I really do wonder how accelerated Seto was into his own emotional isolation before Gozaburo’s abuse. I always end up circling back to the shit with his parents' siblings fleecing him and Mokuba out of all their money and dumping them at an orphanage. Getting abandoned by your family when you are a child is crazy fucking work. It does bonkers things to how you see trust, relationships, obligation, reliability, safety, rules, morality, greed, family, risk and that’s all BEFORE you step foot in a whole ass orphanage to scam an arms dealer into adopting you.
I love explorations where Seto’s self-concept is really transformed and challenged by a complicated or adversarial relationship with Gozaburo, though it’s not something I ever find myself defaulting to in my own characterizations of him. I do wonder if young Seto had begun viewing everything extractively because of his family's betrayal and that by the time Gozaburo showed up, he saw him as a mark to exploit for his own ends and an experience to endure like everything else.
I guess I end up seeing Seto’s relationship to Gozaburo as it’s own kind of opportunism stemming from some pretty terrible things he can observe about his life when all other things are in flux: “my own family took everything away from me and threw me and my brother away. I have not heard from them and they are not concerned for my welfare and the welfare of my brother and it does not trouble their conscience that we survived an orphanage, and could have been separated at any moment to terrible fates, and we have come to board with a severe and callous stranger that physically and mentally harms us. Family is not the sacred boundary that everyone says it is. My mom died and then my brother showed up and then my dad died and then my parents' siblings showed up and then they disappeared but they might as well be dead for all I know or even care for how little they cared for us when it really mattered. People come and go and it seems the only place they can stay put is in the past. As for who cares for me now, I am the ward of a man who I had to challenge to want me. I am not even his son and he is not even my father. Family is not the sacred boundary that everyone says it is. I can cheat my way into his home and cheat my way into whatever I want in his life. There are people who act and people who are acted upon. The more you punish me the more I take. I learn to take punishment so I can take other things. I am taking everything for myself. What is there left to lose? Mokuba? I kept us together but there’s this world where you either take or are taken from at a moment’s notice and he’s none the wiser to it and there’s something about that that makes me sick. If he doesn’t wisen to it one day someone will take him away from me. Or maybe he will take something I need from me—siblings steal from one another all the time. Family is not the sacred boundary that everyone says it is. Maybe it’s better if he goes too if he can’t defend himself, or before he does something I can’t come back from. What’s the point. People strip everything away from you and then it is gone and you have to face the fact that yes, you are nothing. You don’t have to tell me to lose is to die: I already know. Family is not the sacred boundary that everyone says it is. Go out the window for all I care.”
Sometimes young children clue into the fact that some adults can be so self serving and thoughtless as to leave intractable, sometimes irreversible marks on their quality of life. It is a horrible side of the world to encounter as a child. The types of global suspicion, paranoia and distrust of adults that emerge in cases of child abandonment is something I can see as probable in Seto’s circumstance.
It’s certainly reinforced in every adult interaction following Gozaburo’s death: he rules a company with a hostile board who are always trying to literally physically incapacitate him or kill him or trap him somewhere or steal some more shit from him. More adult greed and opportunism: Pegasus, Big 5, whatever.
Their dad died in that car accident and I don’t think they spent 24 hours with a single adult invested in their long term happiness since then, with the exception of Isono.
