Yeah ok. So as per dub tradition his parents ‘went missing’ while looking for Takeru (honestly you can just say dead, I promise your target audience knows what death is and has probably encountered it in plenty of other things they’ve watched or read).
Which honestly just makes it WORSE b/c it means they probably got into an accident somewhere and died but it happened somewhere/in some way (like, being so sleep deprived/distracted that they drove off the edge of the road somewhere remote) that no one’s been able to locate their bodies.
I’m still trying to process my feelings from VRAINS 120 (and this season in general tbh), so y’all just gonna have to deal with these rando posts lmao.
But, I remember thinking back with Ai vs the Zaizen Duo that it was … incredibly odd how Ai kept talking about how much he wanted to see how far the Zaizens would go to protect each other. And then, after Akira loses and is gotten rid of, Ai telling Blue Maiden “now you’ll live with the regret of failing to /protect someone/ closest to you.”
Because if Ai’s only issue was that he regrets being the sole surviving Ignis, even if nothing could be done, then what’s the deal about “protecting”? There was no “protecting” involved back when he tried to save his friends - he was trying to get them out, not protect them from harm’s way like he was trying to do back in season 1.
But, with that bombshell revelation of Ai seeing that future of Yusaku getting killed over and over and over again because of him, who, though he loves humans, was predicted to be the downfall of humanity (probably b/c Yusaku got killed, as someone else theorized), now that statement makes a hell of a lot more sense.
And it essentially means that not only was Ai trapped in the past because of survivor’s guilt, but he was also trapped by a potential future of losing the one he loves when he could do nothing about it:
Which is why Pandor’s “time does move forward” statement really unnerved him b/c yeah okay but what if time moving forward is part of the problem?
I just. Naturally, I thought the whole “Oh wait Ai’s actually depressed about the thought of losing Yusaku ON TOP of his survivor’s guilt” bombshell came out of nowhere when I first watched the episode, but looking back on this season and Akira and Blue Maiden vs Ai especially, they were def hinting at it.
-Zexal established the whole alien afterlife and was left open-ended with Yuma and the others traveling to the fused Astral-Barian world to take care of the Chaos brewing there
-Arc V infers that everyone is aware of the existence of the four dimensions and that characters can likely still travel between them
-Vrains says that LINK VRAINS is the “central station” that connects various worlds, suggesting it is the gateway to these alternate worlds. It’s also been left open-ended, with Yusaku traveling to some unstated place and the implication that Ai is still alive within the mainframe. LINK VRAINS in itself is somewhat of an alternate dimension in cyberspace
-All three of these have had the protagonists able to go back and forth between these dimensions.
-The new YGO series is coming in 2020
-2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the YGO Duel Monster’s anime
-Bonds Beyond Time, which had the first three protags interact, was to commemorate DM’s 10th anniversary. We have three new protags and a 20th anniversary coming up
I’m not saying something…but I’m totally saying something