyboards clamoring, of pencils scratching, the whir of cooling fans and people yelling and laughing at television screens with friends. It was OSTs spinning in stereos in homes across the world, from Sweden to Japan to the United States and South Africa and everywhere in between and kids singing along the whole time.
Sure, the game was made by a corporation, but that just meant that an army of designers, of artists, of story-tellers and musicians was joining in the dance, in this web of common dreams that reached all the way back to a guy animating a mouse in his California garage and all the way forward to a crappy parody fanfiction.
That's what Corporate Hearts was. Not a product polished by focus groups, not something that could be bought and owned, but a swirling, spinning, singing, typing mass of life; lights joined by filaments of light and set on fire by something as silly and inconsequential as a video game. It was fan fucking fiction.
And in the end, that's what Corporate Hearts is. Not a heart, but a thousand hearts, children's hearts, bound freely and burning against the darkness.