Yuugi-ou: Awareness

[branchandroot]

The degree to which co-habiting or divided souls are aware of each other is a puzzle that caught my attention. Let’s start with the easy pair.

Mou Hitori No…

The anime appears to follow the manga, to a certain extent. The manga gives us a nice lot of detail. The anime… well there are some conflicting indicators.

Mangawise, Yuugi notices almost immediately that he’s losing time, that there are gaps in his memory of events. It takes him a while to put the pieces together, but he’s a bright lad and figures out pretty quickly that he has a seriously ruthless tenant living in, based on the aftermath he does witness. What fascinated me was that, when Issue 34 rolls around and Yuugi actually tells Jounouchi and Anzu about his other self, he doesn’t say he’s scared because of how dangerous his other self is. Instead, he says he’s scared that his newfound friends won’t want anything to do with him if they find out. His other self’s dangerousness is certainly a subtext, given the things we’ve seen Pharaoh do by this point, but it’s Jounouchi and Anzu’s reassurance that they’ll always be with Yuugi that seems to banish all his fear, both for and of his tenant. This is the first time we see Yuugi deliberately call on his other self.

In the anime, on the other hand, we don’t know for sure until well into Duelist Kingdom that Yuugi is aware of his tenant. One moment that inclines me to think he might be is in Episode Three. Yuugi stands on the roof at sunset looking determined, and we see Pharaoh’s face overlaid on the scene. It’s a bit hard to tell, but it sounds like Pharaoh’s voice speaking their determination to get Yuugi’s jii-chan back. They seem close enough to “brush” each other then. At their first face-to-face meeting Yuugi says he has tried to make Pharaoh hear him before, so at some point previous he became aware of his tenant.

In both anime and manga, the first face-to-face meeting comes at the end of Duelist Kingdom. In both events, it cements a powerful bond between the two. From this point we start to see Yuugi and Pharaoh becoming visibly present to each other, and presumably gaining access to all of their experiences no matter who is emergent. (Though not automatically, since Pharaoh has to tell Yuugi about why Jounouchi wanted him to hold the Red Eyes.) It’s what I personally term The Partner Point. Manga-wise, the game for the Puzzle takes place soon after, against Otogi Ryuuji. Yuugi wins it on his own, playing for the return of his other self. Definitely a major developmental leap. I did note that it’s actually Otogi who insists that Yuugi must have significant strength of his own as a gamer to have been able to solve the Puzzle. I rather wondered what to make of this in conjunction with Bakura’s comment that Yuugi was chosen as the Puzzle’s owner three thousand years ago (Issue 141). I also noted that Yuugi didn’t seem to really take that insistence to heart until the game to reclaim Jounouchi from Malik, when he demands to fight to the end and prove his own strength.

.

Duplicity

We kind of have to go by the manga to say anything useful about Bakura-kun and Bakura, because the anime gives us exceptionally little material to work with.

At the very first, the part we don’t actually see, Bakura seems to be amusing himself by trapping the souls of Bakura-kun’s friends in the Monster World game. From what he says later this was preparatory to locking Bakura-kun himself in there too, presumably so Bakura can take over his body full time though this is never stated. The sight of the Puzzle galvanizes Bakura to more overt action, and at this point he actually speaks to his host. So Bakura-kun is aware of Bakura from the first moment Bakura moves to possess his body. Bakura does not, it appears, allow Bakura-kun to become aware of what’s happening while Bakura is emergent. In fact, even at those moments when Bakura is close to the surface but not taking over, hovering we might say, Bakura-kun looks pretty zoned out. (See Issue 285 for a good example of this.)

This could be because the one time Bakura lets Bakura-kun’s awareness out (Monster World), Bakura-kun defies him. Successfully, too. I don’t think it’s surprising that, after that, Bakura would take greater care to keep Bakura-kun unaware of things he might object to and try to interfere with. The few exceptions, when he uses Bakura-kun as bait, are very brief, and Bakura goes back on the most dramatic, offering himself as a shield for Bakura-kun’s psyche. So, perhaps there’s a second level, as Pharaoh speculates after the incident during the Battle City finals, and Bakura finds himself bound to his Item’s holder and impelled to protect him. The easiest way to deal with that would certainly be to send Bakura-kun to sleep during any hurly-burly that ensues.

