#however i do want to add that i’ve theorized for a minute that season 3 will either end with the battle above god’s eye

[apoloadonisandnarcissus]

The Missing Piece

@rey-jake-therapist and I have been brainstorming and theorizing about what went down at the finale between Sauron and Galadriel.

From my part, I’ll suspend my dislike for the cringeworthy dialogue and the evil theatrics, because, personally, I didn’t like that scene (sorry) and I think it was badly-executed and that’s what causing the trouble here. The show focused more on spectacle than on the emotional weight of that scene, making it look as if Sauron was only manipulating and deceiving her (he wanted the rings and nothing more), and that Galadriel had no inner conflict whatsoever (she stops when she sees Halbrand, but it's for 2 minutes tops). 

Many of you have already mentioned how Sauron forced Galadriel to bind herself to him (by stabbing her with Morgoth’s iron crown) and that his plan was to make her a Ringwraith (like the Nazgûl of the Nine), but she jumped off a cliff (I will always hate this, sorry).

When I first presented my theory that Galadriel would be wounded by Morgoth’s iron crown at the finale and during her fight with Sauron (you can laugh at it, now), I also speculated that she would be left in a state similar to Frodo’s in “Fellowship of the Ring”, when he was injured by a Morgul blade (also forged by Sauron). And this wound will never heal, meaning she’s now bound to the darkness and to Sauron forever (or until she arrives at Valinor at the very end of the story). I have nothing to add here. 

In “Fellowship of the Ring”, when the Witch-king of Angmar stabs Frodo (at the ruins of the Tower of Amon Sûl), the blade dissolved soon afterwards, and a fragment of it remained within Frodo’s wound, working its way towards his heart and threatening to turn him into a ringwraith. He was saved by Elrond at Rivendell, when he was able to remove the shard and heal the wound, but each year on the anniversary of receiving the injury, Frodo became seriously ill, and only his departure to Valinor offered a permanent cure.  

Morgoth’s crown wasn’t missing anything (I believe), but it was created and used by Morgoth himself, meaning it’s power and dark magic is much stronger than in the Morgul-blades Sauron gave to the Nazgûl. Dealing with this will be, probably, Galadriel’s plot in Season 3, and kick-out her “Lady of the Light” arc. Because we all know the "final" result of this wound for Galadriel:

There seems to be a piece missing to complete this puzzle, emotional-wise, and provide this scene with that emotional weight that's lacking. And it always goes back to the “crack theory” of “it was Sauron on that tent scene of 2x07, and not Elrond”.

I’m aware some like this theory, some don’t (mostly because they believe the showrunners would never go there). I’ve already presented enough evidence on why it’s actually Sauron on that scene, so I won’t repeat myself here. If anything, 2x08 provide us with even more clues.

Adar's Death

Adar's death scene in 2x08 appears to parallel a scene we already saw on "Rings of Power". And I'm not talking about the opening scene of 2x01, which is the obvious answer.

In 1x06, when Halbrand/Sauron wants to kill Adar, for the first time, in the middle of the woods, but is stopped from doing so by Galadriel. During this scene, Adar tries to make sense of why this "mortal man" wants to kill him:

"A woman? A child?" Adar asks Halbrand/Sauron.

At this moment, in particular, this interaction was meant to be a clue towards Halbrand’s true identity (“he is Sauron”), because of Adar being the one responsible for destroying his previous physical form in betrayal. Halbrand wants to kill Adar with a spear (Sauron’s weapon of choice). 

However, in 2x07, Adar really does causes pain to the woman (she-elf) that Sauron loves. At the Battle of Eregion, Adar displays Galadriel trapped in a cage, and has one of his Orcs pierce and bled her neck with... a spear. 

And how does Sauron have Adar killed, at the end? In the middle of woods, like he meant to in 1x06. Using his children to cause him pain, and kill him. And Sauron does it in front of Galadriel, the woman he loves and was, previously, hurt by Adar. 

There are more references to 1x06 in 2x08, because when Sauron appears as Halbrand, he repeats to Galadriel his words to her in those same woods he wished to kill Adar.

Hence: this parallel can mean that Sauron, in fact, witnessed Adar flaunting and hurting Galadriel on the battlefield. I actually joked with @rey-jake-therapist about Adar being toasted after he pulled that off, because there was no way Sauron would let him get away with hurting his Queen... and I was right. 

We know, Sauron was at the walls of Eregion at the time, with Celebrimbor and the guards, and they all saw the arrival of the Elven army led by Elrond. And, yet, the show has given us no reaction from Sauron’s part on what was happening to Galadriel, after he spent an entire season obsessing over her. 

Glûg's death

Glûg’s death has "well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions" vibes for having betrayed Adar and sided with Sauron, instead.

At first, I thought this plot of having Sauron just talk to the Orcs and gain their loyalty so easily was kind of stupid. But when discussing it with @rey-jake-therapist, we got more insight.

Tolkien never specifically wrote about the Orcs lifespans: we know they aren’t immortal like the moriondor (Adar and the other Elves corrupted by Morgoth) and they reproduce like every other “humanoid” being. Meaning, Glûg has never met Sauron before, and has only heard the tales. He was already suspicious that Adar was sacrificing the Orcs for nothing, with other Orcs believing he was chasing a ghost. Well, when Glûg meets Sauron for the first time, he’s shocked to discover that he’s not terrible or cruel like he was told, but rather “nice” and soft-spoken (even asking his name). And, so, Glûg has the confirmation that Adar was, in fact, wrong and killing off his children for nothing... (well, he came to regret that at the end). 

However, Glûg is the one who places a blade at Galadriel’s neck during the “Adar and Elrond tent scene” in 2x07, and we see Elrond’s reaction to it. And so, if Adar was to give the order, it would have been Glûg who would kill Galadriel in that scene.

More: when “Elrond” taunts Adar about sacrificing the Orcs’ lives, the camera lingers on Glûg’s reaction... and guess who’s the first to side with Sauron in the next episode, and strike the first blow against Adar? 

In 2x08, Sauron kills Glûg after Galadriel throws herself off a cliff and he believes her dead.

Many assume this was done in a rage fit, but this isn’t Sauron’s character. And he already lost control with Celebrimbor in this episode and that’s why, according to Charlie Vickers, he cries in that scene: Sauron recalls his time at Morgoth’s side and doesn’t want to end up destructive and nihilist like his master was.

So I would argue the “rage fit” explanation is not it. Could it be, that Sauron - who is always gaslighting others and in self-denial trying to find justifications for his own actions and project them onto others (as Celebrimbor told him in 2x07) - kills Glûg because this Orc was the last being he saw threatening Galadriel’s life? And projects his own guilt onto him? And how could he know that, unless he was the “Elrond” in the room? Because Sauron is powerful, but he isn’t able to see everything just yet. 

Where do we go from here? 

With this insane among of clues and evidence, and how everything falls into place, there is no way the person in that tent with Adar is Elrond. Because if it is, there are plot holes the size of black holes in the story. If it's in fact Sauron everything fall into place and makes sense. And it would also explain the lack of "emotional weight" on their scene at the finale.

Season 3: there is the possibility the show might hold on to this reveal for next season. Since in 2x08, we see Sauron brutally killing both Celebrimbor and Adar, and later stabbing Galadriel, revealing this plot twist to the audience could be a little “WTF” and even lose its meaning. And it wouldn’t match the vibe they were going for with Sauron’s character in 2x08, especially since Sauron and Celebrimbor was the core of Season 2;

Ambiguous or "abandoned plot": this is my concern.

[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.