Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count Part 4 - Pegasus Gets Got
Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count Part 4 - Pegasus Gets Got
If you've only seen the anime, prepare for some surprises
On Wednesdays, we’re reading Yu-Gi-Oh! here on JonathanLack.Com – specifically, as explained in Part I of this series, we’re looking at how many people are killed in the surprisingly violent original manga, and which characters rack up the biggest kill counts. And today, we’re continuing with Volumes 15 through 17 of the manga.
And now we finally come to the incredible Volume 15, which was one of my core inspirations for this entire project, because – well, you’ll see.
First up, Pegasus J. Crawford himself gets on the board by killing Bandit Keith for cheating and threatening him, using shadow magic to transform Keith’s own hand into a gun. In the anime, Bandit Keith simply falls through a trapdoor and comes back several times in later stories, but in the manga? Oh, he’s dead. He’s very, very dead. 1 Kill for Pegasus.
Next up, in Pegasus’ origin story flashback, we meet Shadi again, who punishes a thief by ‘testing’ him with the millennium ring, resulting in one of the manga’s most gruesome deaths. It is ambiguous whether this kill counts for Shadi or the Ring’s spirit (Yami Bakura), but since Shadi initiated the situation a la his kill in Volume 2, we will award 1 Kill to Shadi.
And finally – perhaps the biggest shock to anime-only viewers, we have the incredibly grisly image below. In the anime, Pegasus does lose the Millennium Eye to Yami Bakura, but continues to appear in filler arcs and even in the American-produced movie. But in the manga? Yami Bakura sneaks off, kills him stone cold dead, rips the Millennium Eye out of his socket, and then licks it devilishly.
Pegasus got got. 1 Kill for Yami Bakura.
Now onto Volumes 16 and 17! This is the Dungeon Dice Monsters mini-arc and the prelude to Battle City.
Whether there are truly kills here is a matter of debate, but Yami Bakura confronts these two guards, attacks them, and they’re lying on the ground later, at the very least unconscious, after which a deadly fire breaks out, and we never see their bodies carried away to safety. So I think it’s safe to say they’re dead. 2 Kills for Yami Bakura.
As a side note, Dungeon Dice Monsters is very different in the manga. The component parts of this stretch of the manga are split into 3 stories in the anime: The game itself, the Professor Hawkins story, and Yugi battling without the Millennium Puzzle or his dark alter ego and then reassembling it during a fire. All of that comes from Dungeon Dice Monsters in the manga.
You have the Ryuji Otogi (Duke Devlin) character still, but here his dad is an evil clown who played a deadly game with Grandpa Mutou and wants revenge, pushing his son to confront Yugi with the game. It’s quite eccentric! The game also has no connections to Duel Monsters as in the anime, and is more of its own thing, which makes it a bit more interesting. The entire story is quite good, and sadly gets pretty diluted in the anime adaptation.
Oh, and one more thing: While not a death, I think what Yami Yugi says here about ‘lil Yugi in front of Anzu in Volume 11 might count as a murder.
OFFICIAL YU-GI-OH! KILL COUNT AS OF VOLUME 17
Yami Yugi: 11 kills
Seto Kaiba: 4 kills
Yami Bakura: 3 kills
Katsuya Jonouchi: 2 kills
Shadi: 2 kills
Baby Joji: 1 kill
Pegasus J. Crawford: 1 kill
NEXT WEEK: Battle City begins, Yugi fights God, and a few new challengers appear on the scoreboard in Volumes 18, 19, and 20.
Catch Up on the Complete Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count Series:
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