I can't read this topic through or else I'm gonna scream. I can understand why people love to make up theories and that's totally ok. I just totally hate how so many try to make the fanfiction characters into solid, hard canon and even go around spreading that as facts. Even here some say they learned about a canon character, while it is not canon! The cub in the end of TLK is canon but it's NOT canonly Kopa, so
stop making it so!!! As in: there's been two more TLK films since those books cane out. If Disney considered Kopa as their official character and so in any way included in the real story, don't you think they'd have mentioned it already! And anyway, what is not mentioned as canon by the makers, can be debated, but I don't think ought to be labeled as canon.
*SIGH*
I really, really don't think Kopa ever exists officially. Because:
1.) They likely didn't even plan a sequel until the first movie turned out to be such a huge success. Thus, the cub in the end, probably didn't have a name nor gender. It was merely a reference to the circle of life being one again complete. Then some fan decided it's a boy named Kopa and maybe because of the film's great successm they wanted to have their work published in profit purposes, and succeeded because Disney saw one more way to make more profit.
2.) As Moka, too, says on the page 3: Disney probably just didn't care about the Six New Adventures books and their characters, as they are NOT officiailly Disney's own characters but a fan's creation. They're lack of popularity probably didn't help. So, it really doesn't have to get any more complicated than that, as for why Kopa isn't in TLK2 in any way.
3.) I always believed Zira offered Kovu for Simba to kill for revenge, over Scar killing Simba's father. Hence, killing family members over kinghood and all that. Notice, that Simba didn't seem to know Kovu wasn't Scar's son, Zira only hinted to Kovu being Scar's favorite, after which she immediately implied that if Simba wants his revenge, he could kill Kovu.
4.) Simba being over-protective of Kiara... No tragic siblings needed here either: Scar had shown extreme cruelty and trust-worthlessness even after given more than he deserved in the exiling, and the lionesses Simba exiled, were Scar fans. So he had every reason to assume they were just like Scar. And then, as Kiara was a lot like he himself in certain crucial terms, of course he would end up over-protecting her. And all that being also the reason why he'd exile them in the first place.
[quote="Moka"]Its obvious that a lot of things changed between the "Kopa" ceremony and the Kiara ceremony. One example is that Simba and Nala aged quite a bit. Simba looks like a full adult male and Nala looks more like Sarabi. In the Kopa ceremony they still looked like young adults. So maybe he did exist. Disney certainly never mentioned Kopa anywhere but the Six New Adventures, so I dunno.[/quote]
As is pointed out earlier, the drawing style was clearly different anyway, in SP seeing to TLK. It is likely they just didn't look into the last seconds of the first film, when they produced SP. All they needed to remember was that they had drawn them to have a cub.
As for my opinion on Kopa as a charaster:
I don't know if Kopa is in any of the other books, but he didn't strike me as in any way special or original character to me, in 'A Tale of Two Brothers'. He was a bad pouncer, just like his Dad used to be. Simba was even going to give him pouncing lessons, just like Mufasa gave him. And he was rather your typical young boy child in every way. Maybe the other books deepen the character 'cause I really don't understand why he's so popular, by that book... Unless the false information monster on his canonsy gives the popularity its wings.
