Predictions and Observations:
Birth of the Blue-Eyes

The first thing I thought when Bakura entered the tablet sanctuary was about how Akhnadon alone knew the extent of Seto’s plan. He was going along with it, but just refused to anymore. Shada knows part of Seto’s scheme, but not how dangerous a path Seto is taking like Akhnadon does. He would have warned Yami and the others, but it doesn’t look like he’ll be warning anyone, and almost everyone else thinks that it’s just, well, airports-after-9/11-type stuff, to use an interesting analogy. This will thus allow Seto to proceed with this unwise, dangerous, and immoral plan unchecked.

By the way, this plan *is* unsound; for one, Seto’s trying to find a needle in a haystack, which may or may not exist. It’s a long shot, but it might have been worth it if not for the fact that such a creature would likely be more difficult than Diabound even was to contain for being more powerful. On top of that, it sows unrest. To drag people up before the law with no reason like that is a very bad idea. You heard that guy; he’ll repay Seto for this! Other similar citizens could revolt, or otherwise turn against Yami’s leadership.

Wherever Kisara went around the kingdom, she seems to have been an outsider, an outcast. What had she done to merit the anger of the people in the market? Why was she such a useless prisoner to the bandits from whom Seto rescued her? It could be in part because she looks so very different; she has white hair and pale skin in a kingdom of people who have much darker skin, hair, and in most cases darker eyeshade. It could also be that she was so tired and hungry (which you can kind of tell from her appearance) that she was forced to try and steal something, and she would certainly stand out in a crowd. But she would have been so tired and hungry because she had no village or safe place of her own. Then again, that one guy Seto was interrogating said that his home village was being ravaged by the White Dragon, so is it possible that Kisara can’t really control her power, and people deem her cursed and keep her away? I hate spoilers, because I’m sure my predictions would be much wilder (if I hadn’t managed to put two and two together yet, of course), but it’s too late and I know that Kisara has some connection with Blue-Eyes so I might as well go with it. It seems to me that Kisara has a certain amount of control over Blue-Eyes, because she was grateful to Seto for saving her and the Blue-Eyes blasted the people who destroyed Seto’s village off the map, sparing Seto himself and destroying specifically the people who so enraged and hurt him. Therefore to me it would seem that the Blue-Eyes reacts to Kisara’s emotions- her gratitude to Seto and her desire to repay him. She didn’t sic the Blue-Eyes on them specifically, but the Blue-Eyes, in blasting those guys, expressed the same thing that Kisara felt, without moral restraint. Therefore, it would seem that Kisara’s emotions become Blue-Eyes’ emotions, no matter what they are. Therefore, one could say that if a village sees this pale, white-haired homeless girl wander into town and is suspicious and reacts how the people in the marketplace did, then Kisara’s fear and/or despair and/or desperation would be expressed in Blue-Eyes whether she really wanted to cause harm or not, therefore leveling said village, leaving her homeless and outcast again, with any survivors deciding that she’s somehow cursed, and several villages living in fear of a Blue-Eyes attack. After re-watching it, I even found some support for this with one bandit’s statement, ‘we should’ve driven her away like the others’ or something to that effect.

I’m sure that Yami will be able to see Yugi and the others. After all, it was their connection to him that let them come at all. He felt Yugi calling out to him even, so even if he can’t see them, he’ll definitely be able to tell that they’re there.

