D: Okaydoke, hello!
B: Hello, how are you doing?
D: I’m a little bit knackered, but I’m ready to talk about Yugioh.
B: I believe that to be more or less a permanent condition.
D: Yeah, a little bit. This may may or may not be the case. Honestly, you could have broken into my house and shaken me awake and I still would have been like what? Yugioh? Yeah, sure.
B: I have not done this.
D: Just for the benefit of the listeners. I am quite safely in my podcasting tent. Fully awake.
B: I have not performed house invasion to demand that Dia talk to me about Yugioh.
D:If anything I'm forcing you to talk about Yugioh.
B: It is a reverse force here. Yes. Hello, hello, everyone, we should introduce ourselves because we sometimes forget to do that. I'm Duck. I'm one of your hosts today pronouns he/him.
D: I'm Dia, I'm the other host pronouns they/them.
B: And today we are performing, in the manner of an acrobat performing, a Jungian analysis of YuGiOh.
D: And I'm very excited.
B: Dia’s very excited. I am supposed to be leading on this one. Although I think we'll probably set aside a little more time for discussion at the end than we normally do.
D: This will happen whether we set the time aside or not so.
B: Right so I think we should just incorporate that into our plans. I have, listener I have spent 11 hours of my life watching Yugioh season zero.
D: Yes, you have.
B: I cannot recommend this experience.
D: I mean, I recommend it wholeheartedly because it possibly made me who I am as a person.
B: So this is the thing this is the thing is I understand that you imprinted on this as a child.
I am a grown adult in my 30s.
D: An adult taxpaying man.
B: Adult taxpaying man, I have had a conversation this week with a mortgage advisor, I have also watched a lot of Yugioh. I would… I preferred the conversation with the mortgage advisor.
D: So yes, valuable context. Yugioh was in a section of our long list of media called Personal obsessions, and I put it there.
B: Yes, you did. This is the thing is I appreciate that you imprinted on it as a child, I believe it to be aimed at 10 year olds and had I watched it as a 10 year old, I think I probably would have liked a lot more.
D: I think also there are things to like about it as an adult. I do not think that there is an overall thing to make an adult watch it for 11 hours.
B: Yes, I think that's fair. And this is also partly that I just don't have a good concentration span when it comes to visual media. This is just the thing about me. So watching 11 hours of anything is difficult.
D: Yeah.
B: Which is why it's taken us a month to come back to record this instead of two weeks because I just have struggled.
D: However, you do sound a lot more coherent than I did after I spent three weeks trying to understand Skyrim.
B: To be fair, you chose a method of understanding Skyrim that specifically excluded playing Skyrim which probably would have been the easiest, most coherent way to engage with that piece of media.
D: It would have been for anyone who can comprehensively play video games, but I genuinely struggle to. So if I had done that we would have come back to record next August.
B: I sympathise because it has taken me a month to get through 11 hours of recorded content.
I understand this problem. I sympathise. However, I think my job was slightly easier because I was able to just watch it, albeit slowly.
D: And yet here we are.
B: Rather than try to understand it through other people's YouTube videos.
D: Yeah, my complete inability to play video games without completely spacing out very much came to bite me.
B: There is to be fair version of playing Skyrim where you can just wander around and pick flowers.
D: Yeah, I thought that might not really lend itself to a religious allegorical reading.
B: Probably not. But it's a game that supports spacing out and picking flowers and all that.
D: Yeah, I've been told that I would probably enjoy Skyrim, I have not played it. But I have been told it lends itself to my inability to play video games in a way that for example, you know,
most video games, the average Sonic the Hedgehog game, things that are designed for children, and I am incapable of beating.
B: Right, the kind of game where you start at the beginning and then proceed along the path to the end.
D: Oh my god, I just I will space out and I'll just look up and my character died like 10 minutes ago.
B: Oh my god, mood.
D: And I was just in my brain going. Yeah, it would be really interesting if… [trails off into mumbling].
B: Yeah, I know, I sympathise with that. I do like video games, but I do play all of them with podcasts in the background and always have done.
D: During COVID my partner at the time and I did some Stardew Valley dates and she got very reasonably annoyed to me because I kept on wandering off from our dates. I was not paying attention to what I was doing in the video game. Like, we were having conversations. It's not like I was disengaging from my conversation with her. It's just I wasn't emotionally connecting that to our characters on the screen so we'd be having a lovely conversation, and I just wandered off to die in the mines in Stardew.
B: I didn’t know you could die in the miines in Stardew Valley, I've clearly got the wrong concept of what Stardew Valley is.
D: You can die in the mines very easily if you are bad at them.
B: I may have got it confused with Animal Crossing, which I also have never played.
D: I have played both enjoyed both. I think I might actually if it was possible to die in both I would have died in both. Regardless.
B: Anyway. So that's my kind of just just to set the emotional scene. I did not enjoy this experience. However, this is not a review programme. This is an analysis programme. I do think that we have a really good fit between text and analytic.
D: I feel like this is a match made in heaven. Jungian analysis of Yugioh.
B: Right, coming up with a thesis here was extremely easy.
D: Yeah, I think when you got assigned to this, I was like, I'm gonna send you like, you're going to watch season zero because we kind of thought, Okay, let's have like a coherent narrative rather than piece together episodes or manga pages, let's have like one little unit of thing. And I will do a rundown at some point of what the different versions of YuGiOh are just for confused listeners. But I did, you were planning to watch season zero, but I also sent you about three Wiki pages. And I think you could honestly have done this analysis from three Wiki pages because it's such a neat match.
B: It's a very good match. Yes. I probably have done the obvious thing, but that's okay. Sometimes the accurate analysis is the obvious one.
D: Exactly.
B: Do you want to… introduce us to what Yugioh is?
D: There was a pause there where I feel like I really felt like you were going to say do you want to tell us about Yugioh and then realised you knew the answer?
B: Well, it was all that I was trying to avoid saying very pointedly briefly. And it ended up being a very pointed pause instead.
D: Yeah. So yes. Dadadadada…
B: It’s an anime show.
D: So what we have specifically watched is one iteration of Yugioh, so yeah, I'm sure listeners are at least vaguely familiar with the fact that there is a YuGiOh anime, manga, card game, etc.
B:Yes, I hope if you're listening to us, you have heard of it as a nerd thing.
D: If you've not heard of Yugioh this is going to be a really excruciating hour, you might want to just like reevaluate your life choices that brought you to this point. But yeah, Yugioh which is a, originally it's a manga Written by Kazuki Takahashi, which is about a little boy who's bullied, he really likes games. He likes puzzles, he gets given an ancient Egyptian puzzle box--
B: Of course.
D: By his grandfather, a retired archaeologist who now runs a game shop.
B: All normal things to happen.
D: Very normal, extremely normal. And he manages to put it back together. And he's been told that you can make a wish on this puzzle. So he wishes for I believe, for friends in most versions?
B: Yeah, I think it's friends.
D: Yeah, it's for friends, and then discovers that the puzzle contains the spirit of a long dead Egyptian pharaoh with no memory.
B: Well, I’m gonna stop you there, he does not discover this.
D: And then he gets friends-- to be entirely clear, he does not discover this for some time, but I'm giving a very potted summary of Yugioh total.
B: Yugi finds, Yugi himself learns this like,
D: Oh, yeah, it takes a while.
B: Time is weird, but he learns this in about episode 25 of 27.
D: Yeah. So he eventually basically, I'm giving a potted summary of the overall thing then I'm going to zoom in to the bit you read.
B: That’s fair, of the actual plot rather than as it appears to Yugi.
D: Yeah, so the spirit of the Pharaoh who is in the puzzle will challenge wrongdoers, because, to things called Shadow games, which is basically the world gets a little bit weird. You play some form of game in the manga and in season zero especially this can be any game in the better-known anime which is Yugioh Duel Monsters. It's usually card games.
B: Yeah.
D: Which is very very funny when you are watching it as an adult. You sort of accept it when you're nine and then you watch it as an adult and people are having these world changing high stakes card games and you go, God imagine if that was Pokemon cards.
B: Well, in a very similar way to Pkémon, where you watch it at 10 like yeah, adventure with friends. And then as an adult you're like, yeah, children being in cockfighting tournaments. This is a bit weird.
D: So as the story goes on, there's kind of dual plots of the current day modern world plot that involves duel monsters, the card game that they're all really into. And this involves degrees from, running from like necromancy to corporate espionage is all happening in this plot.
B: In the same episode sometimes.
D: Quite frequently. Yeah. Sometimes the same character. His plan is to commit corporate espionage to make his necromancy easier.
B: True.
D: There's a lot going on with Pegasus. Anyway. At the same time, the B plot which you later find out is actually the plot of Yugioh is ticking along which is there are various shady vaguely ancient Egyptian characters who have similar items to the puzzle, which we at some point learn is Millennium puzzle, there are other Millennium items. There are various people who are reincarnated versions of people who had these items in ancient Egypt times. And within like the span of the last seven like, days of plot, you find out the entire backstory of millennium items, they, I'm not gonna get into it partly because I assume it's not relevant because it wasn't in the version you watched.
B: Yeah, none of that appears in this.
D: But it involves, yes. In like the last 20 minutes of plot maybe, you get the entire plot of YuGiOh which involves like, human sacrifices, reincarnations, dark shadow monsters, there's a lot going on. You also find out that the blue eyes White Dragon is a girl, which is the funniest revelation you could possibly drop on someone in like, the final 20 minutes of plot.
B: Sure, why not? That might as well also be a thing.
D: The main plot is Yugi having the adventures, the adventures and the power of friendship stuff, I think, and I am looking at our chat here where I sent over links, and I think I described it to Duck when this was first assigned a couple weeks ago, as you know, it was like what if the horror story went off the rails because the monster got really into Magic the Gathering?
B: Yeah.
D: And it's not not that.
B: It's not not that it's also very much in season zero, from what I've watched because I haven't watched any of the other versions.
D: Yeah.
B: When we say learning about the power of friendship, that is literally the plot power by which he succeeds in various
D: Yeah, no I’m not being--
B: The power of friendship is a magically enforced power of friendship victory.
D: Yes, I am not being flippant when I say the power of friendship. I mean, the power of friendship gives him the power to crush people's minds
B: There are five or six times what he's about to lose and he goes no, but I have friends and the memory of having friends gives him magical strength by which he wins.
D: Sometimes in games of pure chance, like he wins coin flips through the power of friendship. B: Right and I wish that worked.
