![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
OOC INFORMATION
Name: Mordrid
Contact:
Are You Over 18?: yep
Other Characters: n/a
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: the Ring-Spirit
Age: 3000+ years, physically appears to be late teens
Canon: Yugioh! (manga)
Canon Point: Millennium World ch.45 ("Into the Tomb!")
Character Information: on Yugipedia
The "Yugioh! Duel Monsters" anime and "Yugioh!" manga are loosely the same overall story, but characters and plot details also diverge a good bit; in addition, the manga features several arcs prior to Duelist Kingdom (which is what the anime starts with), while the anime adds several arcs (Virtual World, Waking the Dragons, and Grand Championship) that never happen in the manga. A summary of the manga canon can be found over here.
This character is more commonly called "Yami Bakura" in the fandom, though he's also known as "the Spirit of the Millennium Ring". He legit never gets an actual name in canon. Since I prefer to call him "the Ring-Spirit" in my tag-narration, I figured if it's just. like, a label to stick on him for list-purposes, that I should probably give the label I'd be using the most?
The Ring-Spirit is the result of two other characters fusing their souls together. While the Ring-Spirit is a person in his own right, that person is heavily informed by who he's made of: Thief King Bakura and Zorc Necrophades
Personality:
If ya had to summarize the Ring-Spirit in a single word, "destructive" would be a good choice. ("Determined" is a close runner-up, and dang-heckity is that an unfortunate trait combo.) He's killed and maimed people (including himself) in pursuit of his goals. He kills Pegasus for the Millennium Eye at the end of Duelist Kingdom, and during Battle City, he kills at least one of his defeated opponents for no reason beyond "he felt like murdering someone"; he's killed and terrorized plenty of other folks for his own entertainment. He rather specifically has a history of turning people into living game miniatures and forcing them to act as nameless NPCs in his tabletop sessions. (Targets have included the gym coach at Domino High, and... for a while, pretty much anyone who interacted with Ryou.)
He literally exists to kickoff the apocalypse. And is there a level of "destructive" beyond "destroy the world"? If so, it'd probably be something like UnMaking yourself in order to destroy the world. ...And while it hasn't happened quite yet by the canon-point I'm using for him - yeah, he uh. he does exactly that not too long after his pull-point - and even at this canon-point, it's already on his to-do list.
Why. Why all this? Ultimately it comes down to what, exactly, the Ring-Spirit is: a composite, the result of two souls fused together - and those souls fused as a gambit to get another shot at destroying the world. The Ring-Spirit has motivation informing his destructive nature, but that's the department of his progenitors: the Thief King Bakura and Zorc Necrophades. Zorc's motive? Well, according to him, he was "born from the darkness in the hearts of men", so he's a conglomeration of every unfortunate tendency found in humanity - he wants to wreck shit because he can. In small part he also wants to spite the pathetic little mortals who (coughsuccessfullycough) attempted to defy his will, but mostly he's just. he's a demon. He wants to do demonic things. (Coughand someone dared interfere with that, which cannot be allowed to standcough; just let him live his best life,,) As for the Thief King? His entire village was slaughtered as the human sacrifice needed to create the Millennium Items in the first place. He grew up in the ruins, surrounded by the ritual's aftermath: mangled scraps of ghosts, screaming in unending agony. Since the Items run off the power of ~The Shadows~ aka Zorc... one would think he'd blame, yknow, Zorc. The Thief King, however, managed to get himself past that stage of Avenging Injustice and all the way over to "my family is suffering and they cannot be saved or soothed: if they're going to be like this forever? The rest of the world can join them." He would have gladly destroyed himself to help his village, but as he believed nothing could help them, he turned this capacity for self-sacrifice into something malevolent.
The Ring-Spirit isn't "Zorc and Thief King as tag-team" though - they simply form the foundations he started with and built from. Thanks to pharaoh-induced amnesia, the Ring-Spirit had no idea he even was fusion-based for roughly 3000 years. He did remember he had a goal, and that it involved gathering all the Millennium Items. Despite his readiness to go any distance to achieve this goal, he didn't... quite recall what the goal was, just that he needed the Items. Over the course of the series he gradually learns or remembers more and more; by his pull-point he knows most of the details, including the fact that he was intended to exist only on a temporary basis from the start. He's not utterly thrilled to know this detail, but he has no plans for it to get in his way either: and helpfully, he's kept very occupied with all the other happenings throughout the Memory World arc. He hasn't had a chance to stop and really think about the finer points - and he doesn't want that chance. He knows full well that deconstructing himself (to contribute his Zorc-half towards the whole "Reviving Main-Zorc" thing) is going to suck. He'd just prefer to ignore the fact. He's pretty good at focusing on the here and now, living in the present, all that - his incredibly long bout of "I have a goal, I will attain it, and at some point in between those I'll figure out the everything-else" gave him a lot of practice with working off very little information. He adapts to changing situations well and does so quickly. He legit prefers to work off of a vague Big Picture "plan" than something too well-crafted: he's an improviser, not a strategist. Shockingly enough, this means he's also prone to acting on impulse - good instincts and quick thinking are only so far separated from. well. When he and Marik worked out their alliance in Battle City, the Ring-Spirit decided the best way to demonstrate his on-board-ness was to, with zero warning, stab himself in the arm. Marik got to figure out how to utilize this development, because the Ring-Spirit's plan began and ended with "become injured".
Something that encourages the Ring-Spirit's impulsivity is his own sheer arrogance. Is such-and-such be too risky? Maybe for someone else, but he won't fail simply because he doesn't intend to. Did something go wrong? A minor inconvenience, he'll deal with it. Did he fail? Merely a delay. Did something go horribly horribly wrong? ...Alright, maybe he did lose the round, but a game with no difficulty is boring after all - and the next round starts any moment now.
One way he shows his arrogance is in his speech and mannerisms - while it's more blatantly apparent in the original Japanese, the Ring-Spirit talks down to others plenty, using unnecessarily aggressive, informal, and/or outright insulting word choice or turns of phrase. He' uses "ore-sama" without irony or shame. ('Ore-sama' being one way of saying 'I'... but it's a bit closer to 'I, the great and glorious'...except for the pokemon anime, where it's 'Ya Boy') When he shows up to support Yugi during the Dungeon Dice Monsters arc, he does so primarily by mocking Ryuji.
On that note, the Ring-Spirit doesn't take much, if anything, all that seriously. It's like he thinks everything is one long game - and for him, it is. He exists for the purpose of setting up the Memory World rpg after all - the recreation of Zorc's last great battle, the one where the pharaoh sealed away their memories and shattered the Millennium Pendent into the Millennium Puzzle. He also has a... "mischievous" streak, though strictly speaking, the word "mischief" doesn't quite convey the full. range of malice he brings to the game table.
5-10 Key Character Traits:
- Destructive
- Determined
- Arrogant
- Aggressive
- Playful
- Malicious
- Impulsive
- Adapts
- Spite-Fueled
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Fits
Opt-Outs: Demon, Simulacrum, Slime, Troll
Roleplay Sample: on the TDM