After three years of writing, the Acolytes of Chaos saga is finally finished. As promised, here's a long-winded Author's note where I look back at everything I've written and explain what led us to this point.
Wow, I can't believe my own stamina. What started as a generic and clichéd story idea that's been rolling around in my head since middle school has evolved into a saga spanning nine fanfiction stories, 300 chapters and possibly a million words. Holy crap! Back in sixth grade, when I started speculating about future directions for the Kingdom Hearts series, my ideas were very basic and in retrospect, generic and unoriginal. I don't remember all of what I had in mind but it involved the Disney villains going after the Princesses of Heart again, the worlds begin destroyed by the Heartless again forcing all the survivors to live inside a giant Gummi space station that was Noah's Ark and The Death Star rolled into one.
Sora would have wound up on Earth and people would have thought he was crazy. A redeemed Xehanort (This was before the reveal of old baldy, so the only Xehanort I knew at the time was Terranort) going undercover on Earth as a high school science teacher (I later alternated between Ienzo and a freed-from-possession Terra in this role). Incorporating the Disney shows of my childhood like Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Kim Possible, and American Dragon: Jake Long was part of the plan from the very beginning, and I had originally had Rose as an eighth Princess of Heart. The ending of all the fragments of the original world coming back together was also something I've had in mind from the start, but I had originally planned on ending things with a big musical number.
…Yeah, not exactly the best ideas to work with. As more games in the Kingdom Hearts series came out and the canon storyline began to evolve, so too did my story ideas. The Disney villains going after the princesses and Heartless destroying the worlds again ideas morphed into one: an ancient society of beings dedicated to serving the Darkness (basically a Disney version of The Hand from Daredevil, as I reimagined Chernabog as the collective embodiment and consciousness of all Darkness) attempting to plunge the entire universe into Darkness. This was when I decided to have Marluxia and Larxene's human selves be villains still, even though I had planned for the redemption of the rest of the Organization. (Braig being in league with Master Xehanort meant that he was out of the redemption picture as well)
In early iterations of this saga I came up with, Sora would have actually died, and the final act of the story would have followed his disembodied soul making his way through the afterlife to the door to Kingdom Hearts, while his friends fought the bad guys in the land of the living. When I came up with the "Single embodiment of Darkness" idea (itself inspired by information that early drafts of KH1 would have had Chernabog as the main villain and source of the Heartless), I thought "then who or what should be the embodiment of light?" So then instead of fighting his way through the Realm of Darkness back to life, Sora would be resurrected as a physical vessel of Kingdom Hearts itself.
Around the fall of 2013, I decided to try and get my ideas out of my skull and put them into words. My first attempt was posted on the American Dragon: Jake Long Fan Forums under the title "The Dark War". In retrospect, my first crack at fanfiction was very bad. It was rushed, sloppy, and honestly, not very good. Then a few months later one of my submissions for the Kingdom Keepers Insider app (which allowed Kingdom Keepers fans to contribute to the writing of the final book in the series) was selected to appear in the seventh book. That gave me another confidence boost and spurred me to completely overhaul my idea.
My third iteration of the idea that would eventually become the Acolytes of Chaos saga was known as the Acolytes of Darkness Saga. Gone was the ancient Chernabog-worshiping cult. Instead, the Disney villains were back as the main threat to the universe. While the bad guys worshiping an embodiment of Darkness idea still remained, I ended up changing it from Chernabog to Vanitas (or at least his Remnant bonus boss from Birth By Sleep Final Mix). I also completely rebuilt the Disney Villain Alliance as well.
Maleficent's new cabal now consisted of Yzma, Barbossa, Hades, Captain Hook, Dr. Facilier, Rourke, and Darth Maul. Maul would have been one of the only Star Wars characters to appear in the story, having accidentally travelled from the Star Wars galaxy to the Milky Way in a blind Hyperspace jump after his defeat in the Son of Dathomir comic that had ended that summer. I didn't keep track of all the details of my early versions of this storyline, so a lot of details have been lost to time. Anyway, Sora would have been captured and used as a host to resurrect Vanitas, who would have killed Maleficent and seized control of the Hellfire Club as soon as he woke up.
