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Related to previous post about my ChocolateBox letter.

So, usually I go in looking for particular tags, but fic exchanges are sometimes an opportunity to request something weird that one had never considered as a real possibility before. One of the things I picked of this nature was Thief King Bakura/Atem.

I would never, ever have considered this in a million years as a thing I would organically Start Shipping and yet I'm interested. You can see my prompt on my letter for why, but the thing I wanted to just put SOMEWHERE for posterity is how it occurred to me that Atem and Thief King Bakura, shippy or not, could be a bit like a motive/moral-weight-reversed Rameses and Moses from The Prince of Egypt. Like, IMAGINE:

"The Prince of Egypt -The Plagues HQ" (Watch on YouTube)

And now suddenly I'm way more invested in their pre-canon/Millennium Item entrapment potential interactions than I ever was before which is fun.

Also that's one of the best cartoon film songs ever. As a Christian, I absolutely adore The Prince of Egypt as a sort of... non-proselytizing adaptation? I feel like adaptations of Bible stories that are intended to have a particularly Religious intent are often... sanitized which makes no sense at all, but is extremely reflective of the weird relationship between American Civil Christianity and Conservatism and censorship and a bunch of other stuff that one could write a dissertation on. The Prince of Egypt takes faith and religion as series and very real within the narrative, but it isn't trying to pitch the religion to someone from a weird, meddling-PR standpoint which I would tend to think makes it more effective as a story and as an introduction-point to a faith with which one was previously not familiar or emotionally connected to incidentally. It has an organic relationship with its source material that is strangely absent from a lot of "Religious Film."

"Through Heaven's Eyes" is also a really great song that is genuinely devotional and inspirational, on that note, even though it isn't written with that explicit intent. I also like that this movie didn't shy away from the fact that Zipporah and the Midianites were black and that there were, in fact, monotheists and people who influenced and partook in the spiritual heritage of the Abrahamic faiths from within Africa itself, contrary to the colonizing narrative that later European cultural Christians would use to justify their invasions of African cultures. There's a bunch more I have to say about that, both informed and curious, but for now here's a song:

"Through Heaven's Eyes" (Watch on YouTube)

Now, back to YuGiOh (sublime to ridiculous).

On Bakura (both of them) and Mixed Identity

For ease, when I say "Bakura" I mean Yami or Thief King Bakura, as appropriate, and when I say Ryou I mean modern day teenager child host / "landlord". When I use the full name, Bakura Ryou, I mean both of them as appropriate.

I have known for years that Bakura was a name of Hebrew origin. I don't remember where I learned it. GeoCities? An issue of American Shounen Jump? Something. But it's a real thing and you can look it up. I never really considered it having a deeper meaning until this recent foray into being into YuGiOh.

Also, we know how Ryou really likes the Change of Heart card art and is trying to communicate meaningfully through telling his friends this.



Now I would like to talk about a couple of headcanons about both of them that I think play nicely back into this theme, even if I know for a fact I'm just wholesale making shit up that Takahashi likely never gave a second thought. I also want to disclaim that while there is certainly a light/dark, good/evil symbology behind the divided heart or theme of being part-one-thing-part-something-else that I am in absolutely no way giving that kind of value quality to being mixed-race, though I'm going to talk about that as part of this, too. There are some serious issues with how we equate "dark" with "bad" and how that relates to the perception of skin color and beauty standards and such and it isn't exclusive to western culture, and I feel like I shouldn't HAVE to disclaim that, but I'm gonna just in case. I know the can of worms exists, but we're not opening it here.

So, the American dub gave Ryou a British accent so as to impart the vibe of his very polite way of speaking in Japanese since we don't have honorifics and have different cultural baggage. Then, for consistency, they gave Bakura a British accent but instead gave it the character of a sort of dark, British mastermind with a much deeper tone. This was my first exposure to the character, so it certainly threw me for a loop when I started watching the sub and heard Ryou|Bakura's original voice and how little distinction there was between the two. However, as I have watched, it has grown on me and begun to make more sense. Now, I can understand how the original polite versus impolite thing is imparted in a different way though the language itself and the character of the voice and its tone has more of a creepy horror movie child vibe. But I can see the sense in both these characterizations. Localization of concept is not always a bad thing! Occasionally, 4Kids did... something... right!

(If anything, kid-friendly dubs of anime back then often had this quality of tried-too-hard to polish for perceived demographic. Sometimes it was terrible, but other times it was adorable.)

So even though I now know what Bakura Ryou "sounds like" in the original transmission, the whole Britishness thing is sort of indelibly tied to my perception of the character. However, I don't think that this is necessarily a problem. Rather, I think that it creates a pretty interesting pathway to fill in some of the gaps in Ryou's background. We don't know a whole lot about Ryou, but we do know some things.

