Yu-Gi-Oh Manga: 319 The Pawns of Memory!

Sometimes I feel like I'm a pawn of my own memory, and judging by a lot of the memes floating around, I'd say I'm not the only one. Finding yourself lying awake at night replaying some moment of intense embarrassment or loss in your  life seems to be a pretty pervasive experience, one which makes people wonder why their brains hate them so much. In my advanced age (exaggeration, but still...), I've gotten to the point where I can do that a bit less, because I've had time to train myself MOSTLY out of the habit of dwelling on shit I can't change, emphasis on the MOSTLY. Of course I still have those moments where I just can't stop thinking about that moment ten years ago when I said something stupid and spent the rest of the night hiding my bright red face in shame. 

It begs the question: if I'm the pawn, what larger game are my memories playing here? What's the strategy behind these painful trips down the proverbial lane?

*fingers crossed* Oh PLEASE don't be a fake-out, PLEASE...

Surprisingly, thief!Bakura still has some blood in him to spit up through his gritted teeth. He mumbles that Diabound, his spirit, is fading, and it does indeed seem to finally be dissipating into thin curls of smoke. I am SO relieved right now, I cannot even express it. Through blurred vision, thief!Bakura regards Yami and insists to himself that he MUST kill the pharaoh, increasing his grip on two of his greatly increased collection of Millennium Items as he continues to urge himself that he must stop the pharaoh now. 

An echo of his promise to steal the items and acquire that dark power he wants so bad appears over an image of the mold tablet, and thief!Bakura collapses to his knees next to it gurgling in barely conscious pain. He inserts the Millennium Puzzle into its slot, grinning an thinking there's nothing he can't steal, being the king of thieves and all. In short, the dude's finally lost it. Yami and the priests look on at this rapid descent into madness, Priest Seto vocalizing that it's no good to thief!Bakura, because as long as they have the last Millennium Items, this "great evil god" thief!Bakura keeps referencing won't ever be set free.

At long last, Akhenaden stumbles the rest of the way into the chamber. I'd say better late that never, but I don't think that's true in this case. Especially since when he observes thief!Bakura groaning and putting each item into its designated slot, what began as labored anxious breaths morphs into a quiet sinister laugh as he leans on a pillar for support. That horrible sleep paralysis demon of mine, Zorc Necrophades, looms behind him like the terrifying apparition it is, thinking that everything is at last in place for his ceremony to resurrect his soul. The seven Millennium Items and their wielders are all there, and apparently thief!Bakura didn't really need to get ALL of them in his possession after all. Pawn that he was the whole time, ZN dismissively says thief!Bakura has served his purpose.

Yeah, that'll happen in those sleep paralysis fits.

Thief!Bakura screams as his whole body dissolves into sand, Yami staring in disbelief and horror at him disappearing in the worst way possible. Behind Yami, most of the priests are gathered around Kalim's inert form, yelling his name in shock as he too starts turning into sand. Siamun stutters, questioning what magic this is that has him literally collapsing into grains of sand. I guess he was living in an hourglass, and his time was up. Are my jokes getting worse? Probably.

Anyway, farewell Kalim. I'm sorry that I had to repeatedly look your name up so often. 

The screaming from thief!Bakura has ceased, simply because his mouth has completely dissolved, but his wide, horror-stricken eyes are still wide with the slow existential agony to which he's been subjected. This is pure fucking nightmare fuel guys, no lie. Someone off-panel advises Yami that this is actually a RULE of this world - when a pawn is no longer required, it disappears from the game. Yami is even further shocked by the new voice, and by the it addressing him by Yuugi's name.

Because this is actual Hell? I don't know. 

Asshole!Bakura asks Yami sarcastically how it's going, because he's clearly reveling in how absurd a struggle Yami has been engaging in this entire arc. He says Yami seems to have gotten into character pretty easily, only to acknowledge this whole world is based on Yami's memories and his own life 3000 years before, so it's not all that surprising really. Yami repeats the term "World of Memory" as a question, asking asshole!Bakura if he really means that thief!Bakura and Kalim are turning to sand because the world they're in right now isn't real. Not sure if he doesn't remember ZN already kind of revealing this before because he turned back time, OR if ZN's whole long-winded exposition session wasn't really out loud. Either way, or BOTH, Yami appears to be confused all over again, but asshole!Bakura isn't in a particularly communicative mood to fix that. Instead of directly confirming what he means, asshole!Bakura indicates that people turning to sand isn't the only strange thing that is going on, drawing Yami's attention to what's happening behind him.

Or what's NOT happening. Yami turns to see, shockingly, that all the priests are gathered around the half-dissolved Kalim, noting that they're all frozen and that time has stopped. 

Wait, did I say ALL the priests were frozen?

Yami notices right away that, in addition to still being mobile, Akhenaden has taken two of the remaining three Millennium Items off the frozen priests. Oh, so Yami and Yuugi combining their energy to summon Ra before isn't allowed because it isn't what happened back in the day, but THIS is fair game? Does ZN expect me to believe that he had enough power over the real world at this point in the real course of events to freeze time and have Akhenaden just pilfer those last Millennium Items? Or can I just conclude that the metaphor is dead and he just doesn't give a shit about whatever perimeters he set up before?

Akhenaden mumbles to Yami that the time has finally come, while Yami asks in horror what he's doing with those Millennium Items, in deliberate disbelief over what this probably means. Suddenly, Yami tenses with a groan, hyper aware of the fact that he can't move now, just like the priests. Thief!Bakura chuckles in the knowledge that the almighty Zorc Necrophades stopped time so that only Akhenaden can move now. More like almighty DICK Zorc Necrophades, supreme hypocrite. 