D: Later in the manga and your monsters I don't think it actually comes up in season zero, you learn a bit about the heart of the cards, which is, you're such good friends with all the monsters in your card deck that you can like, channel the monster you need to the top of your deck. And it is never explained how this works on a physical level. And it's bothered me for about 20 years.
B: If you start applying physical laws to the contents of YuGiOh you will go mad.
D: You absolutely well. Yes. So as I said you Yugioh has been adapted essentially twice. There are many, many series. But there are two sort of streams of series. If you go by how stupid the hair colours are. Once focusing on the early sections before the Magic the Gathering stuff really kicks off, and which is the game duel monsters in universe and once focusing on the Duel Monsters plot without so much of the horror elements. The version that Duck has been watching is season zero, which is the first adaptation that has, I would say is more true to the manga. Definitely. It's a little bit toned down from the manga, the manga has a lot more straight horror. The manga is also incidentally the version I got into when I was seven because I was a morbid child.
B: Your reading was not well supervised.
D: I was not supervised. I had Internet access. It's a story of our times.
B: Well, our listeners can either empathise, empathise or are now frantically checking that their children do not have access to adult mangas.
D: Yes, I stumbled into a YuGiOh fan site when I was genuinely sevenish, I think? That had not actual episodes, but a lot of fanfiction, a lot of fanscans and a lot of transcripts of episodes. So I didn't actually watch either of the anime until years and years later. I read transcripts of both anime, which is not necessarily the recommended viewing experience. But I had fun.
B: At 15, that was how I was consuming Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
D: Yeah.
B: Was through script fansites.
D: And you know, we both have very normal relationships with media. That's why we do this podcast.
B: Absolutely.
D: Anyway, so that's sort of the potted history of YuGiOh overall, season zero takes us from Yugi puts together the puzzle,
B: Yep.
D: Through sort of the discovery that there is this dark Yugi Pharoah character.
B: Yeah.
D: And that's discovery to the viewers, it takes a while for Yugi.
B: Yugi has no idea.
D: Yugi has no idea what is going on for most of season zero.
B: Although one of the girls does and she's very into it.
D: Yeah Anzu, who people who watched the Duel Monsters anime will know as Téa--Tea? Téa.
Spots that there is a spirit of some kind possessing Yugi to kill people with games and thinks, that is my man.
B: Right. She's like sometimes Yugi goes weird but in a hot way.
D: Do you know what, I respect her so much.
B: I like weird hot Yugi, I'm gonna put myself repeatedly in danger to try and provoke weird hot Yugi to come out and protect me.
D: I have so much respect for Anzu, she knows what she's about.
B: It is honestly very teenage girl. It's like I have developed a psychosexual interest and I am going to pursue it in a relentlessly weird way.
D: Yeah, they turned down a lot of her weirdness in Duel Monsters and I think it's a weaker show for it. I think you need to have deranged horny behaviour from your teenage girls.
B: It's only accurate. If you want to be relatable to your audience.
D: Anyway, she's probably the most familiar with the plot of Yugioh of any character in Season Zero.
B: She has more idea of what’s going on.
D: She’s at least vaguely aware that something is happening. We also meet the rest of Yugi friends so we meet a Honda who Duel Monsters viewers know as Tristan, Jounouchi who is Joey, and um, Miho who is completely disappeared from Duel monsters despite the fact that she's great. She is honestly equally deranged. It's just she has slightly more normal taste in men.
B: It's true.
D: None of these people make good life choices. Yugi probably tries, no one else is trying to make good life choices to be fair. And we also meet a few of the sort of most iconic fan favourite characters and iconic fan hated characters, depending who you ask. So we meet Shadi, the mysterious guy who knows a lot about ancient Egypt and tells us absolutely sod all.
B: Right, in season zero, I have to make it clear he turns up for two episodes. He explains absolutely nothing and he has never seen it again.
D: It is honestly kind of iconic.
B: He clearly shows up with a bunch of lore that he understands but he does not explain this lore and then he leaves.
D: Yeah, that is not explained for several 100 issues.
B: There's just, he’s also around. There’s also this guy.
D: Like, Yugioh was serialised for I think like eight years? I think Shadi showed up in like the first year and then nothing for eight years.
B: No explanation.
D: Go king give us nothing! And of course we meet my personal favourites which are the Kaibas and Bakura. The Kaibas are probably, Seto is probably one of the best known Yugioh characters apart from Yugi and Yami Yugi, he’s the dude with the coat, who you've seen in reaction gifs if you're not familiar with YuGiOh.
B: I don't think I've seen this guy in a coat in reaction gifs.
D: It may be just the corner of the internet or on but there are several like, if you've ever seen the screw the rules. I have money meme reference. It's that dude. And he’s the guy that that is from.
B: It’s so good.
D: It's very good. That-- it's from the abridged series of Yugioh which honestly did more for Western culture than the Roman civilization. I can say that right? No one's gonna come for me. But yes, so we meet the Kaibas, who at this point, still like kind of evil when we meet them. Seto Kaiba is a teenage multimillionaire businessman.
B: Yeah.
D: Who we later find out has a very normal backstory, extremely normal, which I did explain to Duck, because you can’t go through this…
B: What if Elon Musk was 15 years old, and ran a toy company.
D: Gaming company it’s very important difference.
B: A gaming company, and had a strange like rivalry/obsession with a high school kid who barely understands he exists.
D: So they are the same age, for some reason in this Seto is in school, because that is his scheme to get Duel Monsters cards? Is he goes to different schools, and plays DUEL MONSTERS to get cards
B: To get the rare ones. Despite that he has money.
D: And he does all of this while managing a fortune 500 company. He has so much money.
B: What you may have learnt so far, listener, is that Yugioh does not make sense. It’s not one of the things it does, it’s not part of the project.
D: He also has a baby brother called Mokuba, who I love just because we are introduced to him as like this murderous gangster child.
B: He is a tiny gremlin.
D: And he is that for two episodes. And then he had a sweet baby innocent bean for the rest of the show. And it's just never really touched upon the he was fully down to commit murder.
B: Right, he's a tiny Gremlin who just wants his big brother to like him and also appears to be wearing his big brother's coat.
D: It's extremely cute.
B: It drags on the floor.
D: Literally the greatest moment of all of of the Duel Monsters anime, when the two of them are flying home from one of the adventures and Kaiba drapes Mokuba in his coat and you’re just like, he’s so small!
B: That sounds adorable.
D: He’s so tiny.
B: He’s very small. So is Yugi, we’ll get to that in the analysis.
D: He is so small. Also, the most notable thing about Kaiba from like a lore perspective is that he is a reincarnated ancient Egyptian priest. And he is involved in all of the--
B: This did not come up.
D: No, it didn't. It's not relevant.
B: But it strengthens my analysis, so thank you.
D: It’s really not relevant at any point. But it is... He is involved in all of the magical parts of the plot, right? There's soul stealing, there's reincarnation, there's possession, all of this stuff is going on. He does not believe in magic. He does not come to believe in magic even when the reincarnated Pharaoh is duelling Yugi for a place in the afterlife in front of him.
B: Magic happening to him does not prove anything except that he's having a weird day.
D: Okay, I feel like this tells you everything about this guy's characterisation.
B: Also, none of this happens in the version I watched.
D: No, it's just important to me that you know that.
B: He builds a theme park.
D: Yes.
B: That turns out to be just a series of like extremely deadly game arenas.
D: Yes. It's like if--
B: Specifically targeted at Yugi.
D: It is literally like it is a full sized theme park. It's like if you went to Disneyland and the COO of Disney, it was just like, oh, yeah, sorry, this was actually just a trap for one dude.
B: Right. And the show today is me having a game of Magic the Gathering.
D: To the death!
B: With this guy, to the death! Against this schoolkid.
D: Again, they are both school age, which is funniest to me because it's very easy to forget
that these people are supposed to also be attending high school while all of this is happening. And then final character I was going to touch on because he is my son is Ryou Bakura, who shows up at the very end of Season Zero, when there hasn't really been Plot Resolution, but there's a vague emotional sense of, we have been on an adventure. And then this guy shows up.
B: Right, the structure of Season Zero is off in that way. Because you have Kaiba being the main adversary in that very familiar, like, Monster of the Week with campaign plot kind of structure. So you have things happening that have nothing to do with him. And then you have episodes that are about him meddling with our protagonists, and we have another unrelated episode. And then we have this finale theme park, two or three episodes. And then we have four more episodes.
D: And those four episodes are a new kid shows up at schoool and invites them all over to his house to play d&d, at which point it is revealed for he also has a millennial item, which is a ring which has stabbed itself into his body that contains another ancient Egyptians spirit, this is a malicious one.
B: Right, he goes weird and evil and they have a weird evil game of d&d. And then that's the end of the series.
D: Yes. And it's this sort of like two or three episode just like, a little like evil d&d campaign. And like it's very high stakes sort of emotionally in that, you know, there's, it's hinting at the ongoing plot. It's got like Ryou trying to sacrifice himself for his friends. It's all very high stakes and dramatic. But because there was never a follow up, that's the end of the show. That is very funny as a structure.
B: Right. Now in, narratively it's bad. If you presented this as a narrative, like this is how I’m going to structure my story, they would say no.
D: Yeah, and that’s very much the vibe of Yugioh. You'll notice, listener, that none of what I've said is a summary of what Season Zero was. That's because a summary would not make sense. It's not possible to summarise season zero. It is a series of episodes introducing these concepts and characters that we have told you about.
B: Right with very, very little exposition. I understand what I do because of having read bits of the wiki and talked to Dia.
D: Yeah.
B: Rather than because the show told me this is partly why I did not have the best experience watching it because it's like as a show of an age where I care about narrative. And yeah, the narrative is--
D: The target audience for this is actually older than Duel Monsters. But the target audience for this was also people who had read the manga and didn't mind that it didn't make sense. So they kind of went in with an approach of you know what you're here for? You're here for this stuff.
B: Which does make a lot of sense.
D: Whereas the Duel Monsters anime I think has much more of an attitude of Hey, you, small child, you like TV shows, right?
B: Right.
D: What if we made one of those instead of whatever the heck season zero was.
B: I think season zero does have a particular flaw I want to touch on which is it has this weird combination, probably again, by dint of being an adaptation of compression and padding.
D: Yeah.
B: So you have things crammed into one episode that do not make sense because they did not take the time to explain what just happened. Like, and in those episodes, you have this sense of lots of just happened, but we have no time for that we have to move on to the next thing. And the next thing is about five minutes worth of show that takes 20 minutes because every other line is repetition or what? Or thc noises.
D: Occasionally--
B: There are so many angry cutting noises in this show. It's deeply annoying.
