soooo something i missed the first 4 times i read the ygo manga was THIS statement mahad makes when he’s fighting bakura:
and on the 5th time around that really stuck out to me! it’s just one line, it probably doesn’t mean much… right?
well in ch30/308, where we learn abt the origins of the millennium items, the magician that wields the ring (as seen in the scene where they defend the palace) is there with akhenaden when he proposes creating the items to akhnamkanon
the other two magicians with him don’t seem to match up with any of the item wielders, so i think it’s safe to assume that they’re not very important. what i think IS safe to assume is that this mysterious unnamed magician contributed to the translation of the millennium tome
and he may have even steered akhenaden towards the massacre of kul elna, though that’s pure speculation on my part.
what i’m really focused on is the idea that 1: the previous magician’s ‘evil’ (or perhaps ‘evil intelligence’ ? hmm?) resides in the millennium ring and 2: that this ‘evil’ is what causes unfit wielders to burst into flames & you need extremely strong magical power to suppress it
the ring has the power to seal souls into items, as seen several times throughout the series, but i think it also absorbs souls. this would be a unique quality among the items, since (i assume) none of the other items are possessed (besides the puzzle and that was on purpose). i think the only reason that mahad isn’t also inside the ring is because he fused with his ka and became dark magician, thus separating his soul from the ring even though he was in possession of it when he died.
basically what i’m saying is that yami bakura might be even more complicated than we think. there are a lot of popular theories about him, and i myself have a lot of thoughts on the topic, but for now i will stick with the one where he is an entirely new personality formed from a little bit of thief king bakura, a little bit of zorc, and 3000 years of marinating in darkness and memory loss. that one little sentence from mahad adds a new spice to the mix: the ‘evil’ of the previous ring holder.
i think this could explain a LOT of the apparent inconsistencies in motivation and action for yami bakura. i won’t be going into all of those bc then i’ll be here all day but i do wanna point out a few things
here’s a bit of dialogue that always tripped me up:
here’s yami bakura, talking as though he himself is not the thief in the ring. and we know he isn’t, he’s something else, but the funny thing is that he usually does identify himself as a thief!
and the phrasing ‘thief’s soul’ perhaps carries the implication that there is more than one soul housed within the ring. i always assumed that was zorc, because right now yami bakura is acting as/for zorc, but then i thought, ‘does zorc even have a soul?’
i think the answer is no. zorc is the embodiment of evil, darkness, chaos, malice, what have you. he exists in peoples souls but i don’t believe he has one himself. but then again it’s hard to say anything concrete about something that doesn’t even actually appear in the series (which i would go into but that’d be a whole other post). what i’m getting at here is that the unnamed magician likely contributes to yami bakura’s actions as much as the the thief king and zorc do.
in fact, i would even go as far as saying that the only reason akhenaden survived his encounter with bakura was because of the magician’s influence. zorc/yami bakura didn’t really need another pawn. a backup is nice, sure, but judging from the way that he let TKB crumble into sand for no reason instead of promoting him shows that he really doesn’t need more than one pawn and that it doesn’t particularly matter who he uses as long as they can wield an item.
i mean, if you were the lord of darkness, which one would you want on your side? the guy with the demon god ka that’s been raised on revenge and the screams of the dead from the tender age of (???) who is hell-bent on destroying the pharaoh and all he stands for and the whole world, too, while he’s at it? or the old absent father with a magic eye who doesn’t even have a personal ka and who just wants to put his son on the throne?
not to mention, it wasn’t even really zorc that made akhenaden into a pawn. it was TKB. he spared the guy that was responsible for the massacre of his entire village. you know, the village that he’s getting revenge for. why in the world wouldn’t he just rip his eye out and be done with it?
well, that goes back around to the mysterious unnamed magician. i mentioned earlier that i thought that he could have steered akhenaden towards the path that he took back then. why did he order the massacre of kul elna? because he was desperate. why was he desperate? because they were being invaded. why was that so bad? besides people dying, which akhenaden doesn’t seem too bothered by, it was because the invaders were after the millennium tome. but the tome has gone untranslated for 100 years… oh wait a sec. it’s translated now. but who translated it? well it probably wasn’t just akhenaden. my money’s on our unnamed magician. oh and it just so happens that our friend the magician got to wield one of the items! how nice! but none of his other magician buddies did.
what im saying is that our mysterious magician may have also been a master male manipulator. he influenced TKB to spare akhenaden because ol’ akh was his ticket to power back in the day. this is really all just speculation, but it makes sense to me. mysterious magician could’ve been the mastermind behind a lot of things. too bad he died offscreen of unspecified causes. it’d be funny if he did all that and then just died of old age or got into a palanquin pileup or something and spent the next five years trapped in a necklace getting his evil machinations suppressed by mana’s algebra tutor
alright i wrote way too much. i’m not that invested in the mysterious unnamed magician, i’m just interested in what he might reveal about the history of the millennium items and what, exactly, yami bakura’s deal is
so, TLDR: the previous wielder of the millennium ring’s ‘evil’ is sealed within the item, which may account for some of yami bakura’s inconsistencies. this previous wielder may have also led to the creation of the items
The other day I was rewatching the scene between Moses and Seti in The Prince of Egypt and it made me think of a scenario where the same thing happens between Atem and Aknadin