In his interview with US Shonen Jump, Takahashi was asked to describe Bakura-kun’s character. He responded that Bakura-kun is possessed by Bakura and proceeded to characterize him. I took this to mean that Bakura-kun doesn’t have much character in the author’s eyes. Poor thing. We can, however, speculate based on what behavior we do see. He’s almost got to have a phenomenal degree of mental resilience and flexibility, given how often he “wakes up” and has to immediately assess and respond to whatever situation he finds himself in. He’s also a sharp strategist in his own right, witness his evaluations of the duelists during Duelist Kingdom. Judging by the way he picks up on something being wrong when Yuugi gets separated from the Puzzle during his game with Otogi, Bakura-kun also seems to have some sensitivity to the Items and their magic. He does not, however, seem to share Bakura’s extensive knowledge of the past and how it ‘s connected to the present. He deals with the knowledge that a malevolent spirit is waltzing around in his body with remarkable equanimity. The top reasons that immediately suggest themselves to me for this are 1) he is freaked out and Takahashi doesn’t care enough about this character to show him freaking 2) he has responded to his untenable circumstances with utter fatalism as the only alternative to raving insanity 3) he actually approves, possibly not consciously, of Bakura’s nature, having become tired of being so nice all the time.

The anime confuses things mightily by allowing Bakura to look like Bakura-kun, but most of the same points hold true there. The only time the manga comes close to that kind of elision is at the start of the Battle City finals, when Bakura-kun is chatting with everyone at the stadium. Yuugi suspects that Bakura-kun is being pretty tightly controlled by the Ring, seeing as he denies the slash on his arm hurts at all and playfully insists that how he got six map cards so fast is a secret.

.

Shadows

The Fury is not, of course, a tenant who comes out of an Item, but his evolution is worth a few words, too. And, once again, almost all the juicy detail comes from the manga.

The Fury’s advent accompanies Malik’s experience of his family’s “ritual”, a really nasty looking scarification. Makes perfect sense to me. As soon as the Fury shows up, though, he’s suppressed again. Malik, just post-ritual, asks Rishid who he should hate, the primary choices presumably being his father for doing this or Rishid for not stopping it. This is the first moment we see that tell-tale distortion. Rishid, however, reveals that he has carved what I presume are a copy of the writing on Malik’s back on the side of his face. Ouch.

Precisely how this suppresses the Fury is not explicated for us. Isis implies that this proof of loyalty keeps Malik from going over the edge. It looks like something a bit deeper, to me, though. Rishid thinks at one point that this was when he became Malik’s shadow, and the Fury uses the same terms when he says that he couldn’t emerge while the other shadow was in the way. There seems to have been some sort of three-way identification established by Rishid taking on those scars, wherein he became a part of Malik and took up the space that might otherwise be filled by the Fury. While he is conscious, the Fury is sealed.

Thus, when Malik makes his little excursion outside and his father finds out and beats Rishid to the edge of death, the Fury is able to emerge and give his father exactly what he deserves. I liked the manga much better, here; knowing that o-chichiue-sama got skinned gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling. I really don’t know why Malik feels bad over that.

Of course, the Fury is a bit over the top. His assertion, during his duel with Bakura and Malik, that he might actually be the primary personality because the Rod accepted him first did catch my attention. He acknowledges that he is the hate, pain, sorrow and darkness of Malik’s heart. He just doesn’t think that gives his originator any particular right to exist.

This is *not* standard for multiples, which is what leads me to suggest that the Rod has something to do with the Fury turning out the way he does.

So it looks like everyone except Malik knows about the Fury before the go round aboard the Battle Ship. It’s clear that Rishid knows perfectly well what will happen if he succumbs to the shock of Ra’s strike, as his last conscious request is for Jounouchi and Pharaoh to save Malik from the one who is emerging.

Fascinating note: the priests who held the Items in Ancient Egypt are referred to by priest Seto as the shadows of the Pharaoh, when he’s debating with Akunadin over the ethics of a ka hunt. He feels that the Item holders are the ones who exist to do the things Pharaoh cannot openly do. This implies that, before the Eye overcomes Akunadin enough to make him push his son toward rebellion, Seto thought of himself rather the same way Rishid thinks of himself. …Not as deferential, to be sure, but as the hand of his ruler to do what is necessary.