i know most people don’t like him but i kinda live for leo akaba as the penultimate villain of arc v specifically because of both how fucked up he is but also how irrelevant he is. sure it was his solid vision technology that inadvertently birthed a society obsessed with blood sport but at the same time he was basically a bystander in all the tragedy that ensued when zarc couldn’t handle the pressure anymore. and once again in arc v we see that he’s a genius in every respect, that he managed to organize a multidimensional war assault with the express purpose of erasing zarc and restoring both his daughter and home, but once again he’s basically powerless to do any of that when both the protagonists and antagonists pay even a fraction of attention to him.
But regardless of how useless he ends up being, he’s also legitimately fucked up. He straight up indoctrinated the fusion dimensions entire dueling population and turned them into heavily conditioned child soldiers, released them into the xyz dimension where they basically destroyed the world and cleansed the population, he was aware of the class warfare and inequality in the synchro dimension and set roget there as a puppet specifically because he knew he could take advantage of it to further his goal of harvesting the population, and the next dimension he had his eyes on for his carding scheme was the standard dimension, where he left his wife and child.
And all of this was for the express purpose of reviving one person who chose to sacrifice herself to save the world.
There’s actually no indication that the people sacrificed to the arc reactor would have actually been revived (that was a lie he told edo, and the only reason all the carded people came back was because reira basically sacrificed herself to re-split zarc and then fuse the dimensions again as a way to prevent his reincarnation). He lied to everyone about what he was doing because he literally does not see them as people, to him the only person who even exists is ray and himself because everyone else is just a phantom of people who once existed to him. He doesn’t care about any of the tragedy he causes and literally keeps the bracelet girls in pods where he says to their faces that he’s going to sacrifice their lives to revive his daughter because they aren’t people to him, just fragments of someone who once existed.
Arc-V’s best villain is definitely zarc at the end of the day, but man if leo akaba doesn’t hold a place in my war criminal heart.
man rewatching all the duels leading up to zarcs revival it really is incredible how so much of the tragedy is born from, once again, people misunderstanding zarc.
leo claimed zarc wanted to be revived, yusho believed that zarc placed yuya in his care to be raised as a duelist, edo kaito and co all think that zarc is the one behind everything but zarc is literally the footnote here. He was a peace, he didnt WANT any of this, even in the original dimension it was people forcing him into fights, ignoring both his and the monsters feelings. it was everyone pushing yuya into having to win, pressuring and cornering him that made a wounded animal lash out once again. zarc even tries to claim credit for all of it including the creation of pendulum later in his own duel massacre but ray calls him out on the fact that it was born specifically because he wasnt the irredeemable monster that he styled himself as and that everyone thought he was. pendulum was born specifically because of the indecision that stemmed from whether he wanted to continue his revenge or be at peace, and it was leo who once again birthed the monster with his own hands