"Any card—so long as it exists—has a power that is needed."
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Don’t worry, give him about ten episodes and he’ll be back to normal. He’s still not over his actions in season 3 so that’s why he’s acting so distant and emo.
poor judai :(
Absolute WORD on that particular tag. One of the reasons why Yuki Judai is one of my favorite characters of all time is because as far as shounen protagonists go, he subverts and breaks as many conventions of the genre as he follows. As you pointed out, by the end of GX, his characterization is very, very human — he’s flawed, imperfect, prone to making mistakes in some situations, just like any other person and he knows it. Listen to what he tells the Final Big Bad of the series, at the end of season 4, because his words there both define him as a character and encapsulate his entire world-view.
I’ve often found that a lot of people have a nasty shock when they get to season 4 and realize how much he’s changed from his plucky, carefree self from earlier seasons. Normally, that shouldn’t be surprising — the repeated psychological and emotional traumas he’s gone through in season 3 would have been enough to utterly shatter a less resilient person — so why does it follow that they wouldn’t have a drastic effect on everything from his personality to his overall outlook? I think this is mainly a fault of what we’re used to, as far as shounen anime conventions are concerned — characters grow and evolve, yes, but not too fast and not too sudden and they rarely if ever go through a complete upheaval that changes them to a fundamental level. The kind of change Judai underwent is something that shounen usually reserves just for heel-face turns — villains turning to the Good Guy side (which, come to think of it, is a darkly funny convention, in the context of all the shit that went down in season 3 of GX).
Unlike most shounen protagonists, Judai is as much defined by his flaws as he is by his virtues and this results in him being a very rounded and relatively realistic individual. He doesn’t easily bounce back from trauma, he has to go on with the memory of unspeakable horrors, with all that crushing guilt weighing down on his shoulders AND with Yubel’s own sense of guilt, issues and hang-ups as well, given that they’ve fused themselves so thoroughly, while, at the same time, living up to his decision to protect the world from the depredations of the Light of Ruin or whatever new megalomaniac deigns to threaten the place on his watch (a universally bad idea, as of the end of GX).
It’s hardly surprising that, after having to pull himself back together again, it turns out that some of the parts don’t fit as they once did, while others might have gone missing. All of this without adding the fact that a lot of the symptoms he shows through season 4 (avoidance, issues with communication, aloofness, constant guilt and self-doubt, covering all of this with the emotional equivalent of armor-plates) are classic signs of PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder, something you’d expect to see in soldiers coming back from a grisly battlefield. He does find it easier to relax and smile again among those he’s close to as the season progresses, but Judai will never return to the person he was in S2 or even at the beginning of S3.
(via se-to-oh)