I was also an extremely careless child and didn't actually know how to riffle shuffle cards. I probably should have been supervised.
Where were we? Oh yeah.
Also, why is Mokuba calling his brother Kaiba? It's his last name too? I don't...
Anyway, I guess Yami HADN'T deduced that much, because he's looking just as shocked at this as he is that the Blue Eyes White Dragon showed up in this duel. Mokuba urges Yami not to lose as Saruwatari has him in a firm headlock. Saruwatari isn't really concerned if Yami wins, because there will be more "assassins" that were mixed in with the actual duelists whose job it is to ensure that Yami is disqualified. This first one just comes with a creepy ventriloquist theme. Again, keep in mind that this appears to be a strange attempt at a red herring by someone who clearly doesn't understand that red herrings actually have to be consistent with the facts by the end.
Conical Hat Weirdo is thinking that Yami CAN'T win against him, because Kaiba's grudge combined with Yami's guilt will bury Yami with the help of Kaiba's deck. DOES Yami have guilt over what happened to Kaiba? I know that Yuugi went to visit Kaiba (hospital/mansion setting is still not exactly clear), but it's possible for YUUGI to have some guilt over what happened because his other personality totally trashed Kaiba's headspace, with Yami having any negative feelings over it at all. This whole arc seems to carry a common undercurrent of people feeling responsible for things that they're not actually responsible for.
Anyway, as Dummy!Kaiba giggles, Mokuba shouts at Yami to please win, because if Yami loses, Pegasus gets Kaiba Corp. Could this information have not been squeezed into the other panel in which Mokuba was explaining that Saruwatari was a spy? I'm feeling like the recap of the last chapter is going on a bit too long here.
Yami is grinding his teeth at the puppet across the table, and the seemingly contradictory fact of Yami winning with more life points. Dummy!Kaiba claims to be the real one, borrowing the body of the doll in order to get his revenge, all while giggling like an idiot.
Jonouchi shouts at Yami to cool his balls, because, as Honda points out, Dummy!Kaiba is only a ventriloquist throwing his voice. Yami glares, which is I guess is supposed to indicate his inner turmoil over what he knows to be true and his fears that some part of Kaiba really is in the dummy. Meanwhile, Dummy!Kaiba says he's ready to play some more, though he's not ready to attack with his dragon quite yet. He's going to forfeit his attack to play a mysterious card face down on the table instead, giggling that soon Yami's monsters won't have anywhere to run.
Yami wonders if the card Dummy!Kaiba played was a spell or trap card, announcing that it's his turn out loud. Since the Dark Magician isn't powerful enough to take the Blue Eyes White Dragon on, Yami switches it into defense mode, playing Curse of Dragon in defense mode on the table as well. Dummy!Kaiba claims he knew Yami would do that, because when a monster in defense is destroyed, it doesn't detract from the player's life points. I had not IDEA, Dummy!Kaiba! Thank you for your bottomless WISDOM!!!
Dummy!Kaiba tells Yami that his defensive play won't save him, because he decides to play that face down card he put on the table earlier, which turns out to be a trap.
Dummy!Kaiba giggles that there's nowhere to hide, and commands that Sinatra Jr. attack the opposing dragon with its burst stream. Yeah, I think it's Sinatra Jr. because of a certain roundness around the nose. The Dark Magician leans out of the way of the attack, looking kind of shocked. Yami's points have been taken straight down to 1000 and he makes some sort of gurgling noise. Jonouchi, Anzu and Mokuba all call out Yami's name in distress, and Dummy!Kaiba giggles. Yami can't help but wonder how he's supposed to win now.
Man, we all know you'll figure some bullshit out.
Saruwatari laughs, guessing that Kaiba is happy as he watches Yami's defeat from heaven. I don't know if HEAVEN is a fair assumption of where Kaiba would be going, dude. Mokuba, calling his brother "Kaiba" again (weird), has tears welling in his eyes, and starts insisting that his big brother isn't dead. I kind of want to punch Saruwatari for deliberately making a child cry, even if that child is a murderous one like Mokuba.
Mokuba, descending into a tearful mess, turns on Yami now as the one who told him Seto would come back. Mokuba believed Yami, but he demands to know where Seto is because he waited and waited for so long for him to come back. Look at what you caused, Saruwatari! This is breaking my heart right now, and do you know what happens when my heart breaks? I break your ribs.
With another Burst Stream the right middle hat is destroyed, but Conical Hat Weirdo notes that there was no Dark Magician there with a scoff. He wonders if that was the wrong hat. Obviously, you idiot. Yami smirks, saying it's too bad, but his turn has started again. He draws another card and slaps it on the table with his usual gusto. It's not showing up on the table, though, and Conical Hat Weirdo can't figure out where it is.
But that's all over in the next panel when he smirks, saying that if Conical Hat Weirdo chooses the wrong hat, he'll activate the trap card Yami just played. Conical Hat Weirdo seems surprised that there would be a trap card under one of the hats now, something that really shouldn't cause him any shock at all. He knows the odds are one of three, so he chooses the middle hat. Another Burst Stream is fired at the aforementioned hat, and a face-down card is revealed beneath it. Yami scoffs and says it's a good choice, but with that cocky little smile still plastered on his face and a chuckle.
Conical Hat Weirdo silently asks what's under the hat, but with wide, bloodshot eyes, so you know he already knows the answer. When the digital dust clears, he sees the face-down card too, and is devastated that it turned out to be the trap. Yami says it was a good choice for him, anyway.
