Basically My Yu-gi-oh Shrine Lol

Today on this episode of my current Special Interests! Mostly Yu-gi-oh but I will post anything I want

[moonogre]

Snippet 3

Business | Technology 

KaibaCorp Dreams of Another World

May 28 

“It’s not a question of what’s next. It’s what’s happening right now. Right in front of you.”

These are the words from the seventeen-year old visionary Seto Kaiba, known worldwide as the reigning Duel Monsters champion and CEO of KaibaCorp (TSE:KBA). His advice seems perfect for this moment: he is standing right in front of a gigantic dragon. It is screaming and ready to attack and he is fearless. 

The creature in question is one of three in the world that belong to the young CEO: Blue Eyes White Dragon, a rare Duel Monsters card and the star of KaibaCorp’s impromptu demonstration of its latest project: Scheherazade.

Named after the fabled storyteller of “One Thousand and One Nights,” Scheherazade is as much a technological marvel as it is a philosophical leap forward. The platform creates immersive worlds drawn from both written stories and players’ own memories, merging fiction and reality into a seamless experience. A combination of machine learning, memory recall, and advanced simulation technology allows the system to respond and adapt for real-time, constant immersion. While virtual reality has been evolving steadily over the past decade, Scheherazade’s memory integration takes it to another level, with unprecedented possibilities for storytelling, education, and, of course, gaming. 

Its most immediate application will be for duelists, offering fully interactive Duel Monsters matches in an arena where the creatures seem to step out of the cards and into life. Industry insiders speculate that this move could put KaibaCorp at the forefront of both gaming and virtual reality, potentially outpacing rivals like Industrial Illusions (NYSE:ILL) and Meta (NASDAQ: META).

This is the latest in the bold new direction forged under young Kaiba’s leadership, which transformed KaibaCorp from an arms contractor to a tech powerhouse, pioneering innovations at the intersection of telecommunications, augmented reality and entertainment. KaibaCorp’s origins date back to the post-World War II era when it rose to prominence as a leading arms manufacturer, standing just behind global defence giants like Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) and Northrop Grumman Corp (NYSE: NOC). The company’s previous success in the defence sector is often credited to the founding family’s deeply personal experience with war: Ryu Kaiba, KaibaCorp’s founder, served in Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service during Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. The war also impacted his son, the late Gozaburo Kaiba, who was one of the 650,000 survivors of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 

The latter half of the twentieth-century saw KaibaCorp as a bastion of military technology, supplying weapons to governments around the world. Yet the company was perpetually mired in controversy, and a frequent target of political outcry for its contributions to war and conflict. Protests frequently accompanied its business dealings, which placed it at the centre of public debate about the ethics of arms dealership. It is speculated that mounting pressure and dwindling public support factored into the shocking suicide of Gozaburo Kaiba, who jumped to his death from the KaibaCorp headquarters during a meeting with the company’s board of directors. 

This tragedy would make it the third time Seto Kaiba had lost a parent. Gozaburo Kaiba adopted both the current KaibaCorp CEO and his younger brother, KaibaCorp’s Senior Manager of Technology Operations, Mokuba Kaiba, following the deaths of their parents. Their mother died of eclampsia while giving birth to Mokuba, and their father was killed in a car accident in the infamous Izumo Earthquake Disaster.

Seto Kaiba succeeded Gozaburo as CEO of KaibaCorp at fifteen, making him the youngest person to ever lead a billion-dollar company. His youth left him no shortage of ideas, and he set the company on course for a seismic shift in focus. He went on a buying spree, absorbing a staggering number of promising computer technology companies in his first quarter as CEO. He also terminated operations at KaibaCorp’s global weapons testing centres and completely divested the company from projects supporting armed conflict. These actions led KaibaCorp to several high-profile lawsuits for defaulting on its contracts and sales agreements. These disputes were settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.     