The palace gates are probably spelled against even invisible intruders. But then how on Earth would anyone figure out how, when no one knows they exist? They’re like ghosts; no one can see them, no one can feel them, no one can hear them. Perhaps the Millennium Items can sense such phantoms? But no, then Shada and Seto would have been able to sense Yugi and the others standing there with Kisara. Perhaps it’s exclusively a power of the Millennium Puzzle. I’m not saying that the Millennium Puzzle will be the only reason Yami knows they’re there, but I had always wondered about the Millennium Puzzle’s powers. I mean, we’ve seen that the Key brings the wielder into the mind to explore it; the Eye examines the mind from afar; the Ring detects other Millennium Items, magic, and danger, and may pull souls from their bodies (Evil Spirit of the Ring), and can also be used to make one invisible (Birth of the Blue-Eyes); the Scales measure evil (this is confusing, we only get a small glimpse of it in The Intruder I when Bakura shows and Karim says that the Scales cannot find balance which means Bakura’s evil is immeasurable); the Rod controls the mind and subdues the demons of the spirit, and also may move objects or people and prevent them from moving (throwing people against the wall and holding them there…); the Necklace shows glimpses of the past, present, and future to suit fate (rather than its bearer; I’ll cover this in more detail below). But what does the Puzzle do? To me it seemed illogical that when a situation such as Yugi and Yami’s was beyond the imagination (ah, the good ol’ days when that sort of thing was strange—to us now it’s perfectly normal!) a Millennium Item was created that had that as its main power, making the Millennium Puzzle a rather benign item, not a threat. But this is the Pharaoh’s Item, so in theory it must be the most powerful. So what does it do?
To begin with, it seems that all Millennium Items can create Shadow Games, because we know for a fact that the Eye, Ring, and Rod can, and this is considered kind of the thing about Millennium Items is that they control Shadow Magic; all items sense the presence of pure evil, which is sort of a plot device; all items can Shadow-Realm folks (we’ve seen the Puzzle, Ring, Eye, and Rod do this); all items serve fate first and their wielders second, if it can be said that they serve their owners at all (this takes some explaining: the Millennium Necklace is a prime example. To begin with, when Ishizu first inherited the Millennium Necklace, long before Battle City, she saw some events of Battle City occur, and understood the necessity of persuading Kaiba to host the tournament and giving him Obelisk. Therefore, if she had not seen that, she would not have known. Therefore, the Millennium Necklace shows the future by creating it, prompting its user to react to their vision and follow their destiny. A follow-up example to this was when the Millennium Necklace ceased working for Ishizu and did not let her predict her own defeat, because then she could have prevented it, which to fate was impermissible, because you saw how huge a role Kaiba’s advancement into the Semifinals played. Therefore, the Millennium Necklace prompted fate by causing Ishizu to lose, showing that it serves fate, and not its bearer). All Millennium Items protect from the power of other Millennium Items (this is questionable; it’s stated in Back to Battle City I that the Millennium Necklace protected Ishizu from Marik blasting her to the Shadow Realm, and if this is so, there’s no reason it shouldn’t apply to all of the Millennium Items unless there’s some special ability that belongs to the Millennium Necklace alone, which is possible but improbable because the Necklace is certainly not the most powerful of the Items, and the Rod would probably trump its power and we know it isn’t a matter of Marik’s mystical energies vs. Ishizu’s, because Ishizu is only human, and Yami Marik is a spawn of pure hatred and states in The Darkness Returns I that his inner strength far exceeds Joey’s, which was a generalization, because it becomes apparent that Yami Marik had no clue how strong Joey was, which would mean that he’s really saying there that his inner stength far exceeds that of a normal mortal. However, if the Puzzle is indeed the most powerful, then therefore it should protect against the onslaught of other Shadow Magic also, and we’ve been shown on several occasions that it does not. In Evil Spirit of the Ring, Yami Bakura was able to Shadow-Magic Yugi into the deck along with the others; In Match of the Millennium, Pegasus was able to read Yugi’s mind (until they learned to mind-shuffle, of course); in Aftermath, Shadi was able to peer into Yugi’s mind with the Millennium Key; Throughout Battle City, there was the risk of Yugi being Shadow-Realmmed for loss of a duel, when if the Millennium Puzzle protected him from Shadow Magic this would have been impossible; in Mind Game III, Yami Marik threatens to Shadow-Realm Yami then and there after he passed out protecting Joey and Mai, though this could always have been to scare Joey; I could go on, but I won’t). Millennium Items can NOT, in most cases, undo the work of other Millennium Items; Yugi was powerless to simply release Grandpa, Kaiba, Mokuba, or later Mai or Bakura; he had to fight it out the hard way.
Now to move on to specifics: The Millennium Puzzle allows two souls to exist within the same mind, to merge and separate their consciousnesses at will, and to converse with each another (throughout; Match of the Millennium III). The Millennium Puzzle can free someone from closed-mindedness and open his or her heart (The Heart of the Cards). The Puzzle grants power to mind-crush (Give up the Ghost; Panik Attack, and Face-Off I). The Puzzle’s powers are described once directly contradicting those of the Ring, restoring souls where the Ring has separated them (which brings up the parallel of Bakura being Yami’s ultimate foe as was said in Makings of a Magician last week, come to think of it; this is derived from events in Evil Spirit of the Ring). The Puzzle protects the spirit within it from harm (Match of the Millennium IV—Yugi was safe when he switched out and was therefore inside the Puzzle). The Puzzle may only maintain contact between the two spirits that share one mind if the wielder is in very close proximity with the Puzzle, or, rather, if the two minds are in close proximity with one another (Mystery Duelist I). Its power can be exerted as a shield, to protect the bearer, and anyone else he/she wishes to defend, from powerful blasts of power or fire, though depending on the blow’s strength the shielder could suffer a drain of energy rendering him/her unconscious (Panik Attack, Mind Game III). The Millennium Puzzle reflects the mind of its inhabitant (wonder what the Puzzle is like in this world, where Yami exists outside it?). The Millennium Puzzle contains doorways to both the Dominion of the Beasts and to the Ancient Past.

