"Any card—so long as it exists—has a power that is needed."

zeravmeta:

pendulum-sonata:

Not sure if this counts as some sort of mini-analysis because it’s more of a late realization that came as I was thinking that some people think that his off-screen death was “easy” and dunno, I guess they wanted to see him punished onscreen? 

Because he was such a well-written scumbag that at the end we were all rooting for his demise, but I mean more like, I don’t think I ever heard anyone even refer to him as a “problematic fave” or anything even as a joke. He was irredeemable to the point that the only believable reason many find for him not dying on-screen or getting carded or something, it’s because censorship and the like. 

But that’s not the only reason, Arc V needed to stay consistent in the central themes of the series revolving entertainment dueling and bonding with people, by that logic they couldn’t have any of the Lancers and much less Yuya to card him or anyone else, for some of you it may be easy to say: “But, he really did deserve it and it’s not like they were suddenly going to card people willy-nilly.”

Well, no, obviously, but it would mean that it would have made it okay for any of them to card Dennis, or the Doc, or Leo, because doing that with Roger would have set up the precedent of “it’s okay to card people, if they deserve it.” and it’s also the reason why the Doc’s carding had to be done by Leo rather than any of our heroes.

And at the end? Roget died a miserable death anyway, crushed between dimensions and brought only by himself because he refused to accept defeat, so imo, it’s even poetic in a way.

Because all the villains of Arc V brought their own misery onto themselves on one way or another, so what would be more fitting than their fall or defeat to be brought by themselves too?

Honestly one of the best things Arc-V does is foreshadowing, and to this end one of their trends is that they always had an initial antagonist that’s a microcosm of a much bigger antagonist. 

One of the very first antagonists we had, in terms of actually clashing with the core cast in a thematically meaningful way, was Kachidoki, who presented Action Duels in a far more violent light that was initially hinted with some of Yuya’s qualification duels leading up to the Miami Tournament. After this, the lead-up villain we had was Sora, who turned his first duel with Kurosaki into an actual all out-war to properly represent the true scope of the conflict that was to come. 

I say antagonist and not villain because one of the examples of this are Yuya’s duels against Shuzo and later his mother Yoko, which were all about pushing Yuya to try and see beyond the expectations and ideals of his father that he clinged to for so long. The lead-up antagonist to these two was Jack Atlas, who actively shattered through this illusion and forced Yuya to rebuild himself up from scratch so that he would start speaking with his own words and express his own true ideals with his dueling. There’s tons more examples of this throughout the series, such as Shun directly leading to Kaito who shared a revenge quest and needed to be shown that they could trust others again, Dennis leads to Edo and showcase how horrible Academia’s indoctrination is with how it horribly scarred these children, even Duel Chaser 227 and Battle Beast serve as a taste of the oncoming Zarc and how the obsession with blood sport warps people.

Roget is the lead-up antagonist to Leo Akaba, because while he presents himself as a domineering tactical genius who has complete control over everything, he’s actually a self-absorbed madman who doesn’t care who he sacrifices as long as he achieves his goals, and to this end he does some genuinely heinous stuff. His complete disregard for human life led him to mechanizing Sergey and militarizing the Duel Chaser police along with profiting from the literal slave market under the City, which is later reflected with how Leo built a society where parents willingly sends their children to be brainwashed with military propaganda, where they invade other worlds and treat cleansing the populace as a game all with the intent to power his dimension fusing machine.

Roget is the microcosm here, however, because unlike Leo he has no further purpose aside from initially presenting the concept. Leo had the grand plan of reviving Ray and restoring the Original Dimension at the cost of literally everyone else’s lives, whereas Roget tried to take everyone down with him at the last moment.

And much like Leo Akaba, he is utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. An irrelevant death born from his own hands parallels perfectly with how Leo Akaba was ultimately useless in enacting his own plans.