Yami is flabbergasted, and Dummy!Kaiba asks if that was because he forgot he had THREE Blue Eyes White Dragon cards. He urges Yami to play his next card so his new dragon, Likely Sinatra this time, can incinerate it. That's the most Kaiba thing this puppet has been made to say during the whole game, but he ruins his accuracy again by giggling madly. Yami Looks down at the table in premature defeat, thinking that he doesn't have a card in his deck that can beat the Blue Eyes White Dragon. Not since Exodia took a swim, no. Yami squeezes his eyes shut, convinced he's already lost.
Dummy!Kaiba asks Yami if he's played his final card, because it sure looks like he's given up. Conical Hat Weirdo says this is the end, then, and commands the dragon to attack Yami. Uh... can monsters attack players yet? I know that was a thing later on in the Battle City tournament, but I didn't think it was a rule in this tournament.
When did he play that?
Yeah, and the Blue Eyes White Dragon isn't attacking. It just hangs out, chillin', and Conical Hat Weirdo is shocked. Yami looks pretty surprised too, while Conical Hat Weirdo asks why the dragon isn't attacking. What's even more unbelievable? It starts to disintegrate before his very flustered and popping eyes. He laments how it's vanishing, and doesn't understand why, dropping the puppet and yelling that this can't be happening now. Yami stares, silently saying Kaiba's name.
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? At first, it was difficult for me to pinpoint just what bothered me about this chapter. I thought it was the excessive amount of recapping at the beginning, but generally I try to forgive that because serializations have to assume that they'll have a certain amount of new readers coming in at odd points in the story. This was a fairly complicated encounter, given that there's a lot of history behind it, and how it was condensed wasn't BAD for how much information there had to be gotten across to any new readers. It could have been BETTER, but it wasn't terrible.
I thought it might also have been a difficulty of determining whether the ventriloquist was trying to talk through his dummy all the time, or only part of the time. The dummy DID seem to have its own distinct dialogue from the actual ventriloquist, so I separated the two in the snark above, which is why I attributed some to the ventriloquist and the rest to the dummy. But it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because you would think the ventriloquist would give ALL his dialogue to the Kaiba doll in an effort to make the experience more surreal and disturbing to Yami. After all, the whole POINT of this gig was to mess with Yami's head and make him think Kaiba was seeking revenge by proxy.
But even that wasn't quite it. My real issue with the chapter came at the end, when the Blue Eyes White Dragon wouldn't attack and disappeared. The fact that this didn't happen with the previous Blue Eyes White Dragon was inexplicable in itself. Why didn't the first dragon summoned disintegrate too? Why didn't ALL of the cards? Why didn't Kaiba wake up and reinsert his will into them sooner?
Because this HAS happened before. This situation is meant to mirror the first duel between Yami and Kaiba, in which Kaiba's use of a card that didn't belong to him and didn't have his heart and will in it failed to attack. That card originally belonged to Sugoroku, who put a great deal of significance in it because it was given to him by a friend and not just used to beat opponents. Now, the ventriloquist is using Kaiba's cards and lacking control of them in the same way.
Here's the thing, though: those three Blue Eyes White Dragons don't belong to KAIBA either. He used various violent and underhanded tactics to get them from the people they REALLY belonged to, as he admitted in his duel with Sugoroku. And since Kaiba was in a coma from that day on, after losing to Yami, he didn't exactly have time to develop a genuine bond with them outside of that awful context. They SHOULDN'T have shown any loyalty to him until he bucked up and became a better steward of them later on.
I know that there is a greater context later that explains why Kaiba has control of those cards, but I still don't think it's enough to justify this blatant misuse of a parallel here. Why? If the greater context is supposed to explain why the Blue Eyes White Dragon automatically has an affinity for him, then Sugoroku's card should have automatically had an affinity for Kaiba too, invalidating what happened when the card showed loyalty to Sugoroku in Yami and Kaiba's very FIRST duel.
It's inconsistent and doesn't make any sense no matter how you slice it. And since the larger context I mentioned is a BIG DEAL at the end of the series (at least from my vague memories of the show), that's a BIG STRUCTURAL PROBLEM. This story is already on its way to being a Jenga tower of inconsistencies and contradictions, and we haven't even reached the one-hundred chapter mark yet.
Boy oh boy, what a treat.
In the anime, the Ventriloquist is replaced by an evil mimic who pretends to be the ghost of Kaiba. The dub changes this to the mimic being the dark side of Seto Kaiba sent to "the Shadow Realm" by Atem after Kaiba was mind crushed. Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged says it's just a gay clown who is trying to kill Atem for reasons even he's not aware of, which sounds about right, really.
ReplyDeleteAnother change in the anime, which makes less(?) sense than the manga is that Kaiba is not in a coma since the Mind Crush only removed his dark side, so instead of his soul bond with his cards causing Sinatra to disappear, he instead sends a virus into the hologram machine which... counts as Sinatra being destroyed and removes it from the field? I don't know. It was really dumb.
I think in the anime, they were aiming for a more general audience, and Kaiba being in a coma alone might have been a bit of a bummer for younger kids. That aside, I think they maybe wanted to cool it on the more "spiritual" aspects of the affinity of the cards here, because to be honest it is a little confusing, even for me. I think the justification for it is just not there, as I pointed out in the analysis at the end, so it can come across as a little weird.
DeleteAt least the virus in the big arena makes a little sense from a technical standpoint, but to me they're both equally unsound in how unsupported they seem to be in the wider context of the story.