1. He moved to Domino City's high school, and he had moved around a lot previously.

2. His father traveled to Egypt at some point where he obtained the Millennium Ring and gave it to Ryou as a gift.

3. His mother and younger sister died at the same time at some point prior to his receiving the Ring.

4. After receiving the Ring, he was not fully aware of Bakura's nature. He only ever refers to Bakura as a "Voice," if he refers to him at all, though there have been a few instances of Bakura manipulating Ryou into believing that he has the ability and intent to help him or his friends in a situation.

5. Ryou had trouble making friends after receiving the Ring, both due to moving around and the fact that when he invited friends over to play D&D-esque games they would end up passed out or in the hospital or something because Bakura doesn't play well with others.

So this leads me to this weird headcanon that I have had for some time that maybe Bakura is mixed race (Japanese and English / British of some extraction, specifically or primarily). I presume that his father may or may not be Japanese at all, given that his surname is "Bakura," which is - as I said - of Hebrew origin. Also the one time we see him he has this sort of white dude looking ponytail to me? However, Ryou has a Japanese given name which would indicate at least one Japanese parent, which make sense since he speaks Japanese and goes to school in Japan. However, we know that his dad has traveled a lot. Then you look at the interesting and very fetishy history of British archeology and Egyptomania and all of that jazz. The how's and why's could go all sorts of directions, but I imagine that given this headcanon Ryou's parents met through their professions which somehow involved the study of Ancient Egypt and that one of them was native to the UK. I suppose that Ryou grew up primarily in Japan, leading to his father remaining there with him or at least ensuring that he would be raise there, but it would seem that his father still travels for work even after his death. Not that it matters, but I also assume that his mother and sister died in a car accident, though I don't recall if it's ever stated, given that they died BEFORE the involvement of Ancient Egyptian Dark Magic (as far as we know).

Now, if we go so far as to suggest the Ryou is, at the very least, part-Japanese and part-British and that both his parents had some kind of connection to Ancient Egypt professionally, it might not be that far a leap to suggest that one of them had some kind of heritage-related interest in Ancient Egypt. This leads me to believe that whichever one of them was fully or partly European might have also been part of the Jewish diaspora.

Another disclaimer: Secular Biblical scholars will argue back and forth about the historicity of Egyptian enslavement of the Hebrew people because something or other about lack of sufficient records to indicate it on the Egyptian side of things and archeological things making them think the timeline is off. However, there are also a lot of pro arguments that one can watch documentaries about that don't seem too crackpot-y if you're interested. As someone who has studied the text both religiously and in a secular university setting, the most critical read I can give you is that I think that it smacks of something kind of weird and anti-Semitic to suggest that they made up an entire part of their cultural heritage for no reason whatsoever when we know that, like, the Babylonian captivity has some historicity. Whew. So my take is that something of this nature happened, even if the when / why / extent is not known or corroborated. But I shouldn't even have to say this, again, because from a fictional headcanon point of view I'm mostly looking at it from a broad-strokes, mythological point of view anyway.

So why does it matter if Ryou might have some aspect of Jewish cultural heritage? Well, it goes back to that surname and the fact that it is, apparently and improbably, an overlap with the only known name of the Thief King Bakura. Let's have some fun with weird and possibly-lazy writing!

A really early and uninformed read on YuGiOh canon suggested to younger-me that both Yugi and Ryou were, like, Japanese-reincarnations of... Ancient Egyptian people... never mind the kind of bizarre and problematic view of what the concept of reincarnation would even mean then. They are not and cannot be reincarnations by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, and resemblance can only go so far when these people are separated by thousands of years of genetics and race-typical features. I'm not denying that they resemble reach other in... some... vague... way, but it has to be read with a grain of salt to be taken seriously whatsoever.

Why are you taking YuGiOh seriously? You might ask. Because shut up.

Literally the only people it makes sense to read as actual reincarnations are people like Seto and Isis who had identities in the ancient past who died and lived again to end up in some rehash or continuation of events of their past lives. Yugi and Ryou aren't like that expressly because while Atem and Bakura died physical deaths, their souls have been trapped in the Ring and Puzzle for three thousand years. Yugi and Ryou were born before they were out of their Millennium Item prisons. They aren't reincarnations.

What they could be, though, is some kind of fate-driven, meant-to-be vessel for this unfinished destiny business. Then, Seto and Isis end up where they're supposed to be in relation to it because of some kind of metaphysical gravitational pull/orbit dynamic that is completely undiscussed but that we can accept because shut up.

So, like, Yugi and Atem are... soul...mates, I guess, whether you read it in a shippy way or not. They're similar, but they aren't really connected in any meaningful, corporeal way. In fact, the most satisfying answer that I have ever heard for why they (Atem | Yugi or Bakura | Ryou) look so much the same in the ancient past and in their Japanese teenager forms came from toxictsukino telling me about an explanation for it she read in a tendershipping fic. I have no idea what the fic was as that isn't a thing I really ship, but basically: Bakura explained to Ryou that the reason he perceived of himself, in flashbacks and such, as basically a brown version of Ryou is because Ryou's face was the only face he had ever seen as his own in a mirror or anything. That is somehow tantalizing as an explanation, even though I refuse to believe neither of them ever caught their reflection in the Nile or a blade or something even before the invention of true-clarity mirrors. It's at least a concept I can kind of get behind! So there.

