Yu-Gi-Oh Manga: 091 Death to the Undead!

No kidding! Why don't they just rest in peace already? They're always shambling around, moaning, looking for brains and being general nuisances! Everyone gets enough of all that out of regular old life, so you'd think that people would welcome not having to deal with that shit in the grave. But noooooo, gotta get up and imitate life after it's all over.

But I ramble. Where were we?

Oh yeah, Yami came out and used his special puzzle to give him plot-progressing hallucinations. Somehow, no one is questioning those hallucinations either, not asking how his "visions" can be taken as necessarily true. They see a cave in the side of a hill that Yami leads them to and Honda automatically assumes Yami is right and this must be the place. Okay, I guess we're not going to wonder how accurate Yami's visualizations are in this situation. That's fine.

Yami mentally promises Jonouchi that he's on his way.

Oooh, it's another one of these! Let's see... My money isn't on the monsters, because we're already dealing with opposition that comes back from death stronger than ever before each turn. It's between Kunai and Chain and Sword and Shield for me.

On the next page, another defensive monster is destroyed by the zombie dragon's breath, this time at 2720 attack points. Jonouchi is down to 630 life points, and is looking shocked. He hangs his head and wonders if this is the end, but he fights those thoughts with a mental assertion that there has to be SOME way to win, though he doesn't know how. He puts Tiger Axe down in defense now, trying to get more time to think.

Kozuka explains how bad this situation is for Jonouchi, because every turn Kozuka's monsters get stronger and Jonouchi will eventually run out of cards. He tells Jonouchi that he loses and to give up. Jonouchi thinks that he may be right, because while Jonouchi doesn't remember all the cards in his deck, he does know that he doesn't stand a chance with the cards in his hand. Acknowledging that Kozuka's monsters only continue to get stronger, Jonouchi thinks that he has no choice but to continue defending.

Keith smirks in the background, wondering how long Jonouchi can delay the inevitable. He put Stop Defense in Kozuka's deck, so it's only a matter of time until Jonouchi is FORCED to give up his life points and lose. Jonouchi's heart hammers as Kozuka draws a new card jubilantly at the beginning of his turn.

Jonouchi looks downright close to a heart attack when he hears this, and Keith chuckles at Kozuka's win. Kozuka says he's playing it face down so that the next time Jonouchi calls defense, it will activate and prevent him from playing in anything other than attack. Why play it face down? Jonouchi knows what it is, so it's not like you'll surprise him or anything. Jonouchi doesn't ask this, because he's too busy shitting his pants. Kozuka is ready to call out his attack, but first has his pumpking give his monsters a bit more juice to pump them up. Mmmmmm, zombie steroids.

Kozuka proceeds to tell his unstoppable undead dragon to do what zombies do best and bust through Jonouchi's defenses. It takes out Tiger Axe with its nasty breath, an action that always seems to illicit that agape hopeless look from Jonouchi. Keith laughs, telling Jonouchi it's over no matter how his name is pronounced, because the moment he calls out defense, the trap of Stop Defense will activate and end him. Kozuka agrees, and encourages Jonouchi to draw and end his suffering.

Jonouchi stares at his deck, wondering what to do and thinking about Yuugi. Little does he know that Yuugi/Yami is in the cave along with the rest of his friends, running down the tunnel. Anzu calls out his name, but it looks like they're nowhere nearby, and the maze-like cave just forks again ahead of them. Yami growls, determined to find Jonouchi as the friends all rotate around, still looking and calling out for him.

Someone calls out that there's a dead-end where they are, and Anzu stumbles on something in the dark. She looks down and exclaims that it's a VERY real-looking skull, wondering aloud just where in the hell they are. Honda curses, because he's sure that Jonouchi's in a bad way dueling down here with cannibal cavemen. Bakura asks where he could be, and Anzu continues to call out to him desperately. They keep at it, all the while Yami mentally pleads with Jonouchi not to give up, because he has to remember the promise he made, and the fact that he said himself that ridding oneself of doubt shines a light in the cave of one's heart.

Did he say that? I don't remember him saying that. That promise I DO remember, though.

Jonouchi remembers this too, and after that moment of surprised recollection, narrows his eyes and says he won't give up as long as he can lift his cards. He reaches to draw another, Shizuka popping into his mind as something important he has to protect. Jonouchi thinks he WILL win on his own, and picks up that fateful card, looking at it.

He plays the Red Eyes Black Dragon, which Keith curses, wondering how Jonouchi managed to get such a rare card. Does it matter? You seriously need to stop relying on the assumption that Jonouchi doesn't have rare or powerful cards. Jonouchi says that he's come too far to just run away, so he'll go out in a blaze of glory instead. He targets the pumpking with the Red Eyes Black Dragon, and at 1950 attack points, it's actually WEAKER than all those zombies it's been roiding up. Kozuka is not oblivious to this and is shocked by the explosion and burning of the pumpking.