D: Also scare cords whilst cutting to someone's hand holding like a chess piece or something. B: Right and a lot of shots of someone's face but like the features on the face of vibrating with anger, but the whole head isn't.
D: Yeah, it it stylistically, a lot of choices were made.
B: Right. But one of the issues is that there is a lot of padding in some episodes and a lot of compression in others that
D: Yeah
B: That leads tip not ever knowing what's going on but having a remarkable amount of detail into exactly the back and forth of the dice rolls in the evil d&d game because everything gets explained three times.
D: Having steamrolled through Yugioh which just, it has so much to cover.
B: I’m sure you enjoyed this 20 minute explanation of all of Yugioh.
D: Do you want to hear about Jungian analysis.
B: Jungian analysis actually has a lot in common with Yugioh and I don't just mean in terms of themes, I specifically mean in the way that it is not very coherent. And if you try to make it cohere you are sort of going contrary to the project of what it is.
D: Yeah.
B: So in my researches of analytical psychology is technically the field. Apparently he named it analytical psychology so as to make it clear that it was different from psychoanalysis.
D: Yes.
B: To me, these are the same phrase.
D: Yeah, that’s fair.
B: But I'm not a German genius from the 1910s. So what do I know?
D: You shock me.
B: My disguise is very good. But in fact, the German genius from the 1910s. What's really striking about jungian analysis to me is how clear it is that it is simultaneously trying to invent the field of psychology, which is more or less what Freud was doing, they actually worked together for several years, Jung and Freud, this is a direct descendant of the theory from Freudian analysis. But at the same time, as he's doing that, he's also hanging out with the wonderful world of 1910s, spiritually, spirituality, magical thinking, alchemy, and the development of what sort of became New Age stuff, which is partly why it's difficult to get your head around what Jung is talking about in terms of psychology, because half of what he's talking about, is a spiritual magic framework into which he's fitting all of this. So like Jung's concept of the self, you would think the word “the self” had a fairly clear meaning. But in Jung's terminology, this is also the process of becoming one with the universe, the self is also God, the self is also at the whole of reality. And the process of becoming the whole of reality is also the self.
D: Yeah.
B: This is weird, when you are used to thinking in terms of psychology as what brains do, which is not a very familiar way of thinking about what brains do. Because that wasn't the whole of what he was doing. He was doing a number of other things that overlap. And if you try and draw out the like, the scheme of his various archetypes and things, it doesn't really work, because some of them contradict and some of them overlap. This, I think, is very Yugioh.
D: Yeah.
B: If you try to draw out the plot of Jung. It's, it has inherent difficulties in being reconciled. He has some interesting ideas, some of which I find convincing, and some of which I don't. So he has this one of his famous ideas is the collective unconscious, which sounds like it's proposing a hive mind, but it isn't. What he's saying is that you have certain inbuilt reactions to things, ways of thinking about, basically cognitive structures that kick in when you are exposed to certain things. I find this quite convincing, actually. Because I have seen the David Attenborough episode of Wildlife television, where you get about a five minute sequence of a swarm of locusts, and that is viscerally and upsetting in a way I cannot account for in anything in my actual life. It makes a lot of sense if it's just like humans don't like swarms of locusts. Humans are upset by snakes a lot.
D: I think I would be upset by a swarm of locusts.
B: Right? But it's upsetting in a way that has nothing to do with any actual danger you're in sitting in your bedroom watching a wildlife documentary.
D: Yeah.
B: It comes with a sense of impending doom.
D: Yeah.
B: Which feels innate. Humans basically worldwide are pretty upset by snakes not cripplingly. So for most people that you can deal with snakes, some people like snakes, but there is an attentiveness to the presence of a snake.
D: Yeah.
B: That feels potentially innate. I personally have also experienced the ancient primate feeling of where's the other lion. As I came down to the lion house in London Zoo had previously seen for myself that there were four lions, came back to the design house from the other direction, could only spot three of the lions and just knew that I would never rest easy until I had found the fourth lion.
D: Yeah.
B: So this is sort of the collective unconsciousness.
D: It is the emotion it is when I once was alone in a forest that I knew for a fact it was like a private woodland that I knew for a fact was empty and heard a dog barking, and just thought oh, okay, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. Now, this is how it happens.
B: Right. Your intellectual knowledge hat there are no wolves in England, was fully overcome by the ah! death has come to me.
D: Yeah. Okay, cool, good to know, good to know. Just accept that information, there's nothing I can do about it.
B: Right. And Jung's idea is that along with this, you also have sort of, constructions of thought or of instinct or of reaction, such as the idea of a mother the idea of a father the idea of a wise old man, the idea of a child.
D: Yeah.
B: That sort of kick in when you encounter situations for them. And that the interactions between those innate concepts, your personal unconscious, which he defines as basically everything you are not personally aware of. As opposed to Freud, Freud is like your unconscious of the stuff you have repressed. Jung says your unconscious is just everything you are not consciously aware of, including the stuff in your peripheral vision that you're not looking at right now, that's part of the unconscious.
D: Yeah.
B: The stuff that you would remember if you thought about it, but don't like consciously remember, that's in the unconscious. Not necessarily because you repressed it, maybe just because yesterday's trip to Tescos was not very memorable.
D: Yeah.
B: But now it's in your unconscious because you don't consciously remember it. And your consciousness, which is like-- he borrows the ego from Freud, various other things. I feel like it's the hardest to explain, because it's the most obvious. It's like the bit that you think of as being you when you think about what you are.
D: Yeah.
B: He also has this idea of, partly because he does, he's into the sort of New Age spiritualism stuff. He's very, very big on polarities and opposites and counterparts. Yes. So for Jung you have your conscious self and your unconscious self. This is the first obvious one, you have your persona, which is the version of yourself that you present to the world and to some extent to yourself.
D: Yeah.
B: Which is balanced by the Anima, or animus, which is the opposite gendered version of yourself that you do not present, outwardly to the world, but kind of use when internally dealing with yourself. The only reason it's heavily gendered is because he was writing in 1910. Because in his view, the goal of life is to individuate, which is to inter, integrate all of your parts, including these opposite gender parts into a harmonious whole. So he's not like, you need to-- Freud has this whole thing where he's like, and then the masculinity must overcome the femininity, otherwise, you become a weird pervert.
D: Of course.
B: Jung is like, No, you have to integrate all the parts of yourself, including the opposite sex parts of yourself, but he still feels like the opposite sex part is like a really important distinction because he's writing in 1910.
D: Yeah.
B: I genuinely think that so he probably would not have lent heavily on the and its opposite sex part of it if he had been writing now.
D: It's definitely, there's an element which you really understand why this caught on as literary criticism, like wildfire.
B: Yeah.
D: Like I say this as someone with a background in mythology and fairy tales.
B: Yep.
D: Never had to learn about union analysis. Like it just happened. I don't think I've ever read a paper or a book that explains Jungian analysis, because it would be like explaining soup.
B: You do also get some very odd results of applying Jungian analysis indiscriminately. Today I saw someone say that Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice is the Animus of Elizabeth Bennett, which I do not think is true.
D: No.
B: I do not think that Mr. Darcy is the unconscious. Like reverse self of Elizabeth Bennet. That's just not what's going on in that story.
D: You could make an argument that her father is in like a representative way of projecting the internal on the external and about which was very in vogue in that kind of Romantic era.
B: But thinking about Darcy is simply a case of steering yourself wrong by, by the classic blunder of if there is a dichotomy, it must map on to all other dichotomies.
D: And all dichotomies are essentially about gender.
B: Right. All binaries, can be mapped. And all binaries are basically the male, female, binary.
D: A nonzero amount of union analysis, which is, you know, sometimes you'll see like three things that are a weird combination, like three, you know, a brand that has three flavours that will have silly names, and you'll say, oh, yeah, the three genders?
B: Yes.
D: It's that as a school of literary criticism, when it's not done well. Like I once saw a brand of chocolate that had three brands, which were, I was a shelf of chocolate, which had three different flavours, which were white chocolate with strawberry, dark chocolate with almond and breakdown at the Carnegie Hall.
B: Ah, yes, the three genders,
D: Do you think I didn't send it out to everyone I've ever met or captioned. tag yourself, I'm--
B: Personally I break down at the Carnegie Hall.
D: I am definitely Breakdown at the Carnegie Hall.
B: Yes, there can be a degree of just I have I have a system and I'm going to apply it to everything. And I'm not really going to think too hard about whether it really works. Yeah, gender thing becomes a particular shortcut for that.
D: Well, sometimes in books, there are a man and a woman. And if there's a man and a woman, you can only do two things. You can do heterosexual things, or you can do Jungian things. And that's just how will happen for a lot of 20th century criticism.
B: Why not both?
D: Sometimes it’s both, but sometimes I think you get this weird thing where it's like, Well, the main character is a woman, and there is a man here who she is not having sex with.
B: So clearly, he must be a reflection of her unconscious traits.
D: Yes, he is in all elements the masculine parts of her soul yearning to break free and you’re just like, he is her brother.
B: Right, and any level on which they dislike each other is projection because Jung also has this thing which is what we're going to focus on today of, you have the ego which is for Jung, the executive part of the self. It is the part that is consciously aware of itself. It is the part that is present in the Persona. It's the part that is out front, in his own words, it is the light half of the self. And then there is the shadow, the necessary counterpart of the dark half of the self, which is everything that you don't want to be part of yourself, not just the things you are unaware of, because your light side has an unconscious, which is parts you are not aware of. But there is the shadow self, which is the parts that you don't want to be true.
D: Yeah.
B: Which are not necessarily all your evil parts. Because you may have some, you may think of yourself as I am very strong and tough. And therefore part of your shadow self is the potential to be nurturing.
D: Yeah.
B: Which you probably would even say to yourself, well, that nurturing is a good thing to be, but I'm not that. But of course, you do have that potential. So that potential ends up repressed into the shadow. Can you see where I'm going with this?
D: I can. And I'm just going to do a quick preface. Slightly, probably going to make fun of Jungian analysis. It's really good. It's just a really good school of literary analysis. I'm very fond of it.
B: Right, I'm not I'm not, to be fair, I'm not trying to poke fun. I'm trying to… I think there are both limitations. And a degree to which what Jung was doing isn't what we tend to assume he was doing in terms of how modern psychology thinks about its own project.
D: Yeah.
B: Which I think is interesting context. Because I don't think he's right about a lot of how he thinks body-minds work.
D: This is definitely the first one of these we've done where I would love to Vincent in the Dr. Jung.
B: Right. I would like to go and see what he thought he was doing.
D: I would like to bring Jung into the room with me today and show him Yugioh.
