Sometimes, being misunderstood can be a good story.

Let's face it. Everyone likes a good opponent. They can make or break a series, and in recent years, misunderstood (or sympathetic) opponents have become very common in the media. There are good reasons for this: the audience likes a character they can resonate with, has a character that people should oppose, reveals a sympathetic background story, or a reasonable reason adds a certain depth to the story. However, the handling of such characters varies from series to series, and one series that handles such characters well is Yu-Gi-Oh! .

Yu-Gi-Oh! It is a series that most people are familiar with. Even if you have never read manga or watched anime, you have probably seen the playing cards in the series at your local grocery store. The manga series lasted from 1996 to 2008, and received the first animation in 1998, which had never been released outside of Japan. Yu-Gi-Oh! The series that most people are familiar with began airing in 2000 and ended in 2004, introducing the series and its colorful character lineup to the West, including Muto Game, Joey Wheeler, Cha Gardner, and Seto Kaiba.

Seto Kaiba is the opponent mentioned above. Rude, ironic, demeaning and cruel, Seahorse always hinders the game and disappoints him and his friends. Throughout the series, Haima behaved quite cold and distant, always acting as if he was better than others, and was not afraid to overwhelm others in order to get what he wanted. Because of this attitude, we can see the hippocampus fail. a lot of. When he pushed his brother Mokuba away, we saw him facing terrible consequences. We saw him defeat Yugi again and again and failed, and even if we saw him win, we can see that this did not give him any satisfaction. However, despite the ruthlessness of Haima, we also saw his small moments of kindness. Most of these moments appeared in his relationship with his brother. He always put the only person in the first place, and even the company he claimed was the most important thing in his life.

These are normal characteristics of a compassionate opponent. Coupled with his tragic background story, Haima possesses all the qualities of a villain who is not misunderstood. He is just a sympathetic but annoying person for the audience. However, for Haima's character and his role in the series, a key importance is how people around him misunderstand his personality, motives and behavior. Our understanding of Hippocampus is purely based on what Yugi and his friends think of him. Even with the addition of historical fragments of the hippocampus, such as his time in the orphanage and the rigorous training he received from the hippocampus, the character never uses these things to try to understand the hippocampus. Therefore, the audience does not really want to draw these connections, either.

Therefore, the hippocampus is a misunderstood character. But this is what he should be.

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Misunderstanding the hippocampus as a role is crucial to the theme of Yu-Gi-Oh. As an opponent close to an anti-hero, he is in a very unstable position; he is not a real character that will be permanently defeated, but a recurring character designed to disrupt plans and create plot branches. Because of this, he must have a purpose in the plot, which is to show what happens when you are not like the protagonist.

The main themes of Yu-Gi-Oh! are friendship, faith and trust. Yugi won because he believed in the core of the cards and their connection with his grandfather. Joey gained fighting spirit from the support and trust of friends and the desire to help his sister. The protagonists always depend on the relationship between each other, and they trust each other without a doubt. However, the hippocampus is just the opposite. He is narcissistic, pushing people away, playing only with power and ignoring the spirit of the game. He never trusts people around him, he wants to do things by himself. Throughout the series, we see that his failure stemmed from his refusal to cooperate with the theme and morals of the series. This is common to almost all opponents, but for Haima, we got his reason for doing this. His past—as an orphan, and then adopted just to receive endless training to take over KaibaCorp and all the corruption that followed—makes him vigilant of those around him and just want to be a high-level man. He is skeptical of anything that seems too good to be true, and friendship, faith, and trust are these things.

For this reason, Yu-Gi-Oh! Hope the audience ignores the reason behind the behavior of the hippocampus. It's not about why Seahorse does things; it's just about what he does and how it negatively affects him. By showing the audience what happens when you ignore important things, this keeps the plot going and helps bring the core message of the series home. Haima's role in the series needs him to be misunderstood, it doesn't matter; if the audience wants, the gap can be filled in the end, but this is also a very interesting way of conveying morality. After all, Yu-Gi-Oh! It is the moral and thematic journey of the game. Haima is just to create opposition and bear the consequences. It is perfectly acceptable for the audience to only be asked to see Yugi's perspective.

Seto Kaiba is one of the most complicated characters in Yu-Gi-Oh. Despite his rough appearance, his underlying motivations and morals have been affected in many ways, making him a sympathetic opponent. But Yu-Gi-Oh! It asks us not to sympathize with him completely; it asks us to deliberately misunderstand him, put his background story aside, and focus only on how his neglect of the themes of friendship, faith, and trust made him fail. This is a surprisingly interesting way to promote the morals of the series, while also reminding the audience that this is a story from the perspective of the game. We are not trying to understand Haima, although we can definitely base on the information provided; we are doomed to misunderstand him, because this is what other characters do.

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Sebastian Stoddard is an anime feature film writer for Collider. He also writes video game reviews for Popzara, where he is happy to be able to try a lot of great (and not great) games. When he is not writing (which is not common), he will play D&D, read and research, make online and take quizzes, and watch documentaries about whales and dolphins. He may or may not be 30 tarantulas disguised as human boys...but that is classified information.