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

intheshadowofsignificance:

entamewitchlulu:

I kinda feel like I may have talked about this before but what the hey I’ll talk about it again.

Basically, he’s a manipulative, cruel, and nearly unfeeling bastard who doesn’t give two shits about anyone outside of his “duty”.

First of all, he considers himself as having the right to judge people’s sins and punish them for them.  Sure, the museum curator was an asshole, but did that mean he deserved to die in the way that Shadi killed him?  I don’t really think so.  And Professor Yoshimori, yes, he desecrated a tomb, and while I’m not 100% behind archaeologists disturbing actual bodies (it’s one thing to retrieve things of historical value from the tombs, its another entirely to steal corpses and put them on display, in my opinion), Yoshimori is a generally good guy, but Shadi was planning on killing him for just having the gall to want to learn about the past.  He has a very narrow-minded worldview and anyone outside that is dispensable and useless to him.

And then let’s move on to what he does to Yugi and his friends.  He kidnaps and brainwashes Anzu.  He mentions that he sort of feels sorry for doing it, but that doesn’t stop him from my giving a crap about putting her in danger, threatening to order her to kill herself, and putting her life on the line in a game he had already assumed he was going to win.  Think about that.  He used Anzu as the stakes for his game against Yami no Yugi, and was legitimately shocked when Yami no Yugi won.  He was fully prepared and even expecting him to fail and her to fall to her death.  It just didn’t matter to him.  In fact, the fact that he said he “felt sorry for having to brainwash her” just makes it worse to me.  It’s like abusers who say they feel bad they “have” to do this to someone.  He is not above manipulating and harming innocent bystanders to walk on the path that he has chosen.

And then there’s the matters of Pegasus and Marik, the two main antagonists before Bakura reappears.  Both of whom never would have become Yugi’s enemies without Shadi’s influence.

I’m not saying that Pegasus didn’t develop his villainous tendencies on his own, because he did, but it was Shadi who gave him the resources and the motivations he needed to become the single-minded and ruthless enemy that he became.  It was Shadi that forced Pegasus to take the Millennium Eye, taunting him with the thoughts of maybe seeing Cyndia again and persuading him to go through incredible pain for the sake of an evil item that was going to slowly drive him insane.  It was then Shadi that gave Pegasus the nudge towards discovering the Shadow Games, bringing Duel Monsters into the world.  It was Shadi that implied to Pegasus that gathering the Millennium Items might bring his love back.  It was Shadi who led Pegasus to the tablet of the Gods and conveniently forgot to tell him about the horrors they would bring upon the world until after Pegasus had already created the cards, manipulating the man into creating the Pharaoh’s weapons.

And of course Marik.  Marik was definitely messed up and definitely already had problems tending towards villainy, but it was Shadi who gave him a drive behind his actions.  Shadi told Marik, for whatever reason, that his father’s death was the pharaoh’s will, turning Marik into the pharaoh’s enemy.  Why would Shadi do this if he was supposed to be serving the pharaoh?  It comes back to Shadi’s very narrow-minded and driven worldview.  He believed, irrevocably, that the pharaoh had to win the God cards through his dueling, and for the pharaoh to have that motivation, it was necessary for there to be a villain to oppose him for the cards.  So naturally, he first turned Marik against the pharaoh completely, giving the already troubled child something to turn his unhealthy emotions on, he then manipulated Pegasus into creating the God cards, which would fall into the hands of Ishizu, which Marik would find out about because that was his sister, and voila, one ready-made villain who desired to take the God Cards and you have an instant conflict for the pharaoh.

Like couldn’t there have been a more peaceful and less dangerous solution?  Sure the pharaoh needed to win the cards, but why did Shadi think that the battle for them had to be world-threatening and dangerous?  Why couldn’t the pharaoh have won them through a low-stakes ceremonial duel or something?  In my opinion, the short answer is that Shadi is a dick.  He believed the Pharaoh needed a villain for some reason, and when one didn’t seem forthcoming, he made his own.

tl;dr Shadi is a manipulative asshole who created villains for the Pharaoh because he’s a dick.

All of this, seriously. 

And the thing that really pisses me off about his character is that he has virtually no remorse for any of it. He acts as though he was justified because of the role he played in the Pharaoh’s successful return to the afterlife. He got it in his head that everything he did was necessary, he doesn’t even have the emotional capacity to call it a necessary evil, and that was the end of it. It was permanently rationalized, cemented in his mind as something unavoidable. The end game of Atem reaching his resting place only reinforced the sick way of thinking that everything he did was righteous; for the greater good.

Shadi is the series’ true antagonist and villain in a way that none of the others could be. Outside of fantasy, outside of mythology, Shadi is a force of unyielding tyranny. He is the allusion to realistic oppression and the spread of oppressive thinking and social conditioning. As you’ve pointed out, he was so narrow minded, so set in his ways, that he became void of empathy and compassion. I think the reason I never initially liked Ishizu is because I saw her this way, and she is definitely callous, but not on Shadi’s level. Ishizu deals with the truths her spiritual beliefs present her with, even when they are hard and ugly, Shadi perpetuates them as ultimate justification to dehumanize those around him. 

As the saying goes, reality isn’t truth, reality is perception (and everyone’s perception and pursuit of truth is different.) I don’t hate Shadi for doing what he felt he had to, and for doing what his culture dictated as essential, I hate him for losing so much humanity along the way. He toyed with people deliberately, meticulously, never considering that there might be ways around it because “this is how its supposed to be done.” 

Can you see the parallels? His actions, and the thoughts that lead to them, should make almost anyone angry. (Not to be condescending anon, you’ve raised a very valid question!)