B: So, Yugioh, through some stuff about reincarnation of ancient Egyptian personages, which I am going to as a, as an analytical conceit, recklessly define as a metaphor that we don't need to think about too hard.
D: Oh, don't worry, I didn't send you the in depth fan analysis of how this is actually all a metaphor for the dark and light parts of your soul.
B: I appreciate that.
D: We got you covered, I will pepper that in for the people who are listening going what about the ba and the ka and the ren? What about the light in the dark halves? I might interject with some of those when it's a good bit, but when it's bad and unhelpful we're going to ignore it.
B: We're going to focus today our analysis on the three figures of Yugi himself, Saito Kaiba, Kaiba Seto, I don't remember which order the names go in the green haired guy who isn’t green haired--
D: Pick one and stick to it, it doesn’t matter.
B: We're gonna call him Kaiba because I remember that name.
D: Yes.
B: And Bakura--
D: Yay!
B: Who appears and is important in like the first four episodes, but it's important to this analysis.
D: And is also my son. I am wearing a millennium ring right now. I believe you and I regret that. I own so much Yugioh jewellery, I came in cosplay.
B: I have to point out though in in in season zero he is not wearing a ring he is wearing a dream catcher.
D: The Millennium ring is very dreamcatchery.
B: No, because because the other guy who doesn't explain anything and is in two, the like actual wearing a turban guy,
D: Shadi.
B: The guy is wearing an actually ring on his hand Bakura is wearing a dreamcatcher.
D: Yes, but the dream catcher is called a ring. I think Shadi has the torc? Doesn't he? No, he has the scales.
B: I think he's carrying some scales but he also is wearing the ring. It's there's not a lot of explanation including consist it is difficult. I struggled.
D: Yeah, there are there's a lot going on with different, with the Millennium items in general that you just don't need to know for any of Yu--
B: Shadi falls down a hole, but he's also inside your the soul at the time. And then the other Yogi pulls him out from in the hole and then he's like, I respect that and leaves.
D: Yeah.
B: None of this ever makes sense to me. I'm choosing to ignore it and assume it was metaphorical.
D: I’m really sorry, bruh.
B: Simply because I don't. For the purpose of this. I don't think that the reincarnation of Egyptian figures stuff helps with applying the Jungian framework to this stuff.
D: Of course. Yeah. Please don’t send us emails.
B: Treating the ancient Egyptians pharoahs that are semi possessing, sometimes possessing, sometimes working with Yugi and Bakura as their shadow selves, gives us a really interesting sort of explanation of what is going on. Jungian philosophy proposes that the ultimate goal of the self and basically the purpose of the second half of your life, because you spend the first half of your life like growing up and learning to be an ego and then you spend the second half of your life coming to grips with the idea of death and learning to be like wise and philosophical and integrating your parts. I am proposing here that Yugioh is giving us three people and their respective struggles with confronting their shadow selves.
D: Okay.
B: So we have Kaiba. Kaiba fails to even confront his shadow self. That is just the one version of Kaiba. There is brief flashbacks to a time when he was nice, and had brotherly love which he now rejects entirely but the version of himself that he inhabits and lives out, and which is shown through the plot of the story, to be fundamentally incapable of victory, to be doomed to lose, and to suffer, does not confront his own shadow self. He does not ever interact with the other Kaiba. There's just the one Kaiba, and the one Kaiba is inadequate to the task of life.
D: This is where I am going to jump in with the lore dump, which is basically--
B: There is a shadow self that he's just not aware of, and I’m right!
D: No, it's way funnier than that. He is one of the only reincarnations who is not divided into a light and dark half. And he finds this out, looks his former self dead in the eyes and just says, Nope, not accepting this not today.
B: You see, I'm right. I'm just right in everything.
D: I refuse to develop as a person.
B: I refuse to develop as a person, developing as a person is weakness and I reject all weakness and cannot contemplate the fact that there might be any weakness in myself.
D: Though after After getting his mind crushed by Yami, twice, he does decide to be less of a dick to his brother and his brother alone.
B: That's I guess some growth.
D: Which is so funny.
B: And I’m glad for him, but it is not it is not the Jungian apotheosis of which he is.
D: It is not, it is a conscious decision to be less shitty to one specific person.
B: Right. He is not individuated. Second of these figures, is Bakura who has an exclusively antagonistic relationship with his shadow self. His shadow self takes over for the game of evil d&d, and they are actively fighting over who gets to roll the dice they each in control of one arm, there's possessed dice, they're swapping out the possessed dice for secretly not possessed dice so the other arm can roll them and then they don't win. It's a bit convoluted, but functionally--
D: It's the most unhinged d&d game of all time. And that is saying something.
B: It's amazing. While this is happening, almost all of the characters are trapped in the minis.
D: Yeah.
B: Yeah.
D: It’s weirdly cute.
B: Including Yugi, is trapped in a mini. But Bakura is actively antagonistic towards his shadow self. He is aware that there is an evil version of himself, there is a version of himself that he wishes to reject and to not be. And that evil version of himself is aware of Bakura and similarly feels that he wishes to reject and destroy Bakura. And they actively fight event--
D: He does, however, address Bakura as his landlord, which is the funniest thing ever written in my opinion.
B: That is funny.
D: He describes trapping people souls in dolls and leaving them in the house for Bakura to find as paying rent.
B: See that's creepy.
D: Truly iconic.
B: Right, but they actively fight. So he's aware there's another side of himself. And his response to this is purely to reject it and oppose it.
D: Yes.
B: He gets this sight of the parts of himself that he does not wish to acknowledge. And he says, Well, those are definitely there. What I need to do is cast them out of myself, and cut it away and just not… it’s bad. I found my shadow and I hate my shadow and my shadow is a bad thing. And our third-- so he does not individuate he represses all of that so far down, it can't pop up again. And he goes on with being a nice boy. He is a nice boy. #
D: He is such a good bean.
B: Our third figure then is Yugi. Yugi starts off. Well, I say starts off, Yugi spends like 20 episodes of this 27 episode series, unaware that he does anything apart from occasionally blackout, which are the times that Dark Yugi, aptly named, takes over and wins games, and violently punishes people who cheat at games. Which is…
D: As one does.
B: It’s very weird to me that one of them is literally a terrorist who's blowing people up. But what he gets punished for is like, not playing fair.
D: I mean, I would say by definition, terrorism is not playing fair. So in a way.
B: Still, I just… Dark Yugi has very specific moral code. He applies it quite specifically. It doesn't really treat with things like blowing up theme parks for fun, but it does treat with cheating at blowing up theme parks for fun.
D: He's from ancient Egypt. They didn't have theme parks.
B: I'm not willing to assume that. I will grant that they probably didn't have Ferris wheels. Which is the tool being used for the terrorism but you know they may have had…
D: In this universe anything's possible.
B: Exactly. We're very into games in this universe. Maybe they had theme parks.
D: I'll have you know that the card game was actually the ancient Egyptian judicial system, not a game.
B: That actually improves everything I love knowing this fact. It doesn't make any sense but it pleases me.
D: It was also a game I think but it was also a significant part of the judicial system.
B: It’s a magically enforced and of course the game if you win at the game, it’s because it's trial by ordeal. I understand.
D: Yes, though there is also a whole separate arm of the judicial system which is involved, involves like, putting people at trial and then ripping out their souls to become monsters to then use in the game.
B: That’s a bit weird.
D: So there's a lot happening yeah, that's how the dragon thing happens. So when I mentioned that the dragon Kaiba is obsessed with there's actually a girl who his like, preincarnation had a thing for she got, she done got unsouled and turned into a card game.
B: Things that happen all the time in ancient Egypt.
D: It’s a real That's rough buddy situation.
B: My first girlfriend got turned into a dragon.
D: A dragon playing card.
B: A Magic the gathering card. Yeah.
D: Anyway.
B: Anyway. So Yugi becomes over the course of the series and especially the last couple of arcs but, but like it really becomes outright during the Bakura thing, but he has kind of been working it out over the last few episodes. That there is another Yugi, there is another self that can take over and is just astonishingly good at games in a way that normal Yugi isn't. Normal Yugi is very self-effacing. He just wants to get along. He has this extremely high pitched childish voice. He is about four foot tall when everyone else has hit their teenage growth spurt.
D: Not counting the hair.
B: Not counting the hair. He has a remarkable personal sense of style as well, but I don't think it's symbolic.
D: He is iconic.
B: I think it’s just. When you draw things you end up with occasionally like, like really chunky collars under your school uniform that is never even mentioned.
D: Truly every type of Goth is represented in Yugioh.
B: Right. I think it's just style, it just ends up looking very odd. But he becomes aware that he has this shadow self, the one that Anzu finds very sexy, because he is decisive and he takes action. And he's very powerful. And he always wins at games.
D: The hottest trait, being good at Magic the Gathering.
B: He is intense, in a way that regular Yugi does not do intense. So he does have that sort of oppositional element to the way that Yugi presents himself and the way he wants to be and to understand himself.
D: Now that you’ve said that I'm thinking very differently on the guy who once tried to impress me by taking me to watch him play Magic the Gathering.
B: He was trying to be dark, yeah, your Dark Yugi.
D: I shouldn't… maybe you had the wrong idea about my enjoyment of Yugioh.
B: Maybe I think that might be what was happening there. And then you get in the last arc literally, because regular Yugi gets put into this doll, this miniature that's being used to play Dark Dungeons and Dragons, literally looking back at his other self, who is piloting his body.
And having this moment of collaborative recognition, we can work together, we must work together to save our friends. But also we can work together, we can make each other stronger, we can be a better team than either of us can be separately. So Yugi gets to individuate or to be on that road to individuation. Yugi faces his shadow self and says I can work with this. It can be a good thing, that the, to have these traits, or for some part of me to have these traits, it can be good that the parts of myself I don't normally wish to be aware of can take the fore and help sometimes and I don't need to be in conflict with my own shadow. And the shadow looking back says basically the same about Yugi like, you know, it's fine that this guy is normally around and out front. It's all right. We don't have to fight about this.
D: Yeah.
B: So Yugi is in Jungian terms doing it right, he is in fact developing as a person.
D: Yeah.
B: So there's my theory that these these three figures are presented as three ways of approaching your shadow self: to deny it utterly, to reject and fight it, or to confront and accept it.
D: I like this. Yes.
B: No tell me all the ways I'm wrong because I don't understand about Yugioh.
