tutti frutti. I had gotten a friend of mine into the KH franchise, something I'm proud of, and so far this person played KH1 and 2, and had watched cutscenes of BBS. And though I have tried to help this person understand what is what in the series in order to better understand what has happened, I was asked this question that I had found somewhat difficult to answer. I know that Vanitas's appearance is based on who Ven merges his heart with. (At least his for his face). But suppose that Vens heart merged with a female, for example Kairi, wouldn't Vanitas still be male in that regard? Or female maybe? This kind of bugged me since I'm still puzzled on Xions gender, but for the time being, I'm considering Xion female.

I'd say yes. Even when Vanitas had no face (when he was first born), he still had a male voice. In the end, Vanitas really is similar to Xion in that he technically can't be considered a "he", but rather "it", since Vanitas is a creature created from pure darkness.

 

So yeah, even if his face took the appearance of, say, Kairi, Vanitas would still sound like he does normally.

Vanitas is a special case seeing he is half of a pre-existing heart because ventus the pre-existing heart in which Vanitas was born form was male would automatically make any being spawned directly from his heart would also be a male. Now if aqua was splut if half since she was a female her heart would have most likely spawned a female. However because those beings are directly correalted to their original hallfs when one heart is affected the other's apperance is affected. So most likely if Kairi or any other female bonded with ventus Vanitas would have took thier appearance(I know it sounds weird but hey that's Nomura logic)

 

Q2: I never really considered xion a boy or a girl but for this purpose I will call her a girl. Xion is a replica puppet of roxas baised on Sora's memories of kairi, she was origanally designed to double heart harvesting productivity and as a failsafe in case roxas got out of hand. Then an interesting phenomenom took place as Xion existed over time she began to claim sora's memories as her own creating her own identity and giving her the appearance that we have come to know. Now the more time she spent with roxas the more memories of sora she aquired and the more power she borrowed from roxas. The organiztion realized this and planned to use Xion so that Sora's memories would stay with her and he would never wake up. As xion took on more and more of sora's memories she began to take the shape of sora himself. (had she merged with roxas she would have become a fullfleged sora minus his heart.)

I wouldn't consider hearts male or female, they're just hearts, regardless of what gender has one. Just because he was made from a male heart that doesn't mean, to me, that he wouldn't become female if Sora had helped Ven. In particular, I'd like to bring up that it works something like this:

 

Ven didn't have darkness to balance himself, so Sora became his darkness. On that token, wouldn't Sora have become Vanitas' light, in a magnetic sort of way? If Sora had been female, Ven's darkness would have been female, and that might have reflected on Vanitas.

 

It's still a really silly question and one without a solid answer. It'd be possible, though. If one wanted to write a cracky fanfic where Sora was female, I wouldn't see why they couldn't make Vanitas female as well, even if they wanted to leave Ven male. It's still only a 'what if' scenario. (I'd imagine it to be somewhat like Yubel from Yugioh GX, in the Japanese version they had two actors do 'her' voice, one male and one female, at the same time.)

 

As for Xion... As with any person who you're not sure on gender, it's best to just refer to them how they and their close friends refer to them. It's the polite thing to do. http://kh13.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/happy.png;