Between the payouts, acquisitions and lack of customers, KaibaCorp was teetering on financial ruin. The company was saved with Kaiba’s most notable innovation: SolidVision, the holographic projection technology that brought Duel Monsters to life. This was followed by the Duel Disk, a revolutionary p2p interface that allowed duelists to compete in real-time holographic battles, becoming a staple for competitive players across the world. These commercial successes catapulted KaibaCorp into global fame and made Duel Monsters a cultural phenomenon, while signalling KaibaCorp’s new mission: to create, not destroy.

This pursuit has now brought KaibaCorp to the verge of another groundbreaking moment. Scheherazade, set to roll out this summer, will first be available at stadiums and theme parks before making its way into homes through a specialised hardware release. Duelists and VR enthusiasts alike are eagerly awaiting the chance to immerse themselves in the fully realised worlds this technology promises to deliver.

In many ways, KaibaCorp’s evolution is as poetic as it is fascinating. What was once a company defined by its contribution to destruction is now positioned to offer the world a new way of seeing itself, through stories, memories, and duels. 

“This is just the beginning. Scheherazade isn’t just a virtual space—it’s a new frontier for human imagination. It’s the bridge between what we can dream and what we can live.”

And in that, perhaps, lies Kaiba’s greatest victory: transforming a company of war into one that makes dreams reality.

______

The article featured two captioned pictures. Duel Monster Blue Eyes White Dragon, rendered in Scheherazade: a still of him pulled from the testing zone broadcast, looking up at Blue Eyes White Dragon. He was surprised at the lack of fear on his face– the light from the White Lightning Attack had washed every emotion into brightness. He was just vacant, ready, waiting.  He was more expressive in the second photograph: Father and son. One of the last before Gozaburo’s death. The man had a hand on his shoulder and was sneering down at him. Kaiba, fifteen, slanted his face to return his contempt, the corner of his mouth barely lifted in a matching, cruel smirk.

[moonogre]

Kaiba found the man whose name he’d taken to be broadly unimpressive. Much of Gozaburo’s status was owed to a demolishing conviction that trampled foe and foresight alike: he’d never met a thing to resist the ways he’d come to force the world, and this led him to assume he never would. Hubris, plain as day, it’s opportunity rampant for the common thieves in his influence—despots, warlords, turncoats. His violence fed their violence fed his violence, and this became the best distraction to advantage their agendas.

Gozaburo would argue the contrary of course. His brilliance was, in fact, credentialed. He was a philanthropist whose passion for education supported thousands; and this was lauded both home and abroad: Red Feather and YouMeWe NPO, the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations. He held honorary degrees from King’s College and Yale, to top his merit of distinction in business from Todai. Leaders came to his pulpit at Davos and Milken and Sun Valley. He was a titan of industry, a tour de force, and his beacon drew many fine thinkers from the tyranny of morality. With his patronage they built jets so fast they tore through sound and whale-big payloads that bottled all the power of an exploding star. In the wrong hands— or in the hands of a paying customer, which were usually just the wrong hands finally holding the right amount of money— a nation could be leveled to dust, in a single, dazzling instant. And this too, was seen as an achievement worth decoration: the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics, for its contravention of thermodynamics. It prototyped a lottery of imitators, and by the next year a smaller version fell from a KC-leased bomber onto Myanmar, killing three thousand people and ending the two-year attempt from the citizens to overthrow their brutal government. There was enough punditry to credit the event as a success and a diplomatic misfortune, and the cruel absurdity of this speculation only paused for sloganeering from the Butcher of Naypyidaw himself, no longer dictator but supplicant Prime Minster whose only wish was peace, and to rebuild. He was all over the papers and the radio and the television and he’d appeared a few times at the Kaiba mansion too, always with a case of cigars for Gozaburo in hand. A gift for his kingmaker.

All this destruction and its impunity, its glory and its riches. But it wasn’t immune to infiltration: Kaiba only had to look to himself as proof—all this conquest proved fickle to a child’s dishonesty, and Gozaburo the champion had come to him so blinded with victory that Kaiba could steal the game right out from under him.