D: Yeah, I actually had a fun way of structuring this little tail segment where I nerd about Yugioh, that will make sure you're still involved rather than just me talking for an hour. What I wanted to do and this I am genuinely asking for your consent, because this is throwing something at you. But can I just tell you things that happened in the manga and Duel Monsters and see if you can fit them into your current analysis?
B: Okay, let's have rapid fire Jungian analysis. For the listener, I do not understand more of Jungian analysis, then you can learn by some Googling and reading various bits of the International Journal of Psychiatry.
D: I mean to be fair that is about it…
B: I trained as a chemist and do not understand body minds very well. And I'm not sure Jung did either but with these things said, please hit me with the plot of Yugioh. A thing I do not understand.
D: I think you understand more than Jordan Peterson. That's all you need.
B: That's not doing too well. I grift a lot less well and Jordan Peterson.
D: It’s a shame If only people who were like correct about things were better at being grifters.
B: I think it’s because grifting, really good grifting requires more lying to yourself than I tend to do.
D: True. Anyway, let's go rapid-fire.
B: Let’s go, rapid fire Jungian analysis. Of I lose this game I assume I get, you know, trapped in a pocket watch or something.
D: Sure. Okay, let's go, so the first real arc of the Duel Monsters anime is Pegasus who is the guy who owns the card game Duel Monsters, invites everyone to an island for a tournament and forces Yugi to be part of this tournament by beating his grandfather in a card game and sucking out his soul and saying he'll give the soul back as a prize.
B: Everyone wants to use Yugi’s granddad as a hostage.
D: It's a whole thing.
B: Really, all you have to do to get Yugi in your card game was say, Hey, do you want to play a game? And he'll be like, yes!
D: Yeah, he loves playing games, you can just ask!
B: You can just ask.
D: At the same time Pegasus has also kidnapped Mokuba thanks to an internal coup at Kaiba’s company. So they're both hostages up into that though, unbeknownst to themselves are both trying to win the company to get back a hostage and both think the other is just really intense about card games, which to be fair is not incorrect.
B: Also true. Yes.
D: At this point, they end up duelling one another for a like quarterfinal position or whatever it is. They're having this card game duel using holograms that can, could cause actual ripple effects in the ground on the top of a tower.
B: Uhuh.
D: So Seto Kaiba walks back to the very edge of the tower when he knows he's about to lose and says if you cast the next move, the shock wave will knock me off this tower to my death. Yami Yugi goes, fuck it I want to win this card game. And regular Yugi says absolutely not, we are not committing a murder. And this is the first time the two fall out. How does this fit into your Jungian analysis.
B: It is not aware to simply, it is not enough simply to become aware of your shadow. You have to accept that you have a shadow, you must also go on to do the rest of the work of actually integrating it and in this process, you will come into conflict with the traits that you possess and wish you did not.
D: Very nice. Next up, they do in fact get into the quarterfinals or whatever the heck it is they do get to duel Pegasus to get back to the soul of the granddad. And Pegasus, Dun dun dun, has a millennium item he has the Millennium eye, which means he's ripped out his eye and replaced it with a trinket from an ancient Egyptian tomb which I’m sure is entirely sanitary.
B: Creepy, hate it.
D: And he can use that eye to read people's minds. So he can see all of these cards before he plays them. The only way Yami and Yu, Yami Yugi and regular Yugi can play is by taking turns so neither of them knows what cards the other has placed facedown and they're always not totally sure what's on the field in front of them, they have put their faith in the heart of the cards and in the other's ability to play. Go!
B: Ummm…
D: Yeah, I threw mind reading at you out of nowhere.
B: It just feels like a natural evolution of the thing you know.
D: It does.
B: It feels like, having you know, you have this conflict with your shadow self, but you also have
to achieve full enlightenment sorry, individuation. You have to learn to work with it, which does not mean that it isn't still your shadow, it is still going to be the parts of you that you don't want to have the parts of you that you are not consciously aware of. But you have to sort of take that trust fall, that it is still part of the self and that the self is fundamentally oriented towards enlightenment.
D: Very nice. Okay, let's keep going. We're coming back to my son now, my small boy. Two things, one, if you regard season zero as a prequel to Duel Monsters, it's very funny because they introduced Ryou in the exact same way.
B: But again.
D: Which is that he sits down at their camp and goes, Hey, let's all decide which is our favourite card. And they will tell him which is their favourite card. And he actually chooses as his one called change of heart, which is a card that allows you to control other people's monsters, to give a hint that he is secretly being controlled, and he's going to trap them all in their cards. But when they're trapped in their cards, Yami Yugi takes over. And it's the exact same thing. It's literally the exact same bot as the D&D thing.
B: It just happens again.
D: But in this version, Bakura gets to give them a hint in advance. What does that mean?
B: Well, that sort of repetition feels like it's very much the sort of thing you would encounter in a therapeutic environment where you're like, didn't we deal with this last time I had this problem your therapist is like, yes, but you have to deal with it again. It's gonna keep coming up. But you know more this time because you dealt with it once already. So you have a head start.
D: Very nice. You're rolling with these Not gonna lie. Okay, we have now accomplished Well, this is just a gross detail, but I'm just gonna walk us through to the next bit of plot where I'm gonna pitch you a question. So blah, blah, blah, they get back Mokuba they get back to you these grandfather’s soul, everything's fine. They're not upset with Yami over that time he nearly committed a murder. Everything's great. Bakura actually gets free of the ring, the spirit of the ring, but the ring finds him again, including-- I think it's not actually this time around. It's the next time around. But there's a great scene where he would seek sanctuary in a Catholic church which was added to the anime. Sure why not, he actually rips the Millennium eye out a Pegasus’s head.
B: Gross.
D: So we now find out he's collecting the Millennium items. And then Kaiba announces that he's running battle city tournament, where an entire city is going to be the arena for the Duel Monsters tournament with the police's cooperation and everything, it's great. And this involves basically, a group called the rare hunters who are hunting rare cards, enjoy monsters show up and start cheating and games to get rare cards. And they're led by a guy called Malik or Marik. You know, it's the same in Japanese, who cares, I can't remember which is the official one, I think it's Malik. And what happens here, which is quite interesting is we find out that Malik does have dark self, so he has a dark personality that has overtaken him. But the reason he has nothing to do with being possessed by an ancient Egyptian spirit, he developed this after years of abuse from his father, who was teaching him to be the heir of a secret underground order of Tomb keepers, who were passing on a message that had to be brought back to the nameless Pharaoh, which is what we found, find out is the pharaoh in the millennium puzzle.
B: Of course, very sensible mythology going on here.
D: Yes, how does this factor in? This is real psychology now.
B: This is actually works, itt fits, fits really well with sort of Jung's proposal of how the shadow self works, because it's quite clear that the shadow self is the parts that you do not wish to acknowledge, or to see as parts of yourself as traits that you have. And this is not about primarily morality, this can be very much to do with how you were raised and what you were allowed to show and therefore what you internalised ought to be part of you. As we said, with if you think of yourself as being very tough, and that sort of excludes the nurturing side, it, this is that this is your, the idea you form of yourself, and therefore the parts that end up in your shadow out of your sight are not primarily the evil parts. They're the parts that got pushed there.
D: That’s very nice. I do like that. Actually, I really liked that analysis. And we're also now leaning into my personal like conspiracy theory about Yugioh, which I have mentioned to you before.
B: I need to point out that just having a personal conspiracy theory about Yugioh is deranged.
D: Listen, you knew this when you met me.
B: This doesn't make me like you any less. I just need you to understand that it is deranged.
D: Okay, but hear me out, right. Because I am right about this and I will not accept any other information.
B: I’m listening.
D: This is very interesting to me about Yugioh on like a thematic level. And this is now me giving you a thesis statement, despite it not being my episode, because I wasn't gonna let Yugioh go past and risk it coming out of the hat without giving this statement.
B: Of course not, I would not have expected not to have a counter thesis in this.
D: My thesis statement about you is there's a very interesting through line throughout Yugioh, which is terrible, terrible things are done in the names of people who did not ask for them, but benefit from them regardless, and it is never addressed. So, specifically--
B: Even in, even in season zero I can see a couple of points where it’s like.
D: Yes.
B: Like Anzu absolutely did not ask for that lady to get eaten by a tiger.
D: Yeah.
B: But that's--
D: It seems like an extreme reaction. But it did work out great for her. Malik is one of the first really serious instances of this, right. When evil Marik has been… dealt with, it doesn't seem like he got any therapy, but he's fine now apparently, his siblings are looking after him, whatever. And he reveals the act of abuse that pushed him over the edge was his father carving a message into his back that was for the Pharaoh.
B: I mean I would have a strong reaction to that, I can understand.
D: I also would be unhappy if my father carved anything into my back. But that's the, what pushed him over the edge. And this has been done throughout the generations from ancient Egyptian times to these children who are kept in underground prisons and the adults, as adults live their entire lives underground, etc. Except the thing that's interesting is that Yami Yugi the Pharaoh actually did 100% need that message to save the world.
B: Uhuh. Very, um.
D: That’s not really, like, acknowledged? There's no like, oh, well, it's, it's kind of just like, Well, it sure is good I have this message now. And Malik isn't evil anymore. So everything's fine?
B: Everything's worked out fine, despite the you know, the kids in Omelas.
D: Yeah, it's a weird sort of Omelas-adjacent scenario where you’re just like, Do you not have any concerns about the-- Do you not feel like, uncomfortable with that? Like, you don't know anything about your own past?
B: Or culpable?
D: Yeah, responsible? Like, are you not like crippled with guilt? Like, it's not, it's not really your fault. I guess you shouldn't be but I would be in your shoes.
B: Even without the guilt. I felt like I would feel like I needed to go find the other kids and be like, it's great. I've got the message. Please let the kids go.
D: Yeah, it's kind of just dropped there, and a lot of things like this happen. Even in like quite mundane settings like there are a lot of tragic backstories going around in Yugioh and quite a lot of them are genuinely unhinged. There's a character called Ryuji Otogi, I think, whose father is an evil clown. And this is just never addressed.
B: Yeah, sure, why not?
D: Yami Yugi defeats his evil clown father in in a game of dice monsters and it just, it. He's fine now, like-
B: Honestly, I feel like your shadow self must defeat your evil clown father is extremely psychoanalytical.
D: Yeah, there's a lot going on. But like this is a throughline that I just personally have very strong feelings about. So I think it's really interesting and when you get towards the end of YuGiOh the story as opposed to, you know.
B: The series.
D: The series that you watched. The climactic arc is this ancient egyptian arc, where what you find out is that Yami Bakura has somehow been compelling regular Bakura to create a d&d setup, because he makes his own miniatures, this is established in like the first series, whatever, of the ancient Egyptian setting where their previous incarnations, so the spirits that are now possessing them, lived and died.
