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Seto Kaiba is considered one of the more ruthless opponents in Yu-Gi-Oh!, but outside the actual card game… not so much.
One of the strengths of the original Yu-Gi-Oh! series is that no matter the iteration, the characters are strong and well-defined. The card game may have rocketed the manga into the public eye, but the characters carried the manga through its first rough chapters and keeps the original series near and dear to fans’ hearts.
One of these memorable characters is Seto Kaiba; protagonist, antagonist and sometimes ally. Known for his obsession with the card game in general and the Blue Eyes White Dragon in particular, Kaiba is conniving and ruthless when it comes to Duel Monsters. However, is this intenseness regarding the game the result of channeling his aggression into something usually benign? Is Seto Kaiba in fact a pacifist?
There’s actually quite a bit in Kaiba’s actions that suggest he prefers a more non-lethal approach to things. One of the biggest points of Kaiba’s backstory is that he is the CEO of KaibaCorp, having outwitted his stepfather in order to gain control of the company. Once he had this control, the first thing Kaiba did was to change the company’s tack from weapons to games. Eventually, he uses it to make Kaiba Land, a dream theme park he and his brother Mokuba conceived when they were still in the orphanage of their youth.
But what about Death-T, where he tried to kill Yugi and company? What about the Toei anime, where Kaiba was happy to hire goons to send after Yugi and friends? What about the more well-known DM anime, where he kidnapped Yugi’s grandfather and ripped his prize card in half? No matter the iteration, Kaiba in these situations is presented as still living under his stepfather’s influence, which ends up being banished from him thanks to Yami Yugi’s Mind Crush. In the manga, when Kaiba is shown piecing himself back together, it’s the young, idealistic Seto that does so, not the cold shell that his stepfather created.
From that point on, Kaiba does his best to excise his stepfather’s influence from every aspect of his life, from destroying the island Duel Tower is built upon to fully rebranding KaibaCorp as a gaming company preoccupied with promoting Kaiba’s favorite obsession, Duel Monsters. He builds theme parks for orphans to play in and Duel Academy for people to learn how to play Duel Monsters. With the exception of treating the card games as serious business, Kaiba can practically be considered a humanitarian.
Does this mean he’s a pushover? Far from it — to be a pacifist is to be opposed to war and violence; it doesn’t mean he can’t be antagonized or ruthless in the boardroom. However, the fact that Kaiba makes it a point to solve all his problems with a children’s card game might be more than just an obsession borne of Ancient Egyptian shenanigans. With the exception of Shadow Games, which generally only affect a small percentage of card games, Duel Monsters is a relatively benign way of settling one’s differences — one that still allows for laying a smackdown on the opponent in a bloodless way.
In fact, Kaiba’s insistence on settling things over a game of cards, and one as complex and convoluted as Duel Monsters, might have influenced the game becoming a worldwide phenomenon in-universe — when everything a top-tier CEO does is settled with a children’s card game, it behooves other CEOs to get good at the game. Kaiba’s insistence on not resorting to physical violence or the baser drives of his stepfather may have shaped the path that later spinoffs such as GX and 5Ds took. These pacifistic ways only made the game stronger — and for someone who decided to shoot cards into space to teach aliens how to duel, this probably pleases Seto Kaiba to no end.
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