Character Study: Yami no Bakura
Approximate Age: (by the Japanese anime) Terribly ancient for a sixteen to eighteen year old. (Ha, she thinks she's funny.)
Character Archetype: The Demon in the Dark, the Dark Avenger
Probable Element and Alignment: Dark, changes from Chaotic Good to True Evil
Most Obvious Vocal Quirks: Forceful and self-important.
The most difficult thing about getting a handle on Yami B is trying to figure out exactly who he is and how many of him there are. I'm going to tackle him as a combination of Thief King Bakura with some massive Zorc taint and assume that, during some of his stranger moments, Zorc was actually driving the boat. (The Spirit of the RIng is sociopathic, yes, but he's still too quirkily human for him to be Zorc itself- which is essentially hunger and malice personified.) I'm also going to continue calling him Yami Bakura through most of the essay, for the simple fact that there are two characters named Bakura, and "Dark Bakura" is the closest thing he has to his own name.
As with many of the focal characters in Yugioh, Yami B has a drastic character arc and changes quite a lot over its course. One of the things that makes him unique is that we see him first at his ending point, and it takes the entire series before we see that he started as more than a sociopathic Geistermench. At his beginning, he is noble, fierce and very much a man of his own time period. He's a good man, although a bit mistaken about who his real enemies are and much too willing to do anything in his crusade for justice. (Ancient peoples tended to place a lower value on other men's lives, especially where vengeance was involved, but also it's pretty clear to me that Yami B didn't see Atem's subjects as anything beyond Atem's subjects, and a way to hurt him.) He's also in intense emotional pain, for obvious reasons.
I see the "king of thieves" as being a dark knight, although unlike Batman and the criminals of Gotham, the monster Yami Bakura was fighting is the country that exerted authority over his loved ones by murdering them viciously. Diabound's terrifying power developed because Bakura himself was filled with the most hardened resolve, and because he had survived a childhood of horrible trauma and solitude, sharpening him into a steel blade.
Several things might have happened when Bakura aquired the Millenium Ring, some of which are more clear than others. First, he started to honestly go insane. The Items themselves are seething and surrounded with evil; they connect Zorc more tightly to reality and were created by horrific means. More importantly, those horrific means were witnessed by Bakura when he was young and vulnerable, and they involved killing everyone he'd ever been close to. The Ring tapped into this deeper vulnerability, and thenceforth Bakura's motives began to blur with those of Zorc in a way that I'm not sure he even realized was actually happening. Diabound began to twist and darken, a symptom of the infection.
For me, Yami Bakura attacking Aknadin and turning him into what would become Zorc Necrophades is the strongest evidence that he was no longer acting merely as an avenger. Aknadin is the one truly responsible for the massacre of Kul Elna; indications are that Yami Bakura at least sort of is aware of this. Why, then, did Bakura simply pass on the infection, instead of messily dissecting Aknadin while the older man was still breathing? There were other ways "in" to the Pharaoh's court. The most logical answer is that Zorc is happily directing his behavior, whether he realizes it or not. Aknadin was the best suited to Zorc's purposes, and therefore Bakura leaves him alive and doesn't redirect his vengeance from Aknamkanon's son. (Atem, for those of you I've lost.)
In the modern era, Yami Bakura has been driven further insane by the mere fact that he's been aware this entire time, stuffed inside the thing that drove him crazy in the first place. He's also become more demonic in nature, especially since he must act using the bodies of others. The already considerable skills he possessed when he was more truly alive have sharpened over a period of several thousand years, and Yami Bakura now clearly fits the name of "monster."