This, of course, wasn’t the only embarrassment Kaiba observed of Gozaburo’s circumstance. His vanity came second to one other entitlement: an intrepid and disturbing self-pity; and with no company but sycophants it served as his only occasion for introspection. It was worst at night, brought on most times by one too many whiskeys, but inebriation wasn’t its only catalyst. Bad sleep back to back would cause it too: a strange delusion that endeared Gozaburo to his company.

The first instance was a month into the adoption. A maid had come to wake him to bring him to the man’s study. Kaiba was tired from another late evening with his tutors and annoyed to be taken from a rare night of sleep, but he kept it to himself, as he did most everything since he’d come to live this place. Gozaburo was sitting in a large armchair by the window— it had a twin, across from him, and he pointed at it in invitation. He took his place across from the man and waited.

“You’re doing very well in your studies.”

This flattery wasn’t necessary: he was aware. His aptitude and its progress had invited increasingly difficult work— he was a few years ahead now in Math, Physics, Social Studies and Computing. The unending situational calculus required to keep him and Mokuba safe, together and above despair had been solved with the chess match, and left his mind keen for challenges beyond the chore of their survival.

“It’s easy to study now that I have privacy, and a nice place to sleep. Thank you.”

“You’re most welcome. I know those are terrible things for a child to go without.”

“Yes.”

Gozaburo looked at him, and then out of the window. “How long were you and Mokuba in the orphanage?”

“A year. We lived with our aunt after our dad died, but she said she couldn’t take care of us anymore and took us there.”

“A year is long time. A child becomes a whole different person, trying to survive alone for that long.” Kaiba agreed with this but said nothing. “How did your father die?”

“He was in Izumo during the earthquake.”

“I’m sorry. We sent a relief team there, to help survivors.” Kaiba could nearly hear Gozaburo say it: Even in your tragedy, I was there. Even in your loss, I had reach. The man never failed a chance to own his authority over land and time and psyche, and this altruism was no exception. Kaiba knew that something about this made him more dangerous than he was repugnant, so he focused carefully on Gozaburo’s next words, as if they would reveal why: “Did you have to identify the body?”

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“It looked like he was sleeping. The hospital said he got trapped in his car and ran out of air under all the rubble.”

“You’re lucky he was still recognizable.” Luck had nothing to do with the loss of his father; the mere suggestion roused a thudding temper in his chest, but he kept even breathing and a still face for Gozaburo’s stare so that the man would pose his next question, unencumbered: “Are you glad you got to see him one last time?”

All he felt was rage. “I don’t know.”

Gozaburo nodded, and for a moment Kaiba feared he had admitted to something he hadn’t understood. But then the man continued speaking. “I found it unpleasant in my experience. Very few boys from my school survived the attack from the Americans, so when families failed to claim the bodies they would send me.” Gozaburo looked away from him again and out the window. “It was the right thing to do but I felt angry, to be the one in charge of it all. Sometimes I wished that there wasn’t anything left, so I wouldn’t have to do it.”

“That makes sense.”

“Do you ever feel that way?”

It was the same question, phrased a different way. Kaiba had a split second to answer, and stuck to his response: “I don’t know.”

Gozaburo studied him then, carefully. “You’re quite bright. I have no doubt you’ll decide one day.”

Kaiba vowed that this decision would run counter to the man’s benefit, to prove that all things in the world weren’t meant to be pinned beneath his thumb.

“Thank you.”

“You can go back to bed.”

But anger burned him wide awake, and would for years and years to come.

“Goodnight.”

[chaoscheebs]

One, I still love Kaiba's fancy princess bed.

