Yu-Gi-Oh! and Plato
Guest Post, by the esteemed Aaron Suduiko, founder of With a Terrible Fate. Check it out to see his spectacular work on philosophy and video games, as well as the inspiration for Vive le Weeb!
The titular Dragons of the Waking the Dragons arc of Yu-Gi-Oh!
I grew up falling in love with Yu-Gi-Oh! and philosophy in parallel. As I’ve gotten older, my appreciation of Yu-Gi-Oh! has only deepened as I’ve applied my studies in philosophy to it and discovered more of the series’ unexpected theoretical foundations. Nowhere do I feel this more acutely than in the Waking the Dragons arc, which teaches me more about Plato and card games every time I watch it.
Finding Plato in Waking the Dragons has made me feel like the Pharaoh in a shadow game: by reading the details of the season’s Platonic heritage, just like the Pharaoh reads the details of his opponents’ strategies, we can understand the overall meaning of the season in a cohesive way that would otherwise elude us. Specifically, I want to show you how Waking the Dragons uses the philosophies of Plato to illustrate the immortal reality of monsters and souls, and presents duels as a special mode of dialectic through which wayward duelists can discover, or be reminded of, that reality.
Plato, in Rafael’s School of Athens.
I begin by charting the connections between Waking the Dragons’ heroes and villains and Plato’s late dialogues chronicling the history of the universe and the corruption of Atlantis; I then show how Plato’s theory of Forms and his views on the nature of the soul explain the unusual character attributes and game mechanics we encounter across the season. Ultimately, this puts us in a position to understand many of the duels across the season less as competitions to reduce Life Points to 0, and more as dialectics in which our heroes use Duel Monsters to correct their opponents’ confused views about the nature of the game, the world, and themselves.
Waking the Dragons occupies an unusual place in the Yu-Gi-Oh! canon, and it offers clues suggesting that it’s best read in conversation with a similarly unusual spot in Plato’s canon. This season is one of the few parts of the Yu-Gi-Oh! story that was created directly for the anime, rather than being based on manga; it introduced key cards which weren’t mentioned or used anywhere else in the series, and which weren’t developed into real-world cards until a decade later. The storyline centers on a corrupted Atlantean king, Dartz, trying to revive the monstrous Great Leviathan to defeat the legendary dragons Timaeus, Critias, and Hermos, purging humanity from the world.
The Great Leviathan and Timaeus face off in the ancient war between Atlantis and the Dominion of the Beasts.
The names and plot call to mind a set of three dialogues Plato wrote 2,400 years ago: the Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates. The dialogues centered on conversation between Socrates, Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates on the day following the discussion of the ideal state in the Republic: Socrates put to his interlocutors the task of bringing this idealized state into the real world through the history of the development, operations, and warfare of Athens (Timaeus 19b-20c). His interlocutors obliged him in speeches that begin with the creation of the universe itself, moves on to the development of people, and ultimately illustrates Athens' superior culture through an ancient war they won against the morally corrupted city of Atlantis—a war that had been lost to unrecorded history until it was relayed to Solon by the Egyptians, who represented a culture and government that had enjoyed a longer record of history than Athens ( Timaeus 21e-23b).
Like Waking the Dragons, Plato gives us a picture of a deeper Atlantean history accessible only through the intermediary of ancient Egypt; like Plato, Waking the Dragons offers us an image of three interlocutors who champion Platonic philosophy in the face of Atlantean corruption:
Yugi and the Pharaoh, wielders of Timaeus and the ultimate vanquisher of Dartz
Kaiba, wielder of Critias, who joins the Pharaoh in the final battle with Dartz but falls halfway through
Joey, wielder of Hermos, who fights to redeem Mai and falls before the final confrontation
Not only do the heroes’ legendary dragons bear the names of Plato’s dialogues, but the heroes’ fates also mirror the fates of the dialogues: Timaeus and its cosmology have stood the test of time, surviving to modern day; only an estimated half of Critias has survived to tell the history of the Athens/Atlantis war; and no fragment of Hermocrates has survived, though the Critias implies its existence (Critias 108a-108b).
Left to right: Legendary Knights Critias, Timaeus, and Hermos.
In Waking the Dragons, the paradise of Atlantis fell to corruption through the introduction of Orichalcos Stones, which turned citizens into monsters and corrupted the minds of those such as Dartz; in the Critias, the paradise of Poseidon’s earthly domain, Atlantis, collapsed “when the divine portion [of citizens’ characters] began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand”—leading people to focus more on the material qualities of Atlantis’ rare orichalcum metal, rather than on its function in adorning temples to revere the gods’ divine nature (Critias 121a-121b).
The Platonic model of the soul locates three hierarchical parts of the soul, all of which must remain in balance for the virtuous person: reason (in the head), spirit (in the chest), and appetite (in the stomach); when earthly pains and pleasures assail the body, they can throw the soul out of balance, making it impossible for people to access the reason afforded them through philosophy (Timaeus 86b-87b). With this model in mind, Waking the Dragons shows us how three Platonic knights can guide such lost souls back to balance through the teachings of Plato’s philosophy.
Plato is known for the theory of the Forms, according to which the basic elements of reality are timeless, changeless abstractions, and the sensory world we experience is a collection of derivative images that get their qualities by virtue of participating in particular Forms—a particular brown chair, for instance, participates in the Forms of ‘chairness’ and ‘brownness’. Philosophy uses reason to move away from these particulars and derive conclusions about the Forms themselves, in order to know reality—like freeing oneself from shackles in a cave, watching shadow puppets on the wall, and walking outside to see the real objects in the sun (Republic 514a-520a).
The real monsters of the Dominion of the Beasts present themselves to Yugi and the Pharaoh, begging for their help in defeating the Great Leviathan.
Waking the Dragons’ Dominion of the Beasts makes Yu-Gi-Oh! look a lot like the theory of the Forms. If you look at a collection of the same trading card—say, a bunch of copies of the Dark Magician Girl—you might ask, “In what way are all of these objects the same, and in what way are they different from each other?” Waking the Dragons gives an answer to this question: they’re the same in the sense that they all participate in the Form of the real Dark Magician Girl in the Dominion of the Beasts, and they’re different in the sense that they’re all separate, derivative images of that Form (like the holographic monsters projected by Kaiba Corp technology). The theory of Forms also helps to make sense of what the three legendary dragon cards actually are. The Eye of Timaeus, Fang of Critias, and Claw of Hermos are weird cards:
They’re a different color than any other Duel Monsters cards
They never manifest directly in a duel; for instance, Kaiba can’t summon Critias itself, but rather can only fuse Critias with trap cards on the field
They appear at the beginning of the season, disappear at the end, and are never mentioned again, as though they weren’t really cards to begin with
The official TCG version of the Fang of Critias: not a monster, but a spell card operating on trap cards to bring about new monsters.
I like to think of these cards as a kind of Platonic metaphysician’s tool: they don’t generate new derivative images of a Form, but rather allow an existing image to participate in a new Form: in the same way that Michelangelo might apply a point chisel to a block of marble to make it participate in the Form of David, Kaiba can apply the Fang of Critias to an image like Mirror Force to make it participate in the Form of Critias, forming the Mirror Force Dragon. These legendary dragons aren’t monsters themselves, but rather Platonic operations that create new monsters through metaphysics.
These three cards, Pegasus teaches us, are also special because they are conduits to three particular souls: the souls of Sir Timaeus, Sir Critias, and Sir Hermos. The liberation of these knights from their dragon Forms points to another thread of Platonic philosophy: the immortal, incorporeal soul. We might wonder why the three knights so closely resemble the Pharaoh, Kaiba, and Joey in physical appearance: a Platonic answer would be that these individuals shared the same souls, binding to different physical bodies over the various ages of the universe (Timaeus 41e-42e).
The immortal, divine nature of the Platonic soul also helps to explain one of the most puzzling sequences in Waking the Dragons. Dartz tries to cheat his way to a victory in his duel against the Pharaoh and Kaiba by summoning four Mirror Knights who appear to possess the souls of Yugi, Joey, Mai, and Pegasus. Ultimately, Kaiba is the one who “solves” the puzzle of the Mirror Knights, simply by insisting to the Pharaoh that the Knights are only holograms, destroying them with his Mirror Force Dragon.
It’s not obvious why Kaiba’s characteristic insistence that monsters are only holograms would be the key to defeating Dartz’s real magic, but Plato shows us why Kaiba is right in his assessment of the situation. According to Plato’s metaphysics, it’s a category mistake to identify a person’s immortal, incorporeal soul with a physical form: the soul is only temporarily bound to a body, and it cannot be destroyed like a body (Phaedo 69e-84b; Timaeus 69a-70d). Kaiba’s argument about the Mirror Knights extends the logic of Duel Monsters and Forms to the souls of humans: just like Duel Monsters cards only participate in the Forms of corresponding monsters, without thereby being identical to those Forms, so too are the Mirror Knights only one sort of body that can temporarily cage souls, without thereby being identical to those souls. The destruction of the body releases the soul rather than destroying it, and so Kaiba is right, even if he doesn’t realize it, to identify the Mirror Knights are holograms and a cheap trick: they can only be derivative, like a hologram, because Dartz can only conjure and control physical images, not the metaphysically real stuff itself (Timaeus 41e-42e).
The Mirror Knights, Dartz’s philosophically failed attempt to trap the souls of Yugi and his friends.
Dartz fails to see the distinction between the physical world and the metaphysically real world because, like the Atlanteans of the Critias, his own soul was corrupted by focusing too much on that physical world and becoming imbalanced, unable to perceive the reality outside the allegorical cave. The game mechanics of the Seal of Orichalcos reinforce this very perversion: from doubling the number of monsters on the field, to regularly adding copious amounts of Life Points to its user’s total, to preventing the use of magic and trap cards against its user’s monsters, each level of the Seal focuses a duel more exclusively on the physical representations of monsters on the field, denying the influence and reality of anything beyond them.
In the end, the Pharaoh and his friends overcome the Orichalcos through another Platonic philosophy, the model of learning as recollection. Plato held that the immortal soul possesses knowledge of the Forms, accumulated through its overall existence, which people can be led to recollect through examples that attune them to the Formal qualities of physical objects, rather than contingent aspects of their appearance (e.g., the Form of Equality in which two different triangles participate (Phaedo 72e-78b). Recollection becomes a motif early in the season through almost the almost comical frequency of flashbacks (the first flashback happens in the very first episode, flashing back to earlier in that same episode), but it echoes more substantively in the duels which the heroes fight and win over the course of the arc. This culminates in the Pharaoh, once a victim of the sophistry of the Orichalcos, now undoing the corruption of Dartz and his cohort dialectically:
He heals Rafael’s soul by reviving Rafael’s own Guardian Eatos and using the power of legendary dragon Hermos to show Rafael the Formal inequality between his pure soul and the corrupt Guardian Dreadscythe, destroying Dreadscythe and inspiring Rafael to use his final move to liberate his fallen monsters from the card graveyard through the aptly named Soul Charge.
He overcomes the influence of the Orichalcos in his duel with Dartz by looking inside his own soul and recollecting the virtuous bonds between him and his friends, giving him the intellectual clarity to play Legend of Heart and identify the true Forms of the immortal souls behind the legendary dragons.
He cripples the Leviathan by calling on all the souls it consumed to focus on the light within their hearts, remembering the people and causes they valued, and the reasons for that value—rejecting Dartz’s thesis that souls are defined by darkness and corruption.
The Pharaoh uses Hermos and one of Rafael’s own monsters in a dialectic to free Rafael’s mind from Dartz’s distortions.
Waking the Dragons begins in the deepest darkness—a literal and allegorical cave, in the undersea ruins of Atlantis, and ascends to the highest light in the world—the Egyptian Gods dragging the Leviathan into the radiant light of truth. The moments in between take its characters and viewers alike on a journey to interrogate the truth and value underpinning their lives, revealing philosophical truths through duels much as Socrates did through dialectical “duels” with his interlocutors. It’s a journey that has led me to play the card game differently, and to think about storytelling through a philosophical lens, ever since my first viewing.
