I worked at Disney for a year. Not the parks, the company. 

That sounds a lot grander than it actually was - I was an intern, working in the animation team but not actually doing any animating. 

What I did do was review things. A lot of things. Sometimes animation, often scripts, but the vast majority was made up of pitch bibles sent in by various individuals and studios.

I must've reviewed hundreds of projects while I was there. They were kept in this big tracker, going back at least 5 years. 

Well thought out projects with a lot of potential which got sent to the highest ranks for review. Not so thought out projects that were an instant pass. Full book series that I had to read all of. Weird AI-generated things. On more than one occassion, a parent insisting that we make a show about their kid because they're just so great. I read all of them, I spent time with all of them. 

A times I felt a bit like a groundskeeper for a graveyard. We'd get ten projects and maybe one of them would go further than the intial review I did. A lot of these projects weren't very good - some were so outrageously bad I wondered how someone had the confidence to send it in - but still, that was someone's baby. We'd give feedback on how they could improve the project's chances of being picked up, but still, sometimes I wondered if that would be the last anyone would ever see of that story. We could never have taken on every single project, that's unrealistic, but it made me a little sad to think about if I thought too much about it.

I adored the shows, though. I can't say too much (NDA), but seriously, every single show was great, and an honour to work on. But could I say that, though?

It felt insulting to the people who'd been with the show for the entire ride, to come in and after only a year's worth of input and say that I'd worked on it, when all it often really amounted to was pointing out where an eyebrow wasn't coloured in. It felt like stolen valour, who am I to come in and claim myself as part of that group effort if I'm not there for the wrap party? But at the same time, I didn't do nothing, right?

In Kingdom Hearts, Sora is never actively a part of the stories happening in the Disney worlds. He goes there, leaves his mark, and he leaves - and the story continues without him. The story WOULD have continued without him, discounting the world-ending threats; Belle gets with the Beast, Pinocchio becomes a real boy, Alice leaves Wonderland whether Sora was there or not. But he is, even briefly, and part of the ending of that game is that the characters he meets could never truly forget him. Sora will not be in the credits when they roll at the send of that Disney story - but his footprint will be in the grass.

And, in a similar way, there's evidence of my contributions too to the Disney worlds that I explored. My voice is there (in one case literally), in subtler ways but ways that are still obvious when you know what to look for. I may not be part of that story anymore, I may not be there to leave more footprints in the soil, but the indent is still there. And, who knows - maybe these stories I thought I was burying will crop up again in the future, made better by the advice I and my coworkers gave them. 

So, to the worlds I spent time in - I enjoyed taking care of you. Thank you for letting me be a part of your story too. Thank you for letting me plant a single flower in your gardens. 

(Please PLEASE note: at this time I HAVE NOT played further than KH1, so please exclude any spoilers from comments please and thank you. I'm very new to this series it's just making me emotional right now.)

Kind of a silly one, but does anyone else think a lot about the spiritual implications of the "pony-up" transformations in Equestria Girls? I do, for some reason.

Basically, as far as I understand it, the girls can harness latent elemental magic, usually via music, and this allows them to "pony up", essentially turning them into Umamusume-esque horse girls with pony ears, longer hair (that becomes a ponytail at the bottom, because I guess they didn't want to give them actual tails, a fact that enraged me as a kid) and if they're a pegasus in the pony world, wings.

To be honest, if I was part of their group, and some people got wings and I didn't, I'd be miffed as fuck. Like in regular pony world people just accept wings as a trait like how people have different hair colours, but wings aren't normal here, so I would imagine there'd be some confusion and jealousy!! 

It's the pegasus part of this transformation that makes me curious about the potential soul/spiritual implications of this transformation. If they were JUST turning into horses, that'd be one thing, you could say it's because the magic they're harnessing is specificially pony magic, in the movies they call it Equestrian magic, but the fact that it seems to specifically be drawing from their pony-world equivalents is FASCINATING to me. Why does it do that?

If the magic makes them become like their pony selves, does this imply that the ponies and the humans literally share the exact same soul? Are they inextricably linked and harnessing Equestrian magic brings them closer metaphysically to their pony clone so they start growing features as a result? Is Equestria the origin point for all universes in the MLP multiverse, is ponying up akin to returning to stardust, to the origin point? Are the human girls in fact horses trapped in human bodies they're not supposed to be in, is the mirror dimension supposed to be there or did it end up being created, and the mirror dimension is actually a warped version of Equestria that Went Wrong, DO THE GIRLS EXPERIENCE HORSE DYSPHORIA? Is the reason Rainbow Dash is so obsessed with ponying up because she feels more right in that body, does her mind secretly know what shape it's supposed to be and misses it? Does she miss the wind beneath her wings and the dirt beneath her hooves? Does she lie in bed at night and dream of her body being the right shape? Does Equestria Girls feature canonically alterhuman characters?!

Perhaps I am thinking too much about this. Maybe they just borrow the magic from their pony counterpart. I dunno.