Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s Episode 22

This week it’s Aki VS Kodo, the Duelist Profiler.

And as just about every other situation where Godwin sends in his pesky assassins, (with the exception of Bommer, who was arrested in the beginning of this episode), it doesn’t matter how many times I watch this, it still makes my blood boil. First they call her a witch, and now they call her a monster and describe her powers to be a sin that makes her a disgusting being! GARRRRRHHHHH!!! I really can’t stand this guy. Aki doesn’t deserve to have her wounded heart poked at like that. It is so messed up. Leave my girl alone!

And in all respects, for someone who at a point realized “f— this job, I’m gonna end this ASAP”, Kodo was sure a bloody idiot for continuing to jab Aki’s deepest wounds. If he hadn’t done that, then her powers wouldn’t have exploded out of control. We saw that when her hair piece fell out of her hair, because shit just got even more wild after that. But that wasn’t the only thing that contributed to his loss. It was his overconfidence, which I suppose you could say it was why he felt so comfortable with bullying her as much as he did (besides the fact that was part of the job) he thought he had it in the bag by having designed his deck to counter hers “perfectly”— and how wrong he was. Aki was not okay with the way he was trampling over all over scarred heart, and she made sure he paid dearly for it.

However as awful as it was to see Aki’s traumatic past to be publicized like that, it gave us the viewers a great amount of details about her background and how she has become the person we see her as today.

The first time her powers acted out was when she won her first duel against her father as a child. You can see all over her face she was scared and confused about what had just transpired, all while her father was unconscious and her mother stared at her in shock and fear. Her powers spiraling out of control and progressively getting stronger as she grew older became another problem when she enrolled in the Duel Academy. Before long, nobody wanted to be around her because they were afraid of her due to getting hurt. Once again, Aki finds herself on her own while society continues to shun her powers and call her a witch or a monster. It certainly didn’t help that somewhere along the lines, it seems her parents had abandoned her too.

Then comes along Divine, who extends a hand telling her there’s a place for her to belong (the Arcadia Movement), where her powers will be welcomed— but here’s the problem: It is super obvious that he is not a good guy who is looking to help Aki out of the goodness of his heart. Although we have barely know him, I say we have seen enough to recognize that Divine is the very definition of a manipulative bastard who looks to exploit vulnerable individuals like Aki. Considering he is the first person to have reached out to her since she has awakened her powers, it should really come as no surprise why she feels attached to him. (That’s why she said she came to this tournament, because she believes in “someone” aka: Divine.) We saw how she would much rather wear a mask, but Divine keeps on holding onto it, which explains why she came out without from the start of the tournament.

So it makes a lot of sense when Yusei describes Aki to be someone who is plagued by rejection and anger. But he knows she is still hiding something, and that is possibly what she herself said today: Despite all the hatred directed to her, Aki doesn’t actually want to hurt anyone. If anything, she wants to control her powers so that it wouldn’t. She also described it not just hurting people, but destroying one’s soul. In a lot of respects, she isn’t necessarily referring to her opponents/peers, but rather describing how broken her own soul has become as result of her powers she had never asked for. And we can link back to that during her first encounter with Yusei, where she told him she loathes her mark. Now that we have been given the context of her background and the pain and rejection she has been through since childhood, it doesn’t take much more to understand what she is really saying, is that she hates her powers, and perhaps even her very existence.

Finally, while Godwin already have an enormous list of hypocrisies, boy did I roll my eyes so hard when he went on about protecting the public with his life. Yeah sure, says the guy who is both actively encouraging competitors to engage violently and sending out “assassins” to psychologically attack and bring harm to the Signers he is target. Geez If it weren’t for his ulterior motives of gathering and awakening the Signers to get Momentum to respond, you would think competitors like Aki would be disqualified the moment she inflicted harm to her opponent, or rather she wouldn’t have been invited to compete at all.

Oh and did anyone else find is hilarious how Godwin just brushed off the whole thing with, “I lost my arm in an accident”. The scene was so short, it was made it rather comical.

At long last, but next time we will be seeing Yusei VS Aki, which remains among the most memorable and one of my  favourite duels, not just in this series of 5D’S but of all the Yu-Gi-Oh! series I have watched. So I am excited to revisit it after 10+ years!