His points go down to 900 with his gasp of disbelief. Since the pumpking was undead to begin with, it can't be brought back with his Call of the Haunted card. Jonouchi celebrates the fact that Kozuka's zombies can't get any tougher, but Kozuka reminds him that they're already strong enough to take him out, and it's Kozuka's turn to boot. He tells his zombie dragon to attack the Red Eyes Black Dragon now, and tells the Red Eyes to die and rot away.

Jonouchi is devastated that Kozuka managed to take out his best card, and that it brought down his points to 150 too. Keith laughs at "Joey" that it's all over while Jonouchi looks down at his hand again, wondering what to do. He has three cards, one of them a monster called Ultimator, but its attack points are far too low. The other two are buffs that he can play on his monster, but they still won't put him over any of the monsters on the opposing side in terms of power. He knows he can't play in defense because of Kozuka's face down card, so Jonouchi contemplates this really being the end.

Keith is still heckling him, telling him to "draw" like they did in the old west, and play his card so Jonouchi the loser can die.

Jonouchi looks at the card he just drew and it happens to be Shield and Sword, which he identifies with some confusion as a card that switches attack and defense points. A lightbulb begins to flicker on in Jonouchi's head as he thinks that all of Kozuka's monsters have high attack points, but if he switches those out for the defense points, he may have a chance. He decides to try as his last gamble.

Playing Ultimator in attack mode is his first move, followed closely by what he says is his big finale,  the Shield and Sword card to switch the attack and defense of every monster on the table. Keith is shocked by this turn of events, but Kozuka is initially confused, wondering what it was that Jonouchi actually did. Kozuka eventually catches on, though, and mirrors Keith's agape look of horror.

Keith knows, reciting a lengthy explanation (in his head, of course) about how zombies don't have brains and therefore just attack without thinking, and that's why they don't have defense points. Now that those zeroes have been switched in the place of those beefy stats they spent the duel cultivating, the monsters' attacks are all zero. Kozuka moans about how his monsters are all in attack mode, but Jonouchi is about to show him that his scope is a little narrow.

Keith thinks it's even worse that the monsters were in attack and unable to block the attack of Jonouchi's piddly little guy. He shouts at Kozuka, calling him a fucking moron for losing. Dude, he did LITERALLY everything you said, so YOU were the one who lost. Unless of course the cognitive dissonance of not being the one actually sitting in the chair and physically playing is getting to you.

Kozuka is dumbfounded at having lost, but not as dumbfounded as Jonouchi is at his own win.

Yami and the rest of the search party spot the duel booth at the back of the cave and run over at Honda's prompt. Seeing Jonouchi in the booth, Anzu calls out his name and Honda wonders if Jonouchi's spacey look means that he lost. Yami presses his hands against the glass and asks in a panic what happened. When Jonouchi turns to look at all the racket behind him, he's grinning upon seeing his friends.

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? This has to be the most satisfying win in this whole manga so far. Seriously, this is no exaggeration, Jonouchi's pulling through in this chapter was SO GRIPPING that it eclipses everything else that has happened thus far. I really loved the last few chapters for how self-contained they were in their rising action at the very least, and at most it sums up Jonouchi's very immediate struggle so well that it's nearly perfect.

Essentially, the satisfying nature of this chapter comes with the combined elements of relateability, repeated try-fail cycle, and a victory that is fully EARNED. Everyone can understand what it's like to be insecure in our abilities, and watching one of these situations with multiple failures just makes us more eager to see the person in them eventually succeed, so these two elements are pretty self-explanatory. However, what really needs emphasis here is how we feel Jonouchi has EARNED this victory. Yami and Kaiba started out at an advanced level, and we didn't see them STRUGGLE to get to it. Jonouchi is new, he's right there at the beginning with us at the same level, so he's our stand-in for growth and understanding. This makes every step he takes to get to this point more visible to us, and therefore it makes this victory that much more real and tangible. It feels like he EARNED this with hard work and perseverance that we SAW.

This is what writers mean when they say "show, don't tell". This is what they're talking about. They're talking about their readers and viewers actually seeing what goes down so that further down the road, when character action is actually paying off, they can feel that much stronger about it, that much more proud of the character and how far they've come.

And I disagree with Jonouchi at the end there. It wasn't JUST luck that got him that win. He's finally starting to adapt to situations thrown at him in the duel in creative ways. That risk paid off not just because of luck, but because he was aware of what the card did and what it would mean if the points he was switching ended up being lower than the attack.

That was using his head.