#honestly this was just be rambling and dragging Dr. Kogami through the mud idek if it makes sense oof

[tastes-like-ciel]

>By all accounts, he shouldn’t still care for his father the way he does, but that’s a topic for another time (and one I will happily go into, if anyone likes).

Sure! 

Gonna put a warning message before my answer on this, though. Everyone be advised the topics I’m going to discuss are uncomfortable as the subject is about Ryoken’s relationship (or lack thereof) with his father, who abused not only other children but his own as well and before anyone says “Ryoken was never abused!” 

Yes. 

He was. 

Just not in the same way as the other six.

Abuse takes different forms and just because something isn’t physical or doesn’t leave marks on someone’s body, doesn’t mean it’s not abuse.

But yes. Big warning ahead of my thoughts. Just in case someone would rather not read it. Also spoilers for the whole series. There’s some screenshots in here. Otherwise, carry on.

So Dr. Kogami is a horrible, awful person. We all know this. Not only did he kidnap and experiment on six, six-year-old children for six long months, but he allowed his only child to discover these experiments and showed no kind of remorse for his actions at any point in the series. There was only the one time, just before his death, where he admitted to not doing anything fatherly for Ryoken. Just that one hot second of maybe regret and considering how he immediately jumps into the “But the world needs you.” drivel, he’s only making excuses and I don’t believe he actually regrets how he treated Ryoken all that much.

And that’s it. A whole lot of nothing that only really enforced how much of a terrible person Dr. Kogami is. It wasn’t a redemption (even if perhaps Ryoken himself might have seen it as a sort of apology from a father to his son). It wasn’t even one of YGO’s handwaved or half-assed attempts at a villain redemption. He just was never redeemed and things are fine like that because honestly, I don’t believe there’s anything they could have done or could still do to redeem that man. VRAINS continually condemns Dr. Kogami for his actions in one form or another and goes through great pains to express that Ryoken is not at fault for anything his father has done. If anything, he’s a victim and this is YGO so it’s not going to go that deeply into it, but VRAINS has gone surprisingly deep into this subject as well as with the six kids considering it’s, at its core, a card game anime meant to promote cards. And honestly, the later time slot the show was given makes total sense because it’s not so much the graphic depictions of torn-off limbs or avatar corpses it shows, but the entire subject of abuse and learning to heal and overcome it. VRAINS’ theme is “taking a step forward” and it shines through in this sense because while it is a card game anime, it very much is a story about abuse survivors and characters with deep depression finding themselves and learning how to live despite their trauma.

The abuse of the six Lost Incident children is easy to see and understand, but there are other characters such as Ryoken, Aoi, Shoichi, etc. that are suffering through depression for various reasons. Ryoken grew up with essentially no one. All he had was his father. We don’t know what happened to his mother. It’s possible she died during childbirth or died before Ryoken was old enough to remember her and thus could be a catalyst to setting Dr. Kogami on the path to try manufacturing immortality. It’s also possible that Ryoken was a test tube baby and as much as I hate to think it, it’s also possible the mother just left. Unless the show tells us directly one day, we’ll never know. Regardless, Dr. Kogami was Ryoken’s only parent–his only role model–and a parent is God in the eyes of a child. His father was his whole world and he loved his father very dearly. He had no reason to believe, at such a young age, that his father was capable of physically hurting someone. That’s just not something children think about until it actually happens.

And then, of course, it does happen.

Ryoken brings home a friend one day. That friend is Yusaku. Dr. Kogami, I’m assuming, used Ryoken to lure Yusaku to him. Can’t say about the others because no one except Yusaku has given any indication that they remember meeting a tiny white marshmallow with a deck of Duel Monsters cards, but it’s possible. However, it’s odd that he would only choose to speak with Yusaku and no one else, so I’m thinking this was either a one-time case or he could only get in contact with Yusaku’s cell. But the fact is he and Yusaku meet and Ryoken takes him home. Maybe they played for a little while and I imagine they probably did. Dr. Kogami was after child duelists, specifically, since he believed dueling was the best way for the developing Ignis to understand human behaviour and a young child would still be in the development phase/easier to study, making his experiments have better results overall. So he’d probably want proof they knew how to duel first. What better way than to let his son have a playmate before taking them away? He could have witnessed the other kids dueling or, considering he had assistants to help him with this, they also could have helped in the kidnapping.

His father was so obsessed with the idea of creating humanity’s successors that he kidnapped and tortured six children for months and months and he used his only child to get at least one of them. His eight-year-old son, who didn’t understand what was going on. His eight-year-old son, who had no reason to believe his father could do evil. His eight-year-old-son, who he claimed to never want involved but did absolutely nothing to prevent Ryoken from finding–and hearing!! Ryoken heard them screaming!!–the experiments he was performing on those kids. He starved them, electrocuted them, left them in cold, lonely rooms where they slowly began to lose hope and inched closer and closer to death.

And those kids absolutely would have died had Ryoken not blown the whistle on the whole thing.

Think about it. Dr. Kogami kidnapped these children to use them for experiments. Test subjects gathered in such a way do not typically have happy endings. Dr. Kogami would not have let them go. He would have kept them in those rooms until they died, until they gave up. He couldn’t risk the kids going back and telling the authorities and having all his research taken away from him. They were only there for six months because Ryoken made it end. The only child that might have survived, in the end, would have probably been Spectre. Yusaku was giving up, Jin was being tortured with false hope by Lightning and withdrawing from everything, and can’t say about the others. Miyu kept thinking of Aoi and how much she wanted to see her again and that kept her going, but we don’t know how long she could have lasted. Maybe she would have survived alongside Spectre, though. So at the most, two of the six would have survived.

But the point is, Dr. Kogami is a bad person. Ryoken has every reason to not care for him. He was neglected, manipulated, used. And his father didn’t care. He kept doing it. He kept using him and manipulating him into thinking he had anything to do with this whole mess. Now Ryoken has done some bad things himself. He tried to nuke the entire network in a suicide mission, which was part following his father’s orders and part his guilt complex surfacing. His father was going to let this happen, too. He didn’t care if Ryoken lived or died so long as the Ignis were also dead in the process. Dr. Kogami is truly, truly an awful person. 

But like I said before, a parent is a child’s whole world and Dr. Kogami was all Ryoken had. Even though he was manipulated and neglected and never even tried to deny these things when his father spoke of causing him to suffer, he still stayed by his side. He kept quiet and suffered in alone. He shouldn’t have had to deal with that. He could have chosen to leave his father and no one would blame him, but a point I want to make here is Ryoken choosing to stay with his father despite all he’s done is both him not wanting to abandon his only father out of guilt he’s being a bad son and a classic example of a victim defending their abuser. It’s even more complicated when that abuser is a parent. Ryoken was very young and wasn’t physically abused, but I think you already know where I’m going with this because I kept mentioning it. Neglect and manipulation and grooming to be a martyr for killing the Ignis. Ryoken was a means to an end for Dr. Kogami and Ryoken was willing to die for him if it meant his father was paying attention to him finally. Of course, even then, it was all about the Ignis. Nothing Ryoken ever did to please him made him be fatherly.

He says, in front of his own child. Who he has no qualms about letting die along with the Ignis with the Tower of Hanoi plan he hatched.

That must have hurt an awful lot. Ryoken didn’t deserve any of this. He was done very, very wrong by his father, who never gave a shit about him. Dr. Kogami doesn’t deserve to have him as a son, but I understand why Ryoken stuck with him. He wanted his attention, he wanted his love, he wanted to be important in his father’s life, and I’m sorry, Ryoken, honey, that you never got it.