Name's Dee, I like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Yugioh, and all that good stuff. Chazz Princeton is my spirit animal and I really like guys (and girls too).
I've started watching vrains (it's the last studio gallop anime I haven't watched) and um... HELLO? WHEN WAS THIS SHOW STARTED? LIKE 2019? HOW DID THEY PREDICT THIS SO WELL???
I've decided this is my favorite character and I'm rooting for him even if he's evil. I will not be taking complaints.
Thinking today about how love is central to Yubel's character not because I think it's vitally important that you read Judai and Yubel as romantic, but because love encompasses multiple different kinds of relationships including romantic love but also many others. The recent GX guidebook lists Yubel's keyword as "love," less because Yubel is an ideal love interest and more because their entire character revolves around the concept of love, asking what it means to love and to be loved.
Obligatory disclaimers:
This post is meant as character analysis and is not intended to discuss the merit of any ships. My personal interpretations are also not me trying to define how everyone should see the character, but instead offering one of many potential angles I find interesting.
As with most of my posts, this applies to the sub version of GX but not the dub (which I'll discuss a little of at the end of this post). This is very important where Yubel is concerned, since censorship makes dub Yubel quite a different character.
What Does It Mean to Love?
In Yubel's eyes, Judai can't love them and also love other people. This is which is why they famously believe he's replaced them with Johan. The show dialogue uses the term "shinyuu" (translated as "[irreplaceable] best friend" in the sub; also used to describe Edo and Saiou's relationship) for how Johan describes Judai (episode 130), how Yubel describes what they are to Judai (episode 153), and how Yubel describes what Johan is to Judai (episode 151).
But an episode before that, they say the same about the Neo Spacians. Episode 154 is all about Yubel vs. the Neo Spacians, and they have plenty...
to say...
...about that zero-sum game.
I don't think anyone's going to argue that Judai's love for Johan and his love for the Neo Spacians are the same, but he still loves both. His love for Johan and his love for the Neo Spacians can coexist. His love for his other DA friends is different yet, but no lesser. Love has many forms...for Judai, at least.
Yubel conflates these different kinds of love all into the same concept: a threat to Judai's love for them, because Judai loving others - whether it's friendship or whatever he feels about Johan - means he can't love them. Love is a finite resource, and Yubel wants all of Judai's love.
And why is it so important that Judai loves them?
What Does It Mean to Be Loved?
Yubel is so fixated on love in part because their belief in his love for them was a key part of their coping mechanism for their time in space:
And honestly, fair! Yubel was cooked by the Light of Destruction for years with added atmospheric entry to finish them off. Judai was the one who sent them into that torment, even if he didn't intend to, and then he stopped responding for reasons Yubel never got to know so they just burned alone and con. Telling themself Judai loved them was the only way Yubel stayed sane through that torturous experience, and they clung to that coping mechanism even after returning to Earth (severely damaged).
But why was Judai specifically so important to them? Why was that love their coping mechanism?
Well...because it kind of always has been. Ever since a life Judai doesn't even remember, when a child became a dragon despite being told from the start that they would be reviled in their new body...
...a body they felt made them unlovable.
For the sake of Judai's past life, Yubel willingly took on a form that they knew nobody would love. And the name of Yubel's second form, Yubel - Das Abscheulich Ritter (roughly "The Horrible/Abominable Knight"), suggests that this was in fact how they were remembered.
But they were loved, despite that. The person they sought to protect promised that he would love them, even if the rest of the world would not.
When you're in a horrible hideous unlovable body, a single person promising to love you is a message: "I see something worth loving in you, even if the rest of the world denies you love. Even when the world is against you, I will remind you that you deserve compassion."
Internalizing that message is how Yubel survived their time in space. Because Judai's past life loved them, Yubel was able to see themself as someone worth loving, which was necessary when thrown into unending fire and total radio silence.
Not Judai's fault! But Yubel still needed a way to maintain their sanity, and to do so they delved further into their existing coping mechanism, i.e., assurance of his love. Knowing Judai loves them is just about 100% of what fuels Yubel's will to live in a body they believe is unlovable after years of torture.
And it's only partly the Light of Destruction's fault that Yubel decide to blow up the universe about it once they realize Judai for real does not love them and refuses to even really acknowledge that Yubel's suffering even as they make others suffer. Because if the only person who could ever love you refuses that love, what's left? What's the point of a world where you will never receive compassion?
