Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count Part 8 - Kaiba's Leavin' On a Blue-Eyes-White-Dragon Jet Plane
The end of Battle City, and of Seto Kaiba's vendetta
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 28 through 31 of the manga.
Volume 28 has no deaths to report, but this and the next volume are, in my learned opinion as a professional Yu-Gi-Oh! scholar, the two best duels in the entire series. This one features Jonouchi vs Marik, with Jonouchi doing the single most badass thing in the entire manga by outplaying the big bad before Yugi can get to him, all but winning and only falling short on a technicality because Marik cheats via the shadow game. Damn. How cool is that?
Though he does of course survive, the volume ends with the cast thinking Jonouchi is dead - including Kaiba finally admitting respect, a detail substantially diluted in the anime thanks to a crappy filler arc where he and Jonouchi duel for third place before the finals. But I love this story; it's a great culmination of Jonouchi's arc, and a terrific duel to boot.
It's such a beautifully executed story. Jonouchi's whole goal through Battle City is getting to the finals and facing Yugi as a ‘true duelist.’ And by all rights, he really does beat Marik first and earn that spot, only to lose it through this tragedy, which emphasizes both Jonouchi’s genuine skill and Marik’s abject evil. It's great storytelling, and reading it again this time made me come to the opinion that Jonouchi is the most naturally talented duelist of any character in the entire series. Everybody he comes up against, throughout Duelist Kingdom and Battle City, has much more experience and usually much better cards, and Jonouchi always either wins, comes really close, or in this case is cheated out of victory by dark magic. Battle City ends with Jonouchi and Yugi preparing to finally have the friendly but competitive duel together they dreamed of the whole time, and while Takahashi wisely leaves the duel itself to our imagination, my headcanon is 100% that Jonouchi surpasses Yugi and wins.
Next up, Volumes 29 and 30 feature the final duel between Yugi and Kaiba, which is easily the best-written match in the series. It’s incredibly fast, densely strategic, and tons of fun. The duel fills a full six episodes in the anime and uses most of that time, because it’s just that crazy a stand off. I love it. And most importantly, it leads to the climax of Kaiba's character arc in the manga.
Kaiba continues as a character in the anime, through the extraordinarily long filler arc that follows Battle City on through a greater integration in the final ‘Millennium World’ arc, but this is very definitively his exit in the manga – while there is the ‘Priest Seto’ character in the Ancient Egypt flashbacks, this is our last look at Seto Kaiba until a very brief cameo in the final chapter, and it's a fantastic conclusion to his character journey.
Takahashi truly brings him to a full circle close, a culmination that manages to encompass all the shadings of this amazing character. For someone who entered the manga stealing trading cards and trying to murder old men and teenagers, it’s remarkably affecting to see him grapple with the depths of his anger and finally choose to put that passion towards something constructive.
And then he goes out like a total fucking boss, flying this sick Blue-Eyes White Dragon fighter jet from the exploding island. I mean, come on. How can you not love this series? #KaibaGoals
And in Volume 31, we get the final duel of Battle City between Yami Yugi and Yami Marik, and the one big murder here from this stretch of volumes: Yami Marik, killed and/or sacrificed to the darkness by the combined efforts of Yugi and the ‘normal’ Marik, the latter of whom gets the final kill by forfeiting the match. 1 Kill for Marik Ishtar.
We only have one arc and seven volumes left to work through, but they’re going to take some time. The “Millennium World” stretch of Yu-Gi-Oh! is not only fantastic storytelling, but positively murder-riffic, with a lot of kills and a lot of extremely weird plot turns to work through before we can figure out which Yu-Gi-Oh! character is the King of Kills.
OFFICIAL YU-GI-OH! KILL COUNT AS OF VOLUME 31
Yami Yugi: 11 kills
Seto Kaiba: 6 kills
Yami Bakura: 4 kills
Yami Marik: 3 kills
Creepy Mime: 2 kills
Katsuya Jonouchi: 2 kills
Marik Ishtar: 2 kills
Shadi: 2 kills
Baby Joji: 1 kill
Pegasus J. Crawford: 1 kill
The Sea: 1 kill
NEXT WEEK: Millennium World Begins!
Catch Up on the Complete Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count Series:
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