I'm all for more Kairi. Personally I love her character and she's always been one of my favorites. I think people really don't give her enough credit for the things she does and I will still fiercely defend that she is far from useless/has no personality
(but that is an argument for another day).
I generally feel that the series should try less to force-connect them all and should focus more on developing the characters as their own people.
Agree. However...
Sora, Kairi, Naminé, Xion, Roxas and Ventus all feel very similar to me
I'm not going to go into Sora vs Ventus here but I actually really really like that Kairi, Xion and Namine all have very distinct personalities to me and don't actually feel like the same person replicated over three times. Namine is extremely quiet, demure and very very rarely speaks out (only in extreme cases). Xion feels far more troubled and unsure of herself, much more emotionally volatile and seems like the type of person who, if told to sit in a chair and draw a picture for five hours at a time would just about fall over from boredom. Xion is also way more rebellious than Namine and was often much more quick to accept breaking the Organizations rules when necessary, whereas Namine wasn't constantly trying to escape her room in CoM and was more or less silently struggling with herself. In fact, the only time she actually DID break the rules was when she was practically hint-hint-nudge-nudged out the door. That's just comparing the two of them, anyway. Even when they are emotionally upset the two had very different ways of crying, even. Namine is the kind of girl to sort of turn her head and let those big moe silent tears go rolling while Xion full on ugly cries into the sky, haha. While Namine is very very "feminine" in the traditional sense, I feel like Xion exemplifies much more...for lack of a better word, tomboyish characteristics. Both are cute and awesome and to me, very different sorts of people.
Kairi, to me, is the sort of person who lies almost exactly between those two extremes. She has a lot of similar traits to the two of them but is generally more positive and cheerful of a person overall. She's incredibly determined but more confident and far less prone to feelings of helplessness and rage that Xion falls into. While at the same time can be just as patient and able to read people emotionally like Namine seems proficient at without seeming so melancholy. Also the fact that she enjoys keeping a diary seems very Namine-esque.
I love that Kairi has streaks of tomboyishness (considering she was perfectly content romping around with two boys in a cave scratching up the walls). But she also very clearly likes pink and flowers and that's actually why i friggen love her keyblade. Because we can be girls, we can like pink and flowers and we can also like exploring with the boys and getting dirty all at the same time. I get frustrated with complaints that her Keyblade sucks specifically because "its too girly" because it seems to equate that girls can't have it both ways. I think it's great that it exemplifies that Kairi is somewhere right in the middle of the two extremes that her somebody/alt personality exhibit. She is a bridge.
In fact, Kairi actually symbolically is all about connections and tying things/people together. In the first game that was her entire role, to give a reason for Sora and Riku to be tied together throughout the conflict, both trying to compete to save her in their own way. As referenced in CoM, she is what keeps Sora's heart tied to the light/stable. She was able to get Sora to recognize Riku in KH2 by bridging their hands together. Her name literally is a mix of the water and the land (assuming the kanji for "kai" and "ri" which haven't been confirmed as far as I know). If you look at her Keyblade design it shows the roots of the flowers twisting around the blade down to the hilt, connecting it down to the water. She also likes crafting (and sewing presumably due to the stitches on her charm) which is a hobby that is very much about tying things together. This is also seen in the twisting rope that connects the star charm to the bottom of the Keyblade. And, again, she is represented in her charm by the Paopu fruit which, obviously, is about tying people together. Her Keyblade is really cool in not only the choice of materials but the way they are presented on the blade to indicate she ties, links, and bridges two different things together.
All the more cool that Sora's strength is literally drawn from that very premise. That's why I think it's incredibly telling that Sora's "light" is Kairi and that his heart "couldn't exist without her" because she symbolizes connections and the stuff that bind people together. Super cute, I swear.
Kairi feels like a submissive female Sora
So yeah, I suppose the fact that Kairi's cheerfulness kind of makes her a bit like a watered down Sora if you wanna look at it like that, (ignoring the fact that Sora is a lot more than just a bag of sunshine) but she is way, way more patient than him and seems to have a bit more social awareness at times. She also seems perfectly capable, or at least desires to, solve more issues with more diplomatic means. It's probably cheating/non-canon to quote the manga but there's a really great example in the way that Kairi and Sora both confront Seifer when he's being a jerk. She shows him kindness and chats with him a bit and he immediately gets flustered and his anger deflates whereas Sora snipes him in the face with a dollop of whipped cream haha.
Them both being cheerful, to me, shows how good the two of them are together. They both see the world in the same way and I think that's what makes them such a cute pair...or will, if they can every be in the same place for more than five minutes...
The fact that Kairi copies Sora's battle stance is adorable and no one can tell me otherwise.
That all being said: Xion. She needs a new Keyblade. Desperately.