#(i like both kaiba and yami btw i just don't think the early manga handled either of them super well)

[synthient]

Ever since I finished reading The Cards with Teeth and Death T—the two manga arcs that the first episode of the anime is based on—I’ve been mulling something over.

How could you do Kaiba’s introduction right?

Because that first anime episode, “The Heart of the Cards,” is pretty inarguably a mess. It’s rushed, it’s nonsensical, it’s got a mountain of plot holes and fridge logic, it feels a little like some kind of bizarro world disconnected from the rest of the series…

But if anything, The Cards with Teeth and Death T feel even more disconnected. They’re from a point in the manga where Takahashi really didn’t have a clear idea of where the story was going, what genre and tone he was aiming for, or who any of these characters were supposed to be, and it shows. Death T in particular is almost impossible to reconcile with Kaiba’s later characterization without a crapton of handwaving (and I can’t speak for anyone else, but I personally found the magical personality-altering coma explanation pretty unsatisfying).

So what I’ve been trying to figure out is, if some hypothetical future reboot had the chance to do the anime over again, what would be the best way to make this part of the story work?

I think it’d need to do three things:

1.      Split “The Heart of the Cards” up into two episodes.

2.      Add back in the second half of The Cards with Teeth.

3.      Acknowledge that Yami fucked up.

(more below the readmore that may or may not work on mobile)

The biggest flaw of “The Heart of the Cards” is that it tried to cram two manga arcs (that take place weeks apart) into one twenty-minute episode. The abridged series version is barely even an exaggeration—this thing goes from zero to sixty hilariously fast. So the first obvious fix would be to split it back up into its composite parts: one episode for the elements from The Cards with Teeth, and a separate, later episode for the elements from Death T.

Aside from moving too quickly, however, I actually think the anime writers had the right idea: adapt the parts of Season 0 that are essential to the rest of the plot, but cut the bits of early-installment weirdness that don’t fit anymore. And I definitely think they made the right call in cutting the Amusement Park of Doooom segment of Death T (the world of Yugioh is a better place without Tristan’s nephew in it, and Kaiba is a much easier character to write if you’re not constantly trying to explain that time he became the villain from Saw). The real problem is that they cut the second half of The Cards with Teeth. If you take a close look, the root of almost all the plot holes in “The Heart of the Cards” is the removal of Yami and Kaiba’s first duel.

It doesn’t make any sense for Yugi’s grandpa to “somehow become severely injured by playing a children’s card game,” because Kaiba never had a reason to recreate the Experience of Death penalty game because it was never used against him. It doesn’t make any sense for Kaiba to rip the fourth Blue Eyes instead of keeping it in a nice glass case somewhere, because he’s not mad at it for betraying him before. It doesn’t make any sense for him to challenge some kid he barely knows to a card game out of nowhere and with nothing to gain, because he’s not trying to get revenge against the person who tortured him.

And that’s another element that the anime cut and the manga never adequately dealt with: Yami fucked up. Big time. The punishment he gave Kaiba at the end of their first duel was disproportionate and horrible, and there’s really no way of getting around that. He made a teenager hallucinate about being mauled to death by monsters. In hyper-realistic detail. All night long. That’s one of the most horrifying penalty games he gives to anyone, including violent criminals and murderers, and Kaiba gets it for stealing a trading card.  

And if Yami was trying to teach him An Important Lesson about Not Doing Bad Things or something, it had the exact opposite effect. Shockingly, torturing an already-abused-and-traumatized teenager made things worse, not better, and Death T happened as a direct result of Kaiba’s desire to get rid of his reoccurring nightmares by turning Yami’s own weapon against him.

In the manga continuity, Yami does eventually decide penalty games are wrong and stop dealing them out...but only because Pegasus tells him that the Millennium Items are evil, and the only thing Yami knows about himself at that point is that he came from the Millennium Puzzle and he doesn’t want to prove Pegasus right. But wouldn’t it be more powerful if he came to that realization on his own, without Pegasus having to spell it out for him? And wouldn’t his experience with Kaiba be the perfect opportunity for him to have that epiphany?

So let’s say we’re watching that hypothetical reboot. There’s already been a Cards with Teeth episode, and a few more episodes in between, and now we’ve reached Kaiba’s second appearance. At first it plays out pretty much like the original “The Heart of the Cards” (no combination torture chamber/theme park here, we skip right to the card games), just with the added context of that first duel. But at some point during the rematch, Yami tells Kaiba that he should have learned his lesson the first time. He explains that that’s the point of penalty games: to deal out justice and discourage repeat offenses.

And Kaiba laughs in his face.

Because he knows all about lessons taught through pain, and he already has all the lessons he needs.

(Yeahhh, the parallels between Yami and Gozaburo are, uh. Something.)

The seeds of doubt are sown. When Yami imagines the cards receding away from him, it’s not just that he’s afraid of losing—he’s afraid of himself. Kaiba has forced him question his morality and his methods, and now he’s scared that he’s not the good guy after all.

And at the end of the duel, when Kaiba’s just standing there, waiting to get what a loser deserves, Yami doesn’t go for the manga version of the Mind Crush. He doesn’t put him in a coma. He doesn’t shatter this already-broken kid and him and leave him to pick up the pieces. He goes for the anime version, the one that (I’ve theorized) lifts the fear and anger off Kaiba’s shoulders long enough for him to stop and breathe. If pain didn’t work, then maybe empathy will.

And in this reboot, that’s the last time he ever uses a penalty game.