Kaiba’s opening speech in his tournament in original Dark Side of Dimensions is flat out beautiful and I wanted to try and unpack what I think it means. In one short speech, Kaiba renounces the beliefs he’d held onto and struggled with throughout the manga: that winning was everything, that war and games were equivalent and most of all that everyone is alone and meant to remain so… and then goes on to identify what has replaced them.
At the beginning of his speech Kaiba talks how the soul is trapped inside the body until death releases it. Kaiba has looked on death as the penalty for losing. But I think it’s possible that he also looked on death, if not as a release, then at the very least, as an escape from failure. At both Duelists Kingdom and Alcatraz he expresses a willingness to meet death halfway.
But Kaiba is doing more than refute his past and the values he once held or the war machine he was once a part of. In the second half of his speech, Kaiba is trying to spell out what he has learned as well, staking out his new convictions with trademark fervour.
When he comes back to the theme of freeing the soul later in the speech, I don’t think he’s talking about death. I think he’s talking about imagination and connection. I think he’s saying that these are the things that protect our hearts against all the artificial barriers that divide us… that forming connections, that using our imaginations and our minds are the things that nourish us instead.
Kaiba has used the power of his mind – what he refers to in his duel with Isis as the power of the human soul – to escape the orphanage and to rise to power. But he needed to find something deeper in his struggle to renounce Gozaburo’s legacy. At Alcatraz, he tried anger and hatred and a stubborn self reliance that rejected all connections… and it wasn’t enough. Throughout Battle City, Kaiba questions which is stronger, the power of unity or his own brand of extreme self-reliance and isolation. It’s clear those questions didn’t vanish in the island’s destruction.
The frames where he focuses on freedom and connection in this speech show Mokuba and Yugi’s friends, respectively. His relationship with Mokuba freed him from falling irrevocably to Gozaburo’s brainwashing, their connection freed him from the penalty game that followed Death-T by empowering him to complete the puzzle of his heart. Given that, it makes sense that Kaiba couples freedom and connection here and that visual shifts to Yugi’s friends. While I’m not claiming that this means that Kaiba is now embracing them as friends, I think it does indicate what a strong example of friendship they are, possibly the first one he has seen outside of his own brotherly bond with Mokuba. It’s an echo of this scene from the manga, where Kaiba starts to consider that the power of friendship and connection might be real, might be something to rely on.
If Kaiba was considering the question of friendship at Alcatraz, here he is giving his answer.
Thank you to Rakuei for translating the original version of DSoD.
Please feel free to use all screen captures and manga scans.
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