B: So you can do something, I assume, so you can do something where you put like the reincarnations in the little miniatures, and then you like play out a thing that has magical resonance, because it's the right setting.
D: Yeah. And they get fully sucked into it. And it's like, they're actually there. And they see all of the events that led up to the sort of the spiritification.
B: Full VR reincarnation D&D. I'm into it.
D: Yeah, I know. It's a very cool concept. It's very weird that it’s sprung on you so suddenly, after a lot of Magic The Gathering. But what's interesting about this, one is like, doesn’t really acknowledge that there's a lot going on with Bakura. Like, how long did you spend building this under the control of an evil spirit? Are you good? No one's really checking in with him.
B: Are you routinely blacking out to paint the miniatures.
D: I mean, so are a lot of people I know who play d&d.
B: I'm not ruling out that this could be happening to him. I just feel like it's something he should be aware of if he's doing it.
D: Yeah, but is anyone checking in with you? Are you good? But anyway, we get to ancient Egypt, and we find out a lot of very weird stuff. So most of the monsters who are closest to Yugii, so the Dark Magician is probably the best known one. Dark Magician girl also I think and most notably, the blue eyes white dragon, which is Kaiba’s signature monster, are all people that they knew in ancient Egyptian times, whose souls were trapped in cartouches. So the Egyptians had three sets of souls, the ba the ka and the ren, it’s not really important, which, but it's implied that it's like one part of the soul is the part that can become a yugioh duel monsters monster.
B: Uhuh.
D: There's a lot happening there. So all of the cards they've been playing with this entire time are these kinds of weird effigy sacrificial tokens of real people who existed and lived. And some of whom gave their lives for the people whose reincarnations are unknowingly using them as toys. It's very weird.
B: Hmm.
D: And then you find out, final plot twist, like after so many plot twists that like the dragon is a person and the that she was a reincarnation as well, who who else was here? There's a lot happening. And that plot twist you get to is-- so dark Bakura, right. He's been running around being evil pretty much this entire time.
B: Sure.
D: Like all we really know about him is he wants to steal souls and collect all the Millennium items.
B: Right, he’s much more evil that Dark Yugi.
D: It turns out the Millennium evil were created by forging them in the blood of his entire people.
B: Um, that feels like it's big news to spring on us at the last minute.
D: Yeah. So it turns out the reason he wants the Millennium items is that he's made some kind of pact with a monster called Zorc. Which, let's just not even get into that. But basically, he wants revenge because the previous Pharaoh?
B: Uhuh.
D: Slaughtered his entire village
B: Good reason to want revenge.
D: Drained their blood into a cauldron.
B: Bad.
D: And used that blood to create the Millennium items, and that's why they have this evil power.
B: I don’t think that’s even how forging works.
D: Yeah, no, it's not, I think it's tempering technically. Not the point.
B: Either way, bad. Like, regardless of the metallurgical component of this, this is something you should not do. I think we can agree.
D: Yes. Yeah. But and it's stated that it was a village of thieves. So everyone was cool with this because they were all thieves.
B: Ah, so ethnic stereotyping makes it okay.
D: Yeah. And this is the thing is this is just sort of dropped on us. And they go, Oh, no, we have to defeat Zorc and Yami Bakura. There's not really much time for processing here.
B: Sure. This is just what's happening.
D: And I have so many opinions about the revelation after in terms of like, the release schedule of the manga, I'm not talking about like the overall like, how many episodes there are or whatever, like eight real time years of this storyline being written.
B: Uh huh. That’s a lot of--
D: We meet Yami Bakura as a bad guy quite early on.
B: Right and now in like the very end, we're gonna discover that this is actually a revenge quest. Because like, every one he cares about was slaughtered.
D: Like it's not implied ever that he even knew that it was a different Pharaoh. It was like the uncle of the Pharaoh we know who did this. It seems like he was maybe completely justified the entire time.
B: Seems like it's like relevant to his motivation.
D: Yeah. And it's not--
B: Like, why did you do this, well, because of these excellent reasons.
D: Yeah. Like, it's just like I get that no one really had time to ask him because he was trying to trap their souls in random figurines.
B: Sure.
D: But it's weird that we as an audience never got this information.
B: Right, like narratively, this isn't changing how we're supposed to understand this story.
D: Yeah, and I have very strong feelings about this as an element of a psychoanalytic reading is, I think it's a very interesting trick to play on your audience. And don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible that this happened because Kazuki Takahashi only understands about 96% of, understood, sorry, rest in peace, about 96% of the plot of YuGiOh on a good day.
B: Right. So very often, you know, we assume that sometimes he is writing things that do not in fact, make sense with the rest of it because it makes it up. But even so.
D: But if you, in good faith, take the story as a whole and go this is the story of Yugioh. It's something very psychologically interesting to me that you present these two shadow archetypes, right? If we sort of write off--
B: Yeah.
D: Most of what's going on, and Kaiba does represent this complete rejection of the idea that there is any externality, there is no magic, I don't care if you've done it in front of me, I'm not seeing it, it did not happen.
B: To be fair, his company does a bunch of cool VR things, it's probably just called more VR things.
D: Yeah, exactly. The VR tech that he owns, and only he controls.
B: Right, it’s probably just some of that.
D: It, it's just more corporate espionage. The thing that's interesting about this is it's you meet these two, these two characters who have these shadow archetype possession stories. And there's the good one that learns to be less evil and to value friendship and to know good and doesn't remember its past. It has no, it has, in a weird way, it is nothing but shadow self and also has no shadow self. Because he's a nameless spirit.
B: Right. There's really no indication that, and this may, may of course, be different in the, in the longer version, but at least to start with, like, dark Yugi is is is just the cool good at games version of Yugi. There's no motivation of his own apart from to win these games.
D: Yeah, they only find out through external sources that he is actually the spirit that was in the puzzle, like it's only really from Shadi that they learn that information.
B: Right.
D: And Shadi is not good at informing people of things.
B: No, Shadi clearly works that out, but he does not tell Yugi. So.
D: No, he sort of implies it at a later date. I don't think he ever actually says anything helpful. And we do actually eventually learn that the Pharaoh actually sealed his name away in a magic spell to trap Zorc which is the ultimate big bad that we had no idea existed until this point.
B: That's a rude thing to do.
D: Anime loves to do this to people. I don't know why. It's just more socially acceptable in anime writing to be like, and also this guy was here the whole time. Oh, whatever. But something very very interesting to me on a psychological level about like we said, there were kind of-- there is no shadow and self structure to the Spirit, they are functionally the shadow. He is, the Pharaoh is functionally the shadow of the person who he is possessing despite the fact that they are two distinct people.
B: Yes.
D: As you said, in your analysis, with Bakura, we do get this much more antagonistic relationship. And there is much more characterization, in a sense Yami Bakura is a separate person, because he has memories he remembers the past.
B: Sure, yeah.
D: And then we go through,
B: Shadow Yugi does not appear to have--
D: The entire plot of Yugioh, literally, the entire plot of Yugioh, you go through all of it. And then they drop this information of you. And it is one of those interesting pieces of recontextualization I can think of.
B: Yeah.
D: I wish it had better writing. Because it's a fascinating concept.
B: Yeah, done well, that is well that is the kind of not even twist, but that like end game revelation, that should send you back to do a full reveal and go okay, so knowing this knowing that this person has known this all along, this is a different story.
D: I want the version of YuGiOh that was because I, I want the version of Yugioh that I would go back and go oh, it will make sense. But in actual fact, I go back and go, Why are you like this? But it's fascinating if you look at it as a psychological sort of template, right?
B: Yeah.
D: Because that is what your analysis is, is taking this and going okay, this this and this are three variations on a theme. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, if you had I do not assume this is what you were going to do. But if you had assumed that sort of had that reading at the end of season zero and then gone ahead and read the rest of the manga or watch the duel monsters anime. I think I've just thrown at you a few things that would be stumbling blocks, but then you would get to the end and it would be it's not a stumbling block is it? It's not like here's a new thing to my reading.
B: It’s a wall in the way.
D: It’s a, oh, you were actually walking on the ceiling this whole time.
B: Right! It's just this is a totally different story than the one that you thought you were telling, let alone that I thought you were telling. And now nothing makes sense.
D: Yes. And I kind of wanted to throw that in at the end. Because I do think it's, weirdly, it's not much talked about, which is why I say it is my personal conspiracy theory. But this is very weird element to Yugioh, which is this combination of like I said, there are throughout it, there are these minor beats, which aren't really payed much attention to where horrible, horrible things are done. And it works out great for the main characters.
B: Yes. Yeah. I mean, especially with with sort of Shadow Yugi is constantly winning these games that are life or death situations. And then Yugi gets to skip away with everything resolved, having no knowledge that anything difficult had to be done, it’s a very self protective, viewed as a shadow self, it's very much, you know, this is his other side that he doesn't have to worry about what it does, that comes out and solves his problems. And then he doesn't have to face any guilt, or integrate any of these actions into his understanding of either himself or the world he lives in so he can keep his innocence.
D: Yeah, I think--
B: And he can keep his believe that everyone is basically nice, because anytime somebody is not basically nice, someone else deals with it for him.
D: And as you go through the story, Yugi does grow and mature and gain in strength in many ways. But it does keep happening that other people do bad things. And Yugi benefits from it, Yugi and Yami benefit from it. And it's just a weird little throughline. And it's not even that unusual in like shonen anime for this kind of thing to happen. Like Naruto is full of the tits with well, it sure was bad that that guy beat up that guy. But we’re friends now so it all worked out great, awesome, bye. Don't ask me any questions.
B: It’s not good that somebody killed him. But it's good that he's dead.
D: Yeah, like it's not unusual in this genre. I'm not going to act like YuGiOh is like making some weird tangential point with this, but it’s very interesting that it keeps on happening until you get to this end storyline when it goes, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This was all built on the worst thing you can imagine.
B: Yeah, this entire thing happened from a genocide.
D: This entire thing happened because of a genocidally cruel act. And the antagonist of the story is the survivor of that act.
B: Right. And the reason he's doing all of his antagonism is because he is the survivor like it is directly, but it’s not like--
D: Yeah.
B: Unrelated tragic backstory. He is the antagonist because he remembers these things, and is seeking revenge for these specific things. And it's very hard to say he shouldn't be.
D: Yeah, like, that's the thing. It's like, it's sort of like finessed out by like, oh, well, he's fused with Zorc the evil thing trying to take over the world, and we've got to have a big fight about it. Well, a big card game about it.