Yami groans again, watching helplessly as Akhenaden just walks right on past. Akhenaden reaches up toward his face while he makes his way across the chamber, indicating there's one last item to "get".

... Ew.

Akhenaden is still taking his time getting over to the tablet as asshole!Bakura encourages him to become their key to victory and raising up the great evil god. He might even be getting slower, what with all that blood-loss. As Yami can do nothing but watch Akhenaden get closer to the mold tablet, asshole!Bakura tells Yami that in no uncertain terms, he's just a pawn in this world driven by his own memories. Yami gapes over this description of "pawn".

What, thank you for informing him that this is another of those "what if we lived in a simulation?" black holes of thought? I would thank you for NOT telling me that, personally. Clearly he's aware that he's not really doing Yami a favor right now, given how much sardonic mirth he's drawing from it. Still frozen, Yami stares impotently as asshole!Bakura just laughs darkly at him. 

Meanwhile, in a city center that is just as immobile as Yami, its inhabitants still as statues in the middle of running and walking, the sky is swirled and darkened above them. Jonouchi is still moving about, though, urging the others to look at the new weird shit that's going on. The dart around looking at the frozen denizens of the city, Yuugi declaring after more deliberate observation that everyone has stopped dead. He wonders aloud what's happened to the busy city around them, Jonouchi waving his hand in front of a child with a ball mid toss in an attempt to get his paused attention (still not grasping that the kid wouldn't have paid him any mind if he WAS still moving). Honda wiggles his fingers in front of his OWN face, stating that THEY'RE still moving normally though. 

Jonouchi reiterates that everyone is frozen, and describes them as looking like a bunch of dolls, to which Anzu replies that it reminds her of when they were turned into figurines in Bakura's tabletop RPG game, way back in the beginning of their association. This gives Yuugi shocked pause, and he looks around at all the statues surrounding them, thinking on this word "figurines" until the epiphany actualizes after a moment. He looks up, with horror dawning on him, wondering about the nature of this world. With each new panel, we get a little more zoomed out, until the people below including Yuugi and company are pinpricks, the buildings are mere featureless boxes, and even the gate to the palace looks a bit dwarfed.

Just little sims experiencing the notorious 3 AM frame-rate tank.

OH! THAT'S why Bakura had to be excluded from the adventure in the puzzle. Well-played, KT.

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? The battle preceding this felt like it was taking an awful long time to resolve, so I'm tremendously relieved that it's over now. It was by no means awful, and had a lot of interesting points to it that I've already mentioned in previous entries, but it did drag on a bit. After the ghosts started behaving like a collective "get out of jail free" card for thief!Bakura, that's about when the mini arc started to lose quite a bit of luster. I understand really pushing your protagonist in the tension department and not letting up, but when the device for such starts to seem more like a cheap excuse with NO rules, and unanswerable questions start popping up in a reader's head, the whole situation might be living beyond its natural existence.

While I'm on the tangent of cheap excuses with no rules, can I just piss and moan over this time-freeze for a moment? The last time our protagonists experienced this time-fuckery, as I briefly referred to above, is when ZN turned back time to correct the flow of events and prevent Yuugi from interfering in the true course of events. I didn't LIKE this, but I did understand that this was fair if ZN wanted the natural timeline to be followed as closely as possible, especially if that would lead to the conditions he needed in order to redo that ritual to bring him back into the world. With the time-freeze, though, it seems there are one of two possibilities for it. The first is that this is how things actually went in the original iteration of events; somehow ZN had enough power and influence over the actual real world to freeze time and have Akhenaden steal the rest of the Millennium Items to put them in their designated slots. But if asshole!Bakura's dialog is to be trusted, two of our characters are only turning into sand because they're no longer needed for the larger game at play here within the Memory World, which is not following too closely the rules of reality because of its RPG status. It follows the rules dictated by ZN, and ZN seems to be making those determinations as he goes along.

Because the second possibility is that ZN is pausing time to his own benefit, regardless of his declaration that he cared so much about the integrity of the true events before. He's cheating, because he doesn't actually give a shit about how things actually went, using it only as an excuse when Yami manages to pull one over on him. Which actually makes sense, considering the stakes for him are rather high. His whole aim is to be reborn into the actual world, and not be trapped in the puzzle anymore. Much as it makes me bristle that he's being so hypocritical right now, it does make sense that he would do anything possible to tip the scales, so to speak, in his favor.

He's certainly got much more at stake in this than any of the other cheating villains, especially in the early chapters, and I can respect that. Better than Shadi, low as a bar that is to clear and all.

I'm kind of tickled by the shot of the game setup at the end there, I've got to say. I might have mentioned before how I thought it was a little odd that Bakura wasn't allowed to come along on their quest in the Millennium Puzzle, because it seemed like asshole!Bakura had already infiltrated the damn thing, so it shouldn't have made that much of a difference. It's clear now that Bakura, and his asshole counterpart OUTSIDE the puzzle, had to be out in the museum to put together the whole game board with these elaborate components. Given that Bakura doubtlessly has access to all kinds of shit with his father being an administrator of the museum, it makes sense that he could get into a conference room and get everything all set up in there, including the unconscious bodies of at least one of his buddies, with relative ease. I say "relative" because I don't know if I would believe a high school kid would be able to realistically do such a thing in reality, but kiddo has a bit of power behind him with the Millennium Ring and all.

The big-ass ZN mummy in the background awaiting its resurrection must have been a BITCH to move in there, regardless.