On the subject of properties (don’t you love these silly rambles?), I realized just now that it’s a basic rule that when two persons of equal power wish to take chunks out of one another, they do not try a head-on magical assault, because it would be a stalemate, assumedly. However after a duel is fought, the winner essentially has a claim to the loser’s soul that cannot be refuted by magical power. This does not only apply to Millennium Item carriers, because Bakura had no Millennium Item in his duel against Mahad, and Mahad had to duel him in order to destroy him; the Millennium Ring would have been useless. It’s been seen, particularly in Battle City (Yami Marik and Ishizu’s scene shortly before the four-way duel, for one) that losing a duel is not a requirement for losing one’s soul, except in the case that the person whose soul you are trying to banish happens to be as powerful or more powerful than you, in a case such as the final duel, where I very much doubt that Yami Marik could have destroyed Yugi with brute force. So therefore in the tradition of duels fought for magic and with magical power, to challenge someone to a duel is a way of leveling the playing field against someone stronger than you, whom you couldn’t take on in head-to-head magical combat. I’m not sure if that made any sense, but I tried my best.

Is it just me, or has Yugi grown taller?

What does it mean that the mysterious pyramid of doom in the sky is the Millennium Puzzle?

If only those whom Yami permits can enter, how did Bakura get in? He seems to do that a lot.

I’m sure a question on everyone’s mind—on mine at least—is the mystery behind why Master Seto was almost instantly protective toward and kind to Kisara. It seems rather obvious, because we all know that Kaiba is not as heartless as he first appears, but if you think of Master Seto alone, the move is actually quite out-of-character. As a kid, when he rescued her from those bandits, perhaps not as much, but the fact still remains that he risked plenty to help her before he even knew her, and didn’t even think twice. His rescue in the marketplace is a bit more blatantly odd. For one, there’s probably plenty of such discord in the kingdom every day, and to be blunt, to seek out and quell every one of these squabbles would leave these guardians of the kingdom with no time to do anything else. So how did he discover this one in particular? What led him there? For another, any character so seemingly innocent who has garnered such dislike from the citizens and who looks so (to the Egyptians) bizarre would be worthy of suspicion, if someone who so much as made an unkind offhand remark like that other suspect Seto interrogated was suspect. Therefore, to me it would seem like Seto would not rescue her as much as capture her. What’s more, Shada saw overwhelming power in her heart—the strongest he’s ever seen, he says, and that would no doubt include Bakura. Another reason for Seto to capture her and harness this power. And yet, Seto treats her with kindness, ordering his guards to take her to the palace and make sure that she’s comfortable with plenty of food, etc. and angrily dispersing the crowd with a threat to put them all in chains. To me this demonstrates that some deep part of him seriously cares for this girl, whether he realizes it or not. All of this was done before he even really realized that he recognized her.
Then again, if she has such power, then it may be to their advantage to stay on her good side. I know that Kaiba would be too proud to waive his plan on account of thinking someone was more powerful than he, but Master Seto is a bit less stubborn, didn’t have to toughen up quite as much. So it may be just that, because if you want to be logical, she’s clearly not a criminal because she’s in such bad shape; if she had broken the law to help herself she probably wouldn’t be so thin. Therefore to treat her as one would be to get on her bad side, and considering her power that’s inadvisable at this point. However, Seto told Akhnadon that he found greater power than he could have imagined, and this had to have meant Kisara, which suggests that he’s still planning to use her power for his own plan…

What did Akhnadon mean, that he made the same mistake? I believe that we shall soon find out.

Speaking of things we’ll soon find out, Bakura will take his revenge on Akhnadon, and I think it’s fair to say that it will not be pretty, whatever ‘better’ thing he has in mind.

Bakura’s statement that as he causes more chaos he grows stronger reminded me of Yami Marik’s saying in Mind Game III that every soul he Shadow-Realms strengthens his darkness.

The Kids WB advertises next week’s episode as “The secret of the Millennium Items- Revealed!” and has a picture of Yami dueling. It’s entitled Village of Lost Souls. I believe that they’re giving quite a bit away, and it’s safe to say we’re about to find out about Kal’elna. I had kind of thought so already considering that Bakura is getting his revenge on Akhnadon for that, because it’s been hinted that Akhnadon was part of it. Whatever it was, I have a hunch that it wasn’t, and isn’t going to be next week, pretty.

I think that’s about all I’m going to have a chance to write about for now. I have this mountain of history homework; completing it will be a world war of its own. So, as always write back, let me know if I’m getting annoying, unclear, or just plain dumb, and help me make sense of all this, next week’s episode will be Village of Lost Souls, and that’s all, folks! –Clio