I originally created the early fics of the Acolytes of Chaos saga, Aftermath (an epilogue to the AD:JL series finale), and Convergence in Danville (an AD:JL/Phineas & Ferb crossover set after Aftermath) back when I was still operating with the whole "bad guys use darkness" approach. But then I ended up reading the theory that inspired me to write The Xehanort War. As I mentioned in earlier fics, the Rebirth Theory by Kingdom Hearts Insider user Gelandporn was so good I was just inspired to write about it. And as I started working out ways to put the theory in my story, I came up with an idea: what if there were characters who remembered their past lives? From that simple question, the Unchained Legion was born, and the entire shape of my story changed once again.
The Acolytes of Darkness saga was completely overhauled. In its place was the Acolytes of Chaos saga, with the existing stories in this universe rewritten to account for the change in main antagonists (For Aftermath, I just deleted the scenes relevant to the overarching plot and made it a standalone fic, while Convergance needed to just remove the references to Darkness and rework the epilogue). As I wrote the Acolytes of Chaos story, I eventually decided that I wanted to find a way to include the Marvel Cinematic Universe in this story I was building. But I didn't want to overcomplicate the universe with all the twists and turns of Marvel movies that haven't been released yet, so I basically reworked everything in the MCU that happened after The Winter Soldier to create a different variation of the Marvel movie universe.
As the story I was creating evolved, the plot elements I had planned all the way back in the original migrated over and changed to fit the new story line. The space exodus storyline turned into Sora and the Avengers travelling the universe to get back to Radiant Garden. Sora being possessed by Vanitas became being brainwashed into a fanatically loyal agent of the Unchained Legion. Kairi's near death experience in Infinities was one of those ideas that came into my head when I came up with the general idea of "something causes Sora to fight for the bad guys' team," figuring that Kairi being in physical danger would drive him to snap out of his possession/brainwashing.
And then while I was thinking about that battle, I was suddenly reminded of the scene in Once Upon A Time where Prince Charming's heart is crushed, killing him, only for Snow White to bring him back to life by giving him half of her own. That idea lodged itself firmly in the crevices of my brain and I began planning the scene where Sora and Kairi do the same thing. And once that idea flowed out of my head, the mental image of the two of them tearing their way through the villains' ranks with the X – Blade and Infinity Gauntlet like the bad guys were made of paper soon followed.
Now comes the part to talk about the ending. Bringing all the scattered pieces of the original world back together was always the endgame from day one, but everything else about the ending has completely changed over the years. Originally, the worlds were all going to end up slotted onto different continents per where the movie was set (or in the case of Disney movies adapted from fairy tales, where the story originated). Then in the second iteration of the story, Jake Long and Rose were going to be the ones engaged during the story, with their wedding at the end of the saga. Then when the story was pushed back to six years after Kingdom Hearts 3 instead of only one year, so I switched it to Sora and Kairi.
When The Dark War turned into Acolytes of Darkness, Sora was originally going to propose after the final battle, since I originally had Vanitas' methods of possession leaving some mental scars that Namine would have spent several weeks helping him deal with. When I reworked the possessed by Vanitas elements and moved it forward into The Xehanort War, I decided to have the story end with Sora and Kairi's wedding. After that, I decided to have Sora and Kairi get married in the middle of the final battle, Pirates of the Caribbean-style. And then I sort of toned it back a bit but kept that "wedding vows on the battlefield" idea for the final version.
All in all, my ideas and abilities as a writer have come a long way in all these years, and I'm satisfied with how the Acolytes of Chaos saga turned out. I hope you all enjoyed the ride as much as I did. Now that it's over, I'm moving on to other projects. I'm going to finish the final installment of my Secret Identities trilogy before taking a break from fanfiction for a while. I have some ideas for another saga taking place after Acolytes of Chaos, but I'm going to let those develop further in my head and take a break from writing before I even start working on that. And on that note, I bid you all farewell and wish you all good luck in the coming years.