Yet a ghost of his noble origins as avenger remains, twisted into almost a parody. This is where Ryou comes in. Maybe being stuffed into a Ring has let Bakura's social skills atrophy, maybe he's just forgotten how to identify with other human beings. In any case, he's fiercely protective of Ryou, and determined to keep the boy's friends close at hand while punishing anyone who even looks at the kid funny. As manga readers know, this often means sealing people into game pieces, or killing them, depending on his whim. He's impatient with Ryou's apparent softness, probably because of how he himself has been hardened into steel. He doesn't understand why Ryou gets so upset over little things like "belonging." Being disconnected from a body for so long, and having lived through a terrible solitude before that, Yami B also doesn't grasp that part of what Ryou enjoys about human interaction is the actual physical presence of another person.
In other words, Yami Bakura's method of "protecting" Ryou is actually perfectly logical, in Yami B's own mind. He's not exactly trying to be cruel, he doesn't understand how he IS being cruel, and the fact that Ryou responds poorly to his efforts annoys and frustrates him, and fills him with disdain for his host. Think of the hardened soldier who served in World War 2 trying and failing to identify with a sensitive hippy child. The two Bakuras come from drastically different worlds, and they'd have a hard time identifying with one another even in the best circumstances.
It is definitely real protectiveness on Yami Bakura's part, as opposed to the simple self-serving "kill em for the lawls" it's usually explained away as. There is one incident in the manga that makes this absolutely clear: when Bobasa chases Ryou out for having an "impure soul," and Ryou is sobbing by himself, Yami Bakura is shown to be thinking, irritably, that he'll have to "deal with this fool's feelings later."
He should know that this is the endgame, and he's plotting vengeance on Bobasa for making Ryou cry? What the hell, man. You've got it bad when you're doing stuff like that. (Whatever "it" is, I leave to interpretation.) He's irritated no end with how soft he perceives Ryou to be, yet he clearly cares that said soft little boy has gotten his feelings hurt. And he will kill over said soft liitle boy's tender feelings, even though he wishes the kid weren't so sensitive. (I'm not saying I see Ryou as soft. See Ryou's character study.)
It's probably because Ryou fought him for their sakes that Yami Bakura harrasses Yugi and company only minimally as the series progresses. He wants something from them, yes, but he's going to avoid giving them undue grief until absolutely necessary. After all, this is the first time he can remember Ryou showing a spine, even if it's in a direction he dislikes. If Ryou hadn't actively fought Yami Bakura, and Yugi and the others had escaped the first attempt he made to trap them in game pieces, there's a good chance he would have kept trying to ensnare them, harder now that they had escaped once. Instead, he only actively fights them when they're standing between himself and his goals, and even helps them more than once. Bakura has decided to let Ryou "keep" these people, under conditions.
Even in the modern era, Yami Bakura doesn't trust that Atem carries any honor, nobility, or even compassion at all. He knows that Atem will fight for who he cares about, but obviously that doesn't mean THAT much, because everyone does it, right? Through Ryou's eyes he witnessed Atem's willingness to let Seto Kaiba throw himself from the roof of the Duelist Kingdom castle, if it meant Atem would win the duel. This is why he saves Ryou from Slifer; unlike Kaiba, he can't trust enough to throw this particular life on Yugi's mercy. (Yes, it is totally possible to be less trusting than Kaiba.) If it had been his own life, of course, he might have been more willing, but Ryou, however irritating Yami Bakura finds him, is the only living being he actually cares about.
One of the sadder aspects to the series for me is the idea that Yami Bakura apparently "dies" while still twisted up with Zorc taint. One can hope that the defeat of Zorc in the Memory Arc blasted him clean, but whatever truly happened to him isn't entirely clear. (Takahashi would probably tell us he "went away to heaven," the silly old bear. XD) There is plenty of room, however, for his potential survival-- the main suggestion of this has to do with the way he sealed up a portion of his soul in one of the Millenium Puzzle pieces. All that he was doing there was gaining access to the Puzzle's intricacies, but if he could seal part of himself in a mystical Puzzle piece, he could easily seal a part of himself in something else, keeping that part, and himself, safe. A canny fanfic writer can take this and run with it in any direction. I tend to believe that he at least temporarily left an anchor within Ryou, which is how the Millenium Ring kept finding itself back in Ryou's possession, and how he didn't actually die in his first defeat.
