Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count Part 7 - Shadow Games in the Sky!
Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count Part 7 - Shadow Games in the Sky!
Yami Marik enters the arena and immediately racks up a body count
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 24 through 27 of the manga.
Volumes 24 and 25 see the introduction of Yami Marik, who is much more explicitly a murderous sadist in the manga than in even the uncut Japanese anime, which tones things down pretty heavily (though not as heavily as the 4Kids English dub, which always replaces ‘death’ with ‘shadow realm’). Shortly after appearing, he stabs this Doctor to death on his way to kill Rishid, though is interrupted from finishing the job. Still, 1 Kill forYami Marik, a new challenger on the board.
From here on the anime continually has to dial back the amount of pain Marik dishes out – like his duel with Mai, which in the anime is a shadow game where Mai loses memories of her friends as she loses life points. In the manga, it's a straight-up death/torture game, with the duelists experiencing their monster's pain in extremely graphic detail. It's dark, and sees the manga returning to its horror roots from the early days of Yami Yugi setting everyone on fire.
Marik very nearly kills Mai (and Jonouchi, who tries to save her) with a direct hit from the Sun God Ra, until Yami Yugi steps in, with one of the most genuinely badass moments in the entire manga. That said, everyone makes it out alive, so no more kills just yet!
On to Volume 26! Here we get the backstory of Marik Ishtar and the tragedy of the Ishtar family, where Yami Marik emerges, takes the Millennium Rod, and brutally murders his father. It’s pretty gruesome! 1 kill for Yami Marik.
With Volume 27, we encounter a problem. Yami Marik duels Yami Bakura in a shadow death game, and wins – and pretty clearly annihilates Bakura. But Bakura obviously comes back later in the story. So does that count as a kill? What of the piece of ‘normal’ Marik’s soul that’s with Bakura that also “dies?”
It is fairly explicit that Bakura and ‘normal’ Marik die here, consumed by the shadows – it’s just that both survive because they have pieces of their souls in other places (Bakura in the Millennium Puzzle, Marik in Anzu from her possession during the Yugi/Jonouchi death game). So do these count as kills for Yami Marik? We’re getting into some weird existential territory here. What is death, anyway?
The biggest puzzle is what the hell happened to Bakura’s actual body. He just completely goes missing – as noted by the characters – until reappearing out of nowhere after Marik’s defeat in Volume 31. He takes back the Ring, which possesses him again starting in Volume 32.
So...what happened? Yami Marik ‘kills’ both the shard of normal Marik and Yami Bakura, and good Bakura’s body disappears. A lot of unexplained dark magic at work. Marik’s soul is in so many shards I don’t think we can call that a kill, but for Yami Bakura, I think we can. It’s Yami Bakura using the word ‘resurrected’ in this panel below that influences my thinking. He is, after all, a spirit who has died and come back before (just like Yami Yugi); him coming back again doesn’t make this not a death, it’s just a death that later has a resurrection. So…from all of this, I am going to award 1 Kill to Yami Marik.
I have thought about all of this way too much. In any case, let’s look at some sexy shots of Seto Kaiba before updating the kill count.
OFFICIAL YU-GI-OH! KILL COUNT AS OF VOLUME 27
Yami Yugi: 11 kills
Seto Kaiba: 6 kills
Yami Bakura: 4 kills
Yami Marik: 3 kills
Creepy Mime: 2 kills
Katsuya Jonouchi: 2 kills
Shadi: 2 kills
Baby Joji: 1 kill
Marik Ishtar: 1 kill
Pegasus J. Crawford: 1 kill
The Sea: 1 kill
NEXT WEEK: It’s the end of Battle City. There will be death, there will be duels, there will be drama - it’s a big one!
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