#there isn't a lot of real meta here its mainly just explaining the manga

[kujakumai]

Hi, could you expand a bit on how the Mind Crush worked in the manga and Atem's s1 character development? the yugioh fan wiki is a bit vague about it

for context this ask was in response to this post. my explanation got really long whoops so I'm putting it under a cut.

Okay so it's been a hot minute since I read them, all the way back in like february, but as I'm sure most people are aware the early manga chapters had a basic structure where:

1) there would be A Bad Guy

2) Atem would challenge the bad guy to a Shadow Game, sometimes an established one but often some sort of makeshift game like "put a bunch of money on your hand and see how much money you can stab through without stabbing your hand."

3) The bad guy would lose the game to Atem, often because of the fatal flaw that made them a jerk in the first place, i. e. "so greedy that in an attempt to get extra money they went overboard and stabbed themselves."

4) Atem exacts what's called a Penalty Game on the loser, often some sort of karmic punishment--the asshole TV producer is blinded so he only sees in pixels; Mokuba has to eat the poisoned meal he tried to trick others into eating. Sometimes you just get set on fire though.

So the first difference between the anime and manga is that unlike the anime, where Kaiba is the only person to get a random post-defeat magic slap and Atem never uses those abilities again, in the manga it was perfectly well-established. Atem does this to everybody. He has the magic powers to do this, knows how to use them, and does it often.

For the mind-crush specifically, what it actually does--purge the evil from Kaiba's heart--is the same as the anime. The difference is the degree of consequence. In the anime, Atem crushes his mind and he has a minor existential crisis and leaves his company to...work on his duel disks and do a bunch of hacking stuff? Unclear? In the manga, Atem purging the evil from Kaiba's heart means he has to piece his heart back together without it, and while he does this he is put in an indefinite coma that ends up lasting six entire months.

So even if he was still doing shadow games throughout the series, the answer to the question of "Why doesn't Atem purge the evil from everyone's hearts?" is:

Manga: It hospitalizes a person for a very long time, which is very serious and very bad.

Anime: No idea, there do not appear to be any real negative consequences, we should just be purging all the evil all the time.

Still, though, let's say we've decided that putting Pegasus or Marik or whoever in a coma would be totally justified and worth it if it meant they would stop being evil. That sounds pretty reasonable!

Atem dishes out several more penalty games after Kaiba, but there's no one else of genuine big-bad-evil-arc-villain status until Pegasus in DK. Two things happen during DK: 1) Kaiba's castle suicide gambit, and 2) Pegasus tells them the millennium items are evil.

Kaiba's threat to throw himself off the castle works out much the same across continuities. Kaiba says he's going to kill himself if he loses; Atem tries to go through with it; Yugi forcibly takes over and forfeits the duel, and has a crisis because it terrifies him that Atem was willing to do that; Atem and Yugi have to mend bridges and agree to work together from now on and definitely not kill people.

The other thing that happens is that they defeat Pegasus, and we get this:

This is before Battle City where he learns he’s a pharaoh. Up until now, Atem has just been hanging out in Yugi’s head, with no idea where he came from or why he’s here or who he is, and one of the first things he finds out is that he’s supposedly an “evil intelligence.” He follows this up by demanding Pegasus spill his tragic backstory, while threatening him with a penalty game--or even, based on the wording, saying he’s going to give Pegasus a penalty game regardless, he just wants to hear the story first.

Afterwards, though, he doesn’t. Atem does not exact a penalty game on Pegasus. He doesn’t say why, but Anzu speculates:

Atem never does a penalty game after that. Not once, in the entire rest of the series.

So once again, the answer to the question of “Why doesn’t Atem purge the evil from everyone’s hearts?” is:

Manga: After dishing out karmic magic punishment after magical punishment, Atem finally did something so bad it made Yugi, who he loves, fall on the ground and burst into tears in horror and stop trusting him; not long afterwards he is told by someone who seems to know more about his origin than he does that he is “evil.” Scared and not wanting to prove Pegasus right or make his partner go through anything like that again, he never challenges anyone to another shadow game.

Anime: None of this. Atem spontaneously manifests his penalty game power for the sake of the Kaiba duel, after which it basically disappears, and we have no context for where it came from or why he never uses it again.

TL;DR: Mind Crush made a lot more sense in the manga. There’s a context for why he does it, it has serious consequences, and there’s a later context for why he never does it again. The anime removed all of these and as a result it comes off sort of random.

#there isn't a lot of real meta here its mainly just explaining the manga #but i know not everyone is going to read the manga so #meta