That coping mechanism is also probably at least part of why they take such an all-or-nothing approach to love: Judai's past life said it first, "My love will belong only to you." You can't just say that and split your love among everyone you meet.
But that was what a young boy in another life said. As we see in the show, present Judai loves much more than one person. Easily, and freely. Except for Yubel, and he even throws that in their face during their final duel:
And although this was a line intended to hurt Yubel...he's also not wrong.
What is Love?
(Get your obligatory "Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more" out of the way here. I'll wait.)
(Okay, let's go.)
A good chunk of GX season 3's themes are about responsibility and growing up, specifically how Judai's carefree attitude to dueling and heroism is immature and doesn't stand up against the responsibility of adulthood. Yubel, the villain he accidentally created, is similarly immature - but where Judai is immature about responsibility, Yubel is immature about love.
For all Yubel looks like an adult dragon-human monster spirit, they were still a child when they were made into a monster.
That defining promise of love came from another child:
What do they know about love? About growing up, or responsibility, or adulthood? Canon doesn't directly tell us what happened after this promise on a rock at sea, but Yubel's grammatically questionable German monikers suggest it wasn't easy.
What we know for sure is that Yubel's view of love is immature: all that nuance about types of love and loving multiple people is collapsed into a single definition and a single person. This is in part because previously it seems to have all really rested on a single person, and in part because clinging to that simplicity has helped Yubel cope with isolation in multiple lives. If Yubel had blood, it would be at least 99.5% copium.
The GX S3 finale doesn't end with Judai slaying the dragon. The hero doesn't defeat the villain. Judai saves Yubel the same way he saved Johan when fighting Yubel in Johan's body: with Super Fusion, with compassion towards someone who needs help, with a conclusion that doesn't involve violence. Even if the victim is also the villain.
And that? That's a form of love, too.
Judai decides to fuse with Yubel to save them, but he doesn't stop loving his friends either. We see him think about them all right after he activates Super Fusion to merge his soul with Yubel's.
The fusion symbolizes a lot of things, and can be read a lot of different ways. Judai talks about going on a journey to become an adult, so of course the most obvious way to read it is as a metaphor for growing up. In fusing, both Judai and Yubel confront their immaturity and start to grow past it.
Judai takes responsibility and finally reaches out to someone who's wanted compassion where he has the ability to give it.
Yubel connects with Judai, and in sharing souls comes to understand what his love truly is.
And you know, maybe love really is wide and large and deep enough to fill the universe. It's more complex than the view of love Yubel had before, but isn't it also more beautiful?
So Let's Talk About the Dub
The dub makes several changes to Yubel's character and even design, simplifying their twisted philosophy of love and pain to basic revenge or becoming "best friends" again. The dub writes out every mention of love or even being unloveable, so Yubel no longer has the same feelings about their body. The final reveal of the past promise of love is changed to keeping Yubel as a companion.
Jaden's past life: Okay, but this doesn't seem fair. You were my friend, but I'll make it up to you! I promise never to forget you, to always keep you by my side!
And then Jaden refers to Yubel as "an old friend" who "started off with good intentions, but you lost your way" and who's "been alone…so alone." And you might ask, isn't that enough? Doesn't that get at the spirit of things even if they don't use the word "love"? If friendship is a form of love, then isn't just friendship enough? There's plenty of plots where someone gets new friends and their best friend gets jealous because they think they'll be replaced.
But I think keeping it to friendship doesn't have the same ambiguity of definition that love does, and that ambiguity is key to understanding Yubel's character and their relationship with Judai in the sub. I haven't watched enough of the season 3 dub to say dub Yubel is inherently worse than sub Yubel (coughChumleycough), but what I have seen tells me that dub Yubel is missing a lot of the nuance that makes them so compelling to me, at least.
I literally thought that was Barian Rei until I read the caption. But hey, at least this lends to the theory that they’re probably siblings or something because Zexal cannot have any character without family issues of some description.
(Also it means I can blame Vector for attacking Alit until further confirmation.)
HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYBODY!!!!!!!!!!! so to celebrate i drew things the gx cast fumbling what not to say during a coming out!!
my goofuses deserve the world...
titsay
dededos
kianamaiart
annaxmalina
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
izzy806
