It caught my attention that in your rules you say you rp manga Gozaburo. So my question is: is there a difference between manga and anime Gozaburo?
There is actually a major difference between manga Gozaburo and anime Gozaburo. Though the manga reveals very little about him, those few panels in which Gozaburo appears actually say a lot of him. Now, this is obviously my own interpretation based on both the anime and the manga. Merely my opinion (which means that please don’t go about telling me how wrong I am or whatever, I won’t stand for that when it comes to mere opinions).
Now this will be really long, I tried putting it under a read more but apparently tumblr fucked up again ‘cause it’s not working for me. So I apologize for the ridiculously long post.
For starters, Gozaburo in the anime is portrayed as a very business-like, collected man. Though easily angered, he is not one to simply lose his temper over small things, though he is obviously firm and intimidating in speech. As the anime hints as well, he used to be quite the good father with Noah and, most likely, the both of them enjoyed a healthy and loving father-and-son relationship. Also, in the anime it is not even hinted that Gozaburo ever abused Seto physically. I must say here that I personally dislike the anime version because I felt it tried to justify Gozaburo in a way, you know, by softening his personality and making him seem like a good father who for whatever reason changed completely after Noah’s accident, when he clearly is just a greedy man who would stop at nothing to achieve his goals from beginning to end. But this is just my own opinion.
On the other hand, manga Gozaburo is anything but a collected man. He is irascible, loses his temper very easily and, if we squint, we can even notice he is not completely sane. There is this madness in his expression that is lacking in his anime counterpart. I mean, we’re talking about a man who killed himself in front of a sixteen year old to prove a point, that losing means death. That alone gives us an idea of just what kind of lessons he gave Seto and with just how much brutality. He is, in a few words, a monster. And as opposed to the anime, in the manga there is enough evidence to at least suspect that the abuse that Gozaburo inflicted on Seto was more than just psychological.
Now, we can even notice this in Seto. In the manga we have the first arc (and more specifically, Death-T) which takes place six months after Gozaburo’s suicide according to Seto himself. During this arc Gozaburo’s abuse is fresh in Seto’s mind and as we can clearly see, Seto acts like a complete, borderline insane, sociopath. So if we take what Mokuba said about Seto being completely different before the adoption into consideration, then we can only conclude that Seto’s erratic and nearly homicidal behavior was directly caused by Gozaburo. And honestly, I do not think a behavior like this can be a consequence of extra hours of studies alone. I do believe there was some brutal psychological and possibly physical abuse that drove Seto to become the monster he was in the first arc. And this is actually a part that I do like of the anime, because it showed some of the things Gozaburo did to “educate” Seto, such as taking all his games away and isolating him from everything and everyone, even his own brother. Though I believe that was only a very small and probably insignificant part of it (we do have to consider, after all, that even the japanese anime censored a lot of things that happened in the manga because they were too “brutal and violent”.)
So in a few words, according to my own interpretation of what little information is given of Gozaburo, he is a much worse and evil man in the manga. And that’s exactly where I base my portrayal from. But again, this is my own interpretation. It’s simply how I see it. Never mind the fact that I just prefer the manga over the anime.