B: This is still Yugioh, they’re still card games.
D: It’s still Yugioh, they’re always card games. And it turns out what they actually need is to find out the pharaoh's name, and that will like unseal everything and then the Pharaoh has to be beaten in a card game by up so he can go to the afterlife, it goes on for a long time after the story ends. It's a pattern with Yugioh. It’s also very very funny because Bakura, after the, when they're doing this ceremonial duel to send the Pharaoh to the afterlife Bakura is just there. Kaiba is also just there, neither of them seems to be totally aware of where they are or what is happening.
B: They’re just, Also Starring.
D: But yeah, it’s just again, on a psychoanalytic reading level, which is what I was looping very slowly back around to because I'm an overexcited child. There's something really interesting to me if you think about Jung as trying to define what is, what elements can be patched together to make a unified self.
B: Yeah.
D: There's something interesting about a narrative which is so entirely built on self-deceit to maintain innocence.
B: Yes, definitely.
D: Yugi is not party to the bad things that Yami Yugi does. Yami Yugi is not party to anything because he has no sense of self. He isn't anyone.
B: Right, and when he comes out he seems to sort of regard himself pretty much as Yugi.
D: Yeah like he has no other identity.
B: He remembers how they got into this situation, he remembers that they're in this game. And you know, it's just that his abilities come to the fore and with it his sensibility about how to act?
D: Yeah and like that's very interesting. There's a-- ages and ages ago I read a review of the dub, which mentioned it's actually really jarring when you watch the dub versions. When he identifies himself, like, if he has to introduce himself or whatever that he identifies himself as Yugi, because most of the versions even the subs usually call him Yami, which does just mean Dark Yugi. But, because it's not an English word, you kind of get used to hearing it as a name and like, oh yeah, that guy, that’s Yugi. But it's not. He's Dark Yugi. So if he has to introduce himself, he says hello, Yugi. And it's actually weirdly jarring because you do forget that these two are the same guy and consider themselves the same guy. They consider themselves two halves of one person.
B: Yeah.
D: And both of them have this constant maintained, pretence of innocence that they are not aware of is a pretence but the victims of their actions and the actions which benefited them. And the actions which brought them all to this point, are right there.
B: Yeah.
D: The entire time.
B: The consequences for Yugi of Dark Yugi coming out and doing via strange spiritual game mechanics, horrendous things to people, are that his problem is solved, and he gets to go on innocently and have a nice day. The consequences for the people to whom his dark self has done the horrible things are, you know, horrible and lasting.
D: Really out of control for some of them.
B: Right, they're really dramatic responses.
D: Like, being eaten by a tiger was not a hyperbolic statement.
B: People, People have their lives ruined and sometimes taken by the consequences of playing a game with Yugi that gets a bit too intense.
D: Yeah, like some of these people were just like, school bullies. Like some of them were actual serial killers. But some of them were just like, dickhead teenagers or mean teachers.
B: Right? And I mean, I’m not saying they should get away with continuing to be awful, but I feel like shattering their psyches and or killing them is not the correct solution.
D: Especially when you consider later on the people who he allows to live like, Oh, my God. Like, I know, you've learned about the power of friendship now. But oh, my God, you've you you. You'd like, put a guy who was an overzealous hall monitor in hospital for the rest of his life. But the actual people threatening you with machine guns are good. The guy who tried to blow up your friend, he's fine. Okay, sure. Whatever you say.
B: Yeah. Like we're chill with this, but not with that.
D: Yeah. So like, I do think, like I said, on a union analysis level, I think there's something really, really interesting about like, the fact that you can maintain this abnegation of recognition, like it's non recognition of the self, to the extent of not recognising the non recognition.
B: It's a sort of instant repression thing. Yugi’s shadow is not just the, the parts excluded from his sense of himself in the normal, like, developing as a child into an adult way. But also anything he does, that does not fit with his sense of himself. He instantly forces back into this same repressed, I am not going to be aware of this space.
D: Yeah.
B: Especially this sort of tallies to me with how you know, dark Yugi comes out. And he's like, I'm just regular Yugi. I understand how I got into this scenario, I understand what is happening, I think of myself as Yugi. And I'm going to play this game in a way that protects Yugi and Yugi’s friends because I am Yugi. And then he instantly gets repressed and Yugi goes, I blacked out. I don't know what just happened.
D: Exactly.
B: He's not lying. He doesn't remember what just happened. But the person who came out and fixed things for him isn't meaningfully a different person. It's just him. But he's maintaining his own sense of innocence by instantly removing that again from his awareness.
D: Yeah, and it's it's so interesting on sort of that level to me, because it's a world designed to accommodate this. And I think it did, to be honest, when I first realised how frustrating this would be if you were a person in this universe, I suddenly understood Kaiba. Actually, I would be that much of a dick if I was dealing with this constantly from everyone.
B: If games, was this much of a life or death situation? I think that would be… Yeah.
D: It’s like…
B: It does seem reasonable as a reaction to be like well, I will simply control all the gains.
D: Especially because like it's, it's, it's pitched as like one of the signs that he's good deep down that his company was under his stepfather's, his foster, his adoptive father's control was a military company. And this actually comes back to bite him when two people who got destroyed by their military-- it's the full Tony Stark, basically, he like unmilitarised debt and turn it into a gaming company. And that's quite funny in a universe where games are this high-stakes because I'm like, Did you save any lives with that? Really?
B: Did you really deescalate or did you just turn your attention to civilian arms?
D: Yeah. But anyway, it's just interesting to me as a psychological piece of theatre.
B: Yeah.
D: And a Jungian piece of theatre because I think in the end, we are kind of denied resolution on this because the resolution of the Yugi storyline is he does defeat Yami in the ceremonial duel and Yami gets to go to the afterlife with his name and therefore his self intact. And the only way that he could defeat evil was by sealing himself and his own self his memories of himself and his name away. And then reclaiming them when light half of himself was reincarnated.
B: As Yugi.
D: As Yugi. Yeah, reincarnation is not actually I think a term used, it's sort of implied by the fact that they are identical and have the same names. But I don't think it's actually specified that it's reincarnation, it doesn't really go into the details, but I don't know another word for it.
B: Yeah.
D: Dadada, birth of the right person -ation. But like, it's very interesting to me that this is so predicated on the self and the elements of psychological self and who the self is. And yet so disinterested in personal ramifications of things that happen?
B: Yes, it's sort of designed-- big, big, I mean, you know, there's the, the Doylist perspective, of well, yes, of course it’s not interested in consequences. It's an anime for 10 year olds. Consequences of psychological, you know, psychological consequences of other people, other people getting eaten by tigers in a monster of the week episode are not things that animes for 10 year olds, give a lot of time to.
D: They should, though.
B: Right, but from a Watsonian perspective, it is like the whole world is built around, things happening on Yugi’s behalf, done actually, by Yugi, in fact Yugi doing things on his own behalf that he never has to face up to that they even happened, let alone that he did them. Never has to integrate that into his sense of who he is. And it sounds like that the resolution to the ultimate, you know, the ultimate resolution of the series is having spent all of this time maintaining this separation from his shadow, he gets to, you know, go through a psychodrama, he gets to believe that he no longer has a shadow.
D: Yeah.
B: Because if you take this as a Jungian psychodrama, he of course still has a shadow.
His shadow has not actually gone to ancient Egypt. It's just that he has found a metaphor by which he's moved from repressing that this happens to repressing, repressing the individual events, to just forgetting that there is another aspect to himself at all. And he can just believe forever that he is and has always been innocent little Yugi.
D: Yeah.
B: He's a much less sympathetic character viewed through this lens.
D: Yeah. And also, in a weird way, he's a much sadder character because like, if you think about Jungian analysis, the goal is always to individualise as the one self to bring all of these disparate pieces of the self together. And you he gets his happy ending by banishing his shadow self to the afterlife.
B: That is not from, in Jungian terms, that is not a happy ending. That is a failure.
D: Yes, but consider this he no longer has to compete for Anzu with his own hotter, murderous self.
B: Yeah but consider this, that Anzu only has the rubbish Yugi that she doesn’t like.
D: No, no, no, because this up has gotten slightly hotter during the run of the show. And he's now better at card games then the other Yugi.
B: Which we do know to be Anzu’s primary consideration.
D: I mean, she likes what she likes, let's n==
B: I’m no judging, but descriptively, that is her primary thing. So it’s less sad. She gets her card games.
D: So, at the end of the show. Yugi is better at car games than his shadow self. So he gets to,
B: Something we can all aspire to.
D: He gets to banish his shadow self to the afterlife, the day is saved, the universe is saved. Kaiba still doesn't believe in magic, Bakura has been freed from his shadow self, who was actually a genocide survivor trying to take revenge for his people. And Yugi gets the girl. I would posit that from a Jungian perspective, this ending is tragic.
B: Absolutely. This is the case. This is this is a story when nobody gets to individuate. Nobody individuates. Everyone either. Like everyone has a bad relationship with their shadow selves to the extent where all of them end up saying no, I don't have one of those. And nobody, nobody wins the prize.
D: No.
B: Nobody is taking home the jackpot.
D: Except possibly Shadi, who seems to have had a really good time.
B: Shadi is, Shadi is just also here.
D: He seems like he's having a good time at every moment.
B: I’m glad someone is.
D: I think he enjoys causing problems.
B: He may, he may do but I feel like that is true of many characters in Yugioh, not least Anzu.Her method of trying to get the boy is to cause problems which I can you know, I appreciate her gumption.
D: I love her so much. But I do think--
B: This has been a Jungian analysis of Yugioh in which we have concluded that Anzu did nothing wrong.
D: Anzu did nothing wrong. Maybe Anzu did individuate in-- you know the word I'm trying to say.
B: Yeah, maybe that's why we never see her shadow self. It's like she's already done this and she is just now having a nice life.
D: I think Anzu individuated when she realised that she could have both nice to people Yugi and hot, good at card games Yugi and eat it.
B: Yes, yeah, she was like I said, If I accept his shadow self, I can have both. And that was her moment of growth.
D: What if the solution to enlightenment was threesomes all along?
B: Is it a threesome if they’re in the same body? Or is one of them in a D&D figure? I don't want to ask this question.
D: Don't worry, I'll send you some fanfiction.
B: Okay.
D: This question has been asked.
B: I'm not surprised I have met fandom before, I am anti-surprised that somebody has answered this question.
D: Yeah, I got into Yugioh fandom. I'd say circa 2005 ish, like LiveJournal Era, tagging was not big. I found our about some stuff through Yugioh.
