Ep. 56: Groove is in the (Kingdom) Heart(s) - G4P Season Finale Final Mix

It's our season finale! We'll be off for the next month, but before we take a little slumber in our memory recovery pods, we're back for one more episode to take another look at one of our favorite video game franchises that we simply cannot stop talking about: KINGDOM HEARTS.

The beloved Final Fantasy / Disney crossover JRPG series has been back on our minds lately. It celebrated its 20th Anniversary earlier this month, alongside the reveal of the next mainline entry in the series: Kingdom Hearts IV. And just recently, the iconic singer of the KH theme songs Utada Hikaru performed some of their hits on the Coachella mainstage.

We've covered KH on the pod before* so this week we're taking a deeper "dive to the heart" of the series viewed through a queer lens: from its use of queer-adjacent shonen anime tropes, to the trans/nonbinary-coded Nobodies, its mindbending ideas of reality and multiverses, and how the game's relationship to its not-so-queer-friendly corporate benefactor Disney has affected how we and others view these games.

We also speculate on what we expect/want out of Kingdom Hearts 4, especially now living in an era of "multiverse media" that Kingdom Hearts laid the groundwork for 20 years ago.

We hope you enjoy this last episode of our season! We'll be back in June with more Gay For Play.

*To hear our original episode on KH, go back through our archives and check out Episode 20! ("Kingdom Farts") where we discussed the origins of the series with our good friend and KH-historian, Casey Fox. 

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CREDITS
Intro and outro music by Connor Marsh (@connorjmarshmallow)

Show art by Nick Adams (@nickadams.art)

Special thanks to our patrons: Blueberri Mary, Elijah Punzal,  Trevor McTavish & Martha Turner <3

MUSIC THIS WEEK:
"Dearly Beloved" by Yoko Shimomura
"The Afternoon Streets" by Yoko Shimomura
"Kingdom Hearts 4 Trailer Music" by Yoko Shimomura, Arranged, orchestrated, and produced by Diego Mitre