I've been meaning to make a post about this for years, and I spoke my mind to a friend and I don't think I'll ever say it better than this, so here you go.
Thief King Bakura speaks truth to power.
So during COVID and amid all the BLM protests, I had a loooot of time to think, and inevitably I found myself thinking about Yu-Gi-Oh (you can probably see where this is going). And specifically how the oppressed who fight back always get labeled violent thugs/terrorists/etc to discredit them. And sure, maybe some of these actors do horrific things that are unjustified (such as TKB killing a bunch of innocents).
That doesn't address the fundamental problem, the violence that incited it all in the first place, enacted by the *state,* not the oppressed.
And here's the timeline that makes this so fascinating:
Aknadin decides to sacrifice an entire village to make magic weapons to fight some foreign enemy, and he orders his troops to massacre a poor village. He accidentally leaves one survivor, a child
Aknadin buries this event, knowing how horrific it is. When his brother the Pharaoh finds out, it kills him (but they still use the items)
Said child swears his revenge and makes his pact with Zorc to gain the power necessary to enact that revenge
TKB confronts Aknadin and the now Pharaoh Atem with the truth. Atem dismisses it as a lie. Aknadin justifies it by saying Kul Elna was a village of thieves whose lives didn't matter / were inherently dangerous and evil
We see that exact script every time the police kill a Black or brown person ("they must have been a criminal / resisted / deserved it") and in Gaza ("well Hamas is just as bad /worse") and in the war on terror ("they're all dangerous, we have to kill them before they kill us") and literally every time the oppressor wants to justify their violence against the oppressed.
And here's the thing! First of all, even if Kul Elna was a village of thieves and low lives, they still didn't deserve what happened to them. And the crazy part is, we *know that's not true* for the simple fact that a child was there to witness the atrocity. It was a village of families.