The mere fact that he did things like this also shows that Yami Bakura had a much sharper understanding of how to use his own shadow powers than most of the other characters that possessed them. He would seem to have had a natural talent for magic, even before he aquired the Millenium Ring, and existing aware within it for so long would have given him plenty of time to adapt to being a bodiless soul. This probably is a large part of why he could face being eaten up by shadows (within Ryou's body) when defeated by Yami Marik; the other reason is that, while he didn't trust Atem to have compassion for Ryou, he DID trust Atem to defeat Yami Marik, and knew that his condition would be temporary if the pharaoh succeeded.
Several people have complained about the Oreichalchos arc within the anime, because Ryou isn't seen and Yami Bakura doesn't act. Surely, with all this insanity going on, Yami Bakura would try to take advantage of it, right? And if not, he'd try to fight Dartz and keep Atem out of his clutches, so that he could have his own vengeance, right?
Maybe not. First of all, Dartz talked about knowing of Atem since Atem was actually alive, and indicated that it was because of Yami Bakura that he didn't act (I suspect he also just wasn't really ready to take on such a strong opponent.) It's possible that canny villains know better than to get underfoot of one another. It's also possible that the Leviathan and Zorc, wanting something similar, were either in cahoots with one another or were actually the same thing. If that's the case, Zorc may have held Bakura back. Even if it's not the case, Zorc may have held him back in order to see how the Leviathan's gambit would play out.
Secondly, in the anime Yami Bakura informs Ryou that it's time to stop fooling around. I've talked about how Yami B may have been nursing Ryou back to health in the immediate aftermath of Battle City. I've also talked about how Ryou was probably in much worse shape than he appeared to be during Battle City. I'm inclined to think that Yami Bakura was granting Ryou a convalesence period, and didn't want to risk reinjuring him so soon. (He may have, however, clung close by when the God Cards were stolen, and decided that the situation was too much for him to put Ryou through at the time.)
Another aspect I want to emphasize about Yami Bakura is that he's most assuredly human, even though he no longer knows how to act human, or how to relate to other people on a human level. He displays a sense of humor and a sense of amused bewilderment during his duel with Bonz. (I also like his "there is no way there is something more dangerous than ME in this graveyard" attitude.) Despite his annoyance with Ryou Bakura, he desires to protect him on a level that goes beyond conveniance. And his understanding of Atem's own human nature is something an eldritch god would be too large to grasp-- even with the fact that he takes a dim view of human behavior (I see him as adhering to Hobbes's philosophical assumptions: "Humans are evil by nature.")
Invid has suggested one other thing regarding the more savage side of Yami Bakura's nature that I feel should be mentioned for the sake of completeness, and which I find rather appealing: an explanation for his blood fetish. It could easily be written off that he's just crazy, and it is likely that Takahashi just wanted him to be as creepy as possible to the modern mind.
But this is the important part: To the modern mind. Many cultures surrounding ancient Egypt believed in blood sacrifice, and more importantly in the idea that by consuming blood, one brought the life of something into oneself. (This is why consuming blood is considered not to be kosher.) Bakura was very much a man of his time period; it's not unreasonable to assume he spent some time among people of non-Egyptian culture during his childhood and absorbed part of that attitude.
Which is one of the many reasons I go weird about trying to write people with their cultural background in mind.
Final Distillation:
Yami Bakura transforms from a noble avenger to a demonic monster.
He is very much a man of his time period, which involves a certain amount of natural savagery.
He has been hardened into steel, although he does have his vulnerabilities (which were much more obvious when he was fully human.)
Yami Bakura is extremely skilled at magic, but he also has good natural aptitude.
He is protective, even at his most demonic.
He no longer understands human interaction on a human level.
Yet at the same time, Yami Bakura is human.
