it’s that kind of night lads. im in a mood to talk about where i think ygo morality fails the most. or one of the places anyway

bakura and akhenaden are what i wanna talk about here. how they’re handled and the context surrounding them. idk what KT’s writing process was, or the ideas he had behind these characters, but from the way they were created and written, it feels like he had blinders on (yeah i know he clearly wasnt in the right mental state when he wrote mw but like. even when im running a high fever i still dont think its a good idea to make genocidal murderers even vaguely sympathetic)

like writing bakura as a tragic victim who let darkness consume him. fine. he’s amazing and compelling and has some beautiful scenes that shine light on his depth (such as the courtroom scene and his calling out of their flawed justice system)

and akhenaden who is by all means still portrayed as a corrupt villain, but is shown to have family and a motive that started in... definitely not the right place but jealousy is a human emotion so perhaps in any other context he could have been a more interesting villain

the problem is, one of these characters has closure, is fleshed out, and has a fully realized arc. the other doesnt.

bakura’s character has a strong concept, but he isnt shown with as much nuance and depth as he should have been. kul elna, for example, the place the entire plot basically spawns from? the villagers are never shown. there are no names or faces to put to them (a lot of the non-royal characters are given this treatment, which is even more questionable). they’re just thieves that “went bad” (because they stopped serving the pharaoh lol?) bakura is almost always made out to be a savage and overall it’s just not handled with the sensitivity a genocide subplot should be given. 

akhenaden in contrast, is actually given a lot of spotlight, especially with set. the family drama between him and his brother is supposed to be sympathetic. like oh no poor atem’s dad didn’t know giving him the go ahead to make the items would cause a whole village to die. he angsts about his son not being pharaoh. why is there more emotional range with him than with tkb, who he, yknow, traumatized by murdering everyone he knew and loved in front of him? on top of this, akhenaden actually takes over bakura’s role as the endgame villain, along with zorc. after he’s killed, his soul is at peace because set ended up becoming the pharaoh. akhenaden technically won.

AND he is shown peacefully in the afterlife at the end of the series are you fucking k-

anyways, when you put them side by side in a narrative about compassion and non-violence, when your protag tries appealing to the wrong one’s (cause of the genocide) humanity and the other one (victim of the genocide) is just plain irredeemable from the get go, it just looks bad. it looks ignorant. it takes atem’s supposed arc about learning compassion and reaching out to one’s enemies (which he never even had much of this to begin with lol? it was almost completely a tell not show situation and the plot breaking itself around atem to make him look morally right all the time) and completely invalidates it. it fails in just about every way.

a lot of this i feel can be chalked up to the overall inconsistency of ygo and KT changing or introducing ideas at the drop of a hat but like. there’s some things i feel are just inexcusable here (along with the general misogyny and racist undertones of the series but thats not what im talking about right now.)

SO im sorry this got so long but this is just me trying to sort out my thoughts on millennium world and why akhenaden is uniquely a fucking terrible character lmao