B: Yeah, there was a lot going on in 2005-era fandom.
D: Yeah, I learned a lot of words from Yugioh fanfiction that my sex ed curriculum was not yet covering.
B: The, right, the cultural system of ratings have not yet evolved to its current state.
D: Also I don't think any rating system really fully covers Yugioh. You know, it's like Homestuck, you've got to put that you've got to put that in the in the tag section. You've got to just explain yourself.
B: The term canon typical does a lot of lifting here.
D: Yeah, it's like, we've all-- like there used to be, Yugioh is one of those ones. You know how fandoms used to have ship names? Like instead of tagging, like the names of the characters, you would have like a specific ship name that wasn't just a portmanteau.
B: My current fandom, like the main ship and my current fandom we is universally referred to as just Them.
D: That's so valid.
B: The discord has a custom emoji, that is just the word them.
D: I was the thing is, I was never that into any of the Yugioh ships. Like I just never found them particularly compelling. And I think the main reason for that is because there was a real trend, this is actually slightly Jungian-analysis adjacent. There was a real trend in Yugioh fandom, there was that was a theory that like, it's sort of mentioned that there's a light half of the soul and kind of ev- this, it's referenced, it's not really explained in any way. And so the fandoms assumption was kind of that half of that basically, the way that the reincarnation plus spirit thing worked was that they were, the spirits were the Dark Half of the soul, they'd carved themselves in half in order to keep on like, staying in the items until the light half was reincarnated and could like reunite the soul as one.
B: Which itself is fascinating because it implies that if you are one of the people who is destined to get a millennium item, you are only half a person.
D: Yeah, it's very interesting. Um, the fandom actually did some genuinely really interesting stuff with this. Unfortunately, they only used it to write porn, but the concept was interesting. Which was a lot of the fandom focused on the idea that like yeah, actually. Okay, well, is that healthy? Is that okay? And there were a lot of really interesting fics about how about like, Yugi and Ryou in specific not being able to function as people because they were missing the dark half of their souls.
B: Right, because, right, it’s a really interesting take on Yugi being this very childish, very ineffectual, very self effacing personality is because well, he doesn't actually have the bit of him that could be decisive or assertive. Yeah, and it's the same as Bakura, which is like one of the really interesting things in the manga it's not as clear from any of the anime, but I don't really see things in the manga is, Bakura, despite the like fighting Yami Bakura when he actively attacks his friends, his friends, and saying he doesn't like Yami Bakura killing people.
B: Understandable.
D: Whenever he's asked, hey, the Millennium ring always finds its way back to him, right. So he throws it away on several occasions, or the others throw it away for him when he's unconscious, just like yeet it into the forest as hard as possible. And it always finds its way back to him. And he always puts it back on and always hides it. Like he doesn't say hey, that evil ring is back. And a lot of the fandom assumes that the ring spirit forced him to keep it secret. But like there are several instances in a mango where one of the up gang will just be like, hey, Bakura, is that evil ring spirit back and he’ll just be like, oh, yeah, got back last Tuesday.
B: And they’re like. You didn't mention this. And he’s like, what?
D: Yeah. And yes, he seems to have this very placid disinterest in preventing in a more, in a less immediate manner. The attacks on--
B: Future-proofing the not having the evil side that does evil things.
D: Yeah, like in the immediate moment of oh, my friends are trapped in miniatures. I can stop this from happening by impaling myself. Well, not, he doesn't impale himself. You know what I mean by getting impaled. It's one body. It's confusing. He doesn't seem to go at any point. Oh, hey, I could warn them that I have the evil spirit back.
B: You would have thought this would be relevant information.
D: I do think there is like, weirdly, I can't believe that this was on purpose because the writer of Yugioh does not know what’s going on. But I do think there's something really compelling about the fan theory that they are incomplete people.
B: Yeah, that they are lacking literally the other half of yourself.
D: I just, it's genuinely one of the fan theories that has the most successfully stucked in my, stuck in my brain. Like there are very few other fan theories that I've heard that I have then almost borderline forgotten when consuming the media that they are not canon.
B: Right. Because it explains so much and fits so well.
D: It makes so much more sense than anything in YuGiOh. Like, they are actually literally incomplete people because of the ancient Egyptian card game magic.
B: Born with half a soul because of Ancient Egyptian Magic, the Gathering is two very different vibes that somehow have been glued together.
D: And this is the fascinating thing is like, the antagonists of Yugioh all know this and the protagonists have no idea that they are only half a person.
B: To be fair, they're very busy going to school.
D: They are busy, but like is that not?
B: It’s very good.
D: I don't know, man, as fan theories go, that is the one that has done the most full on brain rewriting.
B: I’m choosing to believe it.
D: I chose to believe that age 10. And it has been canon ever since.
B: Right that, unlike the big twist genocide survivor revelation feels like it actually does recontextualize events in an interesting way.
D: And the thing is, it even makes the genocide survivor explanation better.
B: Yes.
D: Because imagine a story, right, imagine if this was the story of Yugioh, where a pharaoh committed a genocide to strengthen the next Pharaoh. And the one survivor of that genocide invokes this Dark Pact to get vengeance on the person who has that power. And both of them to try and prevent the other from winning carve themselves in half, and wait for their other half to be born to re instigate this fight.
B: Right, it's so good.
D: And those light halves are born with no idea what these dark things taking them over from these ancient relics are.
B: And they make friends!
D: And they become friends! But like the one that is the Pharaoh, the one who had all of the power and yeah, okay, he didn't do it. But he still inherited the legacy of this terrible thing,
B: It was the thing done on his behalf!
D: Is the who actually gets a chance to actualize in some way, not fully, but--
B: He’s the one who gets the power of friendship!
D: He’s the one who gets the power of friendship, the other one never gets anything. Like he gets nothing, he gets like two of the millennium items, he completely fails in his vengeance quest, because he is unable to unite the light and dark halves of his soul, because he is unhealed from experiencing genocide.
B: We've done it we have solved both Jungianism and YuGiOh.
D: It's so much better than the actual plot of YuGiOh. And that really hurts me.
B: So having thoroughly analysed this. I don't want to put it back in the hat because then I'd have to watch again.
D: Come back next week for more of my Yugioh fanfiction.
B: Though I'm sure there will be future YuGiOh posting.
D: Yeah, just to follow me on Tumblr. If you want to hear more, I'm always around.
B: Just be like, just message us. I will send you over to Dia.
D: And I will talk to you about Yugioh. I think we're on Twitter. Hit us up there. I will tell you all of my opinions.
B: By the time this goes out, we will be on some social medias.
D: Yes. Give me a second. I have forgotten to pull up my list.
B: Yeah, you pull up the dice. Well, I'll pull up some dice and you pull up the list because I think it's my turn to roll.
D: No, it’s my turn to roll. This was your episode. I just stole it.
B: I don’t know who rolls for whose episodes.
D: You rolled last time. Let me just pull up my Google Docs.
B: Yeah.
D: And dice. Because I need to see how many dice I'm rolling. If I get another, if I get another impossible one. I'm just going to scream, I need an easy one after last time.
B: That's fair. We both have worked so hard.
D: We have both. We have both had lucky weeks and unlucky weeks but we have both recently had unlucky weeks.
B: It's true. We've got them backwards the last couple of rolls itt was very sad.
D: Yeah, I could, this is the thing is I could have done this one in two days. You could have done the Elder Scrolls one in two days. It just didn't work out.
B: Instead we had to work.
D: Yeah, like come on, man. Give me one of my random obsessions actually, that’s probably a bad idea. I don't think I should be trusted. Right. So what is the number now? Are we on 18 analyses left.
B: Yes, 18.
D: Yes, so a number between one and 18 Please random number generator? I can say words. Three! What have I got? Postmodern? Okay. Not my favourite but I'll live and then 101 Sorry, are you going to replace the Yugioh with anything? Before I…
B: Um, we should put something into the hat. Let's let's put in another anime for children.
that we will both be somewhat familiar with let's put in Pokemon.
D: Oh god, okay, I'm gonna have to watch Pokémon.
B: Not a lot of it probably, it's more. It's not so much a person obsession, although I did play it when I was an age to be playing gameboy games as an important cultural thing that there's probably something to be said about.
D: Okay, I'm gonna roll the random number generator again. And I am going to get… 63! What do I have? My Hero Academia, we are doing another stupid anime.
B: Right but this time, it's one of your things.
D: It's one I actually understand. I don't have to talk about Pokémon. I saw it was like in that area. And I did think oh my god, if I have to talk about Pokemon right after Yugioh.
B: They’ll cry.
D: Are you kidding me? If we do Elder Scrolls, then Yugioh, then Pokemon I'm just giving up on this podcast. Okay!
B: My Hero Academia!
D: Join us next week for a postmodern reading of Boku no Hero Academia, which I now get to make Duck watch a couple of episodes off, you understand what I'm talking about? I have watched a few episodes. I have not watched none of this one. So.
D: No, I'm gonna send you a couple of episodes relevant to my point. But hopefully not much.
B: Hopefully not 11 hours of it because I will cry.
D: Yeah, that… we thank you for your sacrifice. On the other hand, no one made you read Wikipedia pages about Skyrim.
B: That's true. No one has ever made me do that. I played it of my own free will.
D: Yes. To be fair I did make you watch Shazam. Really this is just an opportunity for the two of us to force one another to talk about things we have zero interest in.
B: It's true this this entire podcast is actually a project to just make each other watch the things in the personal obsession list and then we also put some other stuff in that we felt like we ought to. Secretly of course, we're both hanging on for option 101 to come up with because that will be a good day.
D: That will be a good day. And to be fair, it's not like I wasn't already sending you messages about my Yugioh opinions. It's just now you're going to understand.
B: I don't know if that's better.
D: It's not because now I'll expect you to respond. Rather than be a blank wall that I bounce Yugioh thoughts off.
B: Oh, well. Such are the sacrifices we make for friendship.
D: Okay.
B: So listener, I hope you enjoyed our analysis of YuGiOh I hope you felt that we treated it fairly.
D: I think we’ve treated it fairer than it deserved.
B: Join us again next week, where we should be equally fair and balanced about My Hero Academia.
D: I do not commit to that.
B: Bye!
D: Bye!
B: You've been listening to Analysis Roulette, a podcast applying a randomly selected mode of analysis to a randomly selected creative work, just to see what happens. Your hosts have been Dia and Duck. You can find us on Spotify or on YouTube. And if you'd like to get in touch, you can send us an email at analysisroulette@gmail.com And remember, if you like our show, share it with your friends, and if you don't like our show, share it with your enemies. Thanks.