#but i do NOT have his narratively convenient blanket of unawareness

[unfavorableinstigation]

Thinking about Carrot Ironfoundersson today - I'm beginning to discover that there really wasn't much narrative exaggeration in the idea that you can force people to become a community through sheer force of personality.

I really wish Sir Terry'd given us his take on what the hell you're supposed to do when you realize that personality was yours.

[pharaohsparklefists]

Episode 97, part 3: the DRAMATIC yet tragically INEVITABLE CONCLUSION of the THRILLING DUEL frankly bizarre decisions Yami Bakura has made

(part 1 wherein bizarre decisions were made, part 2 wherein the conclusion became inevitable, my patreon wherein you can support these recaps)

Things aren’t looking good for Yami Malik, as he’s down to a single LP

which is conveniently just enough to keep his card-holding-hand

the ratio of points lost to volume of body parts lost doesn’t seem to be linear and that bothers me more than I can express in these mundane words

CLEARLY when he gained all those extra LP he should have grown extraneous limbs I mean COME ON what kind of half-assed horror show is this??

but speaking of all those extra points, things aren’t actually looking bad for Yami Malik at all because those extra points are all comfortably ensconced in the breast of 

THE MURDERBIRD 

who happily immolates all Yami Bakura’s monsters, Yami Bakura’s petulant boyfriend partner, and Yami Bakura himself, who is gracious and magnaminous in crushing defeat

THIS time.

this time??

this. time.

lol.

He is unconcerned by his disintegration to the dark void of nothingness, because

#gothlyfe

I guess he’s in his Zorcified persona right now.

Meanwhile, Malik is going through the five stages of Grief At Being Immolated With The Burning Fire Of The Gods

denial

rage

bargaining

despair

and nakedness.

It is in the quiet moment of calm right after all the immolations that Yami appears through the cloud of purpleness, having apparently compromised with Anzu that she won’t enter the deathcloud but also won’t go back to the bed she doesn’t even have. 

Yami immediately demands to know where Bakura is and Yami Malik says he doesn’t know, which ~Technically~ isn’t lying because you see,

And Yami, bless his probably-tiny socks says in apparently genuine shock and horror, 

So that is just adorable that he apparently Believes In his ridiculous arch-nemesis like that.

He shouldn’t have left Anzu unsupervised, though because, bereft of his own body and Bakura’s, Malik reverts back to his last save in Anzu, and arrives at Isis’s door right as she wakes from an intriguingly prescient nightmare of Malik being burned alive

Does she naturally have a faint telepathic bond with him? Or is it a lingering effect of the Necklace?

Either way, her door opens to reveal...

“No, I’m Isis.”

Malik, via Anzu, implores Isis to save Rishid from Yami Malik’s repeated murder attempts.

Because yes, FOURTH TIME’S THE CHARM, LET’S GET THIS GUY MURDERED

wakey wakey, stabby stabby

“this is just a pillow under a blanket, how did I fall for it??”

Real question: major props to Isis and Anzu for moving Rishid’s limp-ass brick-shithouse of a body, damn. He’s canonically apparently 188cm or 6ft 2in tall, and he’s a pretty muscular guy. If he was bang in the middle of his “normal” BMI, he’d weigh 75kg (~165lb) but BMI assumes you don’t have much muscle, so he’s more likely to be closer to 90-100kg. That’s a lot of dead weight to drag!

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Mokuba wakes up for probably the hundredth time under his big brother’s coat in the middle of the night, and says maybe the only sensible thing anyone’s said all episode:

<3

Instead of going to bed, Kaiba and Mokuba take a stroll to the front of the blimp and down memory lane. Kaiba brings up the (literally) looming spectre of their abusive adoptive father...

BUILDING? the island? or just building the shit ON the island?

*opens Japanese Duolingo again, need to learn this ridiculous language to properly follow this ridiculous show*

Mokuba remembers the last time they interacted with the island which honestly seems like a really shitty place to build any kind of factory but maybe some of the weapons they were building were too dangerous to build closer to human habitation. In any case,

when Seto took over the company.

But it’s not good enough for him.

Seto says that only this will be a “true victory”, and

You know, Kaiba is absolutely ABSOLUTELY awful at dealing with his emotions, he does loads of the wrong things, often at full speed and at great expense. But to his not insignificant credit, he does do things. This isn’t a good way to get past the fairly obvious emotional and mental trauma (maybe PTSD?) that his abuse at the hands of his father figure has left him with, but it is SOMETHING. So many tragic-pasts-asshole-presents anime anti-heroes are unaware or uncaring of the emotional work they must do to be at peace with themselves and a decent person again. Kaiba isn’t unaware and he certainly isn’t uncaring. He’s trying really hard, and maybe what he’s come up with is a really terrible fucking idea, but he’s working with the abysmal set of emotional tools he’s been left and he’s making something of it.

(see also: DSOD)

And so they fly off into...

the glitching sky? Well I ~wonder~ what that could be about? Sure would be an frightful shame if something should happen to ~delay~ the Finals given that we have such great character-driven narrative momentum going into them right now and it’d really lose a lot of its impact if we fucked around some kind of false, or “virtual”, storyline for a bit...

Oh and where was Bakura’s last save point?

“Forward planning actually WORKS? I’d best make a note! ... “Nah I’m sure I’ll remember.”