Back on track, I think that the above why-the-hell-do-you-resemble-each-other-at-all-then applies more to Yugi and Atem than to Ryou and Bakura for the simple reason that I can maybe buy some narrative where Bakura is a thousands-of-years-back ancestor to Ryou if we go with him having a European Jewish Diaspora parent. Because...

Where did that name "Bakura" come from at all? Well, maybe it was because Thief King Bakura was Hebrew.

Based on the Biblical account/mythology: The Hebrew people came to live in the Land of Goshen in the Nile Delta as a result of the life and exploits of Joseph (of Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat fame). Joseph had some dreams that foretold him coming to power greater than that of all of his older by-another-mother half-siblings and his parents. He was also favored by their father as the son of the one of two sisters he actually wanted to marry in the first place. This made his older brothers not like him very much, so they conspired to kill him. One day, he went to them out in the field wearing his multicolored coat that was expensive and proof that he was the favorite kid, and they tossed him down into this pit thing from which he could not get out. He begged for them to help him and stop this nonsense while they conspired how to kill him, but then one of the brothers saw some traders coming by and decided that they didn't actually have to kill him, the could just sell him into slavery instead! So they pull him out of the pit only to sell him as a slave to these passing traders. They take his coat and drench it in animal blood to convince their father that Joseph was gored by some animal, and Joseph is exiled into Egypt.

Joseph has some pretty wild ups and downs until eventually he rises to power second only to Pharaoh because of some dream prophecies. Joseph is given the wisdom of how to prepare for a seven year famine, and Pharaoh gives him all the control he needs in order to make it happen. Then comes the famine, and Joseph's brothers come looking for food because they have exhausted their options where they were, but they have no idea that it is Joseph who is in charge as it has been at least fourteen years. Then some other things happen, and Joseph reconciles with his family, and they and their tribe come to settle in the land given to them by Pharaoh. (They didn't just assimilate mainly because, on the Egyptian side of things, the Hebrews were shepherds and the Egyptians didn't really do that so much, so they thought the sheep herds were stinky.)

So then comes a Pharaoh who has forgotten the relationship of friendship between the Egyptians and the Hebrews, he sees the Hebrews as Others and freeloaders, pulls some typical racist bullshit, and enslaves the Hebrews. So that's how you ended up with Hebrew slaves in Egypt, according to the Bible.

So I really don't know when one can best-date the fictional reign of Atem and his dad, but assuming the possibility that either Hebrew friendship or slavery might have existed during that time assuming that it was a thing that happened in some kind of reasonably mythologically parallel way, it is an interesting idea to me.

It became an interesting idea to me because of something a Troper on TVTropes pointed out:

Whole Costume Reference: Appropriately enough, given the setting and his backstory, the red robe kinda makes him look like a topless version of the classic depiction of Moses◊, as in The Ten Commandments.

So then we get back to both my laughing-but-not-really about the juxtaposition between Atem and Bakura in the ancient past and the possibility of them as a sort of played with and inverted narrative of Rameses and Moses per The Prince of Egypt. [To note: Rameses II being the Pharaoh in The Prince of Egypt and Moses having a fraternal relationship with him is pure artistic license on the film's part and not something that is textually given in the Bible.]

This would kind of work for a YuGiOh-verse interpretation of why the people of Kul Elna were so randomly expendable and how much Bakura perceived himself as an equal-opposite to Atem in his efforts to avenge his own loss. It wasn't just Atem's Evil Uncle Aknadin who did this; he had help, so why was he able to rally support to go murder 99 people in cold blood who didn't see it coming? Why did Bakura as an unknown survivor go on to be a sort of self-raised feral child for the rest of his growing up? Why did he become aligned with criminality and theft rather than finding someplace to find sympathy and be absorbed into someone's family life?

It is almost an inversion of the Moses myth itself. Moses was saved from the massacre of all of the Hebrew male children under the age of two because the Pharaoh at the time felt that the Hebrew people were becoming too numerous and may one day get free of their bondage. Moses's mother kept him hidden for as long as possible while crafting a waterproofed basket which she placed him in and let it free to allow it to float it up the Nile, giving him at least a chance of survival. Then he was found by the daughter of the Pharaoh, taken in as her child, and arose to the position from which he was eventually exiled. Later, he returned from exile with a mission to free his birth people from slavery on the part of his adopted people.

Bakura, on the other hand, is a survivor of a massacre but he is not a purposeful survivor. He was overlooked as a child. He grew up embittered, and he has no adoptive family, no salvific mission, and when he does come up with a plan for vengeance he is manipulated by the very architect of his people's massacre.

This all interests me because it gives yet another layer to the theme of Part against Part, Person against Person, and so on that runs so deep with the whole symbology surrounding Ryou as a character and how that connects him or makes him at all fit or destined to be involved with Bakura at all. While Yugi is destined through spirit, maybe Ryou is destined by blood.


Wow, this post went all kinds of places.