Two, yeah, that penalty kinda really fucked the boy up on top of all the other fuckery he's endured in his life, huh? :/

[kaibasupremacy]

Gozaburo had died less to a year before this means that whole year was spent under so much pressure where he had to rework the entire corporation and if he failed him and Mokuba could have very well ended up on the streets penniless as well as dealing with the fact that he was abused and that his stepfather actually jumped off a window in front of him (and people blaming him for it too, there is a panel where he says there were rumors he caused his father’s death) with his last words being that to lose is to die. This is also the time in which he became duel monsters champion I assume because in the anime it is shown that Gozaburo forbid Seto from playing games and confiscated his cards. So his only escape from the mess of his life was winning more and more competitions but of course that wasn’t healthy either and it was fueled by the mindset that to lose is to die. And this leads us to the day where he tries to take the card from Yugi. At this moment in his life he has nothing but winning and he also expresses that he is excited over the possibility of experiencing death after the penalty game (probably as a form of self harm) and yet this is the moment that fully solidifies that losing is actually death, that what he had been told was right and it’s also another soul crushing moment of trauma because that’s basically torture. But he also see this as a moment of learning because he could have just sent someone to assassinate Yugi, he had that power we know this but he wants to prove that Yugi deserves to die by having him lose. “To lose is to die” for him doesn’t just mean you die if you lose but if you lose you deserve to die even if you don’t. That moment, the Experience of Death, even after the Mind Crush (which tbh can also be seen as a reinforcement of that lesson) stays with him equally as much as the final words of Gozaburo did.

The Cards With Teeth and then Death T arc is so complex it always makes me roll my eyes when ppl say stuff like “he tried to kill a child because he defeated him in cards”

[kaijufluffs]

She's being so big and brave.

[roswellsoup]

graduated and was blessed by ladybug freaks 💛🐞🎓

[noeiilyn]

blue-eyes seto kaiba

[millenniummmbop]

They’re getting lunch after work ヾ(•ω•`)o

Kaiba was pretending he didn’t want the bewd toys so yugi bought himself two kid’s meals and let kaiba hold onto the toys for him

you know for safekeeping

[raptorific]

At work I referred in passing to "46-year-old Seto Kaiba's deeply unconstitutional bid to be elected President of the United States" and the idea crystallized so immediately in my head

[millenniummmbop]

hate crime dot jaypeg

[lysimachias]

@c-l-y-d-e TFLTF ch11

[lysimachias]

Well you see i saw a rarepair poll going around the other day and my hand slipped (;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`)

[lysimachias]

In my mind palace this is 100% their post-canon friendship

For @seekerbr who requested Anzu or Kaiba, but...I couldn't decide, so you get both (◌˘◡˘◌)

[eevee-eevee-blog1]

I don’t remember where I saw the inspo for this but have some tender Blueshipping 😊

[millenni-em-tauk]

Atem and the Kaiba Brothers in some lighthearted, post-DSOD fun.  For a happy Inauguration Day in the U.S.!

After Kaiba went to such great lengths to see Atem again, Atem realized there was something he could do to break the awful cycle of abandonment in the Kaiba brothers’ lives.

It’s also just super-fun to draw Kaiba freaking out…mwa ha!

[millenni-em-tauk]

Seto and Ishizu discuss little brothers and forgiveness at Mokuba’s birthday party.

In my heart of hearts, I’m probably a trust-shipper–they’re so very different but get each other so well.

Happy March!

[millenni-em-tauk]

Very quick and very silly comic!  

Looking forward to going back to the movie theater! :)

[millenni-em-tauk]

Practice aging a character, featuring Mokuba Kaiba.  From right to left, he’s pictured at about 12, 18, 24, and 30.  

I for sure see him growing up to be the World’s Coolest Teacher–the one who brings his guitar to class and plans more educational field trips than actual days in the classroom.

Bonus Scene with Uncle Seto: Mokuba’s daughter is as moody and precocious as Seto ever was.  Mokuba is as impervious to (even fond of) her attitude as he is to Seto’s–meanwhile, Seto has met his match…

[sbd-laytall]