In which children's card games are serious business (Part 1)

[lego_joker]

This being the community it is, I suspect that many of you know about the less-than-family-friendly roots of Yu-Gi-Oh! To this day, it's kind of surreal for me to read the original manga - no matter how much violence and death Takahashi piles on, and no matter how nasty the antagonists act, I still find it difficult to disconnect it from the much less gritty and more lighthearted conflicts of the 4Kids anime.

Now, I know that many people believe that the series lost all its teeth when the card games took over (so the 4Kids anime, which was a dub of the series that only adapted the card game-centric storylines, never had any in the first place), but I must respectfully disagree. Even after reading the original manga, Battle City remains my favorite arc - it's got the gritty urban atmosphere of the original, pre-Duelist Kingdom storylines, but with the addition of Duel Monsters at every turn.

And the result? Sweet, sweet dissonance in which the card games look simultaneously darker and more delightfully over-the-top than ever.


Some context for those of you not familiar with the series: Marik, the current villain of the arc, is sending a bunch of assassins (alternatively called "Ghouls" and "Rare Hunters") after Yugi, with the ultimate goal of killing Yugi (and the Pharaoh he harbors in his soul) as painfully as possible. With, naturally, children's card games.

This guy here (the one in the striped mask) is the second of those assassins - Pandora, a duelist who claims to be an expert in using the Dark Magician card. He's also quite possibly the most screw-loose of Marik's henchmen. Don't believe me?





Well, I did say the series still had teeth, didn't I? Two hundred of 'em, as a matter of fact.

*Dodges rotten tomatoes*



Yup, that there feels like straight-up Saw levels of sadism (no pun intended. Honest!). Still, I have to wonder how it really stacks up to Kaiba's house o' horrors from the Death-T days.





Awww, look. The Pharaoh's come so far from his early days of "Hey, wanna play a game? We each pick a finger, then we try to kill each other with it!".

So, card games happen, yadda yadda yadda (there are a couple of nice bondage scenes with Dark Magician, but I'm too lazy to go fish them out). The Pharaoh wins, naturally, through Main Character Power, which manifests itself in this particular duel through the sudden debut of the Dark Magician Girl (even Pandora calls ass-pull on this, yelling "there's no such thing!").

But Yugi will have none of his whining, and murders his soul via Mind Crush gives him a stern talking-to.





Yep. Like most of the series' deathtrap-wielding antagonists, Pandora has a backup plan in case things don't go his way (hence why he was so casual about putting himself at "equal risk" with his opponent).

For all the good it's going to do him...





Yeech. Those of you who remember this scene from the anime (either version) will likely remember that the saws/"Dark Energy Disks" never touched anyone. Dead-tree-and-ink Pandora's not so lucky.

(And that's a pretty neat use of powers there from a psychic/mind-control character. Puppet-mastering and outright personality rewrites are all the rage, but I think that little sensory hacks like these are highly underrated.)



Oh, Little Yugi. Always the killjoy center of morality in this series (notice that the Pharaoh and Yugi switched back before performing the rescue - who wants to bet that the Pharaoh was perfectly happy with letting Pandora get dismembered, only for Yugi to forcibly take control and go the save-the-villain route anyways?).

Anyhoo, Marik - with Pandora as his meat puppet - has a long, exposition-filled chat with Yugi. His family roots, his past with the Pharaoh, the significance of the Egyptian God Cards (basically this arc's plot coupons), blah blah blah. Once that's over with...





Yeah... those of you who have only watched the anime probably don't remember this part, either. In the anime, the thing with Pandora's assistant/lover is expanded and changed slightly (the accident horrifically scarred Pandora instead of killing his assistant; afterwards, he drove her away, and Marik has now promised to reunite them), and this part with Marik secretly "executing" Pandora doesn't exist.

Which is probably just as well. It's a pretty damn depressing note to end on (in case you're wondering - no, Yugi doesn't save him, and yes, this is the last time Pandora appears), and it makes Marik's eventual reformation a bit tougher to swallow. In fact, this might be the sleaziest thing he's ever done (discounting the stuff that Yami Marik gets up to).

Next time: Marik's choice of card-game assassins (and death traps) get more Die Hard and less Saw, and we see levels of card game silliness that even the anime wouldn't touch (thus, sadly, depriving us of the chance to see LittleKuriboh's take on it). Stay tuned!

Comments

[icon_uk]

I know very little about Yu-Go-Oh, pre or post card game thing, but yup, that some Riddler level nuttiness right there (The Gorshin Riddler more than his more cerebral incarnations) with a LOT of "Saw" in it (Does this predate those movies?) and a deeply depressing ending.

[lego_joker]

Heh. Just be glad that I don't have any decent scans of what Yami Marik does during HIS card games. (Regular Marik, though, can be even nastier than this, as you'll see in future posts.)

As for the Saw question... yeah, it does. The original Yu-Gi-Oh manga ran from the late 90s to 2004. The first Saw film came out in the last year of its run (which I was honestly not expecting - I'd have expected that a seven-movie franchise would at least be ten years old).

[cypherfdp]

Look out, Yugi, those saw blades will cut your legs off send you to the shadow realm!

Yeah, the 4kids dub is not the best-remembered for a good reason.

[terrykun]

The taxes in The Shadow Realm are higher than the Home For Infinite Losers, but the school system is better.

[bj_l]

I really should have paid more attention to YuGiOh.

[md84]

In the anime Pandora's fate is still really cruel. The whole promise to reunite him with his lover was a lie. Marik tricked him using a life-sized doll behind a curtain. The scene with Pandora hugging the doll still delusionally believing it's his love was pretty haunting for a kid's show.

[janegray]

And that's a pretty neat use of powers there from a psychic/mind-control character. Puppet-mastering and outright personality rewrites are all the rage, but I think that little sensory hacks like these are highly underrated

Hear hear!

[slippy]

I love boggling at Yu-Gi-Oh's brand of cartoon violence. It gets so odd. That said, I had no idea Marik was this creepy in the manga, jesus.

Thanks for scanning this, because I never got my mitts on this part of the Battle